Windows or Mac?

[aidanjt]

Name them. I used to work for a certain german institute which shall remain nameless. They have been withdrawing their linux terminals.

Yahoo be one. NYSE being another, much of Wall St. is following suite. Need I go on? Not that it'd satisfy your irrational Linux hate anyway.

Where does this happen? The reason these technical faults are magically eliminated again shows you've no fricken idea.

Erm, how did you derive at that notion? And where did I use the word 'magical'? "They'd have" implies work/effort.

Have you ever sat foot inside a company, or had to have one of the projects your managing depend on an internal IT team?

Yes, and yes. I was with an internal IT team helping in-house developers fix their code for integration with our network when I was with an electronic engineering SME. Are you going to make a point some time?

Yes because telling all your counterparties to change their working pratices is a GOOD idea.

It surely is.

[TheAnimus]

Yahoo be one. NYSE being another, much of Wall St. is following suite. Need I go on? Not that it'd satisfy your irrational Linux hate anyway.

yahoo is political, NYSE is a bespoke internal system, kind of like bloomberg, its not a market maker...

There was one big wall street player that heavily used linux and unix in general, its now been half slotted into a certain japanse bank and BC!

Shall we go down the check list of big companies (FTSE would be easier for me, as i know more people who work there) and see what their running.

There is no trading bank in london that dosen't use windows for the majority of its desktops.

Erm, how did you derive at that notion? And where did I use the word 'magical'? "They'd have" implies work/effort.

What issues would it fix, please list them? You make it sound like there is infanate upside, with no downside. I think your risk perception is wrong, and i think your reward perception is wrong.

Yes, and yes. I was with an internal IT team helping in-house developers fix their code for integration with our network when I was with an electronic engineering SME. Are you going to make a point some time?

so an EE firm, how easy do you recon it would be for them to make the change? How much do you think it would cost? Are the apps they use going to run as is? It took me ages to even begin to learn how to work Orcad at uni, the cost in productivity of a workforce changing tool because its not available any more is hudge!

It surely is.

You wouldn't get in a position where your able to talk to counterparties if you think like that, if you ever want to make good money in the business world, loose the "i know better than you" attitude when it comes to a business you know nothing about, your counterparties will rape you otherwise.

[aidanjt]

yahoo is political, NYSE is a bespoke internal system, kind of like bloomberg, its not a market maker...

There was one big wall street player that heavily used linux and unix in general, its now been half slotted into a certain japanse bank and BC!

Shall we go down the check list of big companies (FTSE would be easier for me, as i know more people who work there) and see what their running.

There is no trading bank in london that dosen't use windows for the majority of its desktops.

Did I, or did I not, say "market trading"? And I don't care if "Yahoo is politicial", it's a valid example of a company which successfully runs Linux for trading and finances.

What issues would it fix, please list them?

Time, money, security, and experienced administrator's sanity.

You make it sound like there is infanate upside, with no downside. I think your risk perception is wrong, and i think your reward perception is wrong.

No. I didn't say anything of the sort. I'm dismissing ridiculous Linux myths, FUD, and flat out lies, nothing more. Again, with the strawman arguments. Enough already.

so an EE firm, how easy do you recon it would be for them to make the change? How much do you think it would cost? Are the apps they use going to run as is? It took me ages to even begin to learn how to work Orcad at uni, the cost in productivity of a workforce changing tool because its not available any more is hudge!

The apps they used worked spot on natively, in Wine, and Dosbox, and we kept a few Win2k boxes around for experimental purposes. And all it cost was my time, since I worked on the infra. part in the lab, and rolled out over weekend.

You wouldn't get in a position where your able to talk to counterparties if you think like that, if you ever want to make good money in the business world, loose the "i know better than you" attitude when it comes to a business you know nothing about, your counterparties will rape you otherwise.

Yes, TheAnimus 'no's best.

There's a difference between an "I know better than you" attitude (as you're coming off now, as a matter of fact), and disseminating useful information to your business partners. It may be a fine line, but tact is key.

*Note*: I wont be bothering to respond to future stupid "LOLZ LOONIX IZ T3H SUX" type arguments.

