Apple Ruins Microsoft's New Ad Campaign

The problem with Compiz of course is the lacking 3D driver support in X11 for many graphic cards. So far only nvidia has made some progress while ATI/AMD slowly catching up.

Of course, the nvidia X11 driver is closed source, so that inherently sucks when you want to learn and tweak your own setup.

Also the lacking mpeg4 acceleration is driving me nuts trying to watch 1080p material on my mythtv box.

 

in this long sordid user-biased thread, this statement really sums it up.

it really boils down to a basic question...would you like your OS options made for you? (MS)

or would you rather make those decisions on your own? (Linux)

now, until someone can come up with a clear information and install system that is able to explain at the basic level of understanding what each option will allow your computer to do, or not do, and do it quickly and simply, MS will always be on top because it allow lazy users to get what they want at a severe cost of

1)loss of privacy
2) loss of understanding and control
3) loss of hardware capability and speed

as daniel has stated, Linux requires much more than a basic understanding of how computers work...

now for all you guys that use Linux, you can dispute this statement all you want, but the facts are, you are so far above basic understanding of computers that you can no longer define "user friendly" on a basic level.

i talk to people who cant even understand the basic concept of "cut and paste"... they will NEVER NEVER NEVER use Linux...and i can tell you from daily , 40 hours a week experience, that they far far far outnumber any other segment of the computer industry....

couple that with kids under the age of 25, a good 25% of which can not read at a high enough level to understand basic instructions....

now it could be me simply not doing my job well enough...but since we are rated where i work, and i rate in the top 20 (actually being modest here) i find that to probably not be the case.

there has been great advances in search capabilities from Google simply because 90% of people today could not effectively search using boolean methods and that is THE SOLE REASON WHY GOOGLE HAS BECOME SO BIG... Google understood the interface was the most important (as has all software developers... in this battle, MS is only beating Linux...) and has done the best job so far...albeit, they dont provide as complicated a system as Apple or MS.

to be honest with ya, we need another major player in the OS world and i sincerely hope it Google

 

The thing with AppleTV is, it can't do much.
I use mythtv as
a.) DVD iso storage. Drop in DVD, rip it, put DVD away, watch from HD
b.) HDTV over antenna. DVB-T pci card. Antenna on roof.
c.) Watch satellite TV. DVB-S pci card. Satellite dish on roof. Watch sat TV
d.) Music storage. Takes mp3's, WMA, AAC and other music formats
e.) Picture storage. Show pics on your 60" big screen to the family
f.) Programs can be set to record through a web interface
g.) Burn shows or recorded programs on DVD

and much much more

That's the difference between canned, ready made, easy to install solutions and mostly open-source, linux based applications.

I've looked at Apple-TV before as well, but the functions were just too limited.

Thomas

 

Most large companies that I've worked for, and I've worked for more than a few, usually use Unix backends to support their Windows front ends. Microsoft's pricing policies usually pushes them in that direction, NTLM2 or no...

And, from what I see and hear from the consultants, having Java skills is more important than having .NET skills. .NET is considered a bit of a lost cause for anything other than lightweight web development.

 

Cute commercial.

I have to wonder if there are some GM execs working for Microsoft.

 

I think it will catch on. In fact, look at the iPhone as an early showcase for this sort of program; touch screen, move this and that with your finger. It's just a matter of time for Surface.

Hey, it's already on CSI: MIAMI, so you know, how far away could it really be?

 

Pretty bold of Apple to release an ad like this given their Leopard blue screens and the slew of other problems with OS-X that they've had to correct with their latest bug fix.

Apple is now distributing the latest upgrade to Mac OS X, v10.5.5, through Software Update. The patch addresses a considerable number of aspects in the operating system, such as Mail, MobileMe and Address Book, as well as some "general" concerns, according to Apple's support notes. Some of these include Spotlight indexing, the reliability of iPhone sync with both iCal and Address Book, and problems with Macs powering on involuntarily at the same time every day. The update is sized anywhere between 136 and 353MB, depending on the number of minor patches already installed. iCal has been updated to better deal with repeating events, and fix a number of other bugs, such as problems with syncing published calendars, and maintaining access to the "Refresh All" button. Address Book has been tweaked for issues with Smart Groups and printing multi-page cards, and MobileMe has had reliability enhanced for sync and the Back to My Mac feature.

Disk Utility should be more reliable when rebuilding a software mirror RAID volume, and Directory Utility has had server status improved. Mail updates are numerous, incorporating answers to problems like SMTP settings for services like AIM and Road Runner, RSS feeds disappearing from the sidebar, and IMAP messages bogging down performance.

