Yes I wasn't clear. I was alluding to the app store being quite a good central repository of software. Consumer software though.

If you need apache/perl you'll be messing with the internals, in which case you are going to probably going to have to get used to apple's particular flavour of *nix. For me it was no more or less difficult than figuring out the implementation details of various other distros (eg launchd vs sysvinit)

I'd recommend homebrew (some prefer macports) - analagous to portage, or yum. It's pretty straightforward.

OSX isn't a magic bullet for everything i still find myself tinkering under the hood with 'developer' stuff, same as I would on a linux box.

The rest of the stuff, day to day, all tends to work on the whole with little to no input from me. This frees up my time to get on with real work, where before I was distracted by tweaking and fixing the little glitches that every linux system seemed to have. Maybe it was me though, I dunno. Now though the choice is no longer there! Some say thats a bad thing. *shrugs*. works for me.

It sure sounds like rage! "Vile", "boycotted" and "making you feel ill", such dramatic language for one so allegedly unruffled. You might start by having the composure to produce a legible post!

They are successful, you hate that, I get it.

They are only overpriced if you don't value the product. To me they are quite reasonably priced, but then I am considering their value to me in day to day use, their longevity (i can burn through cheap laptops in 12 months) not to mention the initial cost is also offset by there resale value.

Your use of the word "closed" as some irrefutably negative aspect suggests you are more bothered about open source as a religion, than the practical use of a computing device. OSS and proprietery software both exist both have their relative merits and both have a place in the computing ecosystem. I am no stranger to open source. I support the concept of opensource, but I don't feel that doing so mutually excludes my use and/or acceptance of propritery software as a concept. I'm going to judge software by my own measure whether its closed or open doesn't have much of fundamental effect on my decision thesedays. I've been to FOSS and back, the pent up rage of being forced to use windows for a decade fuelled my view that linux was the holy grail, but as my rage softened and I started to see clearly again I started to see that linux too has its downsides. The thing is the shiny has worn off of MacOS now for me too. So I feel (note: opinion) I'm left with a fairly objective view of what works best for me, and as I said earlier the choice for me was between windows or *nix. I chose *nix, my distro of choice (because it seemed to be the one that had its shit together most) was OSX. I'm sure i will be derided for not being a 'true' linux fanboi, and mocked for being an apple fonboi, but really that comes so far down my list of "reasons why I do stuff" that I'm not even sure if it might have fallen off the bottom. Oh well, it won't be missed.

If there is some real solid reason that you want to be able to go digging around in the GUI subsystem or need source code access some other proprietery aspect of OSX then I can see your point about how 'closed' is a bad thing (for you) and you should pick something else.

I am aware of the arguments about the relative technical merits of closed vs open source, security, maintainability and even cost. They are arguments though, neither has been conclusively proven as better, so why not let the free market decide.

In closing why not just choose what suits you best and feel comfortable. If somebody comes along and makes a compelling argument why I need to shift from OSX back to (say) windows 8, my choices are to dismiss them out of hand or to listen to what they have to say, see if what they are saying makes sense in my particular use case, and if it does go ahead and try it out. I'm not saying you haven't tried OSX (I mean really tried it, like give it a year) you may have, but your post seemed to imply that there was no way in hell you would move to osx because you have something against the company. So long as thats the case then by all means boycott away, but you might want to check out that world view of yours, see whether its really serving your best interests.

(pre-emptive "apology for being selfish western world white trash". I am. I'm over it. What am I gonna do rage at the world for being born into the relative wealth of working class Britain? Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta eat. We are only human, trying to pretend we aren't is noble but ultimately doomed to failure.)

QFT. If the extremists could stop treating OS choice as some kind of religion they might find that your post pretty much sums up the optimum setup for your typical *nix guy.

Of course there are plenty of trees you can use to justify this not being the wood you are looking for, confirmation bias (which I realise I am also guilty of by singling out the parent as being all that is right with the world!) is strong, no more so then in the nerd, whose superior intellect quite easily rules out the subpar opinions of others!

