Training / Netbooks
I’ve been going to a lot of training events lately. Of course, they have all been Microsoft events.
At the last two PADNUG meetings, I have seen more than a few netbooks running Win7 beta. It is very compelling to watch a Microsoft employee give a full presentation of some feature in Visual Studio with SQL Express running in the background all on a Win 7, BETA. I repeat. They were running daily builds of the operating systems on a netbook while running and IDE and a database server. That has me REALLY interested in getting a netbook for my next laptop. I’ve got an older Toshiba widescreen. It works fine, but it takes forever to boot up, the batteries are shot and it weights a ton. Also the woman seems to have need for a small light-weight laptop to take to presentations. She has one or two presentations a month where a netbook would be perfect. This assumes the netbook could actually run Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. My own need is firmly rooted in Visual Studio 2008 and the possibility of Azure development. I have got to have Vista or Win 7 to run the developer fabric for Azure. XP isn’t supported in that development environment and all of the netbooks on the market today are running either Linux or XP. Non-starter.
So… I’ve been looking around a bit. The Acer Aspire seems to be ‘the one’ but since I know that I have to have a different OS there isn’t any point in taking the leap just yet.
Anyway, all of my research and training has lead me to a few amusing YouTube clips.
Mac vs PC: Autobots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLbJ8YPHwXM
Mac vs PC: South Park
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_kGL3M5Cg
Mac vs PC vs Linux: South Park
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-22EpQOm8c
Having been a Linux guy I really like the last one. It is kind of an inside joke I suppose. Linux systems don’t crash like PCs. When something goes really wrong, ususally you get a system dump which is saved to a file. When you reboot or otherwise recover from the unhappy event, the sysadmin can review the dump file to see what really happened. I was never that deep into the process to care about sys dumps, but I know what they are because I’ve been known to cause them. LOL Another difference touched on in the vid is that EVERYTHING in Linux is a service. Once the kernal loads, everything after that is loaded as a service. Windows and Macs do similar things but it was a ribbing that Linux machines are so tied to the service idea that they can’t seem to abstract things far enough to be useful for mere morals outside the tech world.
I’m already working on another post related to the training I went to yesterday. More on that in a few.
