What would you suggest instead? I used to run Linux on the desktop, but the $50 I paid for RAM is nothing next to the time and frustration of dealing with the user-hostility of the developer community. I've done Windows, but that's no fun. Mac OS X sucks worse than every operating system but the ones that exist.

I figured that Apple is using +/- standard chipsets now. So I looked up the memory spec for my laptop (DDR2-1NNN where N is a number I don't remember), and picked an inexpensive kit off newegg where there were some reviews reporting that it worked in macbooks. For the price I figured it was worth buying something that hadn't had the relevant dead chicken waved over it.

Good for you.

My late 2009 macbook would randomly beachball when I had it on Snow Leopard at 2GB. Maybe because of the combo of a largish itunes library and using Firefox (maybe not my best decision). By this release though 8gb slots in fine and didn't cost me much more than $50. Combined with a fast hard disk (and dumping firefox), it's back to being my favorite computer.

I barely got my new mini booted before running back to Microcenter to get an 8gb kit.

My experience is that a Mac with a recent OS rev is almost unusable with 2GB of memory. 8GB and it sings.

On the requires Windows side:
  - garbage CRM uses ActiveX
  - Exchange

Doesn't work with Linux:
  - the iPhone

On the tired of Linux side (used linux from ancient days):
  - developers keep fiddling with my interface
  - hardware support still uneven and unreliable, especially graphics and (surprisingly) network
  - inconsistent copy/paste behavior
  - Netflix, espn3

I used to have time to fiddle with this sort of thing. I don't want to do that anymore.

C (and for that matter unix) reflect a very specific aesthetic. C was by no means inevitable - there were plenty of other languages forty years ago, some of which are more "modern" than C. It is the aesthetic of the language that makes it so beloved (and despised), and that we owe to a very few people.

The direction of the T4 has been set for some time. It's overdue - the single thread performance on the T series is basically miserable and has barely improved since the original T chips. My job involves doing a lot of single thread activities on T series hardware, and that makes me a sad panda.

It is simply easier and less fiddly to manage applications when they are all totally isolated from each other. I've found that it's pretty damn complicated (especially if your dumb ass sales guys haven't negotiated a proper maintenance window) to negotiate downtime across multiple customers or constituencies. Applications step on each other, have subtly different requirements and expectations, and generally expect to be the only thing running on a system. For instance you stick multiple applications in that one database - and then one application requires you to upgrade and one requires you to not upgrade. And the same goes for web servers - suddenly you find yourself stuck on Apache 2.0 because you require some crufty plug in.

All of this can be worked around with a bit of cleverness and perseverance but hardware is cheap and good IT guys aren't.

Enjoy providing free computer support to your family and friends. I have other priorities.

I'm sure he has. I don't know about your post's parent, but Gnome suffers from random imperfections and features moving or disappearing at inapt moments. I used to be 100% Gnome / Linux, but by day's end the only place where I'll have it installed is in a small VM I keep for "picture" web browsing.

I've been using cygwin for almost its entire lifetime. It has pluses and minuses. For the most part using the rxvt shell lets me feel like I'm on a proper computer, except when I do some file operation that hangs cygwin for 30 seconds, or windows is under load and it takes 30 seconds to get a command prompt. Maybe mintty will solve some of the cygwin problems I have - I'll try it when I go to work tomorrow. But as a person who spends all day at work every day logged into multiple random customer servers via SSH, putty just works for me. It's stable. It's light weight. The selection behavior is almost always right. It's self contained and small, so I don't have to worry about some piece in the chain of cygwin breaking and stranding me at an inconvenient moment.

It's in Chicago. There's so much haze and light pollution here that you can't even see real stars.

Magnet links, how do they work?

That's not really the point. The reason you buy the Solaris/SPARC combo in the enterprise is to get a fully supported platform for running specific applications. Alternate OSes break the center out of that. The OS isn't supported by one vendor on the hardware, the application isn't supported on the OS. It turns an enterprise platform into a toy for geeks. Nothing against toys for geeks - I've done a lot of tinkering on random hardware at the edges of the organizations that have employed me. But there aren't many Libraries (my customers) who would be willing, let alone able, to move their operations onto FreeBSD.