What do you want them to do? Give up this hugely profitable and innovative business just because some company is going to file a lawsuit?
No. Apple should avoid music distribution becaused Apple agreed to. You know the story behind the "sosumi" system sound right? That was produced when they settled with Apple music. A part of that settlement was to not enter the music business.
Music is practically the core of Apple's strategy lately, and they can't give it up no matter what it costs them.
I thought that it was "thinking different".
What they would do if they were smart is negotiate a new contract this time so they don't get sued in the future, because Apple's music strategy is not going away.
It will go away if they are so ordered by a judge.
Take a look around. As far as suggested reading goes, we already have that going on in public education.
Which is precisely why there is so much interest in school vouchers.
I meantioned nothing about taking away a parent's custody, so i don't understand why you meantioned such.
The reason why is because you presuppose that it it is acceptable for someone else to decide what games your or my children can play. Once you make the decision that someone else has the right to determine that, what is to stop you from taking the next step?
Rating systems determine whether or not an item is suitable to reach the hands of a minor.
Video games rated M are for "Mature", as I'm sure we all know, maturity isn't measured by age.
It is the affore meantioned shopkeeper who determines whether or not to follow those rating systems, since the system is voluntary. The decision making has already been made at the high level. The shopkeeper isn't endorsing or censoring, he's merely making an informed (or on some cases uninformed) judgement call.
And I, and others like me, have decided to annoy such shopkeepers as much as they annoy us.
2. Please don't confuse criticism of the policies of the Israeli administration with 'Jew-hating'. It's a diservice to all concerned. Including those of us whose ancestors lived through anti-Semitic pogroms, but who may not think that the Israeli government has the right idea.
In many, most circumstances to criticize Israel in any context is called antisemitism.
If one says that Israel is not completely blameless in their conflict with the Palestinians, instantly the title of antisemite is given. I suspect this is why such stories are often censored.
However, kids whose parents don't use enough discernment as to what material they endorse (i.e. violence, sex, drug use), need others to look out for them. I mean, we have alot of stupid parents in the world, and because of that we have a deterioration in our youth's morals, and we have incidents such as meantioned in the news.
Where do you draw the line? If someone allows their child to eat too much junk food and become obese, that will have a lifelong impact on that child's health. Do we take their children away?
Whether or not it is a good idea to keep certain games away from children is not the point. Once we make the decision to allow a third party to determine what video games your children should play, then will next be trying to tell you what books your children should read.
And 90% of the time, the parent nods and says yes, they know. And then the kid, insulted that I had to point out how young they are, brags that they've already played that game before. And they often mention that they've already played GTA: Vice City.
You don't think that the kids should be insulted? I'd be upset as well. If you want to behave like a judgemental ass, you can't be surprised when people treat you like one.
Those kids are just plain jerks sometimes.
And they should be. Your company's policy is idiotic. I'm pushing 30, and I look like I'm pushing 30. 6 months or so ago, I got carded when I bought Operation Flashpoint Gold.
Personally, when I encounter a policy at any company that I don't like, I am sure to behave as abrasively as possible so that they remember me and don't subject me to that policy next time.
That's great, legally she has to be in store.
What state are you in? Or are you in Canada? The video game rating system is voluntary, it is called that for a reason. Because it was not mandated by law. It may have been your company's policy, but was it really 'legally' required for you to be difficult?
This isn't like selling tobacco to children, we're talking about video games.
So why should a floppy controller be on the motherboard in 21st century, when you can easily buy USB floppy just for a case when you cannot live without floppy?
Because an integrated floppy controller will allow me to use a $5.00 floppy drive when I need no.
It still annoys me to no end that few boards have ISA slots anymore. I don't have many ISA devices, but when I need to use one, it's nice to be able to.
In the US, that is already illegal. Depending on whom you offend. A man was once sentanced to jail time for parking an EMPTY Ryder truck outside of an abortion clinic.
Duh! You didn't specify that you were talking about commiting a state crime, but not being caught in that state.
I said "obscenity" that is a state matter. Are you European or Canadian?
guess I'm still not convinced that if I rob a gas station, and flee across the border, that no charges will be able to be pressed against me.
You broke that state's laws while you were in it. If you never entered that state you couldn't rob the gas station now could you?
Or that I can slander someone as much as I want as long as I am not in their state.
If you're in the US, they can come to your state and sue you. If , by magic, your state did away with its laws against slander and libel you could say or write anything you wanted to with impunity.
Bullshit yourself. Bad analogy. When I call 911 on my Vonage phone (the one advertised to replace my analog line), I should expect the same service. If I'm going to get the same service, I should have to pay for it just as I did with the local telco. In this case it could literally be a life-and-death situation.
It doesn't matter. If you can dial 911, 411, 611, or 011, it doesn't change the fact that a state has no right to regulate something that does not act within its borders. If they are allowed to do this, then New York would be within its rights to regulate any date transmitted between Maine and Florida. Date travelling through the state is not the same as having an actual physical presence there.
If their service claims to be able to connect you with emergency services provided on a local level, they should be regulated just like a normal telco. If you don't like that, your argument should be to get rid of 911 service, not to promote a one-sided regulatory system where only traditional telcos have to meet federal/state requirements.
Moot point. It doesn't matter if they can forward your call to your local 911. If they have no actual presence in your state, the state has no jurisdiction over them.
If Vonage has a branch office or something located in Minnesota, then I am mistaken. If they do not, then the state has no legal leg to stand on.
Furthermore, I don't think that if I make a threat against the President that I will be able to escape charges just because I was in a different state.
A threat is a different matter, that is a federal crime. It doesn't matter which state you're in. Only a fool would threaten the President of the country, while still in the country.
In instances where a company is offering Internet based services that both compete and replace traditional services, it makes sense that such a service would be subject to the same regulatory control as the competition.
In a word, Bullshit. Email coupled with a scanner and a printer can replace the USPS for many run of the mill mailings. That doesn't mean that the USPS should have the ability to regulate. (Yes HR 602P is a hoax, but you are echoing the thinking that could one day make it reality)
At what point do these unregulated services cross the line where they become subject to local public utility commission regulations.
They never do. If they don't have a branch office or something located in the state in question, that state has NO RIGHT to regulate them. Period. A state's rights end at its borders. For example, if I were to say that George Bush and Bill Clinton can suck my (whatever), neither Arkansas nor Texas could bring me up on obscenity charges because I'm safely in another state. The fact that people from Arkansas and Texas may see this post doesn't make a difference.
won't be impressed until they can make a healthy human male yearn for a nice healthy vegan dinner.
Isn't this an oxymoron? In the immortal words of Paul Rodriguez "I've never met a vegetarian that looked like he could kick MY ass".
Regerdless of how many times you people say otherwise, it doesn't change the fact that a BALANCED diet that includes some meat and/or animal products is healthier than a purely vegan diet.
At the heart of the matter when some script kiddie gets busted for distributing a worm/virus a part of the outrage is that he appropriated the control (partial, temporary or otherwise) of someone else's computer without their permission.
Couldn't we go after software publishers who do this sort of thing on the same grounds?
Stuff like this is just asking to offend peoples' beliefs--especially those who see Freemasonry as an occultic religion.
Well, technically they're right. Occult simply means "hidden", since the Masons perform their rituals behind closed doors, that would make their practices and beliefs "occult" in nature.
So I say again: lose the silly religious / pagan overtones.
Did you complain about VIA/Cyrix's CPU naming scheme? They used names that were of Judeo/Christian/Islamic origin. In case you didn't know, many, MANY of the people working in the IT field (from programmers to network admins) are pagans. Most of the world is still free enough that these people can pay homage to their beliefs without fear of being burned alive.
Not necessarily for the hardware or the software, but for the training necessary to teach students to work in it.
It is much harder to teach the faculty how to do something. When I have done work in schools, many, if not most teachers have one particular student whom they would ask me to teach a particular task to so that the student could perform it and later instruct the teacher. Kids are fast learners. Faculty members are the ones who are set in their ways.
During the mid and late 1990s I worked for a fairly big Apple authorized dealer. In fact, before Skully this particular business made several million dollars worth of Apple sales per year.
Back in the day, before Skully, schools made their purchases from Apple authorized dealers. Apple deeply discounted the hardware to the dealers who were making educational sales so that they made a profit margin on the equipment. Schools got better prices than the soccer mom who was going to the same dealer.
Skully thought that if they eliminated the middle man, Apple could sell equipment for the same price and keep the profits that had been going to the dealers.
His plan backfired. Schools had already developed relationships with the dealers. Though it is true that Apple was keeping more of the profits from each sale, the total number of sales fell through the floor. When a school had come to establish a relationship with a dealer that they trusted and that dealer could no longer sell them Apples the schools were interested to know what hardware the dealer could sell them.
Instead of Apple, Apple, Apple. Dealers (like the one I worked for) started to push Compaq, HP, and whitebox solutions. Not because they didn't think Apple was good anymore, but because they couldn't make any money unless they were selling something else. When I was trying hard to get a sale from a school, what I would do is emphasize the cost savings of purchasing 200 Compaq Deskpros over 200 PowerMac 7300s. I'd tell the school how they'd save so many thousands of dollars up front, and many more over the life of the equipment. When the change took place, Apple was still using SCSI exclusively on their 'professional' level machines. So that was another areas where I could illustrate a cost savings by going with Compaq or HP. SCSI vs IDE. 10 HP printers vs the cost of 10 Apple Laserwriters was a losing proposition for Apple as well.
Apple lost the educational market ~10 years ago when they tried to screw the dealers who were generating sales on their equipment. Pure and simple.
To be fair, OSX was a *spanking new* OS (like NT 3.1) and deserves some time to `settle down'. What i find disturbing is Apple's need to charge early adopters for their show of support.
I expected it. Steve Jobs is just as crafty as Bill Gates when it comes to understanding the collective psyche of his target market. He KNOWS that the early adopters will be happy to open their wallets two or three times just so they can have the latest and greatest offering fresh from the Apple kitchen.
Let's look at the model of the drug dealer. He would prefer that you bought 28 grams of Marijuana individually over the course of the next week than if you bought one ounce today. YMMV but that is the difference between $280 and $130.
Before anyone asks, yes I went to college. Yes we smoked weed when I was in college. I have since grown up and work a job where we have to take the whiz quiz so I retired from that kind of stuff. So if my dollar values are off, chalk that up to the fact that I haven't been to a college party in over 7 years.
The price of $210 for the Athlon XP 2800+ included a new motherboard, because most likely if one is running a chip as old as an Athlon 1GHz a motherboard replacement would be necessary to upgrade to an XP 2800+.
Prices for the CPU/MoBo Combo and PC2700 ram were current listings on Pricewatch.
See, there's what the article is talking about: FUD. You can add RAM to an X-Serve.
True enough.
Somewhere down the road you can probably upgrade the CPU, also.
That is the catch, probably. I won't stake the future of my employer(or my paycheck) on anyone's probably. Paying double for the hardware and then paying double for the upgrades isn't a smart financial move.
There are CPU upgrades available for every single other Mac ever made, so it's quite likely that when the time comes that the original X-Serve CPU can't keep up, an upgrade will be available.
This one is more than just not true, it's misleading as well. Let us start at the beginning. The Mac 128, 512, and Plus had NO CPU upgrade options. NONE! The SE could be upgraded to an SE30 if you spent half the cost of a new Mac to do so.
But the misleading part is as follows. Many, MANY of the other available CPU upgrades feature crippled CPUs. Sure, you can put a G3 in your creaky old 6100, but you have to contend with the fact that the machine isn't PCI.
Sure you can get a G3 for your 6400 (I considered doing that myself), but you'd be hobbled by the computer's 40 MHz bus.
Now let us look at prices. We'll take a look at the cost to upgrade a fairly recent Mac, a Blue and White G3. Mac Zone has a 1.4 Ghz G4 upgrade listed for $599.00 at the following URL http://www.maczone.com/cgi-bin/zones/site/product/ index.html?id=000828086
If you're running an Athlon 1 Ghz, you can upgrade to an Athlon XP 2800+ for $210. To be fair, I'll include the fact that to make such an upgrade, you'll most likely need to replace your RAM, so throw in 512 MB of PC2700 RAM for $73.00 for less than half the cost of upgrading the Mac you can pimp out your industry standard PC. Considering the fact that you would have paid half of the price of the Mac to purchase that PC in the first place you'd be saving money twice.
Conclusion if you're going to make an argument about the merits of PPC against X86 based on upgradability, there is no way that the PPC can compete.
Unless you're a graphic artist(a reason that is becoming less true by the day), there is no compelling business reason to choose the Mac platform over that of X86, be it in the guise of Windows or GNU/Linux/*BSD.
Sorry to be the one to break it to you, I used to be a Mac guy myself. Apple has lost the war for the desktop. The best they can hope for is to snipe away and win a few users now and then, they're pretty much in the same boat as Saddam's few remaining loyal supporters.
10 years ago, I was an exclusive die hard Mac Fanatic. In 1993, if you had asked me about the landscape of future computing, I would have told you that Apple would have taken a much larger market share and would be battling Microsoft and Microsoft only for dominance.
I had no idea that Linux would be the force in the market that it is, I had no idea that Apple would only marginalize themselves even further. I had no idea that "DOS" would be all but done away with. I had no idea that the internet would be used by grandmothers and housewives on a daily basis. I didn't expect user interfaces to come along as far as they have.
Oddly enough, this month will mark 10 years since I first used elm, pine, and gopher for internet access. 10 years since I first used vi. 10 years since my first exposure to UN*X.
Last month was 10 years since I got my first modem. It was a 2400bps modem for my Mac Plus. I used Prodigy and Compuserve for the first time. It opened me to the world of BBSing.
The only things that I was right were that I would expand my knowledge of computing tenfold. I knew that I'd be able to program in a language other than BASIC.
I didn't really expect to have HAL sitting on my desk. So I'm not disappointed.
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What do you want them to do? Give up this hugely profitable and innovative business just because some company is going to file a lawsuit?
No. Apple should avoid music distribution becaused Apple agreed to. You know the story behind the "sosumi" system sound right? That was produced when they settled with Apple music. A part of that settlement was to not enter the music business.
Music is practically the core of Apple's strategy lately, and they can't give it up no matter what it costs them.
I thought that it was "thinking different".
What they would do if they were smart is negotiate a new contract this time so they don't get sued in the future, because Apple's music strategy is not going away.
It will go away if they are so ordered by a judge.
LK
Take a look around. As far as suggested reading goes, we already have that going on in public education.
Which is precisely why there is so much interest in school vouchers.
I meantioned nothing about taking away a parent's custody, so i don't understand why you meantioned such.
The reason why is because you presuppose that it it is acceptable for someone else to decide what games your or my children can play. Once you make the decision that someone else has the right to determine that, what is to stop you from taking the next step?
Rating systems determine whether or not an item is suitable to reach the hands of a minor.
Video games rated M are for "Mature", as I'm sure we all know, maturity isn't measured by age.
It is the affore meantioned shopkeeper who determines whether or not to follow those rating systems, since the system is voluntary. The decision making has already been made at the high level. The shopkeeper isn't endorsing or censoring, he's merely making an informed (or on some cases uninformed) judgement call.
And I, and others like me, have decided to annoy such shopkeepers as much as they annoy us.
LK
2. Please don't confuse criticism of the policies of the Israeli administration with 'Jew-hating'. It's a diservice to all concerned. Including those of us whose ancestors lived through anti-Semitic pogroms, but who may not think that the Israeli government has the right idea.
In many, most circumstances to criticize Israel in any context is called antisemitism.
If one says that Israel is not completely blameless in their conflict with the Palestinians, instantly the title of antisemite is given. I suspect this is why such stories are often censored.
LK
However, kids whose parents don't use enough discernment as to what material they endorse (i.e. violence, sex, drug use), need others to look out for them. I mean, we have alot of stupid parents in the world, and because of that we have a deterioration in our youth's morals, and we have incidents such as meantioned in the news.
Where do you draw the line? If someone allows their child to eat too much junk food and become obese, that will have a lifelong impact on that child's health. Do we take their children away?
Whether or not it is a good idea to keep certain games away from children is not the point. Once we make the decision to allow a third party to determine what video games your children should play, then will next be trying to tell you what books your children should read.
LK
We are trying to instill in him that guns are weapons for the sole purpose of harming and killing other things.
Then you are lying to your son.
I have never harmed nor killed anything with any of my firearms.
I've put more holes than I care to count in paper targets, but no living things.
Guns are for launching projectiles (bullets) what you do with it from there is your choice.
LK
And 90% of the time, the parent nods and says yes, they know. And then the kid, insulted that I had to point out how young they are, brags that they've already played that game before. And they often mention that they've already played GTA: Vice City.
You don't think that the kids should be insulted? I'd be upset as well. If you want to behave like a judgemental ass, you can't be surprised when people treat you like one.
Those kids are just plain jerks sometimes.
And they should be. Your company's policy is idiotic. I'm pushing 30, and I look like I'm pushing 30. 6 months or so ago, I got carded when I bought Operation Flashpoint Gold.
Personally, when I encounter a policy at any company that I don't like, I am sure to behave as abrasively as possible so that they remember me and don't subject me to that policy next time.
That's great, legally she has to be in store.
What state are you in? Or are you in Canada? The video game rating system is voluntary, it is called that for a reason. Because it was not mandated by law. It may have been your company's policy, but was it really 'legally' required for you to be difficult?
This isn't like selling tobacco to children, we're talking about video games.
LK
So why should a floppy controller be on the motherboard in 21st century, when you can easily buy USB floppy just for a case when you cannot live without floppy?
Because an integrated floppy controller will allow me to use a $5.00 floppy drive when I need no.
It still annoys me to no end that few boards have ISA slots anymore. I don't have many ISA devices, but when I need to use one, it's nice to be able to.
LK
Offensive behaveyor.
In the US, that is already illegal. Depending on whom you offend. A man was once sentanced to jail time for parking an EMPTY Ryder truck outside of an abortion clinic.
LK
Duh! You didn't specify that you were talking about commiting a state crime, but not being caught in that state.
I said "obscenity" that is a state matter. Are you European or Canadian?
guess I'm still not convinced that if I rob a gas station, and flee across the border, that no charges will be able to be pressed against me.
You broke that state's laws while you were in it. If you never entered that state you couldn't rob the gas station now could you?
Or that I can slander someone as much as I want as long as I am not in their state.
If you're in the US, they can come to your state and sue you. If , by magic, your state did away with its laws against slander and libel you could say or write anything you wanted to with impunity.
LK
Bullshit yourself. Bad analogy. When I call 911 on my Vonage phone (the one advertised to replace my analog line), I should expect the same service. If I'm going to get the same service, I should have to pay for it just as I did with the local telco. In this case it could literally be a life-and-death situation.
It doesn't matter. If you can dial 911, 411, 611, or 011, it doesn't change the fact that a state has no right to regulate something that does not act within its borders. If they are allowed to do this, then New York would be within its rights to regulate any date transmitted between Maine and Florida. Date travelling through the state is not the same as having an actual physical presence there.
If their service claims to be able to connect you with emergency services provided on a local level, they should be regulated just like a normal telco. If you don't like that, your argument should be to get rid of 911 service, not to promote a one-sided regulatory system where only traditional telcos have to meet federal/state requirements.
Moot point. It doesn't matter if they can forward your call to your local 911. If they have no actual presence in your state, the state has no jurisdiction over them.
If Vonage has a branch office or something located in Minnesota, then I am mistaken. If they do not, then the state has no legal leg to stand on.
LK
Furthermore, I don't think that if I make a threat against the President that I will be able to escape charges just because I was in a different state.
A threat is a different matter, that is a federal crime. It doesn't matter which state you're in. Only a fool would threaten the President of the country, while still in the country.
LK
In instances where a company is offering Internet based services that both compete and replace traditional services, it makes sense that such a service would be subject to the same regulatory control as the competition.
In a word, Bullshit. Email coupled with a scanner and a printer can replace the USPS for many run of the mill mailings. That doesn't mean that the USPS should have the ability to regulate. (Yes HR 602P is a hoax, but you are echoing the thinking that could one day make it reality)
At what point do these unregulated services cross the line where they become subject to local public utility commission regulations.
They never do. If they don't have a branch office or something located in the state in question, that state has NO RIGHT to regulate them. Period. A state's rights end at its borders. For example, if I were to say that George Bush and Bill Clinton can suck my (whatever), neither Arkansas nor Texas could bring me up on obscenity charges because I'm safely in another state. The fact that people from Arkansas and Texas may see this post doesn't make a difference.
LK
You have been recruited by the star league to defend the frontier against Xur and the Kodan armada.
I F'ing loved that movie!
won't be impressed until they can make a healthy human male yearn for a nice healthy vegan dinner.
Isn't this an oxymoron? In the immortal words of Paul Rodriguez "I've never met a vegetarian that looked like he could kick MY ass".
Regerdless of how many times you people say otherwise, it doesn't change the fact that a BALANCED diet that includes some meat and/or animal products is healthier than a purely vegan diet.
LK
Maybe this guy should try installing Mandrake.
LK
At the heart of the matter when some script kiddie gets busted for distributing a worm/virus a part of the outrage is that he appropriated the control (partial, temporary or otherwise) of someone else's computer without their permission.
Couldn't we go after software publishers who do this sort of thing on the same grounds?
LK
Stuff like this is just asking to offend peoples' beliefs--especially those who see Freemasonry as an occultic religion.
Well, technically they're right. Occult simply means "hidden", since the Masons perform their rituals behind closed doors, that would make their practices and beliefs "occult" in nature.
So I say again: lose the silly religious / pagan overtones.
Did you complain about VIA/Cyrix's CPU naming scheme? They used names that were of Judeo/Christian/Islamic origin. In case you didn't know, many, MANY of the people working in the IT field (from programmers to network admins) are pagans. Most of the world is still free enough that these people can pay homage to their beliefs without fear of being burned alive.
LK
Not necessarily for the hardware or the software, but for the training necessary to teach students to work in it.
It is much harder to teach the faculty how to do something. When I have done work in schools, many, if not most teachers have one particular student whom they would ask me to teach a particular task to so that the student could perform it and later instruct the teacher. Kids are fast learners. Faculty members are the ones who are set in their ways.
LK
One word Skully.
During the mid and late 1990s I worked for a fairly big Apple authorized dealer. In fact, before Skully this particular business made several million dollars worth of Apple sales per year.
Back in the day, before Skully, schools made their purchases from Apple authorized dealers. Apple deeply discounted the hardware to the dealers who were making educational sales so that they made a profit margin on the equipment. Schools got better prices than the soccer mom who was going to the same dealer.
Skully thought that if they eliminated the middle man, Apple could sell equipment for the same price and keep the profits that had been going to the dealers.
His plan backfired. Schools had already developed relationships with the dealers. Though it is true that Apple was keeping more of the profits from each sale, the total number of sales fell through the floor. When a school had come to establish a relationship with a dealer that they trusted and that dealer could no longer sell them Apples the schools were interested to know what hardware the dealer could sell them.
Instead of Apple, Apple, Apple. Dealers (like the one I worked for) started to push Compaq, HP, and whitebox solutions. Not because they didn't think Apple was good anymore, but because they couldn't make any money unless they were selling something else. When I was trying hard to get a sale from a school, what I would do is emphasize the cost savings of purchasing 200 Compaq Deskpros over 200 PowerMac 7300s. I'd tell the school how they'd save so many thousands of dollars up front, and many more over the life of the equipment. When the change took place, Apple was still using SCSI exclusively on their 'professional' level machines. So that was another areas where I could illustrate a cost savings by going with Compaq or HP. SCSI vs IDE. 10 HP printers vs the cost of 10 Apple Laserwriters was a losing proposition for Apple as well.
Apple lost the educational market ~10 years ago when they tried to screw the dealers who were generating sales on their equipment. Pure and simple.
LK
To be fair, OSX was a *spanking new* OS (like NT 3.1) and deserves some time to `settle down'. What i find disturbing is Apple's need to charge early adopters for their show of support.
I expected it. Steve Jobs is just as crafty as Bill Gates when it comes to understanding the collective psyche of his target market. He KNOWS that the early adopters will be happy to open their wallets two or three times just so they can have the latest and greatest offering fresh from the Apple kitchen.
Let's look at the model of the drug dealer. He would prefer that you bought 28 grams of Marijuana individually over the course of the next week than if you bought one ounce today. YMMV but that is the difference between $280 and $130.
Before anyone asks, yes I went to college. Yes we smoked weed when I was in college. I have since grown up and work a job where we have to take the whiz quiz so I retired from that kind of stuff. So if my dollar values are off, chalk that up to the fact that I haven't been to a college party in over 7 years.
LK
The price of $210 for the Athlon XP 2800+ included a new motherboard, because most likely if one is running a chip as old as an Athlon 1GHz a motherboard replacement would be necessary to upgrade to an XP 2800+.
Prices for the CPU/MoBo Combo and PC2700 ram were current listings on Pricewatch.
LK
See, there's what the article is talking about: FUD. You can add RAM to an X-Serve.
/ index.html?id=000828086
True enough.
Somewhere down the road you can probably upgrade the CPU, also.
That is the catch, probably. I won't stake the future of my employer(or my paycheck) on anyone's probably. Paying double for the hardware and then paying double for the upgrades isn't a smart financial move.
There are CPU upgrades available for every single other Mac ever made, so it's quite likely that when the time comes that the original X-Serve CPU can't keep up, an upgrade will be available.
This one is more than just not true, it's misleading as well. Let us start at the beginning. The Mac 128, 512, and Plus had NO CPU upgrade options. NONE! The SE could be upgraded to an SE30 if you spent half the cost of a new Mac to do so.
But the misleading part is as follows. Many, MANY of the other available CPU upgrades feature crippled CPUs. Sure, you can put a G3 in your creaky old 6100, but you have to contend with the fact that the machine isn't PCI.
Sure you can get a G3 for your 6400 (I considered doing that myself), but you'd be hobbled by the computer's 40 MHz bus.
Now let us look at prices. We'll take a look at the cost to upgrade a fairly recent Mac, a Blue and White G3. Mac Zone has a 1.4 Ghz G4 upgrade listed for $599.00 at the following URL http://www.maczone.com/cgi-bin/zones/site/product
If you're running an Athlon 1 Ghz, you can upgrade to an Athlon XP 2800+ for $210. To be fair, I'll include the fact that to make such an upgrade, you'll most likely need to replace your RAM, so throw in 512 MB of PC2700 RAM for $73.00 for less than half the cost of upgrading the Mac you can pimp out your industry standard PC. Considering the fact that you would have paid half of the price of the Mac to purchase that PC in the first place you'd be saving money twice.
Conclusion if you're going to make an argument about the merits of PPC against X86 based on upgradability, there is no way that the PPC can compete.
Unless you're a graphic artist(a reason that is becoming less true by the day), there is no compelling business reason to choose the Mac platform over that of X86, be it in the guise of Windows or GNU/Linux/*BSD.
Sorry to be the one to break it to you, I used to be a Mac guy myself. Apple has lost the war for the desktop. The best they can hope for is to snipe away and win a few users now and then, they're pretty much in the same boat as Saddam's few remaining loyal supporters.
LK
less than 2 weeks until I am living in Jerusalem
I wish the best of luck to you. There isn't enough money in the world to get me to even visit the middle east. Especially Israel.
LK
I'm sorry to rain on your parade, but it's not possible to "murder" a non human.
Some of the many conditions which animals are forced to endure are without question needlessly cruel. However, I'm not going to stop eating meat.
When possible, I prefer to obtain Kosher or Halal foods because the animals are kept under better conditions.
LK
10 years ago, I was an exclusive die hard Mac Fanatic. In 1993, if you had asked me about the landscape of future computing, I would have told you that Apple would have taken a much larger market share and would be battling Microsoft and Microsoft only for dominance.
I had no idea that Linux would be the force in the market that it is, I had no idea that Apple would only marginalize themselves even further. I had no idea that "DOS" would be all but done away with. I had no idea that the internet would be used by grandmothers and housewives on a daily basis. I didn't expect user interfaces to come along as far as they have.
Oddly enough, this month will mark 10 years since I first used elm, pine, and gopher for internet access. 10 years since I first used vi. 10 years since my first exposure to UN*X.
Last month was 10 years since I got my first modem. It was a 2400bps modem for my Mac Plus. I used Prodigy and Compuserve for the first time. It opened me to the world of BBSing.
The only things that I was right were that I would expand my knowledge of computing tenfold. I knew that I'd be able to program in a language other than BASIC.
I didn't really expect to have HAL sitting on my desk. So I'm not disappointed.
LK