The REAL tablet wars are about to start

[DaveNull]

Originally Posted by AustinChief

Yep, I have to buy a stupid Apple now so I can program iPhone apps. They won't even let you code for them without using OSX. Craptastic.

At least the new iMac minis look decent and aren't horribly overpriced.

So? You can't get Visual Studio for OS X. I can't imagine that you'd want to build for a platform you can't test on.

[HC_Chief]

Originally Posted by DaveNull

So? You can't get Visual Studio for OS X. I can't imagine that you'd want to build for a platform you can't test on.

Parallels, dual-boot, or simply run Windows on the Mac hardware... all valid options, but all a bit ridiculous (Parallels is pretty cool, I have to admit).

Apples are great for self-absorbed hipster kids in fake eyeglasses & skinny jeans, blogging away in coffee shops. Their market was built on Windows Vista. Perhaps Windows 8, with its radical departure from a traditional desktop experience, will give rise to a valid third option? Perhaps a more user-friendly Linux distro (Ubuntu is very user-friendly IMO, but to most non-technical people, it is still too difficult to use).

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by HC_Chief

Parallels, dual-boot, or simply run Windows on the Mac hardware... all valid options, but all a bit ridiculous (Parallels is pretty cool, I have to admit).

Apples are great for self-absorbed hipster kids in fake eyeglasses & skinny jeans, blogging away in coffee shops. Their market was built on Windows Vista. Perhaps Windows 8, with its radical departure from a traditional desktop experience, will give rise to a valid third option? Perhaps a more user-friendly Linux distro (Ubuntu is very user-friendly IMO, but to most non-technical people, it is still too difficult to use).

There are Ubuntu-based distro's (LinuxMint anyone?) that are VERY user-friendly.

[DaveNull]

Originally Posted by HC_Chief

Parallels, dual-boot, or simply run Windows on the Mac hardware... all valid options, but all a bit ridiculous (Parallels is pretty cool, I have to admit).

Apples are great for self-absorbed hipster kids in fake eyeglasses & skinny jeans, blogging away in coffee shops. Their market was built on Windows Vista. Perhaps Windows 8, with its radical departure from a traditional desktop experience, will give rise to a valid third option? Perhaps a more user-friendly Linux distro (Ubuntu is very user-friendly IMO, but to most non-technical people, it is still too difficult to use).

That's not a coffee shop. That's the NASA control room.

Then there's this from a retired JPL engineer:

"People started bringing their own into work, and pretty soon a lot of other people followed. Soon they became almost standard issue at JPL, where they were popular in imaging work, especially creating large mosaics, and when OS X came out there was the added advantage of an OS that was UNIX based."

Any one of my Macs is more capable out of the box than any Windows machine out of the box because of the Unix underpinnings. It may be true that you can find someone that remembers a lot of the old DOS commands that can whip together some batch scripts in Windows, but a ton of that functionality was killed off. As I said above, PowerShell is a step in the right direction, but also seems to step back.

A few months ago I started playing with it and was overcome with glee when Powershell correctly interpreted my 'ls' command as one to list the directory contents, but then realized that I didn't know all the PowerShell ls flags so I dropped back to dir. Unfortunately 'dir' functions differently in PowerShell than it does in the typical command prompt.

So it was back to download CYGWIN and get a proper shell again.

Kind of like being a libertarian, there are two ways to get to being a Mac user. Either you want something more powerful than Windows or you want something that's more stable and easier to use than Windows. Either way, you end up using OS X.

As far as Parallels vs. VMWare, Parallels got a good head start but got quickly overtaken by VMWare once they pulled their shit together. Fusion is great and you aren't forced to look at ads while you use it.

Oh, and unlike Visual Studio you can get Xcode for *free* with OS X.

[HC_Chief]

Originally Posted by DaveNull

That's not a coffee shop. That's the NASA control room.

Oh, and unlike Visual Studio you can get Xcode for *free* with OS X.

Heh, NASA, HUGE Microsoft shop for both software and services. Same with DoD. Pretty much the entire government, really...same as the private sector. Sure, the Macs are popping up in ones, twos, threes...they are great consumer products; they just can't get much traction in the real world, where work gets done. In every single BYOD initiative you will hear the same question: "how do I make a consumer device useful in the workplace?" Followed immediately by "how the hell do we control/manage these devices?". That is, of course, if your security group will allow the devices in the building.

Xcode? WTF is that? I can get Eclipse for free too...not much use if you're writing .NET; most shops that write .NET have an ELA, meaning they will have the appropriate IDE for the job. With the "free" software you can hack your way through it, if you are lucky enough to have someone who knows how to do that, but why bother? You will end up spending more money on the effort in man hours. Same old story: save a few dollars in licenses, spend ten times as much in fumbling through defining a process to make up for not correctly investing your software budget.