I think those that are locked into windows face the toughest challenge, the initial switch is hard. Redhat 8 was my baptism of fire. What *is* up with this 'X' thing why does it look so farked, why can't I hear anything, why are my graphics so shit, why doeas my machin keep locking up? wtf I can't access the network etc etc happy days :D

For anyone that can (ie isn't *truly* dependant on windows as opposed to just not wanting to learn something new) take the plunge into the *nix based world though, there awaits freedom choice and power.

So for me, really OSX is "linux on the desktop". It's just another distro, I tried several and when I hit osx it was game over, thanks everyone else for playing.

OSX's hackery to the standard base is no more or less weird than your other monolithic distros' changes. Their package manager is shit hot. There are no driver issues, the gui is slick etc etc I know its not free as in beer, or free as in speech. Those things are way down my list, I just need to get shit done. If freedom or freeness is important to you, then OSX is not for you.

Apple attracts its fair share of haters in absolute terms thats inevitable because of its penetration in the market. It would surely be interesting (if it were possible to measure such a thing?) to know what the relative satisfaction of each OS userbase was in percentage terms.

I know us OSX users are stupid and not real developers, dbadmins, sysadmins etc. It's odd though I never feel the need to deride people that stick with Linux. My advice (if you can call it that) comes from a genuine delight in having found what I think is a great setup, and I want to share that with people. If they aren't interested then that's their choice (and if they haven't even tried it, then its hard not to feel a little bit of pity, however patronising that might sound).

The name calling really undermines the credibility of any argument against OSX being the best *nix on the desktop out there. With linux (gentoo for me, but please choose whichever you like best) on the server boxen, It really feels like the best of both worlds, i've never been happier.

I don't get why all the OS rage from windows/linux desktop users? it's almost like something might really be amiss ;)

See imho religion itself isn't bad, people can believe what they want as far as I am concerned.

The problem is idiots. When you get idiots that start to use religion to justify their "being an idiot" then all hell breaks loose.

Every religion has got 'em. Even the Athiests :/

I am going to guess he means, all your work content should be saved on network shares (or even iCloud - but at the moment its lack of hierarchical arrangement is real pitfall).

That way you don't need USB sticks, which are losable, breakable, and usually not backed up anywhere.

with your logic is you are trying to refute a scenario in which I do not describe any buying or selling, by saying that there would be a problem with the buying or selling.

If you want to buy or sell you use limit orders - you have no business trying to buy or sell in the middle of some flash crash, thats gambling.

Sure your last point may be true, however I would advise that companies that have boards that hire/fire CEO's based on the share price are probably not companies you want to invest in. Annual reports are where you and the board of directors should be looking to glean some indicators about the performance of the CEO. Just my humble opinion though.

I agree the HFT is good and if the HFTers can use some clever alog to 'effectively though of course not actually in a legal sense as that would be illegal and we wouldnt do that would we' kind of way then meh...

I'm just saying that the people who are arguing HFT should be banned because its hurting joe-trader-in-the-street, then they need to consider whether that is actually the case.

If its an ethical argument they have thats a whole different story, I just don't think you can present "HFT is bad" as a fact. (Same as I can't say it isn't). However I can (as have you) outlined ways in which HFT is good.

Why would you buy or sell in the middle of a flash crash? that doesn't sound like a considered investment. It sounds like speculating and/or panic trading.

By definition the flash will be over in a flash.

If anything you benefit, because if it happens when you have a buy (to open) or sell (to close) in place - which of course you wisely and considerately placed at the price which *you* want to buy or sell at, not what the market says its worth, then your order will be filled.

The fact you could have got it cheaper, or could have sold for more - well thats just luck. You got/disposed of the company at the price you wanted. Be happy.

This whole argument that 'its for HFT / no its not' is a red herring.

The idea that 'flash crashes are hurting investors' also wrong.

