Supported? OS X runs on Mac hardware and their peripheral and software support is a fraction of Windows.
Supported? OS X runs on Mac hardware and their peripheral and software support is a fraction of Windows.
Originally posted by: gwag
Originally posted by: Robor
That statement makes no sense. They have 95% of the market share. They're so far ahead of 'the little guys' it's a joke.
maybe in your world but in mine Vista was just about catching up to OS X.
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=45037
My point is related to the title of this thread. Windows is *FAR* ahead now and AFAIK OS X is not catching up.
Macs are far from immune to crashes/freezes. My wifes Mac laptop has program freezes all the time. Oh, and as far as being well built and sleek - hers currently has a DVD stuck in it. Most laptop drives have the release hole you can stick a paper clip in to release the tray or are modular where you can just remove the entire drive and work on it. With her Mac it's slot load so she's screwed.
Slot loaders suck.
Nothing unique with the mac with that.
While rebooting if you hold the trackpad button down it should eject.
People from Linux or especially the Windows world are confused and mystified by Apple computers. You don't so much work on them or troubleshoot them. What you do is memorize magical incantions and wives tales and use those to fix your laptop.
Not joking at all (well sorta). Working with Macs is like working with voodoo.
Nothing unique with the mac with that.
While rebooting if you hold the trackpad button down it should eject.
People from Linux or especially the Windows world are confused and mystified by Apple computers. You don't so much work on them or troubleshoot them. What you do is memorize magical incantions and wives tales and use those to fix your laptop.
Not joking at all (well sorta). Working with Macs is like working with voodoo.
I know slot loaders aren't unique with Mac. I had one in a desktop a few years ago. Eventually it broke or just got outdated - I don't remember but I don't have it anymore. Still, I haven't seen a lappy other than Mac that has a slot load. I've only used IBM and Dell though. Another bad thing about the slot load is it doesn't play the 'mini' DVD's like in some video cameras.
I'll pass that unload method on to her but I don't think it will work. She said when she tries to eject the DVD she can hear it try to eject but it doesn't. I'm wondering if it just got spun out of place and is jammed. I had that happen to me when I (stupidly) laid a PC on it's side while it was in the middle of an Office install. It made a 'bad' sound then spun the disc into the back of the drive. Oops!
ive removed cds from a slot-load player before
the cd will likely be shot, but its not too hard and the drive worked without a problem after that. iirc i was very careful with some needlenose pliers and a coat hanger.
Nothinman
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And from a hardware standpoint we're already past Windows IMO. There are a few notable exceptions but overall Linux supports more hardware and it's easier to get going since there's usually no driver installation. Software's trickier because most Windows software is closed source so we can't just take it and port it. But I think we're slightly ahead in that arena too, again with the exception of some notable things like Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Win32 Games there are native Linux versions of just about everything and most of them are on par or better than their Windows counterparts.
I'm a longtime Microsoft user (from DOS 5 maybe?) and gave Linux (Fedora & Ubuntu) a try about a year and a half ago. It took some learning but after I got the basics down on how it worked I found I really liked Ubuntu and now I prefer using it. However, here's 3 things I can think of that I can do in Windows but can't do well or do at all in Linux:
1. Play games. Linux can play some native but for the most part if you want to game run Windows.
2. Voice/Video chat. Windows has several options. Linux has zero.
3. News browsing (NNTP). I've used Forte Agent and now use NewsBin Pro in Windows and both are excellent. I tried Pan in Linux and it is :thumbsdown:.
When I say 'hardware support' I don't mean taking a new system and installing the OS out of the box. In my experience it's *much* easier to install Ubuntu than WinXP simply because I don't need drivers for Ubuntu whereas I have to get things like chipset, NIC, video, audio, etc drivers for XP. Windows is harder but at least the drivers are available. What I mean is most every piece of peripherals that have native Windows support, come with a driver disc, or a driver can be downloaded. There's plenty of hardware that isn't OS X or Linux compatible or requires a lot of research and tweaking to get it working.
Nothinman
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So? That's like saying if you want to use iPhoto that you have to buy a Mac, duh. There is the small difference in that you actually have a chance to run Win32 games in Linux via WINE/Cedega but it takes some work and luck, but that shouldn't be surprising considering that you're trying to run something designed for a completely different platform.
This I can't comment on since I've don't really care about it, but it looks like Gaim is working in voice and video support for 2.0. Frankly if I want to verbally talk to someone I'll call them on my cell phone.
How many people actually know about NNTP these days? I'm actually surprised that most ISPs still host news feeds.
There's plenty of hardware that will never work with Windows either, it just depends on where you look.
This is used way more than it should. Mac OSX is waaaaaaaaaaay more secure than Windows XP was. Not because it isn't popular.
