apple is web scale

Writing Map reduce jobs is the new C. Just skip it and go directly to something that's more fun and easier to write.

Sometimes I have no idea if you're being serious or not.

I won't have to write them, I'll need to support a process that runs against a hadoop cluster so I'm playing with it at home.

Why would you ever expect really any Linux distro to look better than OSX though? Isn't it sort of apples and oranges in that context, as probably majority of apple's efforts and money is spent on looks, whereas dudes developing Linux are focusing on a lot of other things.

I don't really care why it looks bad, only that it does look bad. Linux has always been focusing on other things than usability and appearance, two things that it turns out are important. It's why it's very unlikely it will ever take over the desktop despite it's pluses.

Of course I'm serious.

I firmly believe that design is a tool best used with empathy. That is empathy towards the very large swath of people with poor eyesight and people with internet slower than 100mbp.

If you are creating sites that are difficult to read or creating sites that throttle my machine and I am running 50mbp, then the least these sites should do is have a huge button on their site saying: "Can't read this or too slow? Click here." so that people who are suffering from UX neglect have an option to turn off the silly styles and whatever other resources are killing their computer.

So yes, if sites want to do light on light or make me wait to see their content, then I feel like they deserve equal effort from me to see their content, thus the appropriate response is Alt <-.

Since I am not supplied with said button on websites, having all the trash turned off by default has made my browsing life much more pleasurable. Yes, this is an admission that sites with derelict design sometimes offer useful content. The irritation stems from the fact that I know this.

Macs are awesome. I've never gone full Linux, but even Ubuntu seems like a pain relative to how nice of a user experience and what a solid piece of hardware the latest macbook pro is. It just saves me a lot of time, which makes that $800 or whatever premium I'm paying for parts seem very minimal.

Awesome battery life, screen, touch pad, keyboard, OS that everyone uses/troubleshoots, and tons of tools built for it.

I use Ubuntu in a virtualbox sometimes on my desktop gaming PC... I've had many more problems with it than I ever had with my mac, in a much shorter amount of time.

Ubuntu is plain awful in a Virtual Box.

I didn't realize Apple was likely announcing their new Macbooks tomorrow.

I will likely be unable to resist.

I have a serious addiction to new electronics. It's my one vice... other than drinking.

edit: and women

What does work decently in virtualbox then? Something that ideally isn't super difficult to learn to use.

Quite topical to the current Mac/Win conversation, Jeff Atwood just posted and article about mac vs windows battery life http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/201...tery-life.html

i've had a perfectly fine experience with it...

does anyone know of load testing software (or a SaaS) that actually simulates real browsers and gives results for that?

to clarify, stuff like apache benchmark, siege, or even the web service blitz.io all test only the response time of the single file you are requesting. so if you want to get stats on your home page's load times, they will request index.html thousands of times for you under stress, and give results for that. the problem is this is basically useless info, as a real user requests index.html, then their browser reads that html and starts making multiple simultaneous requests for various assets (images/js/css) until it finishes and the page has loaded. The load time of that entire process is what we really want to stress test.

Is there anything that does this?

I haven't done load testing for awhile, but the last time I did it I ended up using "The Grinder" and then firing up some EC2 machines to generate load. It was overall pretty painless and I got good results from using it.

Pingdom Realtime User Monitoring does this sort of thing. You install a JS snippet on your site, and it measures page load times for users, giving you a breakdown of page load, customer satisfaction etc across browser, location and a whole load of other metrics.

Might not be what you are looking for tho as it is aimed at sites in production rather than in the testing phase....

new relic gives page load times for actual users, but once again, that's an in production thing.

Yeah actual monitoring is good and I do use new relic, but I am specifically talking about generating load in a realistic way for testing purposes.

jj, a quick look at the grinder's sourceforge page suggests it only for java: "Generic Approach Load test anything that has a Java API. This includes common cases such as HTTP web servers, SOAP and REST web services, and application servers (CORBA, RMI, JMS, EJBs), as well as custom protocols."

Am i misunderstanding?

Do you use Unity? I had occasion to use an Ubuntu VM recently and found it infinitely more tolerable with the Gnome fallback

Try googling Grinder and web apps. Its written in Java but is just making requests so you can test anything. I used it on a python web app.

GM - Thinking about it a bit more though, I think I ended up having to explicitly call some of the ajax calls I was making. Depending on what you're doing that can be pretty crappy.

For me it was alright because I wanted to mimic actual user paths through the app so I needed to get the results of a lot of these calls to figure out the next call to make (Sort of like, out of the 10 items that came back pick one to figure out a link for the user to click).

I believe it was just the standard ubuntu 12.04.
Keep in mind I'm not saying it was great, but it was perfectly acceptable, even on my pretty old crappy laptop, it was totally usable, with like a slightly noticeable slowness when doing some stuff that's absent on the host machine.

it's kind of insane that this service doesn't exist already... it must, right? maybe a good startup idea?

The reason Unity does not work on VirtualBox is because of this bug https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11107

I spent several hours trying to fix it last time I installed Ubuntu on virtual box and in the end just installed LXDE instead. Even with graphics acceleration, I am not a fan of Unity.

For anyone having issues with Ubuntu and VirtualBox, I would highly recommend LXDE. Super easy to install, uses hardly any resources and blazing fast.