HFT seems evil yeah, I thought that at first. Them bad computers stealing money of me a bit at a time. Then I thought about how often I "trade". Well see thing is I don't trade that often at all. In reality I should probably not even "trade" at all. (I am trying, its hard to resist the lure though). If HFTers get an extra cent a trade off me then more power to them. Sure they might do that to a million people a day, thats called a business model. Nothing nefarious about it.

Thing is, if most of the trading is HFT then by extension most of the profit that HFTers are making must be coming from other HFTers.

In actual fact, as an investor, being able to buy or sell at any given point in time and not get screwed by the spread is good. (Though this too is a bit of a red herring, the timescales you should be investing to, spread shouldn't really be of much concern anyway). For mom and pop investors (me) your trading fee is where you get royally screwed in any case, and is vastly more than the extre cent that the HFTer managed to eek out of your trade.

So HFT, for me, does provide liquidity at a pretty fair price. Too much Liquidity? no such thing.

As far the flash crashes. Imagine this (increasingly common?) scenario:

You start the day, holding some stock. The market swings wildly up 10% down 20% and back up 15%.

Q. How much have you made/lost?
A. Nothing.

You still end the day with exactly the same stock you had at the start. The arbitrary price that people are suggesting your stock might be worth? Well what do they know? efficient market my ass!

So day in day out things like this happen (admittedly maybe not such wild swings). The thing is this Daily movement shouldn't be of much concern (big moves might alert you of fundamental changes which you might want to read about sure, but the presence/absence of HFT isn't going to change much here), much less the minute to minute to fluctuations.

Whatever shenanigans might occur each microsecond between the HFTers should of no concern whatsoever. Let them quibble and game each other, shuffling there money back and forth like deranged pachinko playing meth-heads.

Find a company you think is good value set your buy order for the price you want to own them at and then sit tight, collect dividends and wait for that company to stop being the same great company you thought it was before you consider selling. All the prices in between the time you buy and the time you sell, they mean nothing. When it comes time to sell though, being able to sell the instant you want for close to market price (for the cost of a few cents siphoned off by a clever HFT algorithm that sold a matching order nanoseconds earlier...) well that's pretty handy, and no skin off my nose.

Still, Happy investing.

True dat, but amazon's revenue is $54bn vs facebook $4bn quite a difference even given the recent shrinkage of FB's market cap.

Maybe if you buy FB at today's prices then you will smash it out of the park, but I'd still buy amazon. I am trying to be an 'investor' though, not a speculator.

If it hits $6ish it might be worth another look.

I'm into reef (as in coral) stuff. This sounds exactly like what you see with the tolerance of these animals to environmental change (temperature, ph, alkalinity etc)

Take a specimen from a stable environment and subject it to sudden changes and it will suffer - perhaps die. However some species seem to be able to build tolerance to environmental change - this can be seen by taking a 'frag' (like a cutting in plants) from a coral, then exposing it to small changes and gradually increasing them until you reach a point where your now 'tolerant' coral can live and grow happily through sudden environmental changes that would kill (bleach) identical specimens that have not been acclimated in this fashion.

There is a lot of research going on into bleaching events at the moment and why some corals are fine and others don't survive. Some research suggests that certain corals/regions that have experienced prior bleaching events are faring much better than other regions that until now were very stable.

It sounds to me like a similar 'acclimatisation' process is at work here with radiation.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger indeed!

Massive Agree. A universe to rival middle earth, a society/back story every bit as detailed and interesting as 'The Culture'. Perhaps only bettered by the foundation series by virtue of it having been written first.

The film was at best a superficial introduction to characters that missed out swathes of story, and appeared to run out of budget half way through (or maybe never had any at the start!). The TV show... well...

You could easily crank out an amazing film(...series of?). I nominate the Wachowskis!

Perhaps they read this part...

TAGS: FAST FOOD, HUMOR, MCDONALD'S, MCRIBS

...and realised that trying to sue someone for making a joke would be a rather silly idea.

Perhaps you were joking too, your post had no tags though so I couldn't tell!

TAGS: COMMENT, ATTEMPTED HUMOUR, FAIL

Now where have I seen that before....? ;)

Excellently put. Alas, today is no mod point day.