It's been a little over a month since we got our iBook. (I think Jesse Vincent mentioned that once you get an iBook, either you need to get another one, or you need to get a divorce. He's right.)
I liked it so much, I did an impromptu Perl Lightning talk at OSCon. My top ten reasons why Perl hackers should get an iBook:
All in all, the experience has been a net positive. I oversold iBooks and OS X in my mini-lightning talk (in retrospect, it came off less like a piece of humor than a really bad rehearsal for a Switch ad). There are things that don't "just work" with OS X or the iBook. Having used computers for mumble years though, it's the best working OS+Machine combination I've found to date.
Re:One week in...
ziggy on 2002-08-05T15:57:31
There are two constants in the Mac community: a sense of near religious faith in the platform, and a near constant frustration with Apple. I'm looking forward to Jaguar, and I'm not looking forward to the cost. But as far as I can remember, Apple has never bent to the pleas of the Mac Faithful for free upgrades, reducing the announced price (before shipping the product), or any other concessions to the early adopters. And the faithful clamor for this at every major product announcment.It's a very nice OS, and aside from a few performance issues and my annoyance at Apple for charging for Jaguar (which is annoying if you've just bought an iBook and there's no decent upgrade price), I think I'll keep it;-) Yeah, I glossed over a million details there. OS X is unix under the hood, but a fluffy unix.As far as your lightning talk goes, what doesn't "just work" is compiling and linking unix things. I'm really quite frustrated with all that crap now./etc is an unused appendage; HFS+ may have some interesting features, but case insensitivity is a serious drawback; and NetInfo sounds good in theory, but I still have yet to see the benefit on a single box installation. I scratched my head a few times about -framework Carbon and -flat-namespace, too. In the end, I decided that it was a problem for another day and peppered the options about until stuff compiled. Seemed to work.
Re:One week in...
Theory on 2002-08-05T16:49:46
As far as your lightning talk goes, what doesn't "just work" is compiling and linking unix things. I'm really quite frustrated with all that crap now.Although I agree that there tend to be a few gotchas when compiling on OS X, the fact that it's getting a lot of traction in the *nix and OSS communities is a good thing, becuause in many cases, the configure scripts and Makefiles are getting fixed to just work on OS X. Just compare compiling Perl 5.6.1 to compiling 5.8.0. Or worse, compare compiling PostgreSQL 7.0 to compiling 7.2. The latter just works.
Re:One week in...
Matts on 2002-08-05T16:56:26
Yes, I'm looking forward to being able to upgrade to perl 5.8 so that more stuff "just works" - but right now the reason I was given the iBook was to get something working on it, so I need to make sure I do that without upgrading too much.
Funny, so far use.perl has been an even better source of help than google for all this;-) Re:One week in...
Theory on 2002-08-05T17:08:20
Oh, so do you have to use the default-installed Perl 5.6.0 and the DSO'd mod_perl with Apple's
/usr/sbin/httpd? Yucko. Re:One week in...
Matts on 2002-08-05T19:36:13
Yeah, I guess I do - I haven't gotten to that part yet - just got XML::LibXSLT and DBD::SQLite working.Re:One week in...
wickline on 2002-08-05T17:12:09
> annoyance at Apple for charging for Jaguar
The best price I've been able to find is $69 through
http://apple.com/education/store
If you're not affiliated with an edu, buy a license from
some friend who is afiliated with an edu:)
-matt
Re:One week in...
gnat on 2002-08-05T17:23:12
Uncle Tim (or possible Uncle Steve, given our tightness with Apple) will be buying my Jaguar. But wouldn't it just be easier to pirate? Isn't that the classic protest against price gouging?--Nat
Re:One week in...
wickline on 2002-08-05T23:23:38
Well, I'm all in favor of civil disobediance, but I feel like
I get my money's worth with the edu price, so not paying it is
just breaking the law because it's convenient, not because it's
the right thing to do.
If I felt otherwise, maybe I'd consider copying someone else's.
I've seen oodles of O'Reilly CD Bookshelves placed on the 'net,
and rather than download them, I've reported them to O'Reilly's
legal folks and paid for my own. I've even reported a accident
where safari was accidentally left entirely open on a test server
for anyone to download tons of texts.
If I felt like O'Reilly books were priced at "gouging level",
then maybe I'd be downloading them instead of paying.
Just because folks are used to a free (as in beer, never mind
the Free as in Freedom) OS, doesn't mean that every OS needs to
be free. If folks don't feel like Apple gives them their money's
worth, they can break the law and risk (a small risk, admitedly)
letting a judge decide the right of the situation, or they can
go back to their free OS and just not use Apple's.
...or just don't upgrade if the upgrade isn't worth it to you.
Not buying a product is a perfectly legal protest against price
gouging.
My rule of thumb has been roughly "pirate if you just want to
see what the program does or use it only once or twice, but if
you ever make a dime of income from the product pay for it OR
feel like a asshole for taking food from the kids of whomever
wrote the software". I don't enjoy feeling like an asshole. Of
course not everyone uses that rule of thumb. I'm not trying to
call pirates assholes, I'm just saying that *I* feel like an
asshole when pirating under certain circumstances.
I make a dime of income from MacOS X. I make more than enough
dimes to pay for a license. Similarly, I make plenty of dimes
from O'Reilly books and have paid for fifty to sixty of them.
You wouldn't suggest that I just download them would you?;)
-matt
