Disobeying a law via action that can not lead to physical harm is equivalent to sitting at the front of a bus regardless of the colour of your skin.
If I torrent The Big Bang Theory, I am not the moral equivalent of Rosa Parks. Someone who sat at the front of the bus, despite the color of her skin was in fact risking that skin. There was a very large social structure invested in keeping the races segregated and people were beaten and/or killed for violating that.
Deciding that The Big Bang Theory is worth $0.25, not $1, per episode without commercials when the distributor doesn't need to pay distribution costs may be morally right. Stating that using copyright law (according to the U.S. Constitution, for the furthering of art and science) should not apply in the case of sharing King of Thrones because a lot of people would love to throw money at the copyright owners, but are unwilling or unable to pay for cable + HBO may be morally acceptable, but they are not the modern equivalent of Rosa Parks. Although the guy who tirelessly encodes the material and provides it to the group to seed is risking his freedom and financial well-being, he is not risking his life.
I read it differently. If Clinton were VP, and served under a President unable to serve his last 0-2 years, Clinton could fulfill those duties legally and Constitutionally. If the President were unable to serve more than 2 years, Clinton would be able to serve 2 years. At that point, I do not know if a special election would be necessary or if we would need to follow the standard order of succession, which means the Speaker of the House would become President.
They can't be told form the original-- and NEVER has a document not opened or looked funny.
You either have technologically incompetent people opening your documents who don't know complaining is an option or a very simple layout format. In a corporate environment with templates and data-heavy presentations, it's easy to come up with presentations that won't look right in anything other than Office or which Office won't render the same as its free competitors (and that's while trying to remain compatible).
I've never been to Funnyjunk before, but after this blew up, I decided I'd test out their claim about how easy it was to take down infringing images.
Naturally, these sites make it wicked easy to upload any image, taking down an obvious one would be just as simple, no? Well, in 5 minutes I found a Cyanide & Happiness comic (explosm.net). I hit the flag button and found "copyright infringement" very simple to find. "Great!" I thought, "So simple to fix this problem." Nope, that takes me to a DMCA page where I have to type in a real name, e-mail address, phone number and supporting information.
Wow.
If it's so easy to upload an image, shouldn't there be a responsibility to make it just as easy to take one down? Of course, there would be a manual review process and some countermeasures to prevent someone from flagging the whole site (which may be mostly original content, that's a separate discussion), but it should be a whole lot easier.
From what I've read, on CPU tasks it's between an i3 and an i5. An i3 is "fast enough" for most general use, so I think that's pretty good. On GPU tasks, it's significantly faster than Intel's integrated chipsets, knocking on the door of respectable gaming performance if not walking into the room.
If you're doing CPU tasks, you really want the i7. If you're doing hard core gaming, you're also going to want the latest generation video card, even if it's an entry model. If your budget is less than $700 and you still want to play video games, Trinity is a good compromise. I think it's perfect for college students.
If the issue is important to you, take a day off and visit their office. They all have one, and it can't be all that far away if it's in-state.
Say you live in El Paso. For your US Senator, you can choose between John Cornyn, who lives in Austin, or Kay Bailey Hutchison, who lives in Dallas. This "take a day off and visit their office" could entail a 9-10 hour drive, each way. I'll concede that for many Americans, the situation is better, but "can't" is a strong word.
I thought they have viewed their foundries as a competitive advantage against other chip makers.
They may still. If they offer their foundries' services at a premium, that would be one way to profit off of that advantage. The 22/20nm node is still years away for other foundries, so the combined "3d transistor" and more chips per wafer that 22/20nm bring should provide some serious cash. Not that anybody cares if their chip is made at 22nm, but if it means they can yield 25% more chips from a wafer, that's the kind of premium cost Intel can demand for that individual advantage alone.
Their bargain chips have always been the largest piece of Intel's volume, and those bargain I3s and Atoms are now getting pretty small -- which may have opened up some manufacturing capacity.
You don't have to be bad at math to play the lottery.
