On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:22:30 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 09:38:31 +0100, Huge said:

On 2007-08-30, Mike Barnes wrote:
In uk.d-i-y, Huge wrote:
Windows is a festering heap of cack.

So very true.

But in my experience many Linux

I don't run that, either. Nor a Mac.

)

BSD? Solaris?

His headers made it clear enough.

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On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:25:23 UTC, "William Munns"
wrote:

A manual which is only useful if you know what the right questions are

And there you have the time honoured definition of a man page on

UNIX/BSD/SunOS/Solaris/Linux^H^H^H^H^Hjumped up UNIX wannabe

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Eric P. Peterson wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

John Rumm wrote:
William Munns wrote:

I disagree with one minor point- most (all?) distros come
with a manual or two- and a lot of HOWTO's and FAQ's
are available.
man man, man!
A manual which is only useful if you know what the right questions are
Unlike the windows one which is never useful regardless of the question
asked...

"I don't know, please contact your systems administrator..."

Oh indeed. The crazy days when we installed 98SE and suddenly the
machines couldn't use the SAMBA servers..somwhere 45 levels deep in the
registry there is an entry that needed to be 'use unencrypted
passwords=yes'.

You mean there's a manual for Windows? Wow! It's all been word of mouth,
and trial and error...and error...and error...IME

- E
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)

Which is not saying very much, at that..

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:02:35 +0000, Eric P. Peterson wrote:
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)

In the sense of "least worst", I suppose.
W2K was quite reliable. Which is a good thing 'cos the US navy runs
warships on it. I still worry about whether it was reliable enough.

I unforget seeing a missile targetting system, built with Ferranti's
silicon on Sapphire chips, which ran a small multi-tasking kernel based on
BSD *nix. The uptime when the ship came in for refit was 1200 days. The
vessel had taken commission 1190 days before.

On 2007-08-31 18:25:11 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:22:30 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 09:38:31 +0100, Huge said:

On 2007-08-30, Mike Barnes wrote:
In uk.d-i-y, Huge wrote:
Windows is a festering heap of cack.

So very true.

But in my experience many Linux

I don't run that, either. Nor a Mac.

)

BSD? Solaris?

His headers made it clear enough.

ProNews? OS/2?

Surely not. I haven't come across anyone running that for 10 years......

In article , Robert Harvey
scribeth thus
On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:02:35 +0000, Eric P. Peterson wrote:
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)

In the sense of "least worst", I suppose.
W2K was quite reliable.

So it is!, we use that in a lot of locations for Radio station hard disk
playout, up for thousands of hours!...


Which is a good thing 'cos the US navy runs
warships on it. I still worry about whether it was reliable enough.

I unforget seeing a missile targetting system, built with Ferranti's
silicon on Sapphire chips, which ran a small multi-tasking kernel based on
BSD *nix. The uptime when the ship came in for refit was 1200 days. The
vessel had taken commission 1190 days before.

--
Tony Sayer
..

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:29:01 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 18:25:11 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:22:30 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 09:38:31 +0100, Huge said:

On 2007-08-30, Mike Barnes wrote:
In uk.d-i-y, Huge wrote:
Windows is a festering heap of cack.

So very true.

But in my experience many Linux

I don't run that, either. Nor a Mac.

)

BSD? Solaris?

His headers made it clear enough.

ProNews? OS/2?

Surely not. I haven't come across anyone running that for 10 years......

No, they're my headers, not his. Please try to keep up.

In my case, I run many things - part of my job. This machine happens to
run OS/2 because I have yet to come across a better user interface, and
it does all I want. My mail server is FreBSD, my voicemail system is
Win2K, and I even occasionally boot Linux if I have to. And a lot
more...

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On 2007-08-31 20:19:40 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:29:01 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 18:25:11 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 13:22:30 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 09:38:31 +0100, Huge said:

On 2007-08-30, Mike Barnes wrote:
In uk.d-i-y, Huge wrote:
Windows is a festering heap of cack.

So very true.

But in my experience many Linux

I don't run that, either. Nor a Mac.

)

BSD? Solaris?

His headers made it clear enough.

ProNews? OS/2?

Surely not. I haven't come across anyone running that for 10 years......

No, they're my headers, not his. Please try to keep up.

Oh, yes, so it was.


In my case, I run many things - part of my job. This machine happens to
run OS/2 because I have yet to come across a better user interface, and
it does all I want. My mail server is FreBSD, my voicemail system is
Win2K, and I even occasionally boot Linux if I have to. And a lot
more...
/
Interesting. What do you use for voicemail....?

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:40:13 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

In my case, I run many things - part of my job. This machine happens to
run OS/2 because I have yet to come across a better user interface, and
it does all I want. My mail server is FreBSD, my voicemail system is
Win2K, and I even occasionally boot Linux if I have to. And a lot
more...
/
Interesting. What do you use for voicemail....?

The software that came with the PBX...a Cybergear Gold (as a temporary
measure until the Asterisk box is complete)

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On 2007-08-31 21:08:30 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:40:13 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

In my case, I run many things - part of my job. This machine happens to
run OS/2 because I have yet to come across a better user interface, and
it does all I want. My mail server is FreBSD, my voicemail system is
Win2K, and I even occasionally boot Linux if I have to. And a lot
more...
/
Interesting. What do you use for voicemail....?

The software that came with the PBX...a Cybergear Gold (as a temporary
measure until the Asterisk box is complete)


Ah. I was looking at Asterisk. Seems quite nice although quite a
bit of configuring to do. Have you got anything working? Using the
cards they sell or some other way?

Robert Harvey wrote:
On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:02:35 +0000, Eric P. Peterson wrote:
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)

In the sense of "least worst", I suppose.
W2K was quite reliable. Which is a good thing 'cos the US navy runs
warships on it. I still worry about whether it was reliable enough.

I unforget seeing a missile targetting system, built with Ferranti's
silicon on Sapphire chips, which ran a small multi-tasking kernel based on
BSD *nix. The uptime when the ship came in for refit was 1200 days. The
vessel had taken commission 1190 days before.

well that must have been better than the one I worked on in 1967..where
some smart alec did a calculation and worked out that the missile
failsafe would detonate it just 300 ms after launch BEFORE it got into
the beam it was supposed to 'ride'..with an uptime of just 300ms.

It finally became Sea Wolf, and did shoot down an Exocet, so I suppose
they must have modified the code..;-)

tony sayer wrote:
In article , Robert Harvey
scribeth thus
On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:02:35 +0000, Eric P. Peterson wrote:
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)
In the sense of "least worst", I suppose.
W2K was quite reliable.

So it is!, we use that in a lot of locations for Radio station hard disk
playout, up for thousands of hours!...



The worst thing about any of the MS platforms was memory leaks..even
NT4..a friend of mine wrote a program that simply allocated and freed
kernel memory. And wrote the free memory up on a little chart. Over a
period of a few hours it whittled down IIRC 4 bytes at a time to
nothing, and crashed.

With every program alloc/free pair always losing 4bytes..there was
always a limit on how long it would stay up.

Compared with the trusty old DEC VAX of which it has been remarked:-

"A DEC VAX is like an erect penis: it will stay up as long as you don't
**** with it" ;-)

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:45:20 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

Ah. I was looking at Asterisk. Seems quite nice although quite a
bit of configuring to do. Have you got anything working? Using the
cards they sell or some other way?

ISDN and a cheap ATA. No other cards needed for me.

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On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:57:01 UTC, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Compared with the trusty old DEC VAX of which it has been remarked:-

"A DEC VAX is like an erect penis: it will stay up as long as you don't
**** with it" ;-)

Amusing, considering the close linkage between the two systems.

Yes, VAXes are like that. I have three here!

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On 2007-08-31 22:06:21 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:45:20 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

Ah. I was looking at Asterisk. Seems quite nice although quite a
bit of configuring to do. Have you got anything working? Using the
cards they sell or some other way?

ISDN and a cheap ATA. No other cards needed for me.

ISDN I understand for the exchange lines, but how would you connect the
phones? or are they ISDN phones?

On 31/08/2007 22:14, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 22:06:21 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:
ISDN and a cheap ATA. No other cards needed for me.

ISDN I understand for the exchange lines, but how would you connect the
phones? or are they ISDN phones?

The ATA is an analogue telephone adapter, essentially an ethernet/PSTN
connection, different ones allow connection to phone(s) and/or line(s),
(oftern called FXO and FXS), asterisk can send calls to them for your
extensions.

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 21:14:13 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 22:06:21 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:45:20 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

Ah. I was looking at Asterisk. Seems quite nice although quite a
bit of configuring to do. Have you got anything working? Using the
cards they sell or some other way?

ISDN and a cheap ATA. No other cards needed for me.

ISDN I understand for the exchange lines, but how would you connect the
phones? or are they ISDN phones?

The ATA. A box with an Ethernet interface and a couple of phone sockets.
Not as cheap as the cards, but reckined to work a lot better.

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poster, and specifically may not be published in, or used by
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On 2007-08-31 22:29:23 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 21:14:13 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 22:06:21 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:45:20 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

Ah. I was looking at Asterisk. Seems quite nice although quite a
bit of configuring to do. Have you got anything working? Using the
cards they sell or some other way?

ISDN and a cheap ATA. No other cards needed for me.

ISDN I understand for the exchange lines, but how would you connect the
phones? or are they ISDN phones?

The ATA. A box with an Ethernet interface and a couple of phone sockets.
Not as cheap as the cards, but reckined to work a lot better.

Ah, OK. Do you have an example of one you've tried?

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 21:30:47 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 22:29:23 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 21:14:13 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

On 2007-08-31 22:06:21 +0100, "Bob Eager" said:

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:45:20 UTC, Andy Hall wrote:

Ah. I was looking at Asterisk. Seems quite nice although quite a
bit of configuring to do. Have you got anything working? Using the
cards they sell or some other way?

ISDN and a cheap ATA. No other cards needed for me.

ISDN I understand for the exchange lines, but how would you connect the
phones? or are they ISDN phones?

The ATA. A box with an Ethernet interface and a couple of phone sockets.
Not as cheap as the cards, but reckined to work a lot better.

Ah, OK. Do you have an example of one you've tried?

Don't think it's current, so just Google 'Sipura'.

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On 2007-08-31, Bob Eager wrote:
On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:57:01 UTC, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

"A DEC VAX is like an erect penis: it will stay up as long as you
don't **** with it" ;-)

Yes, VAXes are like that. I have three here!

Penises or VAXes?

On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 22:36:57 UTC, Jeremy Henty
wrote:

On 2007-08-31, Bob Eager wrote:
On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:57:01 UTC, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

"A DEC VAX is like an erect penis: it will stay up as long as you
don't **** with it" ;-)

Yes, VAXes are like that. I have three here!

Penises or VAXes?

Oops! The VAXes are bigger!
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The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Oh indeed. The crazy days when we installed 98SE and suddenly the
machines couldn't use the SAMBA servers..somwhere 45 levels deep in the
registry there is an entry that needed to be 'use unencrypted
passwords=yes'.

One of my co-workers recently told me he was fixing
a problem with access to a microsoft service. When
he mentioned the registry, I said, "Surely there's
some way to configure it via the GUI."

"Oh, there is. But you have to look in the registry
for values to enter into the GUI, according to this
document from Microsoft."

!?!

--
Wes Groleau
"To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying
Amen to what the world tells you you should prefer,
is to have kept your soul alive."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Andy Hall wrote:

The ATA. A box with an Ethernet interface and a couple of phone sockets.
Not as cheap as the cards, but reckined to work a lot better.

Ah, OK. Do you have an example of one you've tried?

I had a very brief play with the older versions of these. They may do
what you want. Whether there is much cost advantage over a VoIP phone
these days is debatable:

http://www.solwise.co.uk/voip-4-port-gateways.htm

Not sure how well they will play with Asterisk, but there is no obvious
reason why they should not.

--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 2007-09-01 04:30:52 +0100, John Rumm said:

Andy Hall wrote:

The ATA. A box with an Ethernet interface and a couple of phone sockets.
Not as cheap as the cards, but reckined to work a lot better.

Ah, OK. Do you have an example of one you've tried?

I had a very brief play with the older versions of these. They may do
what you want. Whether there is much cost advantage over a VoIP phone
these days is debatable:

http://www.solwise.co.uk/voip-4-port-gateways.htm

Not sure how well they will play with Asterisk, but there is no obvious
reason why they should not.

Mmm.... I see the point. For the house side, one might as well
sling out all or most of the analogue phones and then just use ISDN for
the exchange line side.....

In article ,
"Tim Ward" wrote:

"Eric P. Peterson" wrote in message
...

(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)

I had to give up using it about a year ago as I needed a bigger faster box.
So I rebuilt the NT4 SP5 machine with Win2k and passed it to someone else in
the family. (I'm sure there was a reason I was using SP5 rather than SP6a
but can't any more remember what it was.)

I found 2000 to be decent as well. I've used PCs with Windoze of various
flavors on jobs, but have never owned one myself, and I'm still on the
fence with the idea. My Macs serve me very well, and I do my best to
keep disasters to a manageable minimum Getting better all the time!

- E

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Eric P. Peterson wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

John Rumm wrote:
William Munns wrote:

I disagree with one minor point- most (all?) distros come
with a manual or two- and a lot of HOWTO's and FAQ's
are available.
man man, man!
A manual which is only useful if you know what the right questions are

Unlike the windows one which is never useful regardless of the question
asked...

"I don't know, please contact your systems administrator..."

Oh indeed. The crazy days when we installed 98SE and suddenly the
machines couldn't use the SAMBA servers..somwhere 45 levels deep in the
registry there is an entry that needed to be 'use unencrypted
passwords=yes'.

You mean there's a manual for Windows? Wow! It's all been word of mouth,
and trial and error...and error...and error...IME

- E
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)

Which is not saying very much, at that..

Serious...and I suppose it's all relative to the computing environment.
Cisco Systems' corporate HQ had a respectable enough setup for office
use, when I worked there. HP Vectra desktops with only 128MB of RAM were
running the above-mentioned OS, and their IT people helped me to
fine-tune the Virtual Memory settings for best performance.

- E

Huge wrote:
On 2007-08-31, Roland Perry wrote:
In message ,
at 16:02:35 on Fri, 31 Aug 2007, Eric P. Peterson
remarked:
You mean there's a manual for Windows? Wow!
I've got a 1600 page book on Windows 2000 Server!

Yes, but most of it will be screen grabs and useless descriptions of what's
already shown you on the screen. IME, books about MS stuff don't describe what's
going on "under the hood", they merely repeat what's already obvious from
looking at the screen.


Try going to any car manufactures website or instruction manual and see
what you get..inside of the engine? no way.

With what has become a consumer product, its more important to use the
manuals to sell manuals, or the product, not to inform.

In message , at 09:04:14 on Sat, 1 Sep
2007, Huge remarked:
I've got a 1600 page book on Windows 2000 Server!

Yes, but most of it will be screen grabs and useless descriptions of what's
already shown you on the screen. IME, books about MS stuff don't describe what's
going on "under the hood", they merely repeat what's already obvious from
looking at the screen

This one's not like that.
--
Roland Perry

Eric P. Peterson wrote:
In article ,
"Tim Ward" wrote:

"Eric P. Peterson" wrote in message
...
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)
I had to give up using it about a year ago as I needed a bigger faster box.
So I rebuilt the NT4 SP5 machine with Win2k and passed it to someone else in
the family. (I'm sure there was a reason I was using SP5 rather than SP6a
but can't any more remember what it was.)

I found 2000 to be decent as well. I've used PCs with Windoze of various
flavors on jobs, but have never owned one myself, and I'm still on the
fence with the idea. My Macs serve me very well, and I do my best to
keep disasters to a manageable minimum Getting better all the time!

- E
One thing this mac does which is bloody annoying, is that Word, when
left running in the background chews up 30% of the CPU and occasionally
slows the machine to the point where another text editor takes half a
second to echo characters. Plenty of RAM.

You will get a PC when you find that the software you need to run simply
isn't available at ANY price, or is impossibly expensive, on the Mac. Or
when you end up with cross-compatibility issues trying to work with
other people who don't have Macs.

Frankly that is the only reason I resurrected my PC. I needed three
specialist programs for which there was no alternative. Compared with
the Mac of similar age and power, its faster on less RAM on XP than the
Mac is on OS-X.

Huge wrote:
On 2007-08-31, Andy Hall wrote:
On 2007-08-31 09:38:31 +0100, Huge said:

On 2007-08-30, Mike Barnes wrote:
In uk.d-i-y, Huge wrote:
Windows is a festering heap of cack.
So very true.

But in my experience many Linux
I don't run that, either. Nor a Mac.

)
BSD? Solaris?

The latter.


More or less thoroughly tested SYS V Unix then.

nice enough if it does what you need.

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

.... snip ...

Try going to any car manufactures website or instruction manual
and see what you get..inside of the engine? no way.

However you can choose to buy the shop manual, which has the
appropriate details.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
http://cbfalconer.home.att.net


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

In article , The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Huge wrote:
On 2007-08-31, Roland Perry wrote:
In message ,
at 16:02:35 on Fri, 31 Aug 2007, Eric P. Peterson
remarked:
You mean there's a manual for Windows? Wow!
I've got a 1600 page book on Windows 2000 Server!

Yes, but most of it will be screen grabs and useless descriptions of what's
already shown you on the screen. IME, books about MS stuff don't describe what's
going on "under the hood", they merely repeat what's already obvious from
looking at the screen.

Try going to any car manufactures website or instruction manual and see
what you get..inside of the engine? no way.

But for a lot of cars, if you want a workshop manual, you can buy one,
and that _will_ show what goes on inside the engine. (To some extent at
least, since a newer car will have things like "Electronic control box.
How to test - connect to dealer only test kit. How to fix - replace
entire box.")

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Eric P. Peterson wrote:
In article ,
"Tim Ward" wrote:

"Eric P. Peterson" wrote in message
...
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)
I had to give up using it about a year ago as I needed a bigger faster
box.
So I rebuilt the NT4 SP5 machine with Win2k and passed it to someone else
in
the family. (I'm sure there was a reason I was using SP5 rather than SP6a
but can't any more remember what it was.)

I found 2000 to be decent as well. I've used PCs with Windoze of various
flavors on jobs, but have never owned one myself, and I'm still on the
fence with the idea. My Macs serve me very well, and I do my best to
keep disasters to a manageable minimum Getting better all the time!

- E
One thing this mac does which is bloody annoying, is that Word, when
left running in the background chews up 30% of the CPU and occasionally
slows the machine to the point where another text editor takes half a
second to echo characters. Plenty of RAM.

You will get a PC when you find that the software you need to run simply
isn't available at ANY price, or is impossibly expensive, on the Mac. Or
when you end up with cross-compatibility issues trying to work with
other people who don't have Macs.

Frankly that is the only reason I resurrected my PC. I needed three
specialist programs for which there was no alternative. Compared with
the Mac of similar age and power, its faster on less RAM on XP than the
Mac is on OS-X.

For these purposes, I'm checking out alternatives to M$ apps that can
read and write M$ formats. If and when the time comes, I'll be
interested to learn if it's more performance-effective to run some
versions of Windows on a Mac (the very thought turns my stomach!), or to
simply keep a PC system around. If the latter, I'd probably prefer to
build it from the ground up.

- E

On Sat, 1 Sep 2007 19:46:52 UTC, "Eric P. Peterson"
wrote:

For these purposes, I'm checking out alternatives to M$ apps that can
read and write M$ formats. If and when the time comes, I'll be
interested to learn if it's more performance-effective to run some
versions of Windows on a Mac (the very thought turns my stomach!), or to
simply keep a PC system around. If the latter, I'd probably prefer to
build it from the ground up.

The problem is the apps that only run on Windows, such as the stuff I
use to load my Zen V, and the stuff with my wife's camera, and my son's
diabetes monitor.

So, yes, I built a small PC. NIce compact black case, 64 x 295 x 288.
Min keyboard of similar width, 15 inch LCD. monitor. Unobtrusive, quiet
(motherboard is fanless) and we keep it in the living room. Uses about
20 watts. Runs XP, and gets used when we have to.

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Eric P. Peterson wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Eric P. Peterson wrote:
In article ,
"Tim Ward" wrote:

"Eric P. Peterson" wrote in message
...
(Who still believes WIN NT4 SP5 was the best OS that M$ ever produced)
I had to give up using it about a year ago as I needed a bigger faster
box.
So I rebuilt the NT4 SP5 machine with Win2k and passed it to someone else
in
the family. (I'm sure there was a reason I was using SP5 rather than SP6a
but can't any more remember what it was.)
I found 2000 to be decent as well. I've used PCs with Windoze of various
flavors on jobs, but have never owned one myself, and I'm still on the
fence with the idea. My Macs serve me very well, and I do my best to
keep disasters to a manageable minimum Getting better all the time!

- E
One thing this mac does which is bloody annoying, is that Word, when
left running in the background chews up 30% of the CPU and occasionally
slows the machine to the point where another text editor takes half a
second to echo characters. Plenty of RAM.

You will get a PC when you find that the software you need to run simply
isn't available at ANY price, or is impossibly expensive, on the Mac. Or
when you end up with cross-compatibility issues trying to work with
other people who don't have Macs.

Frankly that is the only reason I resurrected my PC. I needed three
specialist programs for which there was no alternative. Compared with
the Mac of similar age and power, its faster on less RAM on XP than the
Mac is on OS-X.

For these purposes, I'm checking out alternatives to M$ apps that can
read and write M$ formats. If and when the time comes, I'll be
interested to learn if it's more performance-effective to run some
versions of Windows on a Mac (the very thought turns my stomach!), or to
simply keep a PC system around. If the latter, I'd probably prefer to
build it from the ground up.

well do NOT run a intel emulator on a powerPC chip. DOS yes, windows..it
works..but the cursor moves about as fast as a snail on morphine ;-)

On *86 type platforms, its obviously better.

The MS Orifice stuff runs OK on a mac, as long as thats ALL the mac is
doing.

The mac is pleasant enough at WP, multimedia, e-mail and browsing. It is
obviously well supported in graphical art and typography, if $1000 a
shot for software doesn't upset you. But there is virtually nothing on
the engineering/Cad-cam side..CNC cutters do NOT talk postscript or PDF ;-)

It also has a nasty habit of splattering shared drives with ._whatever
files, to store its 'metatada' on: irritating if you are generating non
macintosh files.

Best GUI, slowest platform, worst 3rd party support, most expensive
overall.

If all you want is to mess around with photos and movies, browse the
web, read e-mail and run MS office, then the mac is a hands down winnner.

Anything else comes at a very high prce, or not at all.

- E

Bob Eager wrote:
On Sat, 1 Sep 2007 19:46:52 UTC, "Eric P. Peterson"
wrote:

For these purposes, I'm checking out alternatives to M$ apps that can
read and write M$ formats. If and when the time comes, I'll be
interested to learn if it's more performance-effective to run some
versions of Windows on a Mac (the very thought turns my stomach!), or to
simply keep a PC system around. If the latter, I'd probably prefer to
build it from the ground up.

The problem is the apps that only run on Windows, such as the stuff I
use to load my Zen V,

What's a Zen V?

and the stuff with my wife's camera,

cameras just plug in and work mosly on macs. They got THAT bit right.

and my son's
diabetes monitor.

Yes. "dying for a mac" is not quite the expression to use here.. ;-)

So, yes, I built a small PC. NIce compact black case, 64 x 295 x 288.
Min keyboard of similar width, 15 inch LCD. monitor. Unobtrusive, quiet
(motherboard is fanless) and we keep it in the living room. Uses about
20 watts. Runs XP, and gets used when we have to.

Yup. XP is pretty awful, but it works well enough to run those apps it
has to run.

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Stuart Noble wrote:

Going with a Mac is like going with a high class call girl. People
admire you and you can take it anywhere, It costs a fortune, looks
great, and it reeks of luxury, but there's a lot of things it refuses to
do at all. And most things cost extra. You still can't take most of its
clothes off.

Going with Linux is like getting married. After the initial excitement
wears off, you realise that although its now free, there are still
things it won't do, although with years of steady relationship ahead,
with cosseting and coaxing, there is always the chance that you can make
it. The style is a shade plain, but eventually you realise it does most
of what you *need*, and although, like marriage, it doesn't come with a
manual,
Can you please relate these 2 paras for me? Last I dug into
Darwin, fink, et al, I couldn't do with my Mac box that I could do
with my linux boxes.

I content that Mac OS X is the nicest front end to a linux box
available. As a long time UNIX admin, I find a number of things
added and nothing missing ... (And before I get flamed, let me
emphasize I'm talking function, not form. It took me a while, for
example to get it clear where /etc files were still needed and
where Netinfo files had replaced them)

--
M for N in address to mail reply

On Sat, 1 Sep 2007 22:20:53 UTC, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

What's a Zen V?

Creative MP3 player. Won't even charge from the bloody PC's USB unless
told to by the software. My wife didn't know that when she bought it for
me.

cameras just plug in and work mosly on macs. They got THAT bit right.

This seems to have some custom software...

So, yes, I built a small PC. NIce compact black case, 64 x 295 x 288.
Min keyboard of similar width, 15 inch LCD. monitor. Unobtrusive, quiet
(motherboard is fanless) and we keep it in the living room. Uses about
20 watts. Runs XP, and gets used when we have to.

Yup. XP is pretty awful, but it works well enough to run those apps it
has to run.

Especially when I get a free licence from work.

--
The information contained in this post is copyright the
poster, and specifically may not be published in, or used by
http://www.diybanter.com

Neal Reid wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Stuart Noble wrote:

Going with a Mac is like going with a high class call girl. People
admire you and you can take it anywhere, It costs a fortune, looks
great, and it reeks of luxury, but there's a lot of things it refuses to
do at all. And most things cost extra. You still can't take most of its
clothes off.

Going with Linux is like getting married. After the initial excitement
wears off, you realise that although its now free, there are still
things it won't do, although with years of steady relationship ahead,
with cosseting and coaxing, there is always the chance that you can make
it. The style is a shade plain, but eventually you realise it does most
of what you *need*, and although, like marriage, it doesn't come with a
manual,
Can you please relate these 2 paras for me? Last I dug into
Darwin, fink, et al, I couldn't do with my Mac box that I could do
with my linux boxes.

I content that Mac OS X is the nicest front end to a linux box
available.

Well it s NOT a front end to a linux box, is it? Its a whole OS and GUI
based on FreeBSD running (officially) only on macintosh hardware.

As a long time UNIX admin, I find a number of things
added and nothing missing ... (And before I get flamed, let me
emphasize I'm talking function, not form. It took me a while, for
example to get it clear where /etc files were still needed and
where Netinfo files had replaced them)


What's missing is third party software and hardware support.

As an OS and GUI alone, its the best around.

However the purpose MOST people have an OS an GUI FOR, is to do
something else.

That's where the Mac is sadly lacking: Programs that run on it.
Expensive and not enough OF them....you CAN get a lot of Linux stuff
ported across to run under X11, but that rather begs the question of
having a Mac, the main point being that the GUI is NOT X11..and you CAN
run widows-in-a-box, but that rather defeats the idea that a Mac GUI is
NOT WINDOWS.

Thats the salient thing that came through to me. By breaking away from
X, and making a radical statement of difference in terms of the API to
the MAC GUI, Apple have left 3rd party developers in a curious
position. Its a BIG job to port an app to a Mac, not the least because
its not JUST a different set of calls into the graphics: There are a
whole new set of ways in which things are to be done to make them
conform to the OS-X look and feel.

Now if they had made OS-X run on generic Intel hardware, then it would
have been worth the pain to port stuff, but Apple chose to keep the
whole thing in the family. So a potential developer will look at PC's -
which is a must have, look at Linux, and think 'not that hard a port'
and look at Mac OS-X and say 'Ee bai gum lad, that bain't worth the
effort for 5% of the desktop market'

If you choose to be exclusive rather than ubiquitous, exclusive you will
be..in the sense of excluding a lot of people who might have rather gne
your way..

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

[snip]

well do NOT run a intel emulator on a powerPC chip. DOS yes, windows..it
works..but the cursor moves about as fast as a snail on morphine ;-)

On *86 type platforms, its obviously better.

Doesn't look good...

The MS Orifice stuff runs OK on a mac, as long as thats ALL the mac is
doing.

Probably a good thing, then, that I have a data management configuration
under OS 9.2.2. I switch to this set using Conflict Catcher whenever I
want to use M$ Word or Excel. These apps don't appear to function as
well in Classic Mode under OS X. Indeed, launching Word in this way
causes Classic to collapse altogether, without so much as an error
message!

The mac is pleasant enough at WP, multimedia, e-mail and browsing. It is
obviously well supported in graphical art and typography, if $1000 a
shot for software doesn't upset you. But there is virtually nothing on
the engineering/Cad-cam side..CNC cutters do NOT talk postscript or PDF ;-)

Works for me, as I don't do anything in the engineering/scientific
fields with my Macs, but I do those things you credit the platform as
doing well.

It also has a nasty habit of splattering shared drives with ._whatever
files, to store its 'metatada' on: irritating if you are generating non
macintosh files.

Now, that I don't like. I find files of that nature--some invisible,
some not--while booted into OS 9.2.2. The files don't appear to cause
any problems, but it always bothers me to discover files unexpectedly.

Best GUI, slowest platform, worst 3rd party support, most expensive
overall.

Slowest? Really? How do we account for that? And is there any hope of
improvement there?

And here I thought Linux's Enlightenment made for the most attractive
interface...but perhaps there's more to "best GUI" than appearance alone.

If all you want is to mess around with photos and movies, browse the
web, read e-mail and run MS office, then the mac is a hands down winnner.

Very reassuring to me, then. I don't even do movies, and I'm committed
to arriving at a computing environment free from all traces of M$ sw.
It'll come

Happy computing,
Eric