I used Windows PCs at work and at home from the 1980's to 2008. Then in 2008 I bought my first MacBook, which could run Excel (which I use for all sorts of financial models). Now I much prefer the Mac. I have a MacBook Pro, a 25" screen iMac, an iPad, and an iPhone, all of which synch and communicate with each other effortlessly. I have become an Apple fanboy.
All my computers run Windows 7. My last 2 (laptop and desktop) I actually downgraded them to Windows 7.
I do love my iPhone, but I never got into a Mac.
One thing that frustrates the fuck out of me with Apple is things have to be just certain to work. For example I have movies files of all different formats (avi. mkv. mp4.) and Apple only takes mp4 when loading onto an iPad or AppleTV. An Android tablet will take any format.
If you need a computer that can handle virtually any piece of hardware that comes along, or you want to play high end games, go with a Windows PC.
If you use the most performant programs for image and video processing, which are optimized for the very few different hardware configurations that Apple has and suports, go with Apple products.
Yep, Open Source is great. One thing that is going to turbo charge the advances in AI. Nowadays if you have a good idea for a project but not the manpower, turn it into a opensource project. Kaggle is another interesting creation along similar lines. If you have an interesting data science problem but not the manpower see if you can get the Kaggle folks interested.
None of the above. I was a PC guy, but I also liked using MacBooks. I probably preferred PC's and Windows slightly over Macs.
Recently, when my old PC desktop and laptop died and became outdated, I bought a Google Chromebook, thinking it would be a temporary solution. However, I loved how lightweight and compact it was, how it started up and shutdown so quickly, and how it synched so well with my Android phone. So, I'm sticking with it and using the cloud for everything.
I like the PC when I want to do a lot of different things without following a predetermined script. I am using an iPad and iPhone and got used to it because it was the only thing like it available when I wanted something like it. I do not like all the restrictions Apple placed on the devices. I definitely do not like following Apple's plan to make devices obsolete after 2 to 3 years making devices without enough ram etc so that web sites crash with older devices while marketing that there is 32 or 64 gig of internal storage etc. if you bought the first iPad, it was good for a couple years then started crashing everywhere. Apple sucks in making products durable. I want at least 7 years before I have to upgrade a device or pc. A pc I can get 7 years out of it. My original iPad couldn't even load most internet sites I visited after 4 years.
I read Apple made devices obsolete on purpose obviously to fatten their bottom line.
Advertise 64 gig internal storage but only put 256k ram in the first generation iPad. Put only 512k ram in the second generation while advertising the internal gigabytes. A bit more in following devices. Then all the older devices crash online because they don't have enough ram even though you may still have over 60 gig of free internal storage.
Agree with many of the comments above stating that Apple products are better for consuming information and PC's are better for getting work done.
Also agree with @Esta that building your own PC is fun and gives you the flexibility to choose what you want. Building a PC is not a great intellectual achievement (unlike paying strippers for sex which requires years of experience, a certain studly coolness, and intense training on inner-workings of The System). We have several Windows 10 desktops at home with CUDA-enabled graphics cards. I've grown accustomed to MS Visual Studio for prototyping. I've also used Unix workstations in the past, but I think I prefer PCs for most things.
My wife has an iPad and iPhone, but I prefer Android phones and PCs. To each his own...
I miss the days of MSDOS when I got paid to understand magic. Then Windows came along and people thought they could do the shit too. Headache as a consultant. Best Windows was WIN2KPRO or NT4. Everything since then has been an albatross of bullshit, permission removal, and marketing.
I just started playing around with this new thing where you can run Linux directly on Windows (i.e. non-virtualized). Most of the good stuff has already been ported to Windows but is nice for the stuff that hasn't. Anyone else tried it?