I disagree. iPhoto is a specific program for the Mac. There are alternatives to do the same or nearly the same in other OS's. If I want to play this or that game chances are I've got to run Windows. There's hundreds if not thousands of games that don't have native Linux versions, don't work in WINE/Cedga, or perform poorly. I'm not blaming Linux either. If developers don't design their games for Linux how can it be blamed? It's a matter of money. It costs a lot to develop a game and there's little point in spending a lot of extra dev time for such a small % of the market.
I'm the same way with the exception of international calls. The cheapest I've found is $.11 per minute and that's voice only.
I do. My ISP's news server sucks so I subscribe to a 3rd party server.
My point is most commercial hardware is designed for Windows in the first place. Again it goes back to market share.
EDIT: Damn I suck at quoting. :-/
Nothinman
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And games like SupremeCommander are specific for XP, the fact that no one has developed a version for OS X or Linux is beside the point.
Luckily I don't care to call anyone outside of this country. =)
But you've already stated that you're not "most end users" since you get by with Linux just fine.
Which is why standards like ACPI, AHCI, PCI, etc are important. The device may be designed for one system but it'll work just as well on any system that supports the standard.
I was waiting to see his response before liking it, just to know if he'd never heard of it and if so was too lazy to use Google to find it. =)
Originally posted by: Nothinman
What I mean is if all games were written for Windows, Linux, and OS X it would remove one more basis for choosing an operating system.
My current situation makes it necessary. In 4-5 months that will change significantly but until then I'll be a Skype voice/video user.
Well I can't get by with 100% Linux. On my laptop it's great because I don't do any of those 3 things I listed above. But on my desktop I need Windows for those things.
As long as there is a driver written for it.
Originally posted by: drag
Zones, plones. blah.
Linux you have Vserver and OpenVZ. Same difference.
Plus you have UML, KVM, KQEMU (recently gpl'd woot), Xen, and so on and so forth.
Wake me up when Solaris gets something stupid simple, like Linux-HA and DRBD. I _love_ how you can do a kernel module and get a extra 9 tacked onto the end of those aviability numbers. Take that downtime from hours per year to minutes, for free.
(also with newer versions of DRBD they support both nodes being primary so you can do some of that ocfs2/gfs tastiness)
The one thing you can't do in Linux with Solaris is Dtrace functionality. And the magic thing about Dtrace is that you can setup instrumentation on a production machine, which is something you'd never be able to get away with with Kprobes or whatnot.
VServer looks promising, but configuration looks really icky, and there seems to be a bunch of gotchas, package management, etc etc, and Xen and friends aren't exactly comparable to zones
Nice thing about zones is that Sun actually did a really good job of integrating them in the OS, including the userland, patching and packaging, and so forth, plus they're fast and easy to setup.
Can't say I've used Linux-HA or DRBD, so no comment, but it's not like clustering is new on Solaris.
Because computer gaming falls into the category of software compatibility. Earlier I said Windows was superior to Linux and OS X in software compatibility and computer gaming is a big reason for that.
I've never had an issue getting a hard drive, cdrom, usb, etc device recognized in Windows or Linux. It's more odd peripherals like a webcam or cell phone where I've run into problems in Linux.
Edit: I still suck at the quotes...
Nothinman
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But there are games for all platforms, the fact that you only want to play Windows games is beside the point.
And I believe USB webcams were the target of one of those new standards, but I'm not 100% sure since I don't care about webcams and it was mentioned in a thread on another topic.
Originally posted by: Sunner
Originally posted by: drag
Zones, plones. blah.
Linux you have Vserver and OpenVZ. Same difference.
Plus you have UML, KVM, KQEMU (recently gpl'd woot), Xen, and so on and so forth.
Wake me up when Solaris gets something stupid simple, like Linux-HA and DRBD. I _love_ how you can do a kernel module and get a extra 9 tacked onto the end of those aviability numbers. Take that downtime from hours per year to minutes, for free.
(also with newer versions of DRBD they support both nodes being primary so you can do some of that ocfs2/gfs tastiness)
The one thing you can't do in Linux with Solaris is Dtrace functionality. And the magic thing about Dtrace is that you can setup instrumentation on a production machine, which is something you'd never be able to get away with with Kprobes or whatnot.
VServer looks promising, but configuration looks really icky, and there seems to be a bunch of gotchas, package management, etc etc,
Vserver has been around for a very long time now. Both Vserver and OpenVZ have been around before Zones, although OpenVZ has been part of a propriatory produce for most of it (Virtuozzo).
I've run Vserver on Debian. It's pretty easy to setup and you'd just end up using a Debian scripts that uses debootstrap to install a new system and does all the intial configurations. (also I didn't bother with the configuration, I just used command line switches to override the defaults) The only problem with any program that I ran into was just that Bind is trying to hard to be smart and ending up very stupid.
and Xen and friends aren't exactly comparable to zones
But Solaris doesn't have anything comparable to those. And it's still virtualization technology.
