I did some more checking just on the pricing model I used. The xw8600 I priced has a single graphics card as outlined in my specs. I actually did upgrade the Apple card so that it would be a better feature match. On the day I priced them, the specs were as close as I could get.
Where people always fall down on me are the CPUs, at the time I was pricing, they were Harpertowns. People coming at me with price comparisons always end up giving me Kentsfields.
I'm trying to get a couple of quad-core Clovertowns, since they're pin-compatible with the dual-cores in my Pro now, and the best Google Shopping can do for me is $1300 for 3.0Ghz. So for the price of two quad-core Clovertowns + $300 for every other part of the machine, I can buy a whole new Mac Pro with them in it. F That Noise.
The reason I did that research in the first place is that strangely this isn't the first time I've had this debate. Rather than defend myself against people who actually care what I spend on computers, I can point to a link and say: No, see...
Oddly, I don't argue with people over what car they buy because I think it's overpriced. Someone wants to buy a Saab instead of an Impreza and pay $5000 more for an identical car with identical trim, who am I to stop them:-) (FWIW I have the Impreza, so it does make me chuckle)
the Mac Pro is a single CPU, Single Graphics card workstation
No, it's Dual quad-cores. You'll see I set the machines up as closely as I could to identical. The comparisons were from Feb 1, 2009. I'm not surprised to see numbers shift.
Again, I'm not trying to sell Apple into the Enterprise, I am just tired of seeing price-point comparisons and people saying how "expensive" Apple is, when I can build a Mac Pro for less than a comparable workstation from other vendors. I chose HP because I had a very very nice HP tower at my job at the time and wanted to get a slightly higher end one for myself. I ended up with the Mac because Apple's price was lower and OSX is a good Unix that I don't have to screw with, ever.
On the Laptop level, I have a 3 year old Macbook 1st Gen, which is my personal laptop, and a Lenovo T61 with OpenSuSE 11.1 64-bit, 4GB of memory. They're both very useful, but Network Manager just doesn't cut it for me for switching between WiFi networks and wired networks at home and at work. The little MacBook does just fine.
Again in the case of laptops, I've had the opportunity to get my company to buy me a MacBook Pro, but at that level, there's no way I could justify the expense given the price difference between it and the T61, with the only major gain being OSX.
Ultimately we're on the same side, best machine for the job at the price for the task at hand. I'm a network admin who also does lots of Linux admin, so GIS apps don't affect me, but "who has a good shell" does affect me. You're partly right about "not working in the support area". I don't support desktop end user crap, I support servers and datacenters and swtiches and routers and things, which to a degree are very different animals. That's why, for instance, I have no idea why no one takes advantage of on-site service at the enterprise desktop level. We just hand over a spare laptop and send the broken one in. My guess is it's way cheaper than maintaining enterprise on-site support contracts.
$2900 for the Mac, $4700 for the HP with the same memory.
I also have to admit that the OS plays a role in my judgment. OSX just works better than Linux + KDE4, especially in portability between networks.
Apple doesn't offer on-site repairs, that's very true, but I haven't worked in a company that took advantage of any of that. My current company has a few hundred Lenovo laptops, we don't get Lenovo to come fix them, we send them back and get a repair. Same thing with the HP workstations at my last company of roughly 1300 users. I don't know why they don't get on-site repairs, but they don't.
Will you please read my comment. Fuck, read the TITLE to my comment. I am not talking about MacBooks. Perhaps that's how all this gets started, Non-Apple users see "Mac" and append "Book" in their minds and thus believe that the MacBook is the only machine Apple sells.
This argument goes from "silly" to utterly moot, as if you price a Dell or HP workstation (not "home computer", but under their SMB workstation sections) and go part-for-part, the Dell/HP easily comes out at hundreds more than a Mac Pro.
I've got a whole ranty article on this written yet not posted for some reason. It's actually a big reason why I have a Mac Pro and not an HP running Linux. The Mac was by far the better value, plus, you get OSX, which is great. I was a solely Linux desktop guy for 10 years before OSX, and I don't see it as "toyish" at all.
Everything Last.fm does generates lots of hate from the community. I've honestly let my subscription lapse for two reasons. First, they were bought out by Huge Record Conglomerate and I decided they don't need my money anymore, but more importantly, it got to the point where the only somewhat useful feature that was subscription-only was being able to see who visited my profile.
It seems this relates only to listening to Last.fm radio streaming, which I don't care about, and I'm in the US, which makes me care even less. But if you consider the amount of bandwidth that goes into streaming that content, if you listen to it for 8 hours a day I would consider it no different than an NPR subscription. Except that the money is going to Big Record Conglomerate, instead of, you know, NPR.
