J Wants a Mac (Vista flame)

MUD transcript:

J wants another Mac.

J bought a cheap laptop to last while he's living in corporate storage, it's VISTA! Holy crap, I have the absolute lowest expectations possible about Windows, well desrved from experience, and somehow Vista blows away every shred of quality or clear thinking. It's truly a self-caricature. Every time you run a program it asks you if you want to run it. Later it'll ask about getting more permissions to contniue to run! Programs will die, and then another program runs to "try to figure out why" the first crashed. It's truly the most pathetic computing experience I've ever had. OH! And the network on the Vista box already hung once. I was appalled. I was restoring a backup from a PII-233MHz to this brand-new box and the best it could do was about 140KB/sec and then it hung.... My G4 Mac had no problem doing 4-6MB/sec to/from the Pentium2.

J says, "And here's another absurdity: Vista is 32bit so it can't see all the memory I bought. M$ spent millions crippling a 64 bit OS."

J says, "However, the laptop is great: 17", dual 2Gz Opteron, 4 USB, 1 FW, crappy graphics card, but here was the deal cincher: Two internal drive bays! This box will become the new R***.com server. I'm sure Linux will run 1000x better on this box than Vista."

mt says, "Yes but Microsoft got the license fee anyway"

client side matplotlib

way cool

App Engine OS X Confusion

Google AppEngine docs is inconsistent at this point.

It offers a download of AppEngineLauncher for OS X rather than AppEngine. Installing that does NOT, per docs, put appcfg.py or dev_appserver.py in the path.

It does create instances of those.

Directly invoking dev_appserver.py works; modulo a warning in importing PIL; that seems OK.

I see two instances of appcfg.py: in Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app//Contents/Resources :

google_appengine/appcfg.py
and
GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine/appcfg.py

Neither works. They both say ImportError: No module named google. I have deployed test code effectively. I don't actually know what appcfg is supposed to do.

Controversy about Software in Higher Ed

here and a reply here