I find that the state lottery significantly increases my happiness during low spots. The Arizona Lotto used to (and may still) have the slogan, "You can't win if you don't play." In fact, if I do play, I am able to daydream of what would happen in the exceptionally unlikely event that I won. How that day would go, how successive days would go, how I could be smart with the money, how I could avoid pitfalls, etc. Heck, I can replay the joke over in my head about the guy stuck on his roof in a flood, avoiding all driftwood, boats and even the helicopter because God would save him. He died and demanded of God why he was allowed to die. God wanted to know who he thought sent all the rescuers! During the times I'm dissatisfied with my job, I can really drag down if I can't daydream about that 1 in 5 million chance I'll win the million bucks -- if I never play, the odds get significantly worse.
For about 6 months, I played the lottery in Vermont weekly. I would gamble $2/week, and pretty much every other week, I would win $4. Against the odds, I broke even for about 4 months before hitting "a dry spell". I kept tossing the money in, and ended up winning $50. Not enough to make a profit, but enough to pay for the hobby and to continue to break even.
IBM Model M, a keyboard that you can use to kill a man, then use to type his obituary.
I tried, once. Picked it up and chased someone out the door. Catch was that it was still plugged in. Cord and connector were stronger than my 200 lbs of running inertia. Snapped me back and I lost the guy I was chasing.
In other words 35% of consumers don't care about the product but the social symbol it is and the status they think it confers on them.
Personally, I've enjoyed my iPod Touch for the past two years, but I'm getting tired of only having network when I'm within range of a wifi access point. I'd really like the cellular modem. At this point, it seems stupid to get an iPhone because a new one is just around the corner. No, I don't know what's in it, but I'm 99% sure it'll be better than the iPhone 4.
There is nothing about a diesel that makes it more efficient at being a generator. They're great for cars because we like to drive torque (accelerate) and diesels do very well with power at low RPMs compared to gasoline. As such, given a desired acceleration curve, a car designer can choose a smaller diesel engine, reducing the weight of the vehicle. This smaller engine has fewer losses, and is thusly more efficient when it is accelerating the resultant lighter car. This is why a 100HP diesel can accelerate a Jetta even better than 130HP gas -- but the diesel will struggle more at highway passing.
Diesel fuel itself has more energy density, so it's good for some applications like trains, but the answer to your natural gas question is that it's much less dense, so each cylinder needs to be much bigger for the same power, or the engine will be underpowered for its size when compared to gasoline. Gas turbines are noisy, although you might enjoy reading about the potential benefits of the Wankel.
Problems with series plug-in hybrids include that the generator always wants to run in its peak power band. No matter how fast I'm going, if my gas car is running at 3500-4000 RPMs, it's very noisy, even if I'm cruising at a constant speed and could easily downshift twice. Batteries add to the hybrid equation for acceleration and regenerative breaking and are simply weights for cruising. A series generator would hate the acceleration part of that and would prefer to simply feed the generator directly. Now, we might be onto something if we suggested a way for the generator to cut over to direct drive at constant speeds, but I suspect that would be too heavy to be of value.
My commute is 14 minutes -- in traffic. When I work from home, I have kids who don't respect the sanctity of my work, and while my wife does, she can't help but ask me to do one little thing here and there. Working at home I don't get hallway conversations, I don't run into people in the hallways and catch up on the latest exciting thing they're doing (or advertise for a position in my department).
At work, I have better bandwidth, I'm closer to my lab, and someone else pays the electricity bill. My work desk is big enough to spread out everything I need to work on, while at home my iMac is pushed to the front of my desk so it's easier to see with my feet up.
If they want to offer me 10% more because they don't want to pay the facilities and utilities charges associated with storing my butt, we're within negotiating space, but I would walk away from a 10% "take it or leave it".
I consider myself quite a strong programmer, and I never think in terms of assembly when writing programs. Higher-level languages, in particular functional programming languages, are far closer to my mental model of things. Why not work in a language that represents or helps formulate the problem-space abstractions better?
