Is Macbook Air with i5 2.7GHz, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD faster than DELL i5 2.5, 8GB, 128GB SSD?

Does Mac OS make it faster?

I wonder what I would sacrifice had I traded DELL for Macbook...

is 2.7 more than 2.5?

@Boris_yo OSX does some things extremely well, and some things badly

windows also does this

swings and round abouts tbh

@djsmiley2k Macbooks are the choice for businessmen. I keep seeing this.

@Boris_yo oo shiny

Also the choice if Hollywood movies.

and they generally more resistant to data loss

and damage maybe

@Boris_yo you realise apple owns lots of movie studios?

@djsmiley2k Are SSDs not created equal?

or rather, steve did, and other mac lovers do

@Boris_yo also true. Some SSD's are faster than others.

@djsmiley2k No.

Apple may be more selective about their choises

@Boris_yo read up on lucas arts

@djsmiley2k Faster does not mean resistant to data loss.

like the 90's

faster generally means manufactured better

But when i say OSX seems to be more resistant to data loss, I mean via virii, and user stupidity

meaning maybe less data loss there too

Virii?

viruseseseses.

Sounds like Roman.

Anti-Virii

Or Latin...

Well, I am sure Mac OS is not as RAM hungry as Windows.

depends how you define hungry

OSX is far better at caching things I'd say

which makes it 'appear' to use more ram

also, you can't go out and buy a macbook with not enough ram.

@djsmiley2k Outlook webmail, Gmail are eating a lot of RAM and use and spike CPU more. I have to close tabs to do my work.

get more ram

On Mac OS I suspect this won't happen.

you'd be wrong

8GB is enough.

:D

No it's not

I have SSD. Why would I need more RAM?

All caching is done on fast NAND.

...

ssd's are like 100x slower than ram

ram is Extremely fast

level 3 cache is even faster

level 1 cache is eye bleedingly fast

I think I will wait to get new PC rather than upgrading to 16GB of RAM on 2012 DELL Latitude?

It pulls out a lot of heat too. Maybe thermal paste needs changing... I need to work on its cooling.

As I move hand close to its vent sometimes it's really hot. Usually when Outlook webmail spikes CPU at 27%

if the heat is leaving it, then that's good

And it's not yet summer here in the middle east.

yeah if you've not changed the heat paste in 5 years it might help

and a good clean might help too

@djsmiley2k I did keyboard cleanup. The stuff I have found... I'd rather not discuss it.

Pringles from 2012, fairy breadcrumbs, teeth for fairy... And that's just an icing on the cake.

There we go. Suck it, roving bands of close voters! :P

@djsmiley2k I heard Sensodyne is best.

@Bob I'll take you up on the very big maybe and the yes.

@allquixotic if that gets one or two more upvotes, I'll throw mine in

That sort of attitude really gets under my skin. I hate so-called "IT Administrators" who think that you should come to them for every little tiny thing you need to do. Control freaks.

lol

@allquixotic I mean, if its something they need to do, sure.

They just want to justify their jobs. They're afraid of users who know what they're doing and can work independently without them, because those users would happily tell management that they don't need IT Administrators and can lay them off, and nobody would notice.

If someone asked me how to do this... I'd erm... ask a question here ;p

@allquixotic though, management would often happily do that.

Really, all I need them for is replacing routers that give up the magic ghost, and resetting passwords.

Now sysadmins are useful. But desktop IT admins? Blech.

looool

@allquixotic I kinda have been one, vaguely

lol

tho not the BOFH sort.

@JourneymanGeek -_- Present company excluded. :D

No, but here's the thing. You can be an IT Administrator that software engineers (or more generally, just clueful users) love. Or you can be one that gets in the way of their work and therefore be hated by them.

@allquixotic In enlightened management?

If you want to be loved by clueful users, stay out of their way. Give them local admin rights. Trust that if they download some program, and the virus scanner doesn't go off, it's probably fine.

Hell yeah.

@allquixotic and then chaos ensues because bob wanted to change that one little thing to make his life easier and breaks 10 processes in the mean time.

@satibel in a sense though, its a matter of balancing needs.