Mac OS X is essentially the last certified commercial Unix distribution. It is *excellent* for Unix software. This is coming from an old BSD, SunOS, Solaris, HP-UH, and Irix guy.
not sure on the Linux directly on Windows thing. (Cywin or posix or GNU utilities ported to Win32?) I do run Linux on bare metal. You can run something like Codeweavers Crossover Office (or WINE or the various ports of .NET Framework or Win32 APIs to Linux). I recall getting Office 2007 to run pretty well on Linux. I think Office 2010 runs well nowadays, assuming you stick to at least one version back.) But to me that is using the tool incorrectly.
I run Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux each day. I'm on Mac right now. Each has it's strengths and I use the tool appropriate for the job. Same with computer programming languages.
I do agree that a lot of what used to be strengths of Unix (or a clone like Linux) has been ported to Windows. But there are still edge cases where Mac OS X or Linux (or *BSD) still has there places. I could be nearly 100% on any of them.
What is really going to blow minds is the thought of something like Linux being a gift from the Fortune 500. There were some networking and scaling problems evident in the Linux kernel about 10-15 years ago (kernel 2.4.x). At lot of those fixes came not from Linus and his team, but from the Fortune 500! The F500 had paid developers on staff, and THEY FIXED a lot of the problems that each Linus himself refused to admit existed at the time. The F500 had a vested interest because they use Linux as glue between at lot of their server system or actually as server systems. The fortunate thing was the things they fixed in their own interests made it into what become the "fixed" codebase in Linux 2.6.x.
So in a way, Linux was a gift from the Fortune 500.
Plus for Windows: Visual Studio is a nice platform. Plus with the server software, you get a bunch of nice stuff thrown in (Active Directory, Group Policy, WSUS, certificates services). MS Office, in particular MS Access and MS Excel are excellent tools for business analysis.
Negatives for Windows: MS Office and MS SQL server (esp. SQL Enterprise, but to a lesser extent SQL Standard) are for-cost add-ins and not free. Visual Studio is not free, but with SQL and Visual Studio, consider the licensing costs a net savings on FTE staff. Plus you don't need an army of software developers to re-invent the wheel.
No it's from Microsoft and runs linux binaries directly. cygwin was an emulation layer (and pretty good) that you had to do a separate compilation for. Like it was a new brand of Unix. The MSFT stuff is pretty new so I imagine there are bugs lurking but fun to play around with.
Now if MSFT would start giving away their OS for free...
There is a good free version out if you are just using it for personal projects. You can get a commercial version pretty cheap (I think. Our company may have some special deal from them on licensing fees. Haven't looked into it.)
Plus for Linux: free as in free beer (no money) and also free speech (open source). Excel free C/C++ compiler (GNU Tools). This compelled Windows (IMO) to release free compilers over the years. back in the 1990s, this was a big deal.
Negatives for Linux: there is the hack and patch mentality. It was designed as a Unix clone by PC hackers. Constrast this with FreeBSD and OpenBSD, where those are Unix clones designed by Unix hackers. It is missing lots of software, like Microsoft Office, Active Directory, Group policy, pretty much all financial and tax software, no real good Adobe Flash support, no Adobe Creative Suite software, the Skype client is low priority and lags the Windows and Mac versions for features all the time, poor out of the box hardware support for a lot of computers, esp laptops. Pro Tip: buy Lenovo Thinkpads, Apple Macbook Pros or Airs, or Dell Precision mobile workstations.
Plus for BSD: a real Unix clone. There is program called 'pf' which as an excellent software firewall. I prefer pf to what's available on Linux but it does have scaling issues at time.
Negatives for BSD: scaling issues with pf. BSD is not as ubiquitous as Linux and let alone Windows or Mac.
Pluses for Apple: The OS is essentially what was NeXT, folded into Apple as Mac OS X. It's a commercial certified Unix platform. The hardware is OK. I like the Airs alot, better than a lot of PC ultrabooks (which are all terrible Air clones, IMO). Mac OS X mostly splits the difference between Windows and Linux, though at a slight mark up and loss of choice. You can also Buy MS Office, Intuit Quicken, and Intuit Turbotax for Mac, too.