[/quote]Nice thing about zones is that Sun actually did a really good job of integrating them in the OS, including the userland, patching and packaging, and so forth, plus they're fast and easy to setup.[/quote]
well that's the same thing about ZFS is that they did a decent job of making it easier to handle. With Linux you have many layers of smaller stuff.. md, lvm, dm, ext3, xfs, etc etc that you can put together to do what ZFS does, but it's not as easy.
Ah. Then you don't know what you've been missing.
If you want to have some service that is need to be ultra-aviable then those are the two things that are going to provide the cheapest and simpliest way to make it happen while being very effective.
Linux-ha provides a heartbeat mechanism. All it does is that it 'pings' another node to determin weither or not it's up and weither or not the service is running. It can use a veriaty of methods to do this, you can choose to use ping packets, or udp packets, and there are a couple others. Whatever is most appropriate. Then it will run scripts to start or stop or restart services based on what is happenning to the services on the other systems.
Also for the services you'd have a virtual IP address that gets shared between them. (but you could setup other mechanisms easily)
The scripts are simple init-style scripts. start|stop|restart|etc. In fact for most things you can probably just copy over the Debian init.d script and only with a little bit of modifications they will work.
DRBD is a method for doing realtime mirroring of a volume between two machines on a network. It provides a method of having shared storage, but without the shared storage single-point-of-failure and added expense. With DRBD 0.8 they support primary-primary if your using a cluster-aware FS like OCFS2 (provided by the vanilla kernel nowadays), but most the time it's going to be primary-secondary were one node can only write to a volume at a time.
if a So for a demostration once I setup two old dells (200mhz, 64megs). Had a extra partition set aside were I used for the drbd mirrored volume.
On the drbd share I did a vserver install, and on that I ran a ftp server.
If the primary node went down (For the demo, I'd yank the power cord out of the back) then the secondary would notice it within a couple seconds, drbd would automaticly make the secondary node the primary node, the Linux-ha drbd script would wait until this happens, then fsck and mount the volume, then my vserver script would restart the vserver.
From the client's perspective it was the identical machine (the vserver) since it still used the same IP address and everything. From their perspective it'd just drop the connections and they'd have to reconnect. It'd look like a momentary network burb. It required no additional configuration or support on the client side at all.
The entire operation lasted about 30 seconds or so. The longest part was the vserver bootup.
Then when I would restore power to the first machine, it'd come up, latch back into drbd and mirror over the new changes to the FS and then assume secondary node. Then I'd pull the power on the other one, and it would cycle back over to the original machine.
You don't have to use drbd if you don't want. You make it do pretty much whatever you wanted which is th nice thing about it. (and with Linux-ha itself your not limited to just two nodes, you can mix and match, run some services on some machines and others on other machines, and just set it up so that you'd have multiple fall backs for anything important)
Linux will not be replacing Windows on the desktop for a long time if ever, because paid full time developers > hobbyist develops who wright software on their free time. Most Linux developers do not have the resources to throroughly beta test their software and test it on many different hardware/software configurations. In consequence, a lot of software/hardware can be very difficult to install and get working properly.
IMO this is an area that Linux hasn't improved much over the years, and this is crucial to mainstream acceptance. Linux is free and so people expect all the software for it to be free. That keeps comercial software out.
IMO this is an area that Linux hasn't improved much over the years, and this is crucial to mainstream acceptance. Linux is free and so people expect all the software for it to be free. That keeps comercial software out.
I take it you never done large amounts of Windows installs on random hardware before haven't you?
The vast majority of people dont' install their operating systems. They don't know often what a operating system _is_, much less how to download a ISO image, burn it to a DVD and install it.
Linux is not going to be suitable for the average home user until you find Linux pre-installed on machines in the sort and by large makers PLUS have the resources locally to support Linux.
The other week I was driving to the store and one of my neighbors had a 'Geek Patrol' VW in their driveway. The small computer store by my old house would charge people 75 dollars to reinstall windows or 200 dollars to clean off the malware (of which some people actually paid)
You go to a community college and there are going to be rooms full of people struggling to get to grips with how Windows and Microsoft Office works. Your taught how to use Windows in grade school, you'll use it in high school and it's required in college.
None of that exists for Linux.
_Thats_ why Linux isn't going to go mainstream desktop any time soon.
Linux software support is horrid on some other fronts.
Photoshop >> GIMP (IMO).
Little or no CAD or engineering design apps on Linux... most closed source math/scientific apps suck balls on Linux (matlab and maple as exhibits A and B) or are not available at all.
Open Office just isn't there yet, for me... I'll stick with MS Office for at least another year or two.
I love LaTeX, but windows open source LaTeX apps are better, IMO, than those available on Linux. Right now... I have to use Word anyhow.
For the foreseeable future, I'll be mixing both linux and windows.
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