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Apple sells designer hardware that's WAY over priced.

No, just generally built with better components and engineering.

Yes they sometimes charge more to upgrade some aspects like RAM, but for the hardware you are getting what you pay for.

Dell sells servers - Apple does not.

Apple sells the Mac mini, so you are wrong.

Dell sells Windows PCs - Apple does not.

Apple explicitly supports Windows on any Apple desktop hardware, so you are wrong.

Dell is diversified for the corporate enterprise market as an IT solution provider - Apple is not.

Well that was sure a load of bullshit, but in any case Apple does have enterprise support in multiple ways, including remote management, and internally facing applications - so you are wrong.

Dell sell cheaper hardware that's functional and modular - Apple does not

All Apple hardware is functional. Can you upgrade video cards in Dell laptops? No? HMM, guess they are not ALL modular as you claim then. And Apple will soon have a newer Mac Pro that is fully modular...

So you are basically on the edge of being wrong there, we'll just call it wrong because of your past errors.

It's like saying Harley Davidson will open up an office next to Toyota and poach the best employees.

I think you meant that to sound silly but what would be odd about a company working on very compact internal combustion engines wanting to hire someone who had worked on very compact internal combustion engines?

Here's my advice to you - if you don't understand computers OR car analogies well, you are better off not posting on Slashdot until you understand at least one well (probably best to start with car analogies, this being Slashdot and all).

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow...
http://blog.macminicolo.net/po...

The hard drive is replaceable after a couple hurdles.

Anytime you have a remote client that needs or could benefit from graphics acceleration. Chrome, OpenGL applications, VirtualGL. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualGL, http://blog.macminicolo.net/post/33839671756/build-a-dummy-dongle-for-a-headless-mac-mini.

Where does this come from and why can't it ever be debunked once and for all?

I would call it a Meta Rule. A rule that is not what copyright says; but was proposed once as a guideline, and took on a life of its own through the power of word of mouth -- with various institutions codifying it. With various degrees of strictness --- if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time and use 31 seconds of a media recording; I suppose you might get expelled from some school, because you're over the limit.

Examples:

Halldavidson: This copyright chart form was designed to inform teachers what tehy may do under the law

Music: Up to 10% of a copyrighted musical composition may be reproduced, performed and displayed as part of a multimedia program produced by an educator or student for educational purposes. ---- Authorities site a maximum length of 30 seconds. See notes by congressman below.

Temple University: College of Liberal Arts: Fair Use Policy:
Educators May use their projects for teaching, for a period of up to two years after the first instructional use with a class. ....
Music, Lyrics, and Music Video Up to 10% but no more than 30 seconds from any single musical work Any alterations shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work. .... Motion Media Up to 10% or 3 minutes, whichever is less

WILEY: Permission requirements .... . A single quotation or several shorter quotes from a full-length book, more than 300 words in toto. ..... A single quotation of more than 50 words from a newspaper, magazine, or journal. .... Material which includes all or part of a poem or song lyric (even as little as one line), or the title of a song. ...

The Law of Fair use and the Illusion of Fair use Guidelines

Pikes Peak Community College: Copyright Portion Limits; Rules of the road: Music, lyrics, music video - Up to 10%, but no more than 30 seconds Arlington Independent School District: Copyright: Portion Limitations
CCSJ: Copyright Fair Use: 'Allowable portion for fair use'
Public Schools of North Carolina: Copyright in an Electronic environment:

Up to 10% of a body of sound recording, but no more than 30 seconds

St. Olaf College: Copyright guidelines

Music, lyrics, music video: up to 10% but in no event more than 30 seconds of an individual work

MolStead Library; North Idaho College The amount of work to be copied is based on the “portion limit” set for that “medium.” [....] In general, you should never use more than 30 seconds or 10 percent of a piece of recorded music. Ball State University, guidelines for educational media:

4.2.3: Music, Lyrics and Music Video : Up to 10%, but in no event more than 30 seconds, of the music and lyrics from an individual work. No alteration(s) of the music and/or lyrics are allowed.

Those sound like FAQs to me.

http://www.macminicolo.net/faq.html
http://www.macminivault.com/faqs/

I think all the services work in a similar way.

The Government is arguing the data isn't really mine because it's hosted on someone else's servers.
So then, what about when it's in a shared colocation environment, such as macminicolo? Now I truly do own the "cloud" and the data is still contained on my personal property. It's just being place-shifted.

I'm waiting for the first Raspberry Pi colocation company to open - along the lines of Mac Mini Colo. But outside the USA, so there's less risk of my major hardware investment being seized by the feds - you know, for being creative on a Sunday without permission or something...

Seriously, colo could get pretty damn cheap with these little beasties.

Dunno, many people seem to be collocating them.

http://www.macminicolo.net/facility.html if you need to be seen with a trendy Mac datacentre.

Here you go:

Don't know about VPS ...

Server Logistics, Inc.:

http://www.serverlogistics.com/

Macminicolo:

http://www.macminicolo.net/macmini.html

I love the Mini but I think it's overkill and maybe not robust enough for this. A Mini also has lots of GPU you likely will not need, older ones don't. The hard drive may also not be robust enough for continuous use.

Care to give any specifics on why you think this is the case?

Just curious, because recently, I've been getting news on people that seriously use Mac Minis as servers (Mac mini Colocation.net) and Apple now also offers an installation of OS X Server on their build-to-order Mac Mini pages.

Never mind development boxes, there are companies that specialise in Mac Mini colocation!

Thanks for mentioning that. I was about to bring up www.macminicolo.net and others like it. Lots of colo sites love the mini because they are only equivalent to 1/2U of rack space (about 1/3U wide x 1.5U tall), but a mere fraction of the depth of most rackmount server gear. In terms of server hardware, you can't even approach that level of density without using blade servers, and you'll spend more for an empty blade server chassis than you spend for two decked out Mini servers running Mac OS X Server (at the new price).

I'm kind of curious how they managed to fit two drives in, the ones I've opened up didn't have a great deal of space inside and storage capacity has always been a bit of problem because they only take 2.5 inch drives.

Easy. The server model has no optical drive. This means that you'll have to have another Mac (remote optical thing) or an external drive when you need to upgrade the OS. Otherwise, for a server box, you'll never use one anyway, so it makes a lot of sense. :-)

For whatever it's worth, I'm using a Mac Mini for my personal server and couldn't be happier. I used to run an old Mac G4 tower, but wanted to be able to do faster photo rendering for generating thumbnails, etc. The Mini fit the bill perfectly, bringing the time per photo down from 30 seconds per RAW file to about 5 seconds, and a subsequent software rewrite from using dcraw and Imlib2 to using sips (Mac OS X's built-in image processing tool) cut that time in half again.

I back it up with Time Machine to the same Airport base station that I use for backing up my laptop, so I just don't have to think about it. It just runs. Every so often, I turn on the monitor and log in to install software updates or security updates. Would I expect my parents to run a server like that? Probably not. Do I think the Mini makes a great personal server for the sorts of people who are inclined to use one? Absolutely.

Fair mod the AC received.

What's not to love about a Intel Core Duo 2 with a few gigs of RAM connected to a fat pipe?
I guess I'd probably go with a VPS somewhere for about the same price and ultimately it'd be more scalable... but, Mini Colo is cool:
http://www.macminicolo.net/

FWIW: Mac OSX == *nix

I use one of those cute little toys as a media server and it rocks my house.

For comparison, I am paying $50/month to these guys for a colocated Mac Mini with 100GB of transfer per month 2 IPs, and great support. Mine is the PowerPC model and runs OpenBSD.

Oh, and OpenBSD on a Mac Mini is really nice.

I can't speak for the OP, but if I were using Mac minis or other "unreliable" hardware, I'd use CARP for redundancy.

It doesn't make sense for every application, but if you can adopt a clustering approach to your services, suddenly you have redundant RAM, redundant power, redundant CPUs... Go cheap and double up.

Personally, I think racking up minis is a silly marketing ploy that ends up looking a lot more like a total wiring and cooling clusterfuck.

I can't speak for the OP, but if I were using Mac minis or other "unreliable" hardware, I'd use CARP for redundancy.

It doesn't make sense for every application, but if you can adopt a clustering approach to your services, suddenly you have redundant RAM, redundant power, redundant CPUs... Go cheap and double up.

Personally, I think racking up minis is a silly marketing ploy that ends up looking a lot more like a total wiring and cooling clusterfuck.

I run OpenBSD on my mini. It took a hour of 'remote hands' time to install ($20) and then just worked. Actually, that's not quite true. About a year later the hard drive died and Apple refused to honour their warranty responsibilities. The hosting company replaced the drive for me from a third party supplier at their own expense (only about $100, and almost certainly less than the profit they've made from me, but that kind of service is why I've found it very hard to go elsewhere).

The WiFi support in OpenBSD is nicer, as is pretty much anything connected to networking, although FreeBSD is slowly importing most of the OpenBSD code (they've got pf - a really nice packet filter - and OpenBSD's dhcpd already). If you're looking for something to put on a firewall, OpenBSD is what you want - pf is so much better than any alternative I've seen (miles ahead of iptables, which was clearly designed by someone on LSD, both for flexibility and ease of use).

FreeBSD has some nicer features on a desktop. The new scheduler, SCHED_ULE, is great for interactive processes - a compile job using 100% of the CPU has no effect on the responsiveness of the desktop, it's almost like being on an SMP machine (you need to enable it in a custom kernel in 6.0 - the default one is throughput, not latency, optimised). FreeBSD also has nVidia support in the form of binary drivers and DRI drivers for many other cards, OpenBSD does not yet. FreeBSD also supports some Windows WiFi card drivers through Project Evil.

Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have a more modern init system (init scripts contain requires and provides lines, allowing them to be run in the right order with as much parallelism as possible), while OpenBSD uses the simpler BSD init system.

Which you prefer will be a matter of personal perference. Do make sure you read the documentation. All of the BSDs have good man pages (although OpenBSD is ahead here by quite a margin), and the FreeBSD Handbook is also very good.

In short:
http://www.macminicolo.net/

Here?

Actually the Mac mini makes a pretty good web server, if you think about it.

The Mac Mini may not be marketed as a server. But like the HTPC use which it also has not been marketed for, I have seen multiple people speculate about using one in such a capacity.

There is already at least one company offering (somewhat cheap) Mac mini hosting. You get a whole Mac mini (not shared), you can either buy your own and have them house it, or lease to own.

It's actually a really nice idea, since it's about as dirt cheap as a standalone unit can get, and the small size and low power make it a great deal for the colo company. It's a lot easier than letting people just throw SFF boxes at the colo provider which may have differeing power needs and might not stack well.

After all, most web pages around could easily be served off a Mini running Apache (which comes standard) as they will not will not really be CPU (or even possibly disc depending on what is being served) bound.

Like this?