[TheAnimus]

Did I, or did I not, say "market trading"? And I don't care if "Yahoo is politicial", it's a valid example of a company which successfully runs Linux for trading and finances.

Yahoo would run it even if it cost ten times more! The financial stuff they do is also childsplay, they are no DBK or proshe! The thing is this is a tiny fraction of the market for desktops. Its market share is minuite. This is such an obserable fact.

Time, money, security, and experienced administrator's sanity.

How? From my experiance of administrating them myself (okay, a lot has changed in 6 years) and paying people to administer them, i've only ever had a linux box compromised (thanks to pearl). Never a windows one, and the muppeter who does the windows one costs less too! Windows is piss easy to administer for 90% of tasks, there are a 10% where the design makes it a real bitch, this is where linux often shines. Maintaining a secure windows system is rediculasly easy, pre SP2 it was hard because out of the box config everything was turned on. But now its so damn easy, i don't see how any time could possibly be saved.

No. I didn't say anything of the sort. I'm dismissing ridiculous Linux myths, FUD, and flat out lies, nothing more. Again, with the strawman arguments. Enough already.

But how can you run half the apps without having emulation like wine, hudge configuration cost surely? Compared to how nicely XP just works, the ease at which SMS can be configured and controled, with people like Sophos doing excellent anti-spam/virus software that is a joy to administer!

The apps they used worked spot on natively, in Wine, and Dosbox, and we kept a few Win2k boxes around for experimental purposes. And all it cost was my time, since I worked on the infra. part in the lab, and rolled out over weekend.

To me emulation (and you will see this stance in the win7 emulation of windows bits) is an administrative cost. This comes from me not having to do the administration myself, but been impacted when people feck it up (the joy of been in systems architecture is you have to think about the costs of every 'great peice of software' you think of using, i would love to name n shame a certain column store database)!

Yes, TheAnimus 'no's best.

There's a difference between an "I know better than you" attitude (as you're coming off now, as a matter of fact), and disseminating useful information to your business partners. It may be a fine line, but tact is key.

*Note*: I wont be bothering to respond to future stupid "LOLZ LOONIX IZ T3H SUX" type arguments.

I'm not trying to say i know best, just that there is a reason why people are using what they are using, and sending formats in the way they are. To say they are wrong with not idea of how they work is going to make you wrong rather swiftly.

[lodore]

Neither is Windows? So you're advocating using what?


Right, so they don't spend money on advertising, but that's not what you said. You said that businesses would be mad to deploy on OSX? How does advertising hook into that?



You can go to Dixons or PC World and buy a Mac compatible scanner. You plug it in, and it will talk directly to iPhoto or something similar. Plug in a camera, and it'll even fire up iPhoto for you and ask if you'd like to import the photos. Drop in a CD and it'll open up iTunes. Log in to iChat, and the video camera will become live.

You can't do that with Ubuntu. You can do bits of that with Windows, but it's not as intuitive. You're talking about all sorts of stuff from the perspective of someone who is a coder/geek.

Hey b0redom,
i found linux better at that type of thing.
when i plugged my phone in to linux it instatly sorted it all out it even had the driver to allow me to connect to the internet using my phone. to get that functionality on windows i have to install software from the sony ericsson website yet on linux it just works.
I have yet to connect a printer to linux. but i have added a printer shared by windows and in around 20seconds i could print to it.

on an unrelated note to the above: yahoo use Freebsd for their mail servers not Linux. but they may use Linux as well I dono.

@ TheAnimus,
I find it quite funny people need retraining after going from 2k to xp.
I can picture it thou.
how many times have linux servers crashed compared to windows servers?
im quite interested in that.

windows 7 takes around 8gb disc space without any software installed.
thats one thing that pisses me off about windows operating systems each new releease takes more and more disc space.
windows 7 take slightly less than vista but still alot more than Linux does for the same amount of applications.
i would assume windows servers are the same in that regard. more disc space= more time it takes to image and restore.

[TheAnimus]

@ TheAnimus,
I find it quite funny people need retraining after going from 2k to xp.
I can picture it thou.
how many times have linux servers crashed compared to windows servers?
im quite interested in that.

