Disqus - Latest Comments for assaf

Re: Measuring the Cost of a Computer

assaf — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:42:26 -0000

"I think we can all agree that when you buy a computer, you’re paying for the software"

There is absolutely no way I'm going to buy a 14" dim-screen notebook that weighs 6lb (check the HP site for more details about this model). I spent a lot of time with the computer to sacrifice back and eyes, so that puts me out of the $800 category. I'm also very unlikely to buy a discontinued model, so can't benefit from the $200 discount you get when the stock gets retired.

So that puts me in the $1,500 price bracket at the minimum, where Apple, Dell, Sony and others start selling their quality machines. I'm even more picky about screen quality, weight and construction, which lands me in the unfortunate $2,500 category. That's a long way from the Wal-Mart $500 PC counter.

First factor in calculating TCO is the hardware I run: eyes, back, fingers.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

assaf — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:06:54 -0000

I do have to say in all fairness that I wasn't using a Dell or a ThinkPad, and judging by my coworkers, life is easier if you stick with the popular models.

Stuff that has worked for a while (i.e. for older models, I have a couple at home delegate to server) never broke. It's only recent models I had problem with, and with the less common or recently introduced components.

Suspend/resume was on again, off again, on again, off again, probably because the new Intel chipset. So while the cycles were very quick, over the course of a year you get the same down time as Vista.

It was definitely worse than OS X, which just works, but Apple doesn't give you much of choice in hardware, and I did exercise that right when picking a PC to run Linux.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

assaf — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:26:00 -0000

I don't know about that. I used Fedora, you Kernel and core updates almost every week, much faster than Windows or OS X.

But then some updates would break sound, or resume (other updates would break suspend), or the fn keys would stop working, something would go wrong and only get fixed a few releases later.

So while things get fixed really quick, they also get broken again (and again) that overall I think I was worse off than waiting longer on a non-regressing release cycle.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

assaf — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:54:44 -0000

I switched from Linux to OS X earlier this year. So let me pick up two examples where, on the one hand OS X can learn a lot from Linux how to do UI right, on the other hand, the were reasons for me switching.

Compiz was rock solid a year ago, it took Apple a year to get Spaces right, and even that pales in comparison to Compiz. (Not to mention Apple got the whole app-centric approach wrong) On the other hand, no more tinkering with X configs, no more randomly crashing X (and with it every open app), no more rebooting before plugging to projector.

Network Manager lets you manage WiFi, VPN and dial-up (EVDO) from one place. Apple has misplaced these features in different parts of their UI, and didn't even get around to implementing some of the stuff (like WiFi signal strength, OpenVPN support).

On the other hand, no more rebooting because the WiFi driver gets lost after suspend/resume, or NW decides it can't see it. No more editing dial-up scripts because the EVDO card sometimes gets owner by the wrong device.

Re: More iPwnage

assaf — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:03:44 -0000

I think the correct spelling is "evar" as in: "teh iphone is the best blackberry. evar!"

Re: Phil Windley's Technometria | Browser Mix on Technometria

assaf — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:19:59 -0000

I'm not seeing my comment, just in case it vanished, wanted to say thanks for the OS breakdown.

I'm glad to see Linux is holding strong, even though I haven't seen a significant increase since last year.

Re: Phil Windley's Technometria | Browser Mix on Technometria

assaf — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:12:00 -0000

I'm comparing notes. My stats for the month of June has FF at 67%, Safari 13%, and IE up to 12% (from 10% earlier this year).

But more interesting, FF version 3 shows -- I'm only counting since the release date -- at 62%. IE version 7, same, 62%. Safari 3.1? 63%. Opera 9.5, 62%.

Have you looked at operating system break down?

http://blog.labnotes.org/2008/06/28/this-blog-o...

Re: Taking the Plunge

assaf — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:42:30 -0000

My experience switching from XP to Linux was about a day to get everything over, a couple of weeks to fully settle.

The installation process is different from Windows, you can apt-get most of the stuff and just let it run in the background for a few hours. You won't be spending the day clicking through wizards and waiting on progress bar.

But to get really settled I had to configure it to my personal style, and that you can only learn from using it daily, so it took a couple of weeks to really settle in.

I set up dual boot just in case, but by the end of the first day I got enough setup on Linux that I never rebooted to XP.

Re: Taking the Plunge

assaf — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:45:54 -0000

I use XP exclusively in VM (VMWare on Linux, Parallels on the Mac). XP itself drives me crazy, but the VM experience itself is positive.

Only problems I ran into: you spend more HD on two OS + apps, you can't run very memory intensive apps on both OS at once, and there's no support for accelerated graphics. But for the occasional IE/Office use, neither one bothered me.

On the other hand, now I have a pristine XP setup that I never have to worry about. You can mount your XP home folder onto the host OS, then every few months, when XP bloats itself to unbearable slowness or wrecks the registry, you can just start over from a clean image.

Re: Do comments qualify as “content”?

assaf — Fri, 30 May 2008 02:44:25 -0000

a) yes, they are content,
b) and therefore, yes they are copyrightable, but
c) by leaving a comment you're giving someone else permission to use it, but
d) you still don't have a legal right to force someone to publish your content.

The thing to remember about copyright law is that it doesn't care to elevate the Web to some mystical level of Wowness, but gives it the same mundane treatment as any other medium for publishing.

So if you're curious, do a quick Google search. I'm sure you'll find some cases of oddballs suing newspapers for not publishing their letter to the editor, or trying to get compensation for their works.

Re: On Static Types and Language Choice

assaf — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:02:13 -0000

"We’re not talking about your taste in clothes or furniture. We’re talking about a way of working that can be right or wrong. "

Except all we got was an opinion that describes possible causation that just feels right, from the same gut feeling that tells us the earth is flat and the Sun rotates around it.

By contrast we know that cloths that make you look good, or just feel the part, are effective. That part has been well researched to statistical significance.

So dynamic typing works -- for Steve. And apparently also for you, and me, and many other people who's experience I read about, and those are all valid data points that add up.

As a data point it's a good one. But as far as strongly convincing rhetorics go, watch out for strongly deceiving rhetorics, even when they sound right.

"That said, for large programming projects (which I am also leery of), static modeling allows the automation of large parts of the refactoring code and other tasks."

That's a myth. Some Java advocates divide the world into the "everything big that is Java or C, and everything else". Have a look at SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, Oracle App, those are some big pieces of software managed by enormously big teams. Look at how they're using types.

Separately, many of the big Java codebases I'm exposed to suffer from greenspunning, doing dynamic type on top of inconsequential static typing, often with reflection or boatloads of XML.

I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that the larger the codebase is, the more it approximates a poorly done dynamic type system.