I have noticed that Apple always picks parts carefully to make comparisons difficult or favour itself. If you relax the requirements slightly and just pick similar but not identical parts you can make huge savings.
The thing that always niggles at me is the idea of saving money on the computer. If all things are equal, sure, go less expensive.But I almost went down this road with a supervisor, who really wanted me to use a Windows solution to my Video and Audio work.
It's not only about cost savings. You say that you do video editing; ever heard of a Black Magic Decalink card? They are awesome if you're doing real-time capture, or broadcast grade output in which you need an alpha channel or genlocking. They're also PCI-Express. How about a Matrix Mojito Max system? Sure, they've got offboard variants, but if you have one of those $1,500 PCI-Express cards, you can do an impressive amount of stacked effects that won't hit your CPU nearly as much as the bundled plug-ins. At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this thread, what about storage? The external Thunderbolt RAID arrays cost upwards of $1,000, and that's not including the cost of the drives. It sounds like you're doing this in a corporate setting so it's probably less of a thing in your situation, but delivering Blu-Ray discs or DVDs requires yet another off-board purchase.
Saving money is but one aspect of the equation. The other is the fact that there is some pretty nice - and expensive - hardware choices out there that either are only possible internally, or are possible externally at greater expense with little to no other benefit.
Additionally, as a guy who cut his teeth on a Premiere workflow myself, the switching editing platforms conundrum is an understandable one - because I would have similar issues moving over to Final Cut if I were to try to. The Adobe Production Studio has always come with some form of audio editing, be it either Soundbooth (single track audio mastering somewhat resembling Sound Forge or Wavelab) or Audition (most of Soundbooth's features, but also does multitrack editing and better 5.1 mastering). Still, there is plenty of value in muscle memory and previously done project files that isn't always obvious, so I do feel that.
All of that being said, yes I edit on Windows, and no, I haven't had a major issue with that...but that's also because I administer Windows systems professionally as well. I'm not at all suggesting that getting a Mac Pro was a bad idea in your specific case (existing knowledge, presumably existing copies of Final Cut), but "saving money" isn't the sole reason to get a Windows-based alternative. It's the combination of "exactly the hardware I need, even if it's not possible on a Mac", "ditching the hardware I don't, even if it's required on a Mac", and "between the two I can usually save a significant amount of money" that make a Windows system enticing.
P.S. To answer your question as to "who's going to stake their job on the PC working right", I know that Origin PC is incredible in that regard, and that B&H builds turnkey systems which also include some high quality support as well. Just throwing it out there that there are ways to have your cake and eat it, too.
You realise that running 4x 256 GB SSDs in RAID0 (to keep up with the PCIe 1TB SSD) that you have quadrupled your expected failure rate, yes?
I never intended to use OCZ drives:-P.
But seriously, I do understand that that's the case. It was a quick and dirty example, and it's really Pandora's box that can be sliced any number of ways. For example, a pair of 500GB drives is still cheaper than Apple's upgrade cost. For cost parity, My local Microcenter has had a healthy supply of refurbed Corsair M4's on the shelf for $130 a pop; you could buy half a dozen of them, plus an LSI RAID controller to connect 'em, and then you've got 1TB of storage in RAID-6. Also for just-a-smidge-higher-than-cost-parity, Samsung's got 1TB drives you can put in a RAID-1 in order to halve your expected failure rate, with a single drive still being hundreds of dollars cheaper than Apple's cost. All of this ignores the elephant in the room, that lots of people - including me, on the very computer on which I write this response - are very well taken care of with a 256GB system drive and a terabyte (or two, or three, or four) of spinning rust storage, which is obviously significantly cheaper than an all-or-nothing SSD approach.
The point I was trying to make is that the Mac Pro doesn't even have these as conceivable options. If you want a terabyte of storage, you're paying through the nose for it. If you want more than a terabyte, you'll need a thunderbolt cable. Depending on how much more storage you need (i.e. if you need some sort of storage tower to hold 4/6/8 drives [that could otherwise be fit, along with the rest of the computer, in a regular computer case]), you'll need to spend at least another $1,000 on one of those, and you'll still need drives on top of that. For all of this added expense, the benefit was the form factor, and ONLY the form factor.
