I'm not a Mac guy... Never had a PC fail me (over about a decade), except one ultraportable toshiba (screen failure). That's... 4 desktops and 2 laptops.
Of course, it DOES fail on the software side... Windows gets pretty painful as it ages.
I've always aid that Mac vs. PC is a decision of whether you want crappy-but-pretty hardware and good OS or ugly-but-solid hardware (assuming you do your research) and a mediocre OS that ages poorly.
I'm seriously considering a hackintosh for my next machine.
Most of the parts in Apple computers are the same parts used in PCs. A majority of the PC laptops are built by one of a few companies in China. As a former sys admin I've dealt with my share of PC hardware failure and in the last several years I've seen my share of Mac failures.
Hard drives are probably the component most likely to die in either and they all use the same group of vendors. Display failures are also more common in laptops and again, they all use the same group of vendors.
"Three of my older laptops have had their hard drives fail (with painful data loss in one instance)."
More like they deserved what they got. A four or five year old hard drive should b expected to die yesterday and full backups should be an absolute requirement. I have had plenty of drives die long before that and would never dare push a hard drive to such a long limit with no backup, especially a laptop one that is moved around a lot.
And just to top it off "hard drives" are not Apple special hardware. I have noticed that some comments have negative points, how do I vote down something (in this case the article)?
The first computer I ever owned had the motherboard die after a few days, maybe I have bad luck.
Almost every hard drive I have had has failed.
I just had a new 500 gig I used for backups fail after less than a year. It replaced a 160 gig that died after 2 years.
Every laptop I have owned has had the hard drive die (3, one mac).
I have had cd and dvd drives fail in various machines.
Personally the least hassles resulting from failure has been with Macs because I buy the applecare warrantee, and I just bring the machine in to get it fixed in a few hours. I imagine Dells service would be comparable, I would probably do that if I had a PC as my primary machine.
I'm not a Mac guy but I've owned 9 PC's (six laptops and three desktops) in 13 years and the worst I've had happen is a failing graphics card in one desktop (and one that's still running Windows 98 very nicely for experiments). All others have been replaced because components (usually RAM) had aged beyond decent utility.
I am looking for some community action for scrapy. It looks useful for a project I'm working on currently using BeautifulSoup but not digging the sluggish performance.
I am having trouble resolving the docs to the code. Is there an IRC, mailing list or forum?
I want to ask people here thoughts on frameworks, this looks well suited to a project I have, but it is built on Twisted and the preferred option of frameworks seems to be Django, now I'm a PHP coder, who is just about to step up to the python challenge so I am thinking it would be better to start with a more established framework? Thoughts would be most welcome.
Django is a framework for creating web applications. Twisted is a framework for network programming. Scrapy is a framework for scraping web pages.
If you're thinking about learning web development with Python, I'd suggest Django. Other Python web frameworks are TurboGears, Pylons, Web.py or Cherry.py. Django tends to have the best documentation and probably the largest community right now, however.
You're all a little young I suspect to know about the infamous "Limits To Growth reports" conducted by MIT CS grads in the late sixties commissioned by the Club of Rome.
They constructed computer models of population growth expectations against energy resources, waste, production etc. They concluded that unless society changed its ways DRAMATICALLY then a collapse would occur which would be unavoidable and would wipe out a large percentage of the worlds population.
The reports were widely dismissed at the time by the main stream media and other 'experts' however, many of their predictions are manifesting before our eyes as we speak, if not a little latter than originally expected.
Those that decry that technology will save us (and it may well do but we do have to create it first) the main unavoidable problem is capitalism = exploitation = waste / population which is increasing because of the high level of fossil fuel energy available / ( which is rapidly diminishing).
If any bright sparks here have a solution to this mathematical problem then I will be impressed. The reason I personally got into programming was to try and make some impact on this problem. Yet all I see here (which I don't blame you for) is naive youngsters who are deluded and indoctranated into believing that success is starting a startup and exiting with 1M+ cash in the bank. To me this = FAIL.
Those that were really smart would have an understanding of the unavoidable mathematical problems really facing us (which are not written about in our favorite math books) and would have a broader knowledge than that spouted by your ivy league universities.
Those bright sparks would be able to demonstrate 1) an understanding of the problem, 2) a deep understanding of the math involved, 3) an interest in solving the problem, 4) the capacity to think outside of the box and not follow the herd, 5) ultimately a working theoretical alternative which would be more robust than the current math which is the algorithm behind current capitalism (or what ever you want to call it, democracy etc.).
For those that think capitalism and democracy is the best system we have, do not bother replying! Your comments will be as limited as your 'intellectual' capacity and you would be better served spending your time on your fab new startup!