Negatives for Apple: The "Pros" IMO are 'pro enough.' Lacking in ports and expandability as well as raw computational and graphics power. Apple has the "City Hall approach to everything. This means "you can't fight city hall." I remind people of this all the time. You need to do things "The Apple way." It makes you life easier, if you use Apple products, when you accept this and approach Apple in this way. Don't fight city hall.
Pro-tip: if you want an Apple desktop, try building a Hackintosh.
Pro-tip: for Apple laptops, buy the cheapest thing that works for you, then get a powerhouse (desktop or laptop) running Windows to offload your powerhouse workloads, esp graphics (2D and 3D), and for gaming.
If you stick to supported hardware, it is no harder to build a hackintosh PC desktop, and load Mac OS X on it than i was to install a Linux distribution in the 1990s. In fact, my hackintosh gives me LESS PROBLEMS on OS Upgrades than my actual Apple iMac, if you can believe that. Stick to ASUS or Gigabyte motherboards and supported nVidia graphics cards, and a real i7 chip. In fact, triple boot Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, if you want.
Just buy one of the $20 or $30 upgrade DVDs of Mac OS X, so that Apple at least gets paid for its work. Nothing makes me more upset and people not getting paid for their intellectual property and for their work. Then legal issue aside, you are OK in my book. :)
Lots of good information in this thread. Still not sure why tittyfag(dot) freaked out at me for starting. Maybe a computer to complicated a device for him to operate w/o his nurse's help?
@Dominic: well lots of times open source has problems, so you have a couple of options: fix it locally and maintain a fork forever or get it back into the mainline. The latter is alot cheaper over the long run, plus your company might score some points for helping out open source. Also having some staff members working on open source can bring attention (and maybe even hires to your company).
Closed source can also have problems. But at least with open source your strong user communities have some chance of fixing problems. Most of the time the answer is just to sustain the old version.
With Closed source, the owning firm forces you to use the new version like it or not, and rarely are they truthful about known bugs.
You don't really want to be 'user', as that must means 'consumer'. You want to find ways to get more actively involved and exert your own pull and work your own adaptations.
So try to go open source, and always support the open source movement.
I know there is a lot of good info out there but with this kind of stuff I sort of zone out, and I just can't pay attention long enough to really have a good understanding, I use a PC for most business applications and keep most of my work on a laptop running Windows latest version whatever number it is, and use an IPhone 5 AFAIK they both work fine for my uses.
Dougster, correct on Visual Studio. One can download the "Express Versions" for home use. These are single language but work well for a lot of home and school projects. I use them a lot and like them.
Dougster, I think MSFT is headed that way for home use. I think MSFT still wants to squeeze enterprise OS agreements (subscription) out of companies, while it still can. But I think, like you, the writing is on the wall.
We use cloud for all of our web stuff and some DB stuff. Lots of growth there.
Oh, ok on the Linux binaries directly on MSFT thing. That makes sense. People like me were already running VMs of Linux on Hyper-V so why not cut out the middle layer. I think MSFT can leverage their support (and they DO SUPPORT it) of Linux on Hyper-V to get those Linux binaries on MSFT running.
A lot of the cloud works great with Linux especially the way things are scripted and controlled. Look at Microsoft Powershell. It's a scripting language but different that say bash or Linush shell scripts because it is Object Oriented (it passes objects) instead of file-based or text string-based like UNIX historically is/was. But like bash and shell scripts the power for automation is there as you often manage, admin, or control Windows Servers (at least 2012 R2) with Powershell, no matter if you have 1 or 20.
I feel MSFT needed something like Powershell to effectively compete with Linux in the cloud space. What do you think?
@dominic: I was think of Visual Studio Community edition which supports many languages (especially since it supports 3rd party language extensions). Really great software, IMO.
