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Originally Posted by ifonline
....he was a programmer in Fortran and COBOL....
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i know Fortran, i'm an engineer and learned fortran 77 when i went to college. altho the language has progressed so far and gotten so advanced that i'd have to take another course just to learn the newer flavor thoroughly (fortran 2003 i think), i still can write fortran 77 programs in ubuntu. the platform is open-source, the compiler is readily available and installable, and it's actually fun writing silly little programs to calculate and make statements.
in windows, i can only find compilers that come with paid software....
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifonline
Speaking of fanboys... I hate being called a fanboy just because I use and enjoy Mac machines (and I'm not suggesting that you are calling me that, I'm just speaking in generalities). However, I also hate those that are Apple apologists. Apple is not a perfect company by any stretch of the imagination. They make plenty of mistakes, and have some pretty draconian ways. Realistically, they are no better and no worse that Microsoft, although each company has its own unique set of problems.
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the 'fanboys' i am referring to, a simple and very similar scenario would be something like you going onto the apple forums and asking how to go about burning an audio cd into itunes (let's say you didn't know and itunes was relatively new). and responses come up, one of them being: "Don't Steal Music !!"......that actually happened to me on apple forums, and i thought to myself W-T-F ?!? don't steal what ? my own audio CDs ? Geez....
Quote:
Originally Posted by ifonline
I have dabbled with Ubuntu a bit, but as you said, I find it difficult to consider it a workable solution at present with the lack of significant mainstream support. Strange, as I remember Dell (I think it was Dell) was offering Ubuntu (or something similar) on some of their machines... is that even still going on? That could be a good boost to that OS.
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altho ubuntu and other flavors of linux are not on the cutting edge, they are pretty darn close. the reasons they have not been popular with most home users is because the code needed to decrypt or decode modern dvd and blu-ray movies rests in the hands of studios that would rather die than give the source-code out. therefore, getting dvd's to play back was a problem back in the early years of ubuntu. eventually the encryption was cracked and now dvd playback is no problem (yet frame rates and resolution requires a little work to get everything smooth and fluid during playback). again in recent years linux distros are not able to play blu-ray discs easily because of the new encryptions and standards. but once managed copy hits the market, i'm sure someone will figure out how to play blu-ray movies in linux.
this logic also applies to other areas of the OS with other 'proprietary' source-code, such as NVIDIA's video drivers, etc, etc....