Lazycoder

Buy Apple for the hardware, not just the software

I’m Too Poor To Afford Apple So Stop Telling Me To Buy One Before I Go Postal:

‘we got a much better computer for her than we could have gotten from Apple.’

You can also buy a Ford for much less than a Porsche. Which car is a better quality car?

I bought an HP laptop for my wife when our desktop finally met it’s maker. The screen is nice, it cost as much as my iBook did but it had more RAM, a 64-bit processor (which I can’t use because it only came with 32-bit XP and she won’t let me install a new OS on it but that’s not the laptops fault), and a larger hard drive.

But after a year little things started to show up. The keyboard is cheap and flimsy. You really have to pound the spacebar to get it to register. One of the arrow keys flips up when you put pressure on it (my daughter pulled several of the keys off when she was an infant, chip off the old block.). You have to jiggle USB cables plugged into one of the USB ports. Sometimes you can’t eject the tray-loading DVD drive. I ran Windows update and the trackpad went nuts, the pointer would shoot all over the screen. The hard drive is really starting to thrash a lot, even after defragging. The battery when we bought the laptop would last for about an hour and a half. Now it’s down to 30-40 minutes.

My iBook keyboard is still just as nice to use as it was when I bought it. HFS+ doesn’t really need defragging. The trackpad still works as well as it ever did even after multiple updates from Apple. A new battery lasted for about 3 hours, 2 and a 1/2 if I used the DVD drive. Now it’s down to about an hour. Overall, after having bought and built computers for 25 years, I’m impressed with the quality of Apples hardware.

Now I’m contemplating buying a new computer. I’m running a couple of scenarios through my head. A new Macbook w/VMWare/VirtualBox so I can do Windows development w/o having to participate in driver-update-of-the-week world that is pure Windows. A Dell laptop dedicated to just development, maybe dual-booting Debian and Windows. Or buying a nice desktop system, maybe a Mac-mini, and using Remote Desktop to do development.

My point is not a new one: Apple makes outstanding hardware. You can buy cheaper computers, but you get what you pay for.

Visual Studio shipping with jQuery

jQuery and Microsoft – ScottGu’s Blog: “”

Wow. This is an interesting development. Visual Studio is going to ship jQuery in a service pack and in future versions of Visual Studio. There will be intellisense support, PSS support, and Microsoft will be submitting patches back to the jQuery library.

This raises an interesting issue. Why does Microsoft need to support 2 different JavaScript libraries? They already have the MS Ajax client library, which does a great job of providing cross-browser support. There’s almost nothing that MS Ajax can do that jQuery can’t do either with a plugin or using only the core jQuery engine. Why specifically jQuery? Why not Prototype or ExtJS or YUI? Heck, they almost BOUGHT YUI.

One other interesting question: How will companies who are normally allergic to OSS code react to this if their developers start using jQuery when writing their applications?

In any case, this is a big step forward for Microsoft and OSS in general. Hopefully we’ll start to see Microsoft shipping more and more OSS software with their developer tools and maybe Windows someday.

Silverlight 2 Release Candidate is out

Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available – ScottGu’s Blog: “”

So I get why Microsoft is adding in controls like the combo box and password box to Silverlight. It’s what the developers want. They want these controls. But what I don’t get is, if Silverlight can work with HTML/JavaScript why do the developers want these controls, which already exist as either native HTML or as JS+HTML widgets? Why reinvent HTML controls inside of Silverlight?