While you can build one cheaper using DYI parts, however the time spent in wages, for souring the hardware, software and doing the software can add up very quickly
. Once you've got Windows and drivers installed, you're at a relatively even playing field. Whether you're installing Premiere or Final Cut, you're still stuck doing software installations no matter what you buy.
Then there is also support and maintenance - will having a custom built machine cost more in the long run?
The more you spent on the machine - the bigger the margin for the DYI version - however at the end of the day - is the cost worth it for business?
The crux of the difference - and why the comparison is all but impossible to make - is the fact that you get to truly choose your parts, based on exactly what you need. Entry level Quadro card? $600 or so for one of them. Uncle-Sam-is-picking-up-the-tab model? $5,000 each, I think they support triple SLI.
64GB of ECC RAM? For a handful of use cases, sure. for the vast majority of workstation work? 16 or 32GB can usually suffice, and saves a whole lot of coin.
1TB of SSD? There's that...and then there's a quartet of 256GB SSDs with a spanned partition or RAID-0, possibly with another quartet of 3TByte SATA drives in a RAID5, the latter of which is possible with either no expenditure (depending on the motherboard), or limited expenditure (anywhere from an inexpensive host bus adapter to an IBM or Adaptec RAID controller), which still ends up being less expensive than having to get one of those Thunderbolt drive bay towers that cost twice the price of a half decent SATA RAID controller. Even without that, Thunderbolt drives made by LaCie are nearly double the price of internal Western Digital drives, and you'll still need to shell out $40-$60 for cables.
Super skinny case? Yeah, that's Apple's thing. Cases of every possible shape and size, anywhere from cheap, flimsy aluminum, to completely transparent plexiglass to neon lights to almost fully soundproofed to half a dozen case fans to having room for 13 hard drives or half a dozen Blu-Ray burners? Apple will never have that number of options.
The question of whether it's worth the cost really depends on what the business need is. If the business need is for cubic inches, then the Mac Pro is about the best desktop computing experience you're going to get per square inch. If any higher amount of storage is necessary, the pendulum quickly swings in favor of the PC route. If an optical drive is necessary (yes kids, there are video producers who still give DVDs or Blu-Ray discs to their clients), external drives are invariably more costly and slower than internal drives. If you've got something like a Presonus Firepod or any number of other Firewire peripherals (remember, Firewire was Apple's darling before Thunderbolt, so there's plenty of very expensive add-on gear that uses it), you're adding adapters for those on the Mac side, while plenty of PC motherboards still support it - and if they don't, a PCI(e) card that can support several pieces of hardware costs about the same as a single adapter from Apple.
The way I ultimately figure it is this: If Apple's product, as it ships, fits the bill, get it. No sense in spending time and money for redundant work. If you're looking for even the slightest amount of hardware variation, or you need any meaningful amount of onboard storage, or you can part with just a little bit of performance or the ECCness of its RAM or a nice GeForce card will fit your needs...it's incredibly trivial to avoid parting with that kind of money.
If you're looking to simply sync files between computers, Bittorrent Sync has been excellent for me. It's like Dropbox without the centralized storage I don't own, and it runs on Windows, OSX, I-think-Linux, and definitely BSD, since I have my laptop happily syncing with my FreeNAS box. It's simple, it's effective, and it doesn't make a mess. The only thing that OwnCloud does better (in theory, anyway) is the browser access part. BT Sync doesn't do browser access in any capacity, except the config panel on the BSD version. OwnCloud gives media playback, file browsing, and, apparently, document editing, in a browser if you point to the server. At the same time, the caveat to OwnCloud is the fact that there must be a server, as opposed to it being optional with BT Sync.
Only the residue left? So you could add it to water and turn it into wine?
Given the nature of the sludge that was likely found, I'd wager that turning this into wine would involve a similarly miraculous feat as cutting the middleman and turning the water into wine directly.
And I think in most of those examples we have agreed that no matter how much it pisses us off and we know it is unethical, companies have no obligation to not rip you off: buyer beware.