Another solution is "Treat everyone like a General, all the time" and you'll be fine no matter what environment you're in. If you speak to your janitorial staff the same way you speak to your CEO, you will gain respect in your organization. If you treat a Private like crap because he's a Private, he will think of you as Lieutenant Jerkass going forward, and probably won't be shy about his opinion.
I've set up Apache and mod_proxy_balancer for just this purpose. The sites don't have enough traffic for me to justify buying an F5 or Cisco CSS load balancer, so I use proxy balancer with a bunch of vhosts, it works great.
Add Keepalived and you can have redundant (though not stateful failover) load balancers on the super cheap.
For SSL it still works well. Give it a look, took all of an afternoon to set up a failover pair of servers.
I don't know yet how much traffic it will take, but a single CPU 800Mhz server is doing a couple Mb/sec with no sweat for me.
1:) Looks like the go full screen by default when a video starts to play, which I think is different from the old version, but I didn't really use it much.
I get that this guy isn't really a secret operative in some alien-human hybrid black-oil conspiracy. But the title of "Shadow Minister" does still imply such to those of us who watched a certain popular TV (TeleVision) show known as the X-Files in the 1990's.
It's OK though, because as we all know, jokes have been scientifically proven to be much funnier when they're fully explained, so for that I thank you:-)
How about some individual projects? Amarok 2 came out in 2008. Other things that existed before but which improved mightily in '08 were:
Flock (released v2)
KDE Released 4x series, abysmal at first, but it's great now. BasKet Probably doesn't belong on a Best Apps Ever list, but it is pretty useful. This existed before, but I just found it this year and it's great, and it has become a lot more stable for me through the year. Someone help get them to qt4!
There are lots of great apps out there that deserve some love this year.
A less scary way is to run whatever you want to run through a relatively large APC, and plug the APC into the generator. I found a 3000w APC was enough to power 15 machines long enough for me to get my homemade romex extension cable and get the generator running.
I've never pulled the trigger on any of these, but I am interested in the old Kinesis Evolution, which they don't seem to make, but which would mount to my chair and let you just let your arms dangle.
As it is, I just use the ones that came with my Macs. I've liked Microsoft keyboards in the past, but they're all sitting in a big pile because they take up too much space.
Exactly what I came here to say. They should be able to crank out enough windmills to fill the Great Plains states and generate till the cows come home.
His elliptical curve is cryptographically secure, he even says so on his web page. And it would be the only DNS solution that will pay you $500 if you site gets hijacked.
SSL is TCP only, DNSSEC is kind of like UDP-SSL for DNS. IIRC there is a proposal for TLS over UDP which would accomplish a similar thing, but I think the specific answer of DNSSEC accounts for all of this.
I believed the "tools" they refer to were the pimply high school kids (and pimply 35 year olds) that complete the steps on the flowchart. It's clear now that they've invented some overengineered "Sandwich Jig" to make up for the fact that they apparently have trouble teaching morons how to stack food on bread without spilling it all over the floor.
In 1.4.9, yes, that works. In Amarok 2, the playlist is not tabular data like in 1.4.x, instead it's one "column" with each track having several fields in two rows per track, it looks like this.
The number to the left of the track name is the track number, which I don't care about. I sort of really prefer the tabular data since it let you move your eye straight down whichever column you're interested in, rather than have to include or reject things based on context.
Anyway, the context menu for these track entries only gives you the options to play, remove from playlist or edit the track details. Nowhere to add or remove fields.
Amarok has lost its main advantages (for me, personally) over iTunes in the 2.0 release.
1.4.x has:
-- Selectable fields (columns) in the playlist, you can select "last played time", which is great for weeding out stuff you've just heard in the last couple of days. iTunes has this, Amarok 1.4 had this, now Amarok 2 doesn't, and I personally miss it.
--SQLite collection.db, which allows you to very easily write applications which query your collection. Now they use an internal MySQL DB, which I'm sure I can move wherever and re-attach, but now I get to rewrite my stuff to use mysql instead of sqlite.
IMHO a music collection is the perfect vehicle for flat file DBs, my SQLite Amarok DB is like 11MB, for about 1500CDs. However, for Album Cover grabbing, it still WASTES iTunes, since it uses Amazon, and Amazon has way more CDs than iTunes does. Lyrics and Wikipedia integration are great, Last.FM integration is great.
Very happy to see this in a native package, I haven't run the latest from Rangerrick, I've been waiting for it to be Official. It's looking great on my SuSE desktops though.
Slashdot Mirror
I did some more checking just on the pricing model I used. The xw8600 I priced has a single graphics card as outlined in my specs. I actually did upgrade the Apple card so that it would be a better feature match. On the day I priced them, the specs were as close as I could get.
:-) (FWIW I have the Impreza, so it does make me chuckle)
Where people always fall down on me are the CPUs, at the time I was pricing, they were Harpertowns. People coming at me with price comparisons always end up giving me Kentsfields.