Apple has lastly made adjustments to Time Machine, improving reliability with Time Capsule, and smoothing out the performance of both initial and ongoing backups. Bad warnings about drives lacking space have been eliminated, and iPhone backups are now saved alongside other items.

Silly me- I thought macs "just worked".

 

I was out of town for a couple of days and have fallen behind on this thread. Let me see if I can catch up all at once:

I won't argue your basic point. Linux has always been attractive to computer nerds, and as such, has been the poster child for the phrase "Some assembly required." Where I do take exception is that you are painting all Linux distributions with the same brush. Linux has come a long, long way in terms of ease of use. Ease of installation and ease of use by the common computer user is the central theme of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is every bit as easy to use as Windows or Mac OS, and is easier to install than either. Where Windows and Mac OS have an advantage is that they come pre-installed on your computer, so everything works right out of the box, at least initially. Apple takes this a step further by rigidly controlling the hardware as well, which helps eliminate the incompatibility problems that plague the computer industry.

At the present time, Ubuntu has to be installed, since it doesn't ship on new hardware. The installation works the same way as any Windows program: you pop in the CD and watch it do its thing. If you just want to test drive it, you can run Ubuntu directly from the CD or a memory stick without having to do an installation. If you want to dual boot, the installer will do that for you too.

My 86 year old mother uses Ubuntu without any trouble at all, and I wouldn't classify her as a computer nerd. Like many (most) computer users, she does four things with her computer: 1) Surf the Web; 2) Read and write email; 3) Do light word processing, and 4) Play solitare. OpenOffice and Firefox are all she needs. The standard installation of Ubuntu installed every driver and piece of software that she needs for all of her daily computing.

Here is another real world example: My son teaches inner city fourth and fifth graders in downtown Detroit at a charter school. His students, like kids everywhere, love to play with computers but are not sophisticated comptuer users. His classroom contains a combination of Mac computers supplied by the school and Edubuntu (the educational distrobution of Ubuntu) running on ancient hardware that he collected. His students move freely between the machines without a problem. The look and feel of the user interface is so similar that the students are unaware of the difference. They do favor the Edubuntu machines, mostly because of the large collection of educational games that come with the distribution. My son prefers the Edubuntu machines because they are easier to set up and maintain, and are less likely to crash.

I could go on with point by point comparisions and real world examples, but I'm starting to obscure my message. This is the one point I want to make: Not all Linux users are nerds and not all Linux distributions are targeted at nerds. This is a common misconception, and it used to be true. Saying Linux is too complex for a common user is like saying "I don't own an automobile. I had a model T once, and automobiles are just too hard to use." Time and technology march on. The Prius is pretty easy to use, and so are the newer distributions of Linux.

Tom

 

Visual Studio is one of Microsoft's best achievements. Its design and layout have become the defacto standard for almost all IDEs. Obviously Microsoft needed to do a lot of internal development, and they had boatloads of cash to throw at the problem. Thankfully, all of us programmers get to benefit from Microsoft's internal work.

There are several good examples of proprietary IDEs. Microchip's MPLAB comes to mind. Most of these appear to have borrowed heavily from Visual Studio.

Sadly, the open source world seems to be lacking when it comes to good development environments. There are plenty of them, and several are very capable, but all are limited, hard to use, or otherwise constrained when compared to Visual Studio. I have been writing in Python recently, and I feel like I am using stone tools.

Tom

 

vim FTW!

 

That's interesting... I was just talking with one of my competitors this past weekend, and he said the exact opposite. They had previously been running on Microsoft SQL Server, but switched over to Oracle for performance reasons earlier this year. Now that they eliminated that bottleneck, they're seeing how bad their .NET environment is running and are placing under serious consideration a complete rewrite of their code into Java.

As a comparison, similar functionality between our two sites has clearly been demonstrated to take up to 5 times longer on their site than ours. Now, I know we can't judge the quality of their code versus ours, but i have to believe the two are at least close to each other, given the number of people who bounce between the two companies.

 

You do realize that example is from 2002... a hell of a lot has changed since then. Heck, just in the past few years things have gotten a whole lot simpler for Java server development. Just a few weeks ago a wrote a sample web app to show some kids i mentor how it's supposed to be done - somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 lines of code (not counting HTML crap) for a full vertical slice fetching from the database. I don't think you can really get much better than that.

Unfortunately, i haven't been able to find any modern day benchmark tests comparing .NET and Java... it'd be awesome if you knew of one

 

Ebay runs on Solaris servers, and they most definitely use Java for all of their web and application logic. Trust me on this one.

You see IIS because, for some very odd reason, they have an IIS based proxy.

 

Yes, I know myspace runs it... I'm sure that's why 9 times out of 14 you get a "page can not be displayed" when you try to pull up someone's profile.