On Apr 21 2006, Steve Lamb wrote: > Look, comes down to this. I'm tired of wrangling with my machine to do > anything on both sides of the fence. Windows is pissing me off daily and > this constant fighting for the basic stuff now on the Linux side is pissing > me off just as much. For a time my Linux box did what I wanted to do. World > zipped by and not the restrictions are mounting. :/
I am an old Unix user that is divided between using a "desktop system" and the old, proven method of more simpler (yet, quite powerful) tools of using basically a window manager and doing most things in a shell prompt, after I have used MacOS X. Yes, I am undecided. But the guideline of having Free Software available weights heavily in my decisions regarding productivity. Yes, I don't want to be "the guy that fixes the computer" anymore. I want to "just use the computer as a tool". But I agree that some software that we may want to use may have deficiencies. Helping it surpass its deficiencies is a good way of going from the "fixing the computer" to "just using the computer as a tool", yet having the nice side-effect of learning how things work. > If only more game developers would produce for the Mac I'd switch in a > heartbeat. And, then, forget about the ability of upgrading your system easily. Well, in fact, you may even discover that your *hardware* is neglected and even if you are willing to pay for the software, without seeing the source code, you are left alone. My iBook G3 doesn't run certain new applications that Apple has released recently. Yet, the ones that interest them the most (like iTunes---which gives them loads of customers for the iTunes Music Store) are "supported". Another problem that I faced with Apple is that my iPod (second generation) is fairly able to run newer software (e.g., letting me read a text file/"small book" on its screen). But the last update it received was to run AAC songs. Which does take a lot more development than implementing a simple, stupid text viewer in for "little notes" (which was available for the third generation iPods, at the same time the AAC decoder was available for *all* then current iPod). Why? That's because the iTunes Music Store sells music encoded in AAC. So, be careful when deciding to go the closed-source route. It's nice to have Free Software boot into my computers to use *recent* software, with all the security updates (and functionality updates too). Oh, and regarding games, I don't care for them. Regards, Rogério Brito. P.S.: Despite my comments above, I should grant you that some of Apple machines are indeed *nice*, like the Mac Mini. And the nicer thing seems to be that you can run Linux on them, AFAIK. -- Rogério Brito : [EMAIL PROTECTED] : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de Homepage on freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