I'm trying to get a couple of quad-core Clovertowns, since they're pin-compatible with the dual-cores in my Pro now, and the best Google Shopping can do for me is $1300 for 3.0Ghz. So for the price of two quad-core Clovertowns + $300 for every other part of the machine, I can buy a whole new Mac Pro with them in it. F That Noise.
The reason I did that research in the first place is that strangely this isn't the first time I've had this debate. Rather than defend myself against people who actually care what I spend on computers, I can point to a link and say: No, see...
Oddly, I don't argue with people over what car they buy because I think it's overpriced. Someone wants to buy a Saab instead of an Impreza and pay $5000 more for an identical car with identical trim, who am I to stop them
the Mac Pro is a single CPU, Single Graphics card workstation
No, it's Dual quad-cores. You'll see I set the machines up as closely as I could to identical. The comparisons were from Feb 1, 2009. I'm not surprised to see numbers shift.
Again, I'm not trying to sell Apple into the Enterprise, I am just tired of seeing price-point comparisons and people saying how "expensive" Apple is, when I can build a Mac Pro for less than a comparable workstation from other vendors. I chose HP because I had a very very nice HP tower at my job at the time and wanted to get a slightly higher end one for myself. I ended up with the Mac because Apple's price was lower and OSX is a good Unix that I don't have to screw with, ever.
On the Laptop level, I have a 3 year old Macbook 1st Gen, which is my personal laptop, and a Lenovo T61 with OpenSuSE 11.1 64-bit, 4GB of memory. They're both very useful, but Network Manager just doesn't cut it for me for switching between WiFi networks and wired networks at home and at work. The little MacBook does just fine.
Again in the case of laptops, I've had the opportunity to get my company to buy me a MacBook Pro, but at that level, there's no way I could justify the expense given the price difference between it and the T61, with the only major gain being OSX.
Ultimately we're on the same side, best machine for the job at the price for the task at hand. I'm a network admin who also does lots of Linux admin, so GIS apps don't affect me, but "who has a good shell" does affect me. You're partly right about "not working in the support area". I don't support desktop end user crap, I support servers and datacenters and swtiches and routers and things, which to a degree are very different animals. That's why, for instance, I have no idea why no one takes advantage of on-site service at the enterprise desktop level. We just hand over a spare laptop and send the broken one in. My guess is it's way cheaper than maintaining enterprise on-site support contracts.
Here are the numbers I arrived at. If you buy an Apple monitor, you're almost as big an idiot as if you buy Apple memory :-)
http://www.xrayspx.com/what-quotapple-taxquot
$2900 for the Mac, $4700 for the HP with the same memory.
I also have to admit that the OS plays a role in my judgment. OSX just works better than Linux + KDE4, especially in portability between networks.
Apple doesn't offer on-site repairs, that's very true, but I haven't worked in a company that took advantage of any of that. My current company has a few hundred Lenovo laptops, we don't get Lenovo to come fix them, we send them back and get a repair. Same thing with the HP workstations at my last company of roughly 1300 users. I don't know why they don't get on-site repairs, but they don't.
Will you please read my comment. Fuck, read the TITLE to my comment. I am not talking about MacBooks. Perhaps that's how all this gets started, Non-Apple users see "Mac" and append "Book" in their minds and thus believe that the MacBook is the only machine Apple sells.
This argument goes from "silly" to utterly moot, as if you price a Dell or HP workstation (not "home computer", but under their SMB workstation sections) and go part-for-part, the Dell/HP easily comes out at hundreds more than a Mac Pro.
I've got a whole ranty article on this written yet not posted for some reason. It's actually a big reason why I have a Mac Pro and not an HP running Linux. The Mac was by far the better value, plus, you get OSX, which is great. I was a solely Linux desktop guy for 10 years before OSX, and I don't see it as "toyish" at all.
Worse, we might all have to become hippies. Think about that.
Everything Last.fm does generates lots of hate from the community. I've honestly let my subscription lapse for two reasons. First, they were bought out by Huge Record Conglomerate and I decided they don't need my money anymore, but more importantly, it got to the point where the only somewhat useful feature that was subscription-only was being able to see who visited my profile.
It seems this relates only to listening to Last.fm radio streaming, which I don't care about, and I'm in the US, which makes me care even less. But if you consider the amount of bandwidth that goes into streaming that content, if you listen to it for 8 hours a day I would consider it no different than an NPR subscription. Except that the money is going to Big Record Conglomerate, instead of, you know, NPR.
Another solution is "Treat everyone like a General, all the time" and you'll be fine no matter what environment you're in. If you speak to your janitorial staff the same way you speak to your CEO, you will gain respect in your organization. If you treat a Private like crap because he's a Private, he will think of you as Lieutenant Jerkass going forward, and probably won't be shy about his opinion.
Laptop LCD's are remarkably easy to open up and work with. You just need the right kind of screwdriver ^W hammer.
Fixed
Were you using IE to send your comment?
I forgot to point out that this does address both HTTP and FTP users, mod_proxy_balancer will balance FTP traffic as well.
I've set up Apache and mod_proxy_balancer for just this purpose. The sites don't have enough traffic for me to justify buying an F5 or Cisco CSS load balancer, so I use proxy balancer with a bunch of vhosts, it works great.
Add Keepalived and you can have redundant (though not stateful failover) load balancers on the super cheap.
For SSL it still works well. Give it a look, took all of an afternoon to set up a failover pair of servers. I don't know yet how much traffic it will take, but a single CPU 800Mhz server is doing a couple Mb/sec with no sweat for me.
1:) Looks like the go full screen by default when a video starts to play, which I think is different from the old version, but I didn't really use it much.
2:) Thank you for Scam School
I'm sorry to do it, but, yeah, *whoosh*.
:-)
I get that this guy isn't really a secret operative in some alien-human hybrid black-oil conspiracy. But the title of "Shadow Minister" does still imply such to those of us who watched a certain popular TV (TeleVision) show known as the X-Files in the 1990's.
It's OK though, because as we all know, jokes have been scientifically proven to be much funnier when they're fully explained, so for that I thank you
When your own Shadow Government thinks you've gone Too Far, perhaps you've fucking gone too far.
How about some individual projects? Amarok 2 came out in 2008. Other things that existed before but which improved mightily in '08 were:
Flock (released v2)
KDE Released 4x series, abysmal at first, but it's great now.
BasKet Probably doesn't belong on a Best Apps Ever list, but it is pretty useful. This existed before, but I just found it this year and it's great, and it has become a lot more stable for me through the year. Someone help get them to qt4!
There are lots of great apps out there that deserve some love this year.
A less scary way is to run whatever you want to run through a relatively large APC, and plug the APC into the generator. I found a 3000w APC was enough to power 15 machines long enough for me to get my homemade romex extension cable and get the generator running.
No love for Kinesis huh?
I've never pulled the trigger on any of these, but I am interested in the old Kinesis Evolution, which they don't seem to make, but which would mount to my chair and let you just let your arms dangle.
As it is, I just use the ones that came with my Macs. I've liked Microsoft keyboards in the past, but they're all sitting in a big pile because they take up too much space.
Exactly what I came here to say. They should be able to crank out enough windmills to fill the Great Plains states and generate till the cows come home.
His elliptical curve is cryptographically secure, he even says so on his web page. And it would be the only DNS solution that will pay you $500 if you site gets hijacked.
SSL is TCP only, DNSSEC is kind of like UDP-SSL for DNS. IIRC there is a proposal for TLS over UDP which would accomplish a similar thing, but I think the specific answer of DNSSEC accounts for all of this.
Because changing DNS to TCP globally would cause a lot of networks to grind to a halt. I believe DNSSEC allows you to keep things UDP and fast.
I believed the "tools" they refer to were the pimply high school kids (and pimply 35 year olds) that complete the steps on the flowchart. It's clear now that they've invented some overengineered "Sandwich Jig" to make up for the fact that they apparently have trouble teaching morons how to stack food on bread without spilling it all over the floor.
Rube Goldberg called, he has prior art.
In 1.4.9, yes, that works. In Amarok 2, the playlist is not tabular data like in 1.4.x, instead it's one "column" with each track having several fields in two rows per track, it looks like this.
The number to the left of the track name is the track number, which I don't care about. I sort of really prefer the tabular data since it let you move your eye straight down whichever column you're interested in, rather than have to include or reject things based on context.
Anyway, the context menu for these track entries only gives you the options to play, remove from playlist or edit the track details. Nowhere to add or remove fields.
Amarok has lost its main advantages (for me, personally) over iTunes in the 2.0 release.
1.4.x has:
-- Selectable fields (columns) in the playlist, you can select "last played time", which is great for weeding out stuff you've just heard in the last couple of days. iTunes has this, Amarok 1.4 had this, now Amarok 2 doesn't, and I personally miss it.
--SQLite collection.db, which allows you to very easily write applications which query your collection. Now they use an internal MySQL DB, which I'm sure I can move wherever and re-attach, but now I get to rewrite my stuff to use mysql instead of sqlite.
IMHO a music collection is the perfect vehicle for flat file DBs, my SQLite Amarok DB is like 11MB, for about 1500CDs. However, for Album Cover grabbing, it still WASTES iTunes, since it uses Amazon, and Amazon has way more CDs than iTunes does. Lyrics and Wikipedia integration are great, Last.FM integration is great.
Very happy to see this in a native package, I haven't run the latest from Rangerrick, I've been waiting for it to be Official. It's looking great on my SuSE desktops though.