In some cases, you really can't do anything

but you can be less "NO SOUP FOR YOU" and more "sorry dude, our overlords insist that you guys can't have any USB access with explicitly calling some dude in security"

@satibel Change one little thing where? IMO, if someone changes something on their local system and it breaks their setup (but doesn't affect anyone else), that's perfectly fine -- they can keep both pieces of their broken system. And a clueful user will frequently break things as they "try stuff" to learn -- which is the correct way to become a (more) clueful user.

Changing stuff on production servers that affects everyone, well... you need some kind of team coordination / change control there, and it needn't involve "IT Administrators", but basically you just need to make sure that any changes to critical systems are reviewed by others, and if they're a HUGE change, it needs to be reviewed by an engineering team lead or manager.

when that guy tries a dhcp server and breaks the network in half, it's annoying.

because it's not him being called by angry users, but the IT admin.

@satibel First of all, installing a DHCP server on your box will not break the network by default; you'd have to configure it to multicast on the network to even have a chance of affecting anyone. Secondly, it's the IT admin's role to lock down the router against that kinda stuff -- should be one of the first things you do when you set it up. Third, clueful users usually don't do stupid things like that without testing it in a VM first.

A clueful user will make mistakes of that "magnitude" somewhat rarely; will always learn from them and not repeat them; and will usually have a very good reason why they were trying to do that (even if the end result was not what was intended).

And talk to the admin first

hmmmm

all of the above, works in IT centric companies

/me doesn't suppor tthose

"Hey, I need a DHCP server to test out pixie booting. Should I be running it in a test network, or can I throw it on my workstation?"

^this

Notice I keep saying "clueful user" -- I'm not advocating giving everyone local admin rights and saying go to town. Unless you have an extremely small company where you've hired selectively, any office is going to have a significant proportion of dunces and people who will do stupid things regularly because they don't know how computers work.

Unfortunately, you can't create a formal corporate policy that describes how to separate clueful users from idiots. You kind of have to play it by ear.

Or you can let people fill out a form to request admin rights, and if they abuse it, take it away.

@allquixotic you ever been a desktop admin for programmers, who don't really have a clue?

the problem is when self proclaimed clueful people are there.

the kind of programmers who'll store 1 million wav files in a single directory on ntfs, and then wonder why it explodes?

@allquixotic or not give them something they don't actually need

@djsmiley2k No, but I've worked with programmers who don't really have a clue. I'm not saying all programmers are brilliant and let them have domain administrator access to every server in the datacenter.

because any good it admin makes sure all the required programs are installed Before the user even asks for them

I'm partially playing devils advocate here

I've seen what people who think they have a clue, but don't have the full picture, can do...

@djsmiley2k hi

@djsmiley2k That's not even possible. You can't anticipate every need a programmer would ever have. You aren't developing the applications they're writing; you don't know what requirements those apps will have. They could have a need for a new program that crops up on day 693 of development when a manager, while picking earwax, asks for a new feature.

o_O

@allquixotic then just ask, it doesn't take long.

Maybe I've not experienced enough devs

I have not once in ~15 years of employment ever sat down at a computer and ably performed my job without a single piece of software needing to be installed.

because all the ones I've dealt with have had an ide. and maybe some server access via putty

@allquixotic every day in my job I don't need any software installing

most of the wonder is due to the fact so much is web based these days

I've never requested any software here, because I needed it

I requested vbox, because I'm hacking together something I shouldn't even be working on.

Then again, my job role is defined. I know my job, I know how i'm meant to do it

one thing I'm for is having a vm with admin rights, but out of the network.

I'm interested, what kind of programs does a programmer require?

On their desktop I mean

If we are talking about installing stuff onto shared servers, that's different kettle of fish anyway

and you could either do it hands off, let them run it how they want, you advise only

or hands on, you change control everything yourself

@djsmiley2k And some kind of UNIX-alike environment to run shell scripts like MinGW. And Git-Bash. And an XML processor. And an image editor better than paint. And Visio or Dia (or Lucidchart on the web these days...). And a PDF editor. And a command-line install of Maven. And a local instance of the Java app server being used. And maybe a different Java app server to determine if $PROBLEM is specific to the app server.

And ideally a local Linux VM (although if you can get one on the network in a shared server environment, even better).

One or more database products, whether it be sqlite or MySQL or Postgres for local data storage and debugging. Database query GUIs. SoapUI for web service testing.

More than one IDE, because sometimes you have to do things in another language or there's a specific feature you need from some other IDE.

The ability to set system environment variables at will without asking IT. Sometimes it's necessary.

The ability to install any version of Java and switch between them at will.

Fiddler HTTP Proxy.

Wireshark would be a dream come true, but most devs live without it because admins are so allergic to its potential black hat uses.

most of this sh/would be in a test vm.

@satibel An off-net box with Fiddler is useless when you're trying to debug an HTTP connection that's on the network. :)

then use a test copy of the server. or have a locked-up connection.

Wow... The coconut MCT oil really makes me focused and productive...

Don't understand how I lived without it.

I can enter the flow faster than without it!

!!wat

@allquixotic We're explicitly not allowed image editors by corp/security audits. I have GIMP and Paint.NET installed...

(That said. I'm 'allowed' them because I need them to do my job -_-)

Plus with its thermogenetic properties I am also burning fat.

@satibel Often it's difficult or impossible to reproduce the problem you're experiencing by simply setting up your app server on another box. You might be running into resource constraints (that wouldn't manifest in another environment), or system load problems, or maybe there are dependency services on the network that you need to use, that you can't replicate because you don't control those services (or the code).

@satibel If you are interested in personal development and productivity you will understand.

You have to give developers tools they need to be successful. Refusing on principle because you're risk-averse is costing the company money, not saving it.

@allquixotic yes already said provide server via putty, git and bash would be on said server, xml processor? Not sure what this is, but if it's standard for the job to be dealing with XML, why is it not installed?, image editor? really.... that's not rpogramming, pdf editor? again really? Oh use open office, that came installed by default.

@allquixotic I... urgh

I never said programmers can't have the tools they need

I said there should be a standard set of tools for the job

and if there is, and it's complete, there shouldn't be a need for said programmer to install stuff themselves.

Also, people are scared of wireshark?

Why, if you start poisoning the network you're gonna get shut down hard and fast...

at least if the admins are doing their job properly

seems like you don't like bad admins. Well, me neither

@allquixotic then, if there's that one case where you really need access to the prod server, calling "mr admin" isn't that hard.

Also @allquixotic your view seems to come from that of someone as a programmer who's been restricted by admins. Mine is an admin who's had to control bad programmers

The good programmers, I loved. they were great.

Don't tar us all with the same brush plz

unless you are with a team of really shy people, having an admin quickly check you aren't trying to sniff admin passwords or play on your work time isn't a problem.

@satibel the former would be a firing issue. The latter's HR or the supervisor's problem ;p

@satibel Yes it is. "Mr. Admin" goes on vacation. Mr. Admin goes out to lunch. Mr. Admin gets in at 6:30 and leaves at 2:30, so if you need help after 2:30 and happen to be a 9-5 or 10-6 guy, you're SOL. Mr. Admin fights you tooth and nail with every single thing you try to get done because he doesn't understand what you do and is continually surprised that you can't do your job with Notepad and IE.

lol

@allquixotic then it's an admin issue.

@allquixotic meh, sublime text and a real browser ;)

g2g

\bye

I once had to wait 3 weeks for an admin to come back from vacation to get a license installed so I could do work, and during that time I kept getting slammed by my customer because I couldn't get any work done.

Sure, he had a "backup", but the backup was clueless and didn't know how to do anything and wanted to wait for the person on vacation to come back because they were too afraid of doing something they wouldn't like.

@allquixotic ugh. Bus rule man, bus rule.

@allquixotic See, terrible admin

@djsmiley2k "Image editor? really... that's not programming" -- Oh come on! You've never needed to write a Word document with screenshots (edited with nice little arrows and blurring out sensitive info and resized to fit on the page) to guide clueless users through an application?

Plus, how do you think all those little icons and widgets and CSS styles on the web apps you use get developed? A hex editor?

And no, MS Paint isn't sufficient. It lacks so many basic features compared to Paint.net or GIMP.

@djsmiley2k "if it's standard for the job to be dealing with X, why is it not installed?" -- because everyone gets the "base image" (which has almost nothing except Windows and Office) and is told to go to town, then has to request individually each and every software tool they ever need to do their job.

And sometimes it's not standard, but you need it to accomplish a particular task, or to do so efficiently.

If I could convince IT administrators everywhere of one thing, it would be that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all standard image of software -- not for a particular role, not for a particular project. There's a lowest common denominator of things you know you need, yes - but you can't exhaustively know what everyone will need all the time.

And users feel like pigs in a pig pen having to constantly request software instead of being able to just go grab it, especially if it's open source or freeware.

And I love how they have policies about having to "bless" software before you can put it on the network. Don't even try to tell me that IT admins are going to perform a detailed audit of the source code of a ~100k+ SLOC C/C++/Java program before blessing it. 99% of the time it gets blessed because a high-level director says they need it.

What an IT admin might do, at the most, is install it in an isolated VM and make sure it doesn't ship adware, run it through a virus scanner, maybe look if it opens any ports or does any network I/O, then bless it. But that's a long way from making sure it has no backdoors, vulns, malicious code, etc.

(And to be perfectly honest, many average/good programmers would do the same sort of vetting before grabbing a tool, usually on their personal box at home, before even bringing it into the corporate environment.)

and we did have people putting in tickets for things we didn't have

@allquixotic those decisions though

are often made at a higher level than your IT admins

How do you access specific website through specific IP/Proxy? I have one that does not work with my ISP.

@allquixotic welp thats dumb :/

anandtech.com/show/11252/…

> Before testing these three units, we would not believe that such performance would be possible with a consumer-grade PC PSU.

(emphasis original)

HOLY CRAP.

jonnyguru.com/…

...perfect 10. You don't see this often from JonnyGURU.

I met with a road accident :(

Not too badly injured, but I'll probably be in bed rest for a couple of days

Ow :(

My OnePlus 3T just arrived. FedEx unexpectedly put in the mailbox ._.

@Rahul2001 Get well soon.

The packaging is really, really cool. OnePlus clearly did their homework.

@bwDraco Thanks

My luck appears to have been pretty crappy recently

Time to start flashing LineageOS.

@bwDraco But... You just got the phone!

Bootloader unlocked. Preparing to flash TWRP...

We're in the recovery.

Blah. The phone does not want to read my flash drive in TWRP.

Moving files to the phone via MTP.

Flashing per instructions at forum.xda-developers.com/oneplus-3/…

...and there's the LineageOS boot splash.

We're up and running. Restoring apps...

@Rahul2001 Such bad luck, have you been bitten by a wild @Dog or something?

Watch out for stuff falling on your head

Especially monitors

Anyone have a quick one-line shell command to traverse a directory and save a text file containing the directory hierarchy? I can't quite figure out a good search string to find an answer on the stack lol

dir /s > file.txt

Or do you want just directories?

all files and sub dirs

that's it

derp, thank you so much

There's also tree for a neat graphical-ish display

was starting to do it programmatically in python and i said this is absurd, im missing something

@logical123 find . > file.txt

Because Linux ;P

@ThatBrazilianGuy that actually gives the behaviour i wanted

brilliant, thank you both

@logical123 The command equivalent of find . > file.txt is dir /a /b /s > file.txt

@ThatBrazilianGuy Woof

Firefox Sync is set up on the phone.

Using an activated charcoal filter on squash is retarded

@Dog It does seem somewhat to defeat the purpose of the filter and it probably sub-optimal for both flavour and filtering purposes.

@Mokubai yup, very much this

Clearly you had the foresight to think about these things before attempting them

Humans are weird

Woo! T-Mobile LTE is amazing!

I on the other hand... I think like a dog. Or a cat. Not sure actually

@Dog I do this more than most people. Hence you'd likely never see me in a video on reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/new

13-15 Mbps downstream and that's with a less-than-perfect signal.

...confirmed Dash Charge works using my USB power meter.

(it was indeed driving 4A at battery voltage, adjusted for resistance)

Chrome leaving 450MB hidden temp files in my downloads directory on my phone... Urgh

@JourneymanGeek my reaction: GOOD! I don't want IT's support. If my company laptop's battery blows up, or the fan stops spinning, or I need a password reset, help me. But I don't want them to play Nanny with me while I'm developing software.

Heck, I'm finally getting VoLTE and the call quality is fantastic with HD Voice!

@bwDraco I might be able to use the 600W fanless version

6 GB of RAM means I should never have to worry about Firefox being a memory hog.

u call people?

:D

LTE Advanced! Yee-haw!

(notice the LTE+ on the signal icon)

thing about trash can makes me think of our bin

it gave itself to the bin truck monster

so we may be forgiven for our rubbish sins..

@Bob, @allquixotic, @Dog check this out, I'm getting LTE-A ^^^

Here's another quick terminal question, is there a way to monitor the progress of rmdir?

Nevermind, I think I found it. --verbose flag

yah, -v

I'm always confused by flag placement, especially with things like ffmpeg

most programs don't care.

@bwDraco if 28/8 is LTE-A, what's the 70/25 I can get sometimes on Verizon when the tower's not saturated?

Weak signal. I'm sure better is possible.

The LTE+ indicator means carrier aggregation.

5pm friday and it's so quiet I could hear a pin drop.

@ThatBrazilianGuy everyones gone home?>

Yeah.

@DavidPostill o_O

Yikes. Performance going to fall off a cliff? Should we expect connection timeouts?

it'll be fineeeeeeee

xD

Charging test. 24% and Dash Charging.

Less than five minutes later: 32%. Wow.

Also, unlike my Nexus 5X when rapid charging, the phone stays cool.

(the N5X would get warm when plugged into the OEM charger for more than a few minutes)

Ten minutes in: 41%.

Dash Charge is no joke.

They're not kidding when they say "a day's power in half an hour".

17% charge restored in 10 minutes. Wow.

Is there a way to modify the output of find so that, inside of a directory, files are in alpha order?

find . > file.txt is the command i am using currently

@bwDraco how well does it last tho

@logical123 `find ... | sort > file.txt

Notably longer than my Nexus 5X, but don't have exacts right now.

@djsmiley2k perfect, thank you

np

@logical123 Hmm. Under Cygwin the list is in alpha order.

@DavidPostill is Cygwin putting it in order, or are you experiencing the results of listing a tree created in order to begin with?

@DavidPostill I got this in my inbox. Link takes me to transcript of this chat, remaining current. But not to any post, as it normally does. Am I in the right place, or should I be somewhere else for this?

@GypsySpellweaver I think the Windows API sorts them automatically, so whatever mechanism find is using under the hood in Cygwin's emulation layer probably also sorts them

@GypsySpellweaver Cygwin is putting them in alpha order. If I look at the files in explorer and sort by creation date they are pretty much in random order.

@allquixotic That's another possibility. I have had to sort the output often in *nix.

@GypsySpellweaver Here is the right place. I haven't created a special room for the cleanup. @JourneymanGeek may decide to do so later I guess if he feels we don't want to clutter up RA with cleanup questions.

@DavidPostill Considering the tag cleanup that is probably a good idea.

@DavidPostill as a RO (fwiw) I'd be fine with just having the chat here

@allquixotic Thanks. Let's see what Geek thinks when he wakes up.

part of the reason is that I don't like having lots of tabs (unlike Bob, who has 10^667 tabs for each human on the planet), so I might not participate in the discussion (due to forgetfulness or laziness) if it's elsewhere, but if it's here, I habitually open RA all the time

and RA has been quiet lately so it's not like we'd be terribly likely to trample on other discussions

@allquixotic Makes me no nevermind. I'll probably have a few Q's once in a while. OTOH, the tag cleanup looks like it's beyond me.

@GypsySpellweaver in that case, treat it like a busy IRC room -- multiple convos can go on in the room at once, and often do

the reply anchors and @'ing make it even easier than IRC to follow

Looked at some earlier, and I think one needs to know the tags available to make intelligent adjustments.

@allquixotic Believe it or not, in my decades of computer use, I've never IRC'd once.

I do like the anchors and @ though. Does make things easier to follow. :D

I used IRC for years when first cutting my teeth on open source and Linux stuff, then used it because it was the method of contact for a gamer group that was somewhat traditional in their ways

I like IRC, but I like SE chat even more, because it's like it was specifically designed to address limitations of IRC

it has fantastic rate limiting; you can edit messages; you can reply to specific messages; the star/pin wall; GCM...

come to think of it, I can't decide if GCM is a strength or limitation of SE chat

@allquixotic GCM?

Ghetto Chat Markdown

@BenN Ah

Deja vu!

@BenN lol. I must be suffering from Alzheimer :/ although it was almost a year ago :)

there's some acronym Geek uses that I always forget

something about a dodgy hard drive

@BenN lol, it was you who told him that time too

@allquixotic DOID

@DavidPostill we had one the last time. Aisle 13 or something

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, the question is whether we want/need one this time ...

ah

I'll leave that to you g