The challenge in many of these instances is knowing, at what point, the sales rep is lying. Yes, you can go to Best Buy and buy a $50 HDMI cable. Even if it's the least expensive one they carry, it doesn't mean that they lied to you by not carrying a $5 or $10 cable. If the "speed up your pc by clicking this button" thing is attempted, and it doesn't speed up the computer, what's the difference between that button not working on that particular machine (but has worked on others), vs. a generally-well-meaning technician who genuinely can't get any meaningful amount of performance enhancement out of three hour's worth of work? Answer: the folks behind "the button" went into the deal/knowing/ that their button didn't work (or, at best, worked at a lower rate than their claims), the tech did not. Your Comcast example also involves a lie, albeit one that hinges upon the definition of "need". The warranty situation would obviously be obnoxious to not cover damage that the salesman led the buyer to believe it covered, but if the salesman said "it covers X", when only W, Y, and Z are covered, it's fraud.
Unethical companies are obviously under no obligation to cost themselves money to the benefit of their customers. However, it is a core tenet of the buyer/seller relationship for advertisements to be accurate, and promises to be upheld. Without these expectations in place, it's impossible to conduct good business, for buyers would pay with fool's gold, and sellers would sell snake oil. The word "scam", almost by definition, indicates that these expectations have not been met.
A good and logical counter-argument. I respond with this. What about a non-google solution?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flvd5gVT7fg...but seriously, a Google Glass-like apparatus independent of Google is technology of an entirely different order - only a handful of companies can meaningfully augment reality with internet data. Now if you're talking about something to the effect of "wearable video camera but stores everything to a MicroSD card", then most of the other issues still apply - no notice, and questionable motivation by the wearer.
Something you have much more total control of the data that flows in and out of it.
The use of the second person here is the crux of the issue: is "you" referring to "the wearer", or "the individuals being recorded"? If the former, the above issues are still in force, motives are still questionable, and it's entirely possible that one of the motives is "uploading to Google by hand". If "the individuals being recorded", then the implementation gets messy, and even if that is somehow solved, then if you have two people recorded, one wants the video uploaded to Facebook and the other does not, who wins?
Is it ok if i do face-matching on my own hardware to build a better picture of who i come near day-to-day?
Same problems - questionable motives of the wearer. Now if I were somehow confident that your only intention was to see how many people you pass by on the street more than once in a week, then yeah, I wouldn't have a problem with it. If you're a marketing rep for Clearchannel counting that data in order to directly state the number of impressions a given video billboard will get, then I'm a bit less enthused. This completely sidesteps the "think of the children" and "rule 34" issues presented...and even if I asked a given Glass wearer what their motive was, and assumed they were 100% truthful, I won't know who's the curious one who doesn't trust anything to the cloud, and who's the sketchy person who streams to Google by choice, until it's far too late.
Can i share the data?
Again, this is where messes come in. "with who", "why", "what will happen to it when it's over", and "even if I trust you, the other five people I do not" issues are still at play.
Aggregate it?
Amongst the issues is how we define "aggregate". If by "aggregate" you mean "compare my own footage with...my own footage", then sure...back in my day, we called that 'video editing'. Tying that in with a database of Facebook profiles? uploading data for distributed analysis amongst 10,000 other glass wearers who are curious as to who passes the same people in a day? Selling videos of city life as royalty free B-roll for news broadcasters?
Anonymize it?
If you're blurring everyone's face for the sake of anonymity, then it kinda defeats the purpose of videotaping in the first place in most respects.
Where are the lines?
Herein lies the true issue at hand. None presently exist. There is no societal construct, no precedence, and no feasibly-enforceable-legislation to adequately define the lines. Thus, we end up with what loosely amounts to anarchy - "I", the person being recorded, have a certain set of standards, and "you", the person recording, have another. When these collide, who wins, and why? In a 1:1 situation like that, I guess the answer would be "the one who's most imposing", which is a pretty poor set of circumstances under which to define what's socially acceptable. I'm certainly not opposed to the questions being posed, and discussions being had, but like I said - this is the heart of the matter.
