These are vulnerability reports. They tell me that there's a problem in the OS, but they also don't indicate anything about Apple claiming to release a patch solely for 10.3.
As for 10.1, it *is* outdated already. It's not 5 years old yet, but it's now been succeeded by two major releases.
Whatever @stake is claiming isn't supported on the record by Apple's official comment. I'm just thinking that we shouldn't be foaming at the mouth about something so new. Panther's been out for 6 days. Apple's probably dealing with TONS of tech support calls right now, as Panther has caused a handful of problems already. Of course they're going to focus on the new OS first. Once this all dies down, if we don't see an update, by all means, release the hounds. Trusting CNet for unbiased tech news is about as useful as asking a fish how to survive in the desert.
While I can't moderate (I choose not to,) I can comment.
WOW. I like that. I like that a lot. This should be standard practice. It's not invasive at all, and it forces the schmucks who never paid attention when they got their massively powerful infection node^W^Wcomputer to finally get up to date.
Let's face it, as long as we have uneducated users, these problems will continue to crop up. If we can keep them offline until they learn the simplest parts of system maintenance, then maybe these problems won't crop up anymore.
Now I want one of these to try to stop mail worms. I don't suppose that's as cut-and-dry, though...
I think the issue is the behavior of others these days is more and more irresponsible.
I personally have nothing against SUV drivers in certain cases. You mentioned snow, sand, and hauling your family around. Y'know, that sounds like a pretty good argument for a light truck, alright. I wouldn't want to drive a Civic through more than 6-8 inches of snow. I certainly can't fit more than 4-5 people, plus gear, into a Civic, and I can't carry a lot of stuff if I do.
From what you've indicated, you're not the problem. You're a valid target market for an SUV. The problems are the idiots chugging along in an SUV in urban traffic, getting 10 miles per gallon because they're stuck behind a red light every few minutes, taking up a space and a half to park, driving with no respect towards anyone else on the road.
The typical suburban soccer mom needs a minivan. The urban hot-shot would do better with a sedan or a coupe. The off-roader who takes his kids with him NEEDS the truck. The height, the 4-wheel drive, etc., are all important.
I still believe that anyone driving an SUV with no passengers and no real cargo in the midst of a densely packed city deserves to be launched into the Sun.
See, I played one online "RPG" that I truly enjoyed. It wasn't massive, but it was multiplayer. I ran around with people I didn't know and killed monsters. Then I did it again. I collected items and money for my trouble. I couldn't multiclass, and the quest was always the same, and most of the monsters were fairly predictable.
The game? Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast.
It's not a deep game, but I'll be damned if it wasn't fun.
The student discounts are pretty small. I've been under the impression since the 5th grade that the school discounts were higher, as I was an inquisitive young whippersnapper who asked "Why don't we have PCs like I have at home?"
I was told "Well, the Mac is better for everyone, and it's a lot cheaper."
Of course, I was floored, as all I had was an aging XT, Windows 3.0 was barely about to come out, and the "cheaper" system was full of bells and whistles and eyecandy that I would never see on my own PC.
It seems that Apple gives a minimal discount on hardware, and up to a 75% discount on software like Final Cut Pro. Perhaps the rules have changed, as I would have expected better hardware pricing.
They're also fairly affordable, durable, and are basically a proven design. The existing iBook chassis has been in production for years now, so unlike the Aluminum Powerbooks, all of the major structural issues have been addressed.
In addition, it's a Mac. It just works, Apple gives phenomenal educational discounts, and with OS X, the kids can *opt* to learn a UNIX-like (well, BSD, really,) environment without having to muck about with installing something new and potentially wiping out their hard drives.
Give every kid an iBook and a USB keychain drive, and they're set for a few years.
This is, of course, coming as the owner of a 12" Powerbook, so I'm probably a little biased.
Once anything has root access, it's tough to stop it from making a great many changes to a system, and worming into other systems with the same vulnerability.
This isn't very different at all from the Windows viruses, where almost everything runs with admin access.