You would be amazed how stuck in ways people get. A place where i used to work we had a multi PHd'd Physicist who couldn't work XP going from NT4, he just hated everything and refused to give it a fair chance. You also get some dodgy apps that people have which make assumptions no apps should make about location of config files etc. Even a re-install can break those, let alone a version change. There are massive costs involved.

Linux servers not crashing, i would say introduce them to this bizarre database vendor one of the teams here is using. The vendor insisted it had to be dodgy hardware, all the hardware was swapped, even differen't UPS. The max uptime is about 2 weeks on those, then segfault. The working solution was to use a "watchdog" timer to automatically reset the server.... I should be really greatful for that team, not only did we come in at a much lower cost on IT (generic, non specalised windows support staff just cheaper) but our systems actually work! Our database server didn't crash once in the 3 months between upgrade time. This is a server been managed by the same company IT team.

The thing is you can manage anything badly, and they have found a way here, they use a certain virtualisation server system, from a more fruit themed software firm:
http://www.parallels.com/uk/products/virtuozzo/
It is the most horrifically unstable, un-reliable peice of crap. How can running a certain vendor app (which is all C/C++) in my container, de-stabalise, and DENY memory allocation to another container? That isn't virtualisation in my book, thats the level of crappery that gets you blacklisted!

[abaxas]

OSX - work
XP - games
ubuntu - sofatop

[peterb]

One of the things to remember is the fundamental difference in design architecture between windows and *nix.

*nix is based on the concept of a central core with lots of simple programms that only do one thing, but does it very well, so outside the kernel is the shell (or several optional shells, which have their own apps to do useful things, like read a directory format a disk etc - and on top of that are the user applications - mail programs, gui's etc - and lots of choice. There is also a lot that you can do scripting, and best of all (to my mind)is that most of the configuration files are text base.

Windows is a large highly integrated monolith. True, there are individuall apps within the monolith, dlls that do specific jobs, but it isn't so easily divisible, and while there is a set of published APIs, there are others that are not readily accessible used internally - making external development of core functions harder. Configuration is through the Registry hives, and while those components exist as system files, they are neither readily accessible (without using 3rd party apps) nor (using regedit) intuitively readable.

Which model you prefer dpends on where you are standing - and The Animus and b0rdom are at one end of the spectrum, Aidnjt is at the other.

For the corporate user, Windows represents the 'safe' option - certainly at the desktop, less so at the server side, many networks have mixed Linux/windows systems (and Hexus is hosted on aBSD platform with Apache/php combination - which I know is another one of The Animus's pet hates - but it works well). Other big UK sites (such as jobsite) use a similar setup. And of course when Microsoft bought hotmail and converted it from a *nix server base to a Windows server infrastructure, they ran into all sorts of problems, which were well documented in a leaked internal paper. That was a while back, and windows has improved since then.

So it comes down to horses for course and while entrenched positions are interesting to watch, neither are ever going to convince the other that 'their' OS is best - because it all comes down to individual philosophy and requirements.

But as this thread was originally 'apple or mac' it has arguably gone off topic (notwithstanding the *nix starting point of Apple's current OS.

[TheAnimus]

and Hexus is hosted on aBSD platform with Apache/php combination - which I know is another one of The Animus's pet hates - but it works well).

Hey NetBSD is my unix of choice at the moment any way. OpenBSD are just too busy with their head up their arse as to what constitutes a flaw.

Mac is built atop BSD, bringing with it lots of easy out of the box functionality, thou little in the way of network maintance, and a whole keg of security flaws!

My hatred for Apache is because i had a bug exploited to loose control (thou not elevated) via it.

My hatred for PHP is because its a fricken awful language, in any metric which you could devise to measure the cost of using it, it fails.

[abaxas]

Find me a solution based on linux where:

7. Has an office suite that can open Office 2007 xlsx and docx files.

If you work in the real world, most businesses refuse to accept office 2007 files. Might as well sent them a lotus 123 file, it's no use to anyone.

[Shaunbarlow]

I voted for Other Windows. I really love the look of Windows XP Media Center Edition.. The taskbar looks pretty sweet