On Slashdot today there was an article from Computer World entitled 10 Things We Hate About Laptops. As I was reading it, I couldn’t believe some of the things being said. I’ve used laptops for a while, though I’ve never had to support them for other people. However, I found much of what was said to either be fallacious or misleading. > more <

For what it’s worth, here’s a picture of Ubuntu Linux running under VMWare Fusion on my new Macbook Pro. You can’t really see the lighted keyboard very well because the backlight is white.

Linux on Mac

Obviously this makes it very easy when developing software since I can test it on any necessary operating system. An advantage of using VMWare for the virtual machine is that VMWare provides several dozen “pre-built” images that I can download and install, giving me access to components I wouldn’t normally be able to have.

Plus, I can now play games in Windows without having a separate machine and I don’t have to mess with Fink or DarwinPorts to have Linux programs running under OS X.

I finally bought a USB wireless adapter for my laptop so I can now use the Internet at my leisure, in bed. I no longer have to struggle downstairs just to check my mail. Because of this, I’m going to try and get back into the “blogging rhythm” again. (In case you didn’t know, most search engine optimizers (SEO) recommend blog sites add new articles every few days to keep them “fresh” with search engines. The more frequent the activity, the hire the ranking, in general.)

So, with this article, I wanted to continue on with my last post about computer file systems. I was going to talk about some of the Linux file systems but decided it probably isn’t necessary right now. Even though I use Linux at home, most people still use Windows so they probably don’t care about what file systems Linux has available. Plus, most Linux users either already know about their file systems or know enough to find out more if they need to. > more <

Choosing the right file system for your computer can have a large impact on how well your computer works. I won’t claim I know everything about file systems, but I will share what I know, which should be enough to give you a basic idea of how these things work.

According to Wikipedia, a file system is “a method for storing and organizing computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access them.” Most people don’t think too much about the file system, if they think about it at all. > more <

It continues to amaze me that people aren’t willing to try new things. Whether it’s food, books, movies, or software, people stick with the tried and true. My wife’s friend refuses to try any ethnic food besides Mexican and Chinese; we’ve offered to take her to Greek, Thai, Indian, Japanese, etc. but she’s afraid she won’t like it so she doesn’t want to go.

However, the biggest gripe I have is when it comes to computers. I understand that people are “brought up” using Windows (home, work, school, et al.) so they are comfortable with it. It just kills me when people bitch about Macs, saying that they suck yet they’ve never used one; if they have, it’s been for five minutes at an Apple store. > more <