In a word, performance. In your particular field of expertise, performance and memory footprint may not matter (99% of desktop applications I suspect), but a strong programmer is fully aware of what goes on under the covers when [his|her] program is compiled to the degree that it impacts the product. Until recently, I never thought there was a functional difference between a lone line containing "i++;" "++i;". Of course, for variable assignment it matters, but what's going on under the covers? If you stop and think about it, i++ actually has to return the old value. ++i can destroy that old value and never needs to worry about returning the old value (you can avoid an extra copy). If you're in a high performance loop, either with not much body or with a lot of increments, such things matter. Understanding the impact of caching, the scarcity of registers, the high cost of flushing the cache, all of these can matter, and it's hard to teach these concepts without using at least a pseudocode that looks suspiciously like assembly. If you're paying for compute cycles, or if you're selling something in a market where performance matters, you're going to see a strong advantage in a computer scientist who understands assembly and compiling.
Now, if your main concern is code readability, maintenance and/or moving onto the next product as soon as this one compiles with no errors, higher level languages are undoubtedly far more appropriate.
I didn't even pause at reading it. With Parallels, other VMs and Boot Camp so prolific, I think Windows is much more of a partner and collaborator than it ever was a competitor. There are a lot of Macs out there with purchased Windows installs on them. How could that be viewed as competition?
What metric are you using? Hewlett Packard beats Apple soundly in the Fortune 500.
Market cap. AAPL is over $300B while HPQ is significantly under $100B.
I'll give you that while Apple's revenue may have doubled in the year since your citation, it's still only $76B. HP is currently pulling in nearly twice that. It's also interesting to note that Apple's operating cash flow is twice that of HP.
I can understand wanting to use annual revenue as a metric of company size, and I can even come up with a few justifications. Within the context of companies needing armchair quarterbacking to tell them what industries they need to cater more to, I hope you can see my perspective that the one with the lower operating margin, return on equity and quarterly revenue growth need more help.
OSX doesn't 'need' TRIM, but without it, you'd better have a controller with excellent background garbage collection, or you're going to suffer performance penalties after a few weeks or months. Unless you stick with the SSD that Apple ship with, in which case I believe you're stuck with that poor performance to start with (far better than spinning media, but not as fast as competing SSDs).
And I'm not stating that OSX is so stupid that it prevents the user from manually putting data elsewhere (like iTunes' "copy to iTunes library vs leave it where it is). I'm stating that the ability to use an SSD as an additional level of cache would be a very compelling feature. Suddenly a 30GB SSD would be very useful for a large number of customers instead of a 128+ GB SSD to manually keep everything you think you might notice.
Honestly killing the Xserve and not letting OSX server be installed on another vendors server hardware is brain dead.
I'm certain your arm chair quarterbacking the largest computer company in the world, and the second largest US based corporation is beyond reproach, but it would be kind to the Apple stockholders (including me) if you'd share some of your data.
Name one advantage Apple gains by sharing their operating system. You want it, but you want the lower prices that multiple vendors imply and the exceptionally low volume enterprise level features that are missing. Let's say that adding redundant power supplies, hot swappable memory and all that jazz costs $50M in R&D. Can you state that they would recoup that investment in the first year? Could they command a $1k premium per box, and amortize it over 50k boxes they would not have otherwise shipped, and then ship another 30k boxes beyond that to count as margin? First, you're going to balk at paying three times as much for Apple hardware as you would for other brands', and the conversation goes down from there.
Features like Time Machine seem to scream for servers, but Apple's implementation is nowhere near what a 24/7 75% usage machine needs, or even what a real database needs under any but the most idle loads.
The kind of people who feel MacOSX is good for servers either need a low power Mini (where the hardware, OS and GUI shortfalls are easily overlooked) or a Mac Pro (for number crunching under familiar development tools matter more than the ability to go out and get more MIPS/$ at any random vendor).
Apple isn't branding their server as something that will compete against Power, Sparc (snicker) or Itanium. They're looking for the hobbyist who doesn't really care about all the underpinnings. For them, it's enough of a server, with enough server features.
I was really looking for better SSD support. I'm an avid Mac user, I'd love my iMac to be faster, but today most of my issues are with the lack of SSD support. I'd love TRIM. Some OS integrated ability to use an SSD as a cache for spinning media would be nice -- I don't want to pay for an SSD to store my iTunes or iPhoto database, but I never want to hear the spinning media seek when I'm playing video games or using Firefox. Even file level deduplication would save me some space, but I'll admit I lust for block level without enough data to justify. Wait, did I just start listing features of ZFS after I mentioned TRIM?
My wife has an iPhone. She really benefits from reading e-mail on the go, and the mapping anywhere. She's a doula (professional birth coach) and mother of two young kids, so information on the go is important.
I need to be able to text during the day and place the occasional emergency phone call, rarely even once a month. I don't want to drop more than $50 to buy it, and I want to minimize my monthly fee (currently $15 above my wife's plan). My phone is way more than I need, and it was the freebie that AT&T was offering. I like T9 text entry, that's a nice extra feature. If I could drop games, applications, MediaNet and music and de-clutter the home screen, I'd like my phone even more. Yes, I want fewer features. Of course, I also like my iPod Touch, mostly for Safari and Facebook, but only within WiFi range. My biggest wish, however, is that AT&T would have a separate plan for people who want to actually buy a phone and not get the price amortized over the life of the plan.
What's with all the stupid CSI sunglasses jokes lately? When did slashdot become digg?
Do you really want to grouse about where the Natalie Portman, naked and / or petrified with / without hot grits jokes went?
Judging from all the haters of the new Slashdot redesign, I'm guessing Slashdot became Digg a few weeks ago, since that's when Digg fell from grace. When I joined Slashdot in 2000 (?), it was seemingly centered around hacking the Netpliance iOpener -- a younger coworker and my father both pointed me to Slashdot the same week. I took that to mean I was missing out on something. In the beginning, and even through the early 2000s, there was a hacking culture here. Each Linux update was posted, along with the occasional nifty water cooling setup. We would see case mods regularly. You know, the stuff some kids finishing up college would be interested in.
The audience has shifted. Us old timers don't have time for everything that Slashdot was when it started. Our interests have shifteddramatically. The kinds of news posted to Digg, Reddit and Slashdot overlap some, and I'm betting the audiences overlap significantly. Personally, I needed more contemporary non-tech news than Slashdot could provide, so I was reading Digg more than Slashdot. When they redesigned significantly and went more to a content provider centered approach, I left Digg and found Reddit. I'm still suffering in the news department.
As far as the jokes go, I think CSI: Miami made itself a joke a long time ago. Judging from its Nielson ratings, it's a widely enjoyed joke. From the absurd "take the sunglasses off moment", to the "dramatic Horatio walks out of the scene", down to the 25-30 minutes of script spliced together with stock footage of the Miami area and bikini models, I think it's a joke a lot of people enjoy. If you don't want to read it, maybe that's more of a statement that you're reading Slashdot comments looking for too much serious discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
If I torrent The Big Bang Theory, I am not the moral equivalent of Rosa Parks. Someone who sat at the front of the bus, despite the color of her skin was in fact risking that skin. There was a very large social structure invested in keeping the races segregated and people were beaten and/or killed for violating that.
Deciding that The Big Bang Theory is worth $0.25, not $1, per episode without commercials when the distributor doesn't need to pay distribution costs may be morally right. Stating that using copyright law (according to the U.S. Constitution, for the furthering of art and science) should not apply in the case of sharing King of Thrones because a lot of people would love to throw money at the copyright owners, but are unwilling or unable to pay for cable + HBO may be morally acceptable, but they are not the modern equivalent of Rosa Parks. Although the guy who tirelessly encodes the material and provides it to the group to seed is risking his freedom and financial well-being, he is not risking his life.
I read it differently. If Clinton were VP, and served under a President unable to serve his last 0-2 years, Clinton could fulfill those duties legally and Constitutionally. If the President were unable to serve more than 2 years, Clinton would be able to serve 2 years. At that point, I do not know if a special election would be necessary or if we would need to follow the standard order of succession, which means the Speaker of the House would become President.
You either have technologically incompetent people opening your documents who don't know complaining is an option or a very simple layout format. In a corporate environment with templates and data-heavy presentations, it's easy to come up with presentations that won't look right in anything other than Office or which Office won't render the same as its free competitors (and that's while trying to remain compatible).
Are you referring to the long string of articles starting with Columbine?
Sorry to reply to myself, but I figured I should link to the easy to find copyright infringement.
I've never been to Funnyjunk before, but after this blew up, I decided I'd test out their claim about how easy it was to take down infringing images.
Naturally, these sites make it wicked easy to upload any image, taking down an obvious one would be just as simple, no? Well, in 5 minutes I found a Cyanide & Happiness comic (explosm.net). I hit the flag button and found "copyright infringement" very simple to find. "Great!" I thought, "So simple to fix this problem." Nope, that takes me to a DMCA page where I have to type in a real name, e-mail address, phone number and supporting information.
Wow.
If it's so easy to upload an image, shouldn't there be a responsibility to make it just as easy to take one down? Of course, there would be a manual review process and some countermeasures to prevent someone from flagging the whole site (which may be mostly original content, that's a separate discussion), but it should be a whole lot easier.
From what I've read, on CPU tasks it's between an i3 and an i5. An i3 is "fast enough" for most general use, so I think that's pretty good. On GPU tasks, it's significantly faster than Intel's integrated chipsets, knocking on the door of respectable gaming performance if not walking into the room.
If you're doing CPU tasks, you really want the i7. If you're doing hard core gaming, you're also going to want the latest generation video card, even if it's an entry model. If your budget is less than $700 and you still want to play video games, Trinity is a good compromise. I think it's perfect for college students.
5 monkeys. 10 minutes.
Say you live in El Paso. For your US Senator, you can choose between John Cornyn, who lives in Austin, or Kay Bailey Hutchison, who lives in Dallas. This "take a day off and visit their office" could entail a 9-10 hour drive, each way. I'll concede that for many Americans, the situation is better, but "can't" is a strong word.
They may still. If they offer their foundries' services at a premium, that would be one way to profit off of that advantage. The 22/20nm node is still years away for other foundries, so the combined "3d transistor" and more chips per wafer that 22/20nm bring should provide some serious cash. Not that anybody cares if their chip is made at 22nm, but if it means they can yield 25% more chips from a wafer, that's the kind of premium cost Intel can demand for that individual advantage alone.
Their bargain chips have always been the largest piece of Intel's volume, and those bargain I3s and Atoms are now getting pretty small -- which may have opened up some manufacturing capacity.
I find that the state lottery significantly increases my happiness during low spots. The Arizona Lotto used to (and may still) have the slogan, "You can't win if you don't play." In fact, if I do play, I am able to daydream of what would happen in the exceptionally unlikely event that I won. How that day would go, how successive days would go, how I could be smart with the money, how I could avoid pitfalls, etc. Heck, I can replay the joke over in my head about the guy stuck on his roof in a flood, avoiding all driftwood, boats and even the helicopter because God would save him. He died and demanded of God why he was allowed to die. God wanted to know who he thought sent all the rescuers! During the times I'm dissatisfied with my job, I can really drag down if I can't daydream about that 1 in 5 million chance I'll win the million bucks -- if I never play, the odds get significantly worse.
For about 6 months, I played the lottery in Vermont weekly. I would gamble $2/week, and pretty much every other week, I would win $4. Against the odds, I broke even for about 4 months before hitting "a dry spell". I kept tossing the money in, and ended up winning $50. Not enough to make a profit, but enough to pay for the hobby and to continue to break even.
I tried, once. Picked it up and chased someone out the door. Catch was that it was still plugged in. Cord and connector were stronger than my 200 lbs of running inertia. Snapped me back and I lost the guy I was chasing.
Personally, I've enjoyed my iPod Touch for the past two years, but I'm getting tired of only having network when I'm within range of a wifi access point. I'd really like the cellular modem. At this point, it seems stupid to get an iPhone because a new one is just around the corner. No, I don't know what's in it, but I'm 99% sure it'll be better than the iPhone 4.
There is nothing about a diesel that makes it more efficient at being a generator. They're great for cars because we like to drive torque (accelerate) and diesels do very well with power at low RPMs compared to gasoline. As such, given a desired acceleration curve, a car designer can choose a smaller diesel engine, reducing the weight of the vehicle. This smaller engine has fewer losses, and is thusly more efficient when it is accelerating the resultant lighter car. This is why a 100HP diesel can accelerate a Jetta even better than 130HP gas -- but the diesel will struggle more at highway passing.
Diesel fuel itself has more energy density, so it's good for some applications like trains, but the answer to your natural gas question is that it's much less dense, so each cylinder needs to be much bigger for the same power, or the engine will be underpowered for its size when compared to gasoline. Gas turbines are noisy, although you might enjoy reading about the potential benefits of the Wankel.
Problems with series plug-in hybrids include that the generator always wants to run in its peak power band. No matter how fast I'm going, if my gas car is running at 3500-4000 RPMs, it's very noisy, even if I'm cruising at a constant speed and could easily downshift twice. Batteries add to the hybrid equation for acceleration and regenerative breaking and are simply weights for cruising. A series generator would hate the acceleration part of that and would prefer to simply feed the generator directly. Now, we might be onto something if we suggested a way for the generator to cut over to direct drive at constant speeds, but I suspect that would be too heavy to be of value.
My commute is 14 minutes -- in traffic. When I work from home, I have kids who don't respect the sanctity of my work, and while my wife does, she can't help but ask me to do one little thing here and there. Working at home I don't get hallway conversations, I don't run into people in the hallways and catch up on the latest exciting thing they're doing (or advertise for a position in my department).
At work, I have better bandwidth, I'm closer to my lab, and someone else pays the electricity bill. My work desk is big enough to spread out everything I need to work on, while at home my iMac is pushed to the front of my desk so it's easier to see with my feet up.
If they want to offer me 10% more because they don't want to pay the facilities and utilities charges associated with storing my butt, we're within negotiating space, but I would walk away from a 10% "take it or leave it".
In a word, performance. In your particular field of expertise, performance and memory footprint may not matter (99% of desktop applications I suspect), but a strong programmer is fully aware of what goes on under the covers when [his|her] program is compiled to the degree that it impacts the product. Until recently, I never thought there was a functional difference between a lone line containing "i++;" "++i;". Of course, for variable assignment it matters, but what's going on under the covers? If you stop and think about it, i++ actually has to return the old value. ++i can destroy that old value and never needs to worry about returning the old value (you can avoid an extra copy). If you're in a high performance loop, either with not much body or with a lot of increments, such things matter. Understanding the impact of caching, the scarcity of registers, the high cost of flushing the cache, all of these can matter, and it's hard to teach these concepts without using at least a pseudocode that looks suspiciously like assembly. If you're paying for compute cycles, or if you're selling something in a market where performance matters, you're going to see a strong advantage in a computer scientist who understands assembly and compiling.
Now, if your main concern is code readability, maintenance and/or moving onto the next product as soon as this one compiles with no errors, higher level languages are undoubtedly far more appropriate.
I didn't even pause at reading it. With Parallels, other VMs and Boot Camp so prolific, I think Windows is much more of a partner and collaborator than it ever was a competitor. There are a lot of Macs out there with purchased Windows installs on them. How could that be viewed as competition?
Market cap. AAPL is over $300B while HPQ is significantly under $100B.
I'll give you that while Apple's revenue may have doubled in the year since your citation, it's still only $76B. HP is currently pulling in nearly twice that. It's also interesting to note that Apple's operating cash flow is twice that of HP.
I can understand wanting to use annual revenue as a metric of company size, and I can even come up with a few justifications. Within the context of companies needing armchair quarterbacking to tell them what industries they need to cater more to, I hope you can see my perspective that the one with the lower operating margin, return on equity and quarterly revenue growth need more help.
OSX doesn't 'need' TRIM, but without it, you'd better have a controller with excellent background garbage collection, or you're going to suffer performance penalties after a few weeks or months. Unless you stick with the SSD that Apple ship with, in which case I believe you're stuck with that poor performance to start with (far better than spinning media, but not as fast as competing SSDs).
And I'm not stating that OSX is so stupid that it prevents the user from manually putting data elsewhere (like iTunes' "copy to iTunes library vs leave it where it is). I'm stating that the ability to use an SSD as an additional level of cache would be a very compelling feature. Suddenly a 30GB SSD would be very useful for a large number of customers instead of a 128+ GB SSD to manually keep everything you think you might notice.
Personally, this is what I plan on doing in May, but not offering TRIM this many years after Microsoft began support is ... embarrassing.
I'm certain your arm chair quarterbacking the largest computer company in the world, and the second largest US based corporation is beyond reproach, but it would be kind to the Apple stockholders (including me) if you'd share some of your data.
Name one advantage Apple gains by sharing their operating system. You want it, but you want the lower prices that multiple vendors imply and the exceptionally low volume enterprise level features that are missing. Let's say that adding redundant power supplies, hot swappable memory and all that jazz costs $50M in R&D. Can you state that they would recoup that investment in the first year? Could they command a $1k premium per box, and amortize it over 50k boxes they would not have otherwise shipped, and then ship another 30k boxes beyond that to count as margin? First, you're going to balk at paying three times as much for Apple hardware as you would for other brands', and the conversation goes down from there.
Features like Time Machine seem to scream for servers, but Apple's implementation is nowhere near what a 24/7 75% usage machine needs, or even what a real database needs under any but the most idle loads.
The kind of people who feel MacOSX is good for servers either need a low power Mini (where the hardware, OS and GUI shortfalls are easily overlooked) or a Mac Pro (for number crunching under familiar development tools matter more than the ability to go out and get more MIPS/$ at any random vendor).
Apple isn't branding their server as something that will compete against Power, Sparc (snicker) or Itanium. They're looking for the hobbyist who doesn't really care about all the underpinnings. For them, it's enough of a server, with enough server features.
I was really looking for better SSD support. I'm an avid Mac user, I'd love my iMac to be faster, but today most of my issues are with the lack of SSD support. I'd love TRIM. Some OS integrated ability to use an SSD as a cache for spinning media would be nice -- I don't want to pay for an SSD to store my iTunes or iPhoto database, but I never want to hear the spinning media seek when I'm playing video games or using Firefox. Even file level deduplication would save me some space, but I'll admit I lust for block level without enough data to justify. Wait, did I just start listing features of ZFS after I mentioned TRIM?
My wife has an iPhone. She really benefits from reading e-mail on the go, and the mapping anywhere. She's a doula (professional birth coach) and mother of two young kids, so information on the go is important.
I need to be able to text during the day and place the occasional emergency phone call, rarely even once a month. I don't want to drop more than $50 to buy it, and I want to minimize my monthly fee (currently $15 above my wife's plan). My phone is way more than I need, and it was the freebie that AT&T was offering. I like T9 text entry, that's a nice extra feature. If I could drop games, applications, MediaNet and music and de-clutter the home screen, I'd like my phone even more. Yes, I want fewer features. Of course, I also like my iPod Touch, mostly for Safari and Facebook, but only within WiFi range. My biggest wish, however, is that AT&T would have a separate plan for people who want to actually buy a phone and not get the price amortized over the life of the plan.
Do you really want to grouse about where the Natalie Portman, naked and / or petrified with / without hot grits jokes went?
Judging from all the haters of the new Slashdot redesign, I'm guessing Slashdot became Digg a few weeks ago, since that's when Digg fell from grace. When I joined Slashdot in 2000 (?), it was seemingly centered around hacking the Netpliance iOpener -- a younger coworker and my father both pointed me to Slashdot the same week. I took that to mean I was missing out on something. In the beginning, and even through the early 2000s, there was a hacking culture here. Each Linux update was posted, along with the occasional nifty water cooling setup. We would see case mods regularly. You know, the stuff some kids finishing up college would be interested in.
The audience has shifted. Us old timers don't have time for everything that Slashdot was when it started. Our interests have shifted dramatically. The kinds of news posted to Digg, Reddit and Slashdot overlap some, and I'm betting the audiences overlap significantly. Personally, I needed more contemporary non-tech news than Slashdot could provide, so I was reading Digg more than Slashdot. When they redesigned significantly and went more to a content provider centered approach, I left Digg and found Reddit. I'm still suffering in the news department.
As far as the jokes go, I think CSI: Miami made itself a joke a long time ago. Judging from its Nielson ratings, it's a widely enjoyed joke. From the absurd "take the sunglasses off moment", to the "dramatic Horatio walks out of the scene", down to the 25-30 minutes of script spliced together with stock footage of the Miami area and bikini models, I think it's a joke a lot of people enjoy. If you don't want to read it, maybe that's more of a statement that you're reading Slashdot comments looking for too much serious discussion.
I was going to come to your defense because of the specific /. crowd, but even Catholics cite their quotations in Sunday mass.