Good luck with that. You lost this fight decades ago when CCTV was installed publicly and privately.
Slight difference...
The DVR systems that exist in bars and restaurants and convenience stores are generally isolated. They exist to ensure a neutral account of something that happened in the event of a dispute. They record to a tape or a hard drive that is usually isolated in its access to the owner themselves. They generally cover entrances, exits, and cash registers. In most states, a notice must be conspicuously posted.
Google Glass users are inherently connected to Google's services, with data easily categorized and indexed by Google, added to a massively interconnected database involving any number of relations and correlations. Glass exists for the benefit of the user, who's definition of "benefit" is undefined, at best. Things that are uploaded to Google are available to whoever Google deems appropriate, regardless of the wishes of anyone else - including the person taking the video and geolocating it. Glass is pointed wherever the viewer intends it to be pointed, and by time there is any "notice" to those being recorded, it is too late.
You can argue that the existence of CCTV has minimized the notion of privacy, and I can't disagree. Even so, being on a video that's only accessible by the owner of the camera system via court order and "geolocated" by the location of the establishment itself is entirely different than being in the field of view of someone who is wearing Google Glass.
If you're only changing out the hard disk or the RAM, you lack imagination. I bought a Thinkpad T61p off eBay for $99. For another $137, I doubled the RAM, got an Intel 6300N wireless chipset, extended battery, and DVD burner (which could have been a Blu-Ray drive if I wanted). The screen has a line through it now; I may need to spend another $50-$60 to change it out. I've had laptops with failed screen inverters that I've swapped out.
Why not max out RAM now? because 32GB of RAM is stupid expensive now, in a year it'll likely be half the price. No sense in letting the OEM mark it up and throw away your money. Also, RAM and hard disks are the two things most likely to die in a laptop, so being able to change them out is a VERY good thing. Extra storage capacity may not be immediately needed, but be incredibly useful a year or two out.
Saying that unibody = reliable is not necessarily a direct correlation. There may be some overlap, but the problem is that if something does break, you're completely screwed to the point where one must really, REALLY hope that Apple will hook you up, because Microcenter cannot.
Yes, because it would have been a much better proposition to start churning out more disposable Android phones in an already over saturated market. At least wp8 gives them some market differential.
Actually, it would have. It's a much better sell to have a 41 megapixel camera that can upload the pictures it takes to Instagram. They could differentiate themselves in the market by offering Nokia Music and Nokia Maps, yes, things duplicated by Google to some extent, but still worthy properties to help differentiate themselves. Nokia was legendary for having phones that were difficult to break, and while Lumias might not be as indestructible as some of their older candy bar phones, even if they beat out iPhones and Galaxy units by 15%, that would be significant enough to differentiate them.
Finally, if they wanted to stand out and not spend a mint, they could have given consumers the option, at least - allowing users to install either WP8 or Android, depending on which suited them better. Yes, it's a support nightmare and I understand that..but if we're talking about differentiating features, then you don't get much more different from the current crop of phones than to have the ability to pick your OS.
Being different is good. Being different in a way that the market has generally deemed undesirable is not a way to increase sales.
The majority of every long legal text is there to be explicitly precise about every detail of how it's supposed to work. As new loopholes are found in existing terms, new language is used in future texts to avoid them.
See, that's why I figure that the best way to address the situation is to divide up a bill like this:
Paragraph 1: The mission statement. What is the essence of the bill, and what is it ultimately trying to accomplish in broadest terms? Paragraph 2: The general rules. State what the bill says is or is not acceptable, as it would apply to the overwhelming majority of cases. Rules that do not directly reflect the mission statement are dismissed from the bill (no more riders or earmarks). Paragraph 3: Funding and enforcement. Who is paying for it, and who is ensuring that the rule is enforced? Paragraph 4: Duration. How long will this bill last before it needs to be renewed? 15 years, tops. Pages 2-10: Exceptions and legal speak. These are the pages intended to close loopholes, answer for as many exotic cases as possible, and be the part that is referenced if a court case needs examining. All statements made here must explicitly clarify and apply to Paragraph 2, and are subject to Paragraphs 3 and 4.
This way, the bill is divided up into the parts that are legible by any reasonable person, and the parts that ensure that define the rules of the court cases involving more unique situations.
1.) Microsoft backing CD-ROM at the time isn't as horrifying at it might seem. If they were backing CD-ROM in 2013, yes, that's dumb. In 1992 though, when 28.8kbps was considered "pretty quick" for a home user, there was no way that a browser-based Encarta would have been a good thing. Steam couldn't have gained any meaningful traction in a dial-up world, and anyone who would want to go online to write a book report for school would have been laughed out of the room in 1992. Proliferant broadband makes backing optical media a bad idea today, but check out some of the software that Microsoft made in 1992 - CD-ROM was the only way to do it.
2.) Microsoft "missed the boat" with search because they started out following the "Yahoo Model" instead of the "Google Model". Each had good points and bad points, but they tried selling a landing page to customers that wanted more advanced and powerful search parameters, and assumed that people would search in computer-friendly ways, rather than adapting their computers to searching in people-friendly ways. Bing is still pretty good for pop culture searches, but pathetic at searching even Microsoft's own knowledge base for Windows and Office errors. Depending on what you're looking for, this might be an acceptable tradeoff.
3.) If you're referring to freely available operating systems, office suites, and server software, you're half-right. An alternative OS is free. An alternative OS that runs Serato or AutoCAD or ProTools or Photoshop is not. An alternative office suite is free. An alternative office suite that supports any one of the dozens of very-expensive, business-running plug-ins like F9 or Crystal Reports is not. Server software is free. Server software that runs Exchange is not. "Free" is great where it can be great, but "free" can also be "incredibly expensive" as well.
4.) Xbox does indeed worry me with regards to its ability to spy. I wonder if some sort of simple mechanism that gives a physical on/off switch to an ethernet port will catch on...
5.) I have been hoping that ReactOS would gain solid traction for some time; in my opinion it's the thing that has the most possibility of actually dethroning Windows, because it's intended to be a drop-in replacement for Windows itself, using the same drivers and software models, for better or worse. However, their inability to get out of the "alpha" stage (something I'll certainly blame Microsoft for making difficult) means that the title giving Microsoft an honest run for their money is still a long way's off. Additionally, what Microsoft has going for them is a whole lot of people with a whole lot of procedural memory. People who understand the concepts of word processing have a minimal learning curve going between Microsoft Word and WordPerfect and LibreOffice Writer and Abiword. People who "know Word" will never switch. The OSS groups have diametrically opposed objectives here: the more they look like Office, the more flack they get from existing users who "would have used Word if they wanted Word", while the more uniquely designed the program is, the greater learning curve from users who only know to "click the blue 'W'".
6.) "Fast enough" processing seems to creep up more quickly than most people seem to realize. Anyone here want to give their mom a P4 with 512MB of RAM for a main desktop? A few might, using Puppy Linux or similar, but for the most part, single-core processors aren't powerful enough for things anymore. For most people, Flash is indeed the most CPU intensive application their computer realizes, but even casual users will notice choppiness on Candy Crush Saga. "Good Enough Audio" is effectively free now and offboard audio interfaces are indeed a niche space, but that was one of the first problems solved with desktop computing; "good enough audio" easily existed in 1994; the only place left for it to go was miniaturized and priced to nothingness; audio playback processing has been minimally processor intensive for decades. GPU performance st
I needed to view a Word document in a hurry. I got a copy of QuickOffice from Amazon when it was a free app-of-the-day last year, but opted to try Google's more recent flavor. Google insisted I logged in, and refused to do anything if I just wanted to use a Word document on my SD card. There was NO reason for this. I, for one, disapprove of this change, regardless of any of the others.
Most of the people I know who dislike E-mail don't like the "formality" of having to write complete sentences
I think this is basically it. With e-mail, it's still the digital analogue of a handwritten letter. Punctuation and sentence structure still counts. The amount of grammatical mistakes that my friends make on Facebook and via SMS is outright annