Posts by Martin Ingram

Korg NanoKey MIDI controller

LPK25

Awful product, you may as well play the laptop keyboard itself.

Another vote for the Akai LPK25. Mine goes everywhere with me.

Ubuntu man challenges open source to out-pretty Apple

@Mark Scott

"Hey muppets who need dummy package install, Suse has 1 click install via YAST"

No no no no NO! Most people are trying to escape Windoze in part because they want to choose what they're running, not have it served up to them by their distro vendor.

Take Eclipse - I need the full WTP-enabled, J2EE edition of Eclipse, with the CVS plug-in preinstalled etc. Ideally, I'd like the latest Ganymede release. The version served up by Fedora is a rebadged mish-mash of (I think) Europa, with no CVS, no server plugins etc.

On the Mac (or, dare I say it, Windows) I can just download the Ganymede J2EE fileset, unpack to a folder of my choosing and be off and running. No fiddling about putting it in /usr/local, creating links, then farfing about with the KDE menu system rather than click-and-dragging a shortcut ...

It needs to be simple and consistent

I've just finished a project where the client asked me to set up a Java dev lab, so I used Linux on the servers and Mac development clients, which was a thoroughly pleasant experience. No BSODs, everything in it's right place and a place for everything.

I started a new project on Monday and the client had provided brand new RHL clients. I dislike Windoze intensely, so I desperately wanted this to work, but even as a relatively competent sysadmin it took me a day and a half to finally get to a KDE desktop that didn't look like a toddler had designed it, with all the right packages installed. Then I fire up Firefox and Eclipse and both apps totally ignored the KDE settings and were in "butt-ugly mode". Yes, I know there's a GTK fix, but this is the sort of thing that makes average users run a mile.

As for the other guy who started the same day as me, he's never been near a UNIX box in his life. Understandably, installing Tomcat, Apache, the Ganymede release of Eclipse is a real challenge for him - every time I winced when I felt like saying "just drop into a command prompt and su to root, configure, make and install."

As others have said, when the GUI can install any app in a simple manner, prompting for the admin password at appropriate times, and everything looks and works the same then we'll be half way towards a Mac OS X experience.

Macs are more secure: official

No, It's not down to the size of the user base

"The only reason Mac's are more secure is because no one can be bothered to make viruses for them when it is not a dominant product."

Perhaps you should do a little research into security on UNIX-based OSs before posting misleading statements like this in the future? ;-)