Comments on: MacOS X vs. Ubuntu Linux

By: Al Lang

Al Lang — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 23:23:15 +0000

@adam

jwz is a very very smart guy but he has a big big blind spot (and a big chip on his shoulder) about email. Get over him, install a nice little IMAP server that speaks mbox, and be happy.

(No, not Courier. Just because someone once posted to jwz’s blog that Courier was good does not mean that Courier is good. jwz only went along with it because he loves any opportunity to diss IMAP.)

I suggest dovecot.

By: Julian

Julian — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 15:42:28 +0000

@Joe

Contrary to popular opinion Linux is a very creative platform for art creation. More and more artists are turning to it.

Linux is already the dominant platform in the movie industry. Unfortunately however alot of the high end 3D modeling software (Maya on Linux is an industry standard these days) and compositing software (Shake on Linux outsells Shake on OSX despite being several times the price) is proprietary and expensive. In other words Linux is standard in big studios, but not in small studios. This is changing however, as more and more musicians and artists move to the platform, if not for it’s performance as the freedom to design their own tools, to get new ‘looks’ and ‘a new sound’ – you know, just like analog artists have done for centuries.

I work in the digital arts and am seeing a slow but steady migration toward Linux in academies and in the arts sector more generally, for the lower cost, but also for the wide range of lesser known applications that offer non-standardised, marketeer-designed art creation contexts. Digital art these days reeks of Photoshop plugins, drag and drop Macromedia interactivity ‘solutions’, composition approaches implied by software like Logic or ProTools. Sometimes ‘thinking different’ means taking the plunge and trying completely different software.

One thing worth noting is that Linux offers a true 64 bit platform. OpenSource applications like http://ardour.org take advantage of this fact, and a few studios have switched as a result.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 18:34:58 +0000

I don’t understand what those folks have to do with “Mac is cool” perceptions in the general marketplace.

Artists and musicians are cool, not nerds. And they care about creating art. Archiving it is a tertiary concern.

I don’t think Apple has anything to worry about in terms of price premium as long as they don’t rest on their laurels.

By: david

david — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:59:20 +0000

Robert:

Thanks for the comment, but I wrote “price premium”, not “margin”. Price premium has nothing to do with profit or the cost of manufacturing — it’s the difference in retail price between the Mac and competing computers with similar feature sets. Historically, that’s sometimes hit 100% or more (consider the price difference between the Mac and the Atari ST in the late 1980s for one example).

By: Adam Fitzpatrick

Adam Fitzpatrick — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:59:59 +0000

robert: there’s nothing “so-called” about it. If you actually bother to do some research, you’ll find that the emlx file format is undocumented. An undocumented format has to be reverse engineered, whether it’s based on XML or binary or smoke signals. Some of it may be obvious (no prizes for guessing what the “subject” element contains), but not all of it is so easy:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/505711.html

By: robert

robert — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 04:04:23 +0000

As a long time stock holder I can guarentee you that Apple has NEVER sold a product with 100% margins… 28% margin was about the top for computers. Think before you post.

The so-called “proprietary formats” are all actually XML files if you bother to do some research. Mark Pilgrim is just pissed off that they changed from mbox to an XML storage format. IT IS XML. Yes, it may be closed source but it’s not some weird binary format.

Take a look for yourself and learn.

By: Danny

Danny — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:29:52 +0000

Ubuntu sounds great, but the CDs I ordered (for free) from a promo site haven't yet arrived. No broadband here. It's just taken me 3/4 of a day to nearly get a fairly standard wireless card going on a Debian machine. The Win2k laptop has long been in need of a wipe-start-again, it's ssllooww. My wife's WinXP desktop has been well behaved apart from occasional (bad) hardware problems. This iBook has behaved itself impeccably. It's my first Mac (6 months?), I was reluctant for a long while because of the proprietary hardware, and that thing where when they break, they really break. But I like it. But still hope Ubuntu's gonna be better. Despite the trendsetters :-)

By: Ian King

Ian King — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 20:12:28 +0000

In fact, you can alter your /etc/apt/sources.list through Synaptic (or adept) in order to enable the universe and multiverse repositories; they even have dialogue boxes and whatnot to set up other repositories for stuff like Wine. (OK, but I still do it in a text editor…)