Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"][quote name="motherfuckerfoodeater"]I think there's a sort of corollary to the opinion expressed <a href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html">here</a> which is that if you're a programmer, Windows machines are cheaper than Macs only if your time has no value.[/quote] Really stupid opinion. Intel-based Macs are both quantitatively and qualitatively more expensive than Windows machines by any measure you want to use. Linux has about 2% of the software market; Macs have about 7%; all other targets combined (BSD, Syllable, BEOS, OS/2) split about 2%; and Windows has the rest. If you're a programmer, Macs are much more expensive to develop software on for any other reason than you have a specialty, niche market that it provides something not available in Windows which is, as far as I'm aware of, nothing. Actually I think his argument was the exact opposite, that Linux was much harder to use than Windows and as such unless you're a sysadmin or a trained, Other systems are going to be cheaper only if your time has no value. "I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more. I hope that some day it will have evolved to the point where my mom can take home a Linux box, turn it on, and get on with her life without having to become a Unix sysadmin first, and without having to give up on all the ease of use she's come to expect from allegedly less powerful operating systems. "Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless. Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?" That may be a good argument but it doesn't answer everything. If you wanted to argue for stability we'd still be using mainframes because you can take a binary COBOL application that you no longer have source for, and JCL, and run an application written for a 360 running MVS back in 1970 and that same app will run today on a z/System using z/OS without change and if what it does is still relevant - like payroll - it will still work and will still be relevant 40 years after it was written. As for the argument about Macs are less expensive if your time has value, it's actually the reverse argument. If you're a programmer writing Apps whose time has value, your time is worth fifteen times as much working on Windows development than it is working on Macintosh development and about 95 times as much as Linux development. If you're doing web development it doesn't matter what your underlying OS is as long as it supports Apache (or any other web server supporting CGI or a built-in interpreter) and the interpreter or compiler you use, whether that's C/C++, Python or Perl for the CGI interface, or PHP as a stock add-in. For Mobile Apps, it's the reverse. Writing for the Windows environment is a waste of your time; you're better off writing for the Android or iPhone. As I said, I bought an inexpensive PowerPC Macintosh Desktop in order to find the cheapest way to get my feet wet learning the differences. That I was also able to use it to run software that I originally wrote in and for a Windows environment was a serendipitous opportunity. I would not have bought it to use as a development environment unless there was some special reason. (Building a much more secure application where security is ultra critical might be one of those. With the older Power PC mostly deprecated, the chances of today's script kiddies bothing with something that's probably less than 0.5% of the computers out there makes it extremely unlikely there's going to be any attack vectors for it.) With most of the computers out there running Windows, the law of diminishing returns says to an attacker that the other machines have almost no value to bother with them. [/quote]