I'd say that Linux is a VERY tempting target on the server front, it's just that those systems aren't only under a more watchful eye than the common workstation, they're also usually locked down more tightly out of paranoia.
Now that Win2000/XP has a "Run As" feature built in, home users really shouldn't have default admin access anyway, so it's more of an issue of defaults than anything else.
This is, of course, coming as long-time Linux admin/Windows PC owner/current Mac OS X user. I've seen all three platforms, and Windows isn't really that bad if you just a) set it up properly, and b) train the users. Perhaps if Microsoft actually made a point of enabling privilege separation out of the box, it wouldn't have all these problems. Of course, this is exactly what's wrong with Lindows, ironically enough. It's engineered just fine, it's just not set up right.
I was one of three engineers on staff, and had been given a fair amount of responsibility, but very little time to document anything.
One day, the CFO called a meeting, told us all that the company wasn't doing well, and that 1/3rd of the staff would be fired.
Being the new guy, I was the unlucky 1/3rd of Engineering. To make matters worse, we were given no notice, and no severance. We were simply strung along, left to assume that the company was still doing alright.
It doesn't surprise that when that company folded, the CFO showed up to the fire sale with a trailer and bought out whatever servers he thought he could get away with selling.
It also doesn't surprise me that by firing me, they ended up losing many weeks worth of work, and whatever amount of money would be related to that. They deserved worse.
Most of this argument has been torn to pieces, so I won't bother with it.
However, the issue of blaming the pharmaceutical companies for giving pills for heartburn, impotence, and hair loss indicated that you're painfully misinformed.
1) Heartburn medications are a good thing as a preventive measure. Better to keep your stomach acid in check now than develop an ulcer later.
2) Certain drugs currently used to promote hair growth or address erectile dysfunction are failed experiments in cardiac medications. If I were to spend millions on a drug to prevent cardiac arrest or to otherwise help people with some cardiovascular problems, and it fails, you'd better believe that I'll want to make my money back on it in some other way. If I don't, then millions go down the drain, and I won't be able to invest in a second attempt.
Just because the pharmaceuticals are capitalizing on failure doesn't mean that they're not working on cures for the major afflictions.
See, I've long learned not to care what other people think of my comments. If I get modded down, I get modded down. If I get modded up, then at least more people get to see what I think, which I always post in a simple attempt to state what's on my mind.
Now, if the moderator in question wants to believe that I'm posting flamebait, that's up to the moderator. However, anyone with a handful of hyperlinks and a calculator can figure out on their own that the iPod is smaller, in that the volume of the unit is less than that of the Rio Karma.
While it might seem that I'm new here for saying this, I'm merely attempting to get accuracy in reporting. As I said, the Karma's larger. It's also lighter. Maybe that fraction of an ounce matters to you, and if it does, then you know which MP3 player is right for you. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the Ethernet, OGG, and other options factor into that decision.
(Note how I still haven't mentioned if one is better than the other. I don't care, so long as the facts are accurate.)
It's more expensive to own and maintain than an SUV, but it's environmentally friendly. Notice that I haven't even accounted for the cost to recharge the vehicle.
Unless we start seeing a sizable decrease in battery cost or an increase in longevity, an electric car isn't about to sell.
Of course, I doubt too many people who are buying a $220,000 sports car are concerned with the maintenance and mileage.
UW-IMAP is great, if you're running a small organization and like to run garbage.
Try anything that supports the Maildir format, like qmail or Courier-IMAP. At my current job, we use qmail for SMTP, POP, and IMAP, and it works well. I don't really like it, but it gets the job done.
At my old job, we used Courier-IMAP and Postfix. This matches my at-home setup pretty closely, but they one-upped it by using the IMP webmail client, available at www.horde.org along with a whole slew of other web-based apps.
IMP is nice. It's in PHP, it's very slick, and it does everything fairly nicely. That said, it can be pretty slow.
The key part is the Maildir support. One message per file just makes sense. Locking issues don't exist, NFS suddenly becomes an option, and shared accounts are viable.
My distaste for qmail is just a personal opinion, though. It's a solid package, I just don't like half of djb's stuff, as it feels like it's reinventing the wheel, then adding said wheel to an already working car without removing the old ones. If daemontools were a full replacement for init, I'd be more interested, but so far, it's not.
You're specifying almost half a gigabit for one disk. Now, slap a few of those in a RAID 5 array, and place that on a GigE connection. You've suddenly got more disk bandwidth than network bandwidth. This makes it troublesome to add more clients up to a certain point. 10 Gigabit would be a good idea at this point.
It's rare, sure, and you probably won't need it in the home, but 1 Gigabit isn't always enough for a LAN.
Imagine being a celebrity with an open wireless node on your property. Not only are the paparazzi taking pictures of you, but they're uploading them to the Weekly World News over *your* DSL line!
The iBook and 12" Powerbook aren't designed to compete with ultra-small Japanese laptops. They're really just designed to be as small as Apple's people consider "usable."
Now, as for the one mouse button, you have to remember, as long as Apple supports only Mac OS, they're going to stick with just one mouse button on the hardware. It's just how they do things, and it's a bit silly to pick on them for targeting their own OS.
Now, as for Apple's sense of style, well, that's subjective, so I'm not even going to challenge your point. I like it, you don't. That's all there can ever be to that argument.
However, Apple's sense of hardware design is pretty solid. Make a laptop that the average consumer can use comfortably, cram it to the gills with that the consumer needs, and attempt to make it damned near unbreakable. Then, on top of that, make it mind-numbingly simple to use. I'd say it succeeds on those fronts, as my 12" Powerbook just works, it holds together well, and it does what I need from a laptop.
Of course, before this, I used a Toshiba Libretto 110, so I know what it's like to use a smaller laptop. While the Libretto's a bit of an extreme case, it's also proof that smaller isn't always better. I had to relearn to type on the miniature keyboard, and required a lot of modified computer habits before it became the nearly-perfect laptop for me. In fact, the main reason I sold it was that I needed a bigger hard drive, more RAM, and the warranty had expired. Usability, however, is completely different on an ultraportable than on a notebook/subnote, and it's that concept which has prevented Apple from making anything smaller than a 12" laptop.
At my office, we follow a simple Bring Your Own Client Policy. This is mainly because we don't much care what OS our people use, as long as they're not asking for support.
On Linux, I ran Sylpheed. On Mac, I run Entourage. I don't think anyone's actually touched the Mozilla Mail client around here, but I could be wrong.
(And yes, I just admitted to using an MS product on a Mac. Deal with it. Entourage works very well for the mass of IMAP accounts which I deal with on a daily basis.)
Actually, that was solved in quite the embarrassing way. After 15-20 minutes, the doors would open automatically.
While this would have the desired effect of keeping the homeless from treating it as a 25-cent hotel room, imagine the one time that someone's actually stuck on the crapper for 21 minutes.
Of course, for added humor value, this didn't stop some bums from *trying* to use it as a home, and things got very interesting that one day it happened around City Hall...
Even with Dell's more P4-friendly numbers, I just noticed that *if* the SPEC scores go up linearly in regards to clock rate on the G5, then the 3.0 GHz G5 that will eventually come out will actually be a hair faster than the existing 3.06 GHz P4.
This is meaningless, however, as in 12 months, we may see a 3.5, or even a 4.0 P4 on the market. Provided the P4 motherboard designs are updated to properly feed the upcoming P4's, they'll still be competitive. If they don't, the G5 will smoke the P4. Of course, just as the 3.06 P4 wasn't built in a day, neither will the 3.0 dual G5. It's very hard to judge performance based on the very first system from any company, as the performance issues which are bound to crop up won't be fixed for at least one more generation.
I'm fully aware at the moment that Apple will spin facts. So will Intel, and so will Dell. Hell, the only reason I'll get a G5 is because I'll eventually need a new desktop, and I've grown to prefer working in OS X. Simply put, the PPC970 is a sufficiently powerful chip for anything that I'll need to do for a while, so I see no reason not to buy one when the time comes.
However, to make everyone feel better, here's what I propose: Take a dual G5 and a top of the line dual P4/Xeon system. Hand the G5 to a highly talented Mac expert, and have him run the SPEC benchmarks, as well as some general application response testing. Hand the P4/Xeon to an Intel expert, and do the same with him.
Then swap. Make sure the Mac guy knows dick about Windows/Intel, and that the Intel guy knows just as little about Mac and the G5 chip. Average these (most certainly lower) scores with the heavily optimized ones, and use the average.
That's your performance level. Let them both cheat as much as they can, but let them suffer for it.:)
The main reason to move onto Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for Oracle support, as you simply won't get any under 7.x-9. If you're not dealing with ever calling up for support for either Oracle or RedHat itself, then why bother paying so much for Linux?
However, the higher-ups won't be happy about giving up an external support resource. The only way around this is documentation, and lots of it. Relying on debian packages? Running a custom apt repository? Document your policies and stick to them. Don't just install some random Linux, make an in-house distro, and with it, the documentation needed to upgrade it. This isn't a toy for a teenager and his Pentium box, it's a corporate-grade Linux distro. No downtime, no compromises. They'll want you to be able to train staff quickly, and in the end, you *are* replaceable. Don't make it too hard on yourself.
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These are vulnerability reports. They tell me that there's a problem in the OS, but they also don't indicate anything about Apple claiming to release a patch solely for 10.3.
As for 10.1, it *is* outdated already. It's not 5 years old yet, but it's now been succeeded by two major releases.
Whatever @stake is claiming isn't supported on the record by Apple's official comment. I'm just thinking that we shouldn't be foaming at the mouth about something so new. Panther's been out for 6 days. Apple's probably dealing with TONS of tech support calls right now, as Panther has caused a handful of problems already. Of course they're going to focus on the new OS first. Once this all dies down, if we don't see an update, by all means, release the hounds. Trusting CNet for unbiased tech news is about as useful as asking a fish how to survive in the desert.
So, you mean that a vulnerability in 10.3 has to exist in 10.2?
/., so I'm not at all surprised.
It's not at all possible that with new functionality comes new bugs?
The very title of this story indicates a lack of proper investigative journalism. Of course, this is
To carry more and more small things, of course.
(Says the guy who has no car.)
While I can't moderate (I choose not to,) I can comment.
WOW. I like that. I like that a lot. This should be standard practice. It's not invasive at all, and it forces the schmucks who never paid attention when they got their massively powerful infection node^W^Wcomputer to finally get up to date.
Let's face it, as long as we have uneducated users, these problems will continue to crop up. If we can keep them offline until they learn the simplest parts of system maintenance, then maybe these problems won't crop up anymore.
Now I want one of these to try to stop mail worms. I don't suppose that's as cut-and-dry, though...
I think the issue is the behavior of others these days is more and more irresponsible.
I personally have nothing against SUV drivers in certain cases. You mentioned snow, sand, and hauling your family around. Y'know, that sounds like a pretty good argument for a light truck, alright. I wouldn't want to drive a Civic through more than 6-8 inches of snow. I certainly can't fit more than 4-5 people, plus gear, into a Civic, and I can't carry a lot of stuff if I do.
From what you've indicated, you're not the problem. You're a valid target market for an SUV. The problems are the idiots chugging along in an SUV in urban traffic, getting 10 miles per gallon because they're stuck behind a red light every few minutes, taking up a space and a half to park, driving with no respect towards anyone else on the road.
The typical suburban soccer mom needs a minivan. The urban hot-shot would do better with a sedan or a coupe. The off-roader who takes his kids with him NEEDS the truck. The height, the 4-wheel drive, etc., are all important.
I still believe that anyone driving an SUV with no passengers and no real cargo in the midst of a densely packed city deserves to be launched into the Sun.
Perhaps the whole genre is just broken.
See, I played one online "RPG" that I truly enjoyed. It wasn't massive, but it was multiplayer. I ran around with people I didn't know and killed monsters. Then I did it again. I collected items and money for my trouble. I couldn't multiclass, and the quest was always the same, and most of the monsters were fairly predictable.
The game? Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast.
It's not a deep game, but I'll be damned if it wasn't fun.
The student discounts are pretty small. I've been under the impression since the 5th grade that the school discounts were higher, as I was an inquisitive young whippersnapper who asked "Why don't we have PCs like I have at home?"
I was told "Well, the Mac is better for everyone, and it's a lot cheaper."
Of course, I was floored, as all I had was an aging XT, Windows 3.0 was barely about to come out, and the "cheaper" system was full of bells and whistles and eyecandy that I would never see on my own PC.
It seems that Apple gives a minimal discount on hardware, and up to a 75% discount on software like Final Cut Pro. Perhaps the rules have changed, as I would have expected better hardware pricing.
They're also fairly affordable, durable, and are basically a proven design. The existing iBook chassis has been in production for years now, so unlike the Aluminum Powerbooks, all of the major structural issues have been addressed.
In addition, it's a Mac. It just works, Apple gives phenomenal educational discounts, and with OS X, the kids can *opt* to learn a UNIX-like (well, BSD, really,) environment without having to muck about with installing something new and potentially wiping out their hard drives.
Give every kid an iBook and a USB keychain drive, and they're set for a few years.
This is, of course, coming as the owner of a 12" Powerbook, so I'm probably a little biased.
What about wrapping a virus around a rootkit?
Once anything has root access, it's tough to stop it from making a great many changes to a system, and worming into other systems with the same vulnerability.
This isn't very different at all from the Windows viruses, where almost everything runs with admin access.
I'd say that Linux is a VERY tempting target on the server front, it's just that those systems aren't only under a more watchful eye than the common workstation, they're also usually locked down more tightly out of paranoia.
Now that Win2000/XP has a "Run As" feature built in, home users really shouldn't have default admin access anyway, so it's more of an issue of defaults than anything else.
This is, of course, coming as long-time Linux admin/Windows PC owner/current Mac OS X user. I've seen all three platforms, and Windows isn't really that bad if you just a) set it up properly, and b) train the users. Perhaps if Microsoft actually made a point of enabling privilege separation out of the box, it wouldn't have all these problems. Of course, this is exactly what's wrong with Lindows, ironically enough. It's engineered just fine, it's just not set up right.
I was one of three engineers on staff, and had been given a fair amount of responsibility, but very little time to document anything.
One day, the CFO called a meeting, told us all that the company wasn't doing well, and that 1/3rd of the staff would be fired.
Being the new guy, I was the unlucky 1/3rd of Engineering. To make matters worse, we were given no notice, and no severance. We were simply strung along, left to assume that the company was still doing alright.
It doesn't surprise that when that company folded, the CFO showed up to the fire sale with a trailer and bought out whatever servers he thought he could get away with selling.
It also doesn't surprise me that by firing me, they ended up losing many weeks worth of work, and whatever amount of money would be related to that. They deserved worse.
Most of this argument has been torn to pieces, so I won't bother with it.
However, the issue of blaming the pharmaceutical companies for giving pills for heartburn, impotence, and hair loss indicated that you're painfully misinformed.
1) Heartburn medications are a good thing as a preventive measure. Better to keep your stomach acid in check now than develop an ulcer later.
2) Certain drugs currently used to promote hair growth or address erectile dysfunction are failed experiments in cardiac medications. If I were to spend millions on a drug to prevent cardiac arrest or to otherwise help people with some cardiovascular problems, and it fails, you'd better believe that I'll want to make my money back on it in some other way. If I don't, then millions go down the drain, and I won't be able to invest in a second attempt.
Just because the pharmaceuticals are capitalizing on failure doesn't mean that they're not working on cures for the major afflictions.
See, I've long learned not to care what other people think of my comments. If I get modded down, I get modded down. If I get modded up, then at least more people get to see what I think, which I always post in a simple attempt to state what's on my mind.
Now, if the moderator in question wants to believe that I'm posting flamebait, that's up to the moderator. However, anyone with a handful of hyperlinks and a calculator can figure out on their own that the iPod is smaller, in that the volume of the unit is less than that of the Rio Karma.
While it might seem that I'm new here for saying this, I'm merely attempting to get accuracy in reporting. As I said, the Karma's larger. It's also lighter. Maybe that fraction of an ounce matters to you, and if it does, then you know which MP3 player is right for you. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the Ethernet, OGG, and other options factor into that decision.
(Note how I still haven't mentioned if one is better than the other. I don't care, so long as the facts are accurate.)
The Rio Karma is 0.1 oz. lighter, just as expensive for the same capacity, and has an Ethernet port.
However, it is larger than the iPod. The square form factor just makes it look smaller in the pictures.
But this one *does* feel pointless, even if it's marginally cheaper than the alternative.
Gamecube + Game Boy Player + Battery pack + LCD screen.
That's maybe 3-5 hours of game time on a single charge, but you can then play any GBA/GB games as well as the full GameCube library.
Granted, it suffers of a horribly reduced hack value, but for some reason, I'm OK with that.
That gives us... 15 cents per mile?
It's more expensive to own and maintain than an SUV, but it's environmentally friendly. Notice that I haven't even accounted for the cost to recharge the vehicle.
Unless we start seeing a sizable decrease in battery cost or an increase in longevity, an electric car isn't about to sell.
Of course, I doubt too many people who are buying a $220,000 sports car are concerned with the maintenance and mileage.
I'm sure your kids will think of you as a great hero when they're starving for your morals.
UW-IMAP is great, if you're running a small organization and like to run garbage.
Try anything that supports the Maildir format, like qmail or Courier-IMAP. At my current job, we use qmail for SMTP, POP, and IMAP, and it works well. I don't really like it, but it gets the job done.
At my old job, we used Courier-IMAP and Postfix. This matches my at-home setup pretty closely, but they one-upped it by using the IMP webmail client, available at www.horde.org along with a whole slew of other web-based apps.
IMP is nice. It's in PHP, it's very slick, and it does everything fairly nicely. That said, it can be pretty slow.
The key part is the Maildir support. One message per file just makes sense. Locking issues don't exist, NFS suddenly becomes an option, and shared accounts are viable.
My distaste for qmail is just a personal opinion, though. It's a solid package, I just don't like half of djb's stuff, as it feels like it's reinventing the wheel, then adding said wheel to an already working car without removing the old ones. If daemontools were a full replacement for init, I'd be more interested, but so far, it's not.
What about RAID?
Or, what about data that never hits the disk?
You're specifying almost half a gigabit for one disk. Now, slap a few of those in a RAID 5 array, and place that on a GigE connection. You've suddenly got more disk bandwidth than network bandwidth. This makes it troublesome to add more clients up to a certain point. 10 Gigabit would be a good idea at this point.
It's rare, sure, and you probably won't need it in the home, but 1 Gigabit isn't always enough for a LAN.
That's not the worst part.
Imagine being a celebrity with an open wireless node on your property. Not only are the paparazzi taking pictures of you, but they're uploading them to the Weekly World News over *your* DSL line!
Good thing I'm just another boring nerd.
The iBook and 12" Powerbook aren't designed to compete with ultra-small Japanese laptops. They're really just designed to be as small as Apple's people consider "usable."
Now, as for the one mouse button, you have to remember, as long as Apple supports only Mac OS, they're going to stick with just one mouse button on the hardware. It's just how they do things, and it's a bit silly to pick on them for targeting their own OS.
Now, as for Apple's sense of style, well, that's subjective, so I'm not even going to challenge your point. I like it, you don't. That's all there can ever be to that argument.
However, Apple's sense of hardware design is pretty solid. Make a laptop that the average consumer can use comfortably, cram it to the gills with that the consumer needs, and attempt to make it damned near unbreakable. Then, on top of that, make it mind-numbingly simple to use. I'd say it succeeds on those fronts, as my 12" Powerbook just works, it holds together well, and it does what I need from a laptop.
Of course, before this, I used a Toshiba Libretto 110, so I know what it's like to use a smaller laptop. While the Libretto's a bit of an extreme case, it's also proof that smaller isn't always better. I had to relearn to type on the miniature keyboard, and required a lot of modified computer habits before it became the nearly-perfect laptop for me. In fact, the main reason I sold it was that I needed a bigger hard drive, more RAM, and the warranty had expired. Usability, however, is completely different on an ultraportable than on a notebook/subnote, and it's that concept which has prevented Apple from making anything smaller than a 12" laptop.
At my office, we follow a simple Bring Your Own Client Policy. This is mainly because we don't much care what OS our people use, as long as they're not asking for support.
On Linux, I ran Sylpheed. On Mac, I run Entourage. I don't think anyone's actually touched the Mozilla Mail client around here, but I could be wrong.
(And yes, I just admitted to using an MS product on a Mac. Deal with it. Entourage works very well for the mass of IMAP accounts which I deal with on a daily basis.)
Actually, that was solved in quite the embarrassing way. After 15-20 minutes, the doors would open automatically.
While this would have the desired effect of keeping the homeless from treating it as a 25-cent hotel room, imagine the one time that someone's actually stuck on the crapper for 21 minutes.
Of course, for added humor value, this didn't stop some bums from *trying* to use it as a home, and things got very interesting that one day it happened around City Hall...
Even with Dell's more P4-friendly numbers, I just noticed that *if* the SPEC scores go up linearly in regards to clock rate on the G5, then the 3.0 GHz G5 that will eventually come out will actually be a hair faster than the existing 3.06 GHz P4.
:)
This is meaningless, however, as in 12 months, we may see a 3.5, or even a 4.0 P4 on the market. Provided the P4 motherboard designs are updated to properly feed the upcoming P4's, they'll still be competitive. If they don't, the G5 will smoke the P4. Of course, just as the 3.06 P4 wasn't built in a day, neither will the 3.0 dual G5. It's very hard to judge performance based on the very first system from any company, as the performance issues which are bound to crop up won't be fixed for at least one more generation.
I'm fully aware at the moment that Apple will spin facts. So will Intel, and so will Dell. Hell, the only reason I'll get a G5 is because I'll eventually need a new desktop, and I've grown to prefer working in OS X. Simply put, the PPC970 is a sufficiently powerful chip for anything that I'll need to do for a while, so I see no reason not to buy one when the time comes.
However, to make everyone feel better, here's what I propose: Take a dual G5 and a top of the line dual P4/Xeon system. Hand the G5 to a highly talented Mac expert, and have him run the SPEC benchmarks, as well as some general application response testing. Hand the P4/Xeon to an Intel expert, and do the same with him.
Then swap. Make sure the Mac guy knows dick about Windows/Intel, and that the Intel guy knows just as little about Mac and the G5 chip. Average these (most certainly lower) scores with the heavily optimized ones, and use the average.
That's your performance level. Let them both cheat as much as they can, but let them suffer for it.
That's nothing. You should've seen the panic that ensued between Windows 98 and Windows 2000.
If not, then get away from RedHat. Far FAR away.
The main reason to move onto Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for Oracle support, as you simply won't get any under 7.x-9. If you're not dealing with ever calling up for support for either Oracle or RedHat itself, then why bother paying so much for Linux?
However, the higher-ups won't be happy about giving up an external support resource. The only way around this is documentation, and lots of it. Relying on debian packages? Running a custom apt repository? Document your policies and stick to them. Don't just install some random Linux, make an in-house distro, and with it, the documentation needed to upgrade it. This isn't a toy for a teenager and his Pentium box, it's a corporate-grade Linux distro. No downtime, no compromises. They'll want you to be able to train staff quickly, and in the end, you *are* replaceable. Don't make it too hard on yourself.