I actually ran some software on my PC at home using the Linux for Windows and it was slow as dog. Was pretty surprised when I tried the same results on an actual Linux cloud machine with about the same horsepower.
Doesn't MSFT already have powershell on Linux? Can't see it becoming a dominate language. IronPython might have that potential, but they don't seem to be pushing it that hard.
I thought about it some more. I don't IronPython could get the momentum either. Python is already easy enough to use with enough libraries so JVM support doesn't add much. It also cuts off using regular Python libraries than that aren't JVM compiled and possibly call into machine code. Regular python seems to have all the momentum these days.
39 comments
I do love my iPhone, but I never got into a Mac.
One thing that frustrates the fuck out of me with Apple is things have to be just certain to work. For example I have movies files of all different formats (avi. mkv. mp4.) and Apple only takes mp4 when loading onto an iPad or AppleTV. An Android tablet will take any format.
If you need a computer that can handle virtually any piece of hardware that comes along, or you want to play high end games, go with a Windows PC.
If you use the most performant programs for image and video processing, which are optimized for the very few different hardware configurations that Apple has and suports, go with Apple products.
PC is more amenable to open source.
SJG
Recently, when my old PC desktop and laptop died and became outdated, I bought a Google Chromebook, thinking it would be a temporary solution. However, I loved how lightweight and compact it was, how it started up and shutdown so quickly, and how it synched so well with my Android phone. So, I'm sticking with it and using the cloud for everything.
Advertise 64 gig internal storage but only put 256k ram in the first generation iPad. Put only 512k ram in the second generation while advertising the internal gigabytes. A bit more in following devices. Then all the older devices crash online because they don't have enough ram even though you may still have over 60 gig of free internal storage.
SJG
Also agree with @Esta that building your own PC is fun and gives you the flexibility to choose what you want. Building a PC is not a great intellectual achievement (unlike paying strippers for sex which requires years of experience, a certain studly coolness, and intense training on inner-workings of The System). We have several Windows 10 desktops at home with CUDA-enabled graphics cards. I've grown accustomed to MS Visual Studio for prototyping. I've also used Unix workstations in the past, but I think I prefer PCs for most things.
My wife has an iPad and iPhone, but I prefer Android phones and PCs. To each his own...
not sure on the Linux directly on Windows thing. (Cywin or posix or GNU utilities ported to Win32?) I do run Linux on bare metal. You can run something like Codeweavers Crossover Office (or WINE or the various ports of .NET Framework or Win32 APIs to Linux). I recall getting Office 2007 to run pretty well on Linux. I think Office 2010 runs well nowadays, assuming you stick to at least one version back.) But to me that is using the tool incorrectly.
I run Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux each day. I'm on Mac right now. Each has it's strengths and I use the tool appropriate for the job. Same with computer programming languages.
I do agree that a lot of what used to be strengths of Unix (or a clone like Linux) has been ported to Windows. But there are still edge cases where Mac OS X or Linux (or *BSD) still has there places. I could be nearly 100% on any of them.
What is really going to blow minds is the thought of something like Linux being a gift from the Fortune 500. There were some networking and scaling problems evident in the Linux kernel about 10-15 years ago (kernel 2.4.x). At lot of those fixes came not from Linus and his team, but from the Fortune 500! The F500 had paid developers on staff, and THEY FIXED a lot of the problems that each Linus himself refused to admit existed at the time. The F500 had a vested interest because they use Linux as glue between at lot of their server system or actually as server systems. The fortunate thing was the things they fixed in their own interests made it into what become the "fixed" codebase in Linux 2.6.x.
So in a way, Linux was a gift from the Fortune 500.
Negatives for Windows: MS Office and MS SQL server (esp. SQL Enterprise, but to a lesser extent SQL Standard) are for-cost add-ins and not free. Visual Studio is not free, but with SQL and Visual Studio, consider the licensing costs a net savings on FTE staff. Plus you don't need an army of software developers to re-invent the wheel.
Now if MSFT would start giving away their OS for free...
There is a good free version out if you are just using it for personal projects. You can get a commercial version pretty cheap (I think. Our company may have some special deal from them on licensing fees. Haven't looked into it.)
Negatives for Linux: there is the hack and patch mentality. It was designed as a Unix clone by PC hackers. Constrast this with FreeBSD and OpenBSD, where those are Unix clones designed by Unix hackers. It is missing lots of software, like Microsoft Office, Active Directory, Group policy, pretty much all financial and tax software, no real good Adobe Flash support, no Adobe Creative Suite software, the Skype client is low priority and lags the Windows and Mac versions for features all the time, poor out of the box hardware support for a lot of computers, esp laptops. Pro Tip: buy Lenovo Thinkpads, Apple Macbook Pros or Airs, or Dell Precision mobile workstations.
Plus for BSD: a real Unix clone. There is program called 'pf' which as an excellent software firewall. I prefer pf to what's available on Linux but it does have scaling issues at time.
Negatives for BSD: scaling issues with pf. BSD is not as ubiquitous as Linux and let alone Windows or Mac.
Negatives for Apple: The "Pros" IMO are 'pro enough.' Lacking in ports and expandability as well as raw computational and graphics power. Apple has the "City Hall approach to everything. This means "you can't fight city hall." I remind people of this all the time. You need to do things "The Apple way." It makes you life easier, if you use Apple products, when you accept this and approach Apple in this way. Don't fight city hall.
Pro-tip: if you want an Apple desktop, try building a Hackintosh.
Pro-tip: for Apple laptops, buy the cheapest thing that works for you, then get a powerhouse (desktop or laptop) running Windows to offload your powerhouse workloads, esp graphics (2D and 3D), and for gaming.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/
https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/f…
If you stick to supported hardware, it is no harder to build a hackintosh PC desktop, and load Mac OS X on it than i was to install a Linux distribution in the 1990s. In fact, my hackintosh gives me LESS PROBLEMS on OS Upgrades than my actual Apple iMac, if you can believe that. Stick to ASUS or Gigabyte motherboards and supported nVidia graphics cards, and a real i7 chip. In fact, triple boot Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, if you want.
Just buy one of the $20 or $30 upgrade DVDs of Mac OS X, so that Apple at least gets paid for its work. Nothing makes me more upset and people not getting paid for their intellectual property and for their work. Then legal issue aside, you are OK in my book. :)
Hack the planet,
Dominic.
Closed source can also have problems. But at least with open source your strong user communities have some chance of fixing problems. Most of the time the answer is just to sustain the old version.
With Closed source, the owning firm forces you to use the new version like it or not, and rarely are they truthful about known bugs.
You don't really want to be 'user', as that must means 'consumer'. You want to find ways to get more actively involved and exert your own pull and work your own adaptations.
So try to go open source, and always support the open source movement.
SJG
We use cloud for all of our web stuff and some DB stuff. Lots of growth there.
A lot of the cloud works great with Linux especially the way things are scripted and controlled. Look at Microsoft Powershell. It's a scripting language but different that say bash or Linush shell scripts because it is Object Oriented (it passes objects) instead of file-based or text string-based like UNIX historically is/was. But like bash and shell scripts the power for automation is there as you often manage, admin, or control Windows Servers (at least 2012 R2) with Powershell, no matter if you have 1 or 20.
I feel MSFT needed something like Powershell to effectively compete with Linux in the cloud space. What do you think?
I actually ran some software on my PC at home using the Linux for Windows and it was slow as dog. Was pretty surprised when I tried the same results on an actual Linux cloud machine with about the same horsepower.
Doesn't MSFT already have powershell on Linux? Can't see it becoming a dominate language. IronPython might have that potential, but they don't seem to be pushing it that hard.
https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell