I was this guy for a while. I like open source, but it's not my top priority. I just want a computer that lets me get done what I need to get done most effectively. For admining *nix boxes and diagnosing networks it's pretty helpful to be on a *nix box yourself, but which variety is not really important as they all tend to have the same basic tools available.

A Mac laptop provides a *nix machine that is 100% supported by the manufacturer with a well-known OS and a good selection of both free and commercial applications. For a while they were better built than most too, my last Macbook Pro was the generation before the "unibody" models and only Thinkpads really compared as far as sturdiness. I haven't yet found a laptop that feels stiffer than one of the unibody models, though some of the PC vendors have adopted that design as well and are thus in the same range.

These days I'm running a refurb Acer because the battery on the MBP wore out and I couldn't see putting more than a third of its remaining value in to a replacement on a Core 2 where the motherboard couldn't reliably handle 4GB RAM sticks (only 2+2 was officially supported, though 2+4 was reported to work with most sticks, 4+4 was not usable in most cases). Core i7, 8GB, 1080p, and 100% of the hardware works in Ubuntu 14.04 so it fits what I need in a laptop.

Why anyone who doesn't need Final Cut would ever buy a Mac desktop I'm not really sure. The G5-like Mac Pro was intermittently price competitive with other workstations in dual-socket form but the new trash can model strikes me as the second coming of the G4 Cube.

Mozilla hasn't made any notable public comments I can find since acknowledging that they would support EME (Encrypted Media Extensions) back in May. I do not see anything about the feature having made it to even the trunk yet, so it'll probably be a while.

Also curious, what difference do you see between Firefox and Chrome as far as UI? I'm on a Windows machine right now so I can't verify if it's the same on Linux but aside from slightly rounder tabs and more blue Firefox 32 looks pretty much the same as Chrome 39. Firefox has a separate search bar by default and the back/forward/refresh layout is a bit different but if I ignore the extra buttons my various extensions have added to both the color scheme is the most significant difference.

Did I ever say I had a problem with Windows overall? I don't, at least no more than any other ordinary OS. It's that second part...the one that starts with an X and ends with a P. That's the problem. Like I said, deploying new Windows XP is fucking stupid.

Windows itself is a fine core platform these days. The key is these days, meaning not a full major revision and two lesser (but hard to call minor) revisions ago.

I'd still personally prefer Linux or a BSD, but I'd have a hard time making a purely technical case for that.

The important part. Brand new systems are still being deployed with Windows XP. Anyone who doesn't see how fucking idiotic that is should never be allowed to make an IT-related decision again, but unfortunately the people who make these decisions don't know and aren't held accountable for their stupidity.

Most of the local banks have installed new Diebold ATMs that scan checks automatically. I saw one reboot the other day. Take a wild guess what OS...

Fuck "enterprise IT" and the bullshit anti-update mentality. If you can't update, you're doing it wrong.

Free market requires competition. If you're required to use this specific model there is not competition. That is not the free market. Suck it yourself.

Who said the students would keep the calculators? The only situation where you MUST HAVE THIS SPECIFIC CALCULATOR is in the classroom. Keep the calculator there! The special calculator stays where people find it worthwhile, everywhere else the rest of us can use a computer like a normal person.

If you're actually going in to a field where having a fancy calculator is useful versus a smartphone you can buy it yourself then. Most of us have absolutely no need for these things beyond the few tests for which they're required.

Best not to say "Try it in Linux" on Slashdot, you're a lot more likely to run in to someone who already has. My laptop and server are exclusively Linux and my desktop dual-boots. Ubuntu LTS all around, 14.04.1 on the desktop/laptop and I haven't gotten around to upgrading the server from 12.04.5 yet. AMD even lost performance per clock compared to themselves with their recent chips.

My home server previously ran a Phenom II X4 945, a 3 GHz quad core released in mid-late '09. That motherboard blew up after a power event so I switched to an A10-7850K, a 3.7-4.0 (turbo) GHz quad core released in January of this year. It's both faster clocked and a full four years newer, plus I threw double the RAM at it since I had to get new sticks anyways for DDR3 vs the old DDR2, yet somehow it's slower in the real world. My usenet downloads parcheck/extract slower, my Minecraft server bogs down more often, and it can't even manage to proxy Steam traffic at the full 100mbit/sec my internet connection allows.

As for Phoronix, how's this one? The very processor I'm running, the top model of the latest core AMD has released.

It barely holds with the Core i3s on average.

I have historically defaulted to AMD. My last Intel outside of laptops was a 300 MHz Pentium II. I regret going with AMD for the server and unless they pull something huge out of their ass in the near future I'll be changing my desktop over as soon as the prices drop on the now last-gen Intels.

Since slashdot stupidly still doesn't allow edits, here's the mandatory car analogy:

SSDs are like snow tires in Colorado. Sure you can get along without them but you're losing a lot by doing so.

Because SSDs are literally the best thing you can do for your computer's performance in desktop applications. Most of the time you're nowhere close to CPU limits and these days standard RAM levels are finally high enough that only the cheapest shitboxes hit swap in normal browsing/chatting/office type tasks. Everything is waiting on the slow old hard drive. Make that an order of magnitude faster and it shouldn't be a surprise that you can rejuvenate even an old computer.

My work laptop is a Dell Vostro from 2010 with a sub-2GHz Core 2 Duo processor. It runs circles around most of my customers' computers in day-to-day stuff even when they have Core i-series processors solely because it has enough RAM (8GB) and more importantly a SSD. It's not even a great SSD, just a cheap Kingston, but it makes a huge difference.

The correct answer for any new computer is a reasonable sized SSD for the OS and applications combined with a regular hard disk for larger stuff like media collections where random access time isn't as important. Only gamers really need to compromise, with so many games these days exceeding 10GB it's still too expensive for a lot of us to have our entire game collections on SSD, but in that case it's still not hard to just install whatever you play most to the SSD and put older/less commonly played titles on the HD.

*whoosh*

I was just making a dumb joke. Chuckle (or not) and move along.

Uh......have you not noticed that AT has a full sponsored AMD section? They literally give AMD news special placement. The fact is, and I say this as someone whose only Intel processor is in his laptop, AMD performance sucks.

They're competitive usually on price to performance, but even the absolute top end 200+ watt 5GHz turbo AMD processor gets matched by mid-range i5s and stomped by i7s.

If you wait long enough the mortality rate goes to 100%.

In the US our consumer-grade vacuum cleaners are already effectively capped around the same wattage. The standard household electrical outlet is rated to provide 15 amps and does so somewhere between 100 and 125 volts. That's 1500-1875 watts as the maximum any single device clet an expect to pull without requiring a special outlet. Nothing in reality expects the higher end of the spectrum because it's by no means guaranteed.

Somehow we get along just fine, residential or commercial, with pretty much the same as what this limit allows. /me awaits some Brit who's come to explain how their 240v 13A outlets allow them to suck the carpet right off the floor with their cleaners.

Wow still? Good to see Verizon is still being the same fucksticks they've always been. Exactly why I tell people to never use them.

Just use a Nexus 5 and an iPhone. Both clean representations of their respective platforms without carrier bullshit, so it's a fair comparison of the networks themselves and nothing more.