from Lifehacker

As for being as slick as OS X, well, spoken like somebody who obviously doesn't own a Mac. It's nice, but there's no way it's even in the same neighborhood that the ballpark for OS X is in. I'm gonna light a small fire here, but I wish a super talented artist would redesign the widget set for Gnome, it's very very dated as it stands now. KDE is far better looking but even it is getting long in the tooth.

Ahhh ... SGI Irix ... how I miss thee ... truly ahead of it's time back in 1993 ... I mean the thing had a freaking web cam before there was a web to use it on!

Ditto ...my very best code happens between 8AM and 12PM, the more noise the better ... earbuds in ... music banging ... foot tapping ... I can get on a hell of a roll ... but if you interrupt me, god help me, I'll kill you. I don't want to talk to anybody before lunch. Besides, there's too much workplace "noise" after lunch to get a good 4 hour block of coding in.

Good post ... good to hear he's in it for the right reasons and not the lobbyist perks. Hope he keeps the tech innovation in this country moving forward instead of mired in IP litigation.

Umm ... no ... it is not security through obscurity. If you want to be obscure, you don't post your source code on the internet like this:

http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html

When you post your sources, you practice security through peer review. The ones who do security through obscurity are the guys up in Redmond.

Also, don't kid yourself, IE8 fell on it's first attempt too. It just so happens that Miller got the first try in the contest and who could blame him for wanting the Mac hardware over the PC hardware.

Wow, what an utter crock of shit those stats are. I'd say that when I'm on the road (read: not in an office), easily 1/3 of laptops I see people using are Macs. I was on a university campus near here a few weeks ago and I'd say the Mac/PC laptop mix there favored Macs 2 to 1. There's no way, and I mean absolutely no way, that number is true for laptop users. In fact, I'd say, from the peeks I've gotten, that OS X outnumbers Vista 3 to 1. That may change since the Windows computers I see are mostly old junkers, with a rare nice Sony VAIO here and there. Having done some support work against Vista, I can understand why too. I think Vista means Popup Window in Latin. It is by far the most annoying end user OS ever, secure or not. I wish I saw more people running Linux, but laptop Linux sightings are still very rare in the wild.

I agree, there is a premium, but it's not signficant on the high end. I just spent $2700 on a 17" MacBook Pro. I think that's a lot of money. However, I bought it because it's thin, light, and has an 8 hour battery life. Could I have gotten a better spec'ed machine for that money? Almost certainly. Could I get a full work day without needing to plug in for a recharge in a package as thin and light as the MBP? No. So ignoring OS X, that Mac bests anything in it's price range for portability.

Ehhh ... do some Python for a while, once you get used to indenting, move back over to COBOL. :-P

Funny enough, COBOL was the first comp-sci class I took in college. It's one of those things that make you wonder how in the hell did it gain such widespread adoption in the first place. I guess there really weren't many options when it first came out.

Oh really?!? Please post a link to the Sliverlight video file format specification. Here is the one for Flash:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/

Go ahead, surprise me ...

If all the ice in the world were to melt, and the odds of this happening are virtually 0, then we're looking at a 200+ft rise in ocean levels. However, the higher probability estimates are for a 24 inch rise by 2100. Not a great source in itself but the references are not bad: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question473.htm

Imagine what the tech landscape would be like if MS had stuck with Xenix ... what a totally bizarro world moment!

I'm pretty sure it's called to an Langue d'Oc ... it's pretty interesting stuff if you're into that sort of thing.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. XP was OK, poorly coded, but OK. Vista is absolutely terrible. It's slow, is primarily a back end for a popup window manager, and consumes an unreasonable amount of system resources just doing nothing. If Windows 7 is a viable XP replacement (ie. small resource footprint and strong performance), then great. I'd rather see MS go the UNIX route and do a BSD kernel with a Windows GUI, but I think it will be a cold day in Hades before that day comes.

Sh!t ... I got one of those emails ... it's been about a month of waiting now too. I was as careful as possible about not using anything on the no-no list, but there is content scrapped from an Apple iPhone "partner". I guess I know what the hold up is now.

Look, I love and use Linux, I think it's excellent. However, even though Linux can be used on the desktop, I can tell you right now that 90% of people out there have absolutely no idea that computers can have a different OS installed on them than what comes out of the box. Slashdot is certainly not a representation of the "average" PC user. I seriously believe that Apple is Linuxs' best hope for more widespread adoption. If OS X can fracture the market to the point that devs have a vested interest in avoiding platform specific code then that removes the excuse for Windows specific applications. The biggest problem right now is that there are very few GUI frameworks with critical mass that are common across platforms. Personally, I wish Apple would release their internal only Windows Cocoa framework, or even better, open source it so it can be readily ported. XCode & Cocoa is the nicest GUI framework I've worked with and it would be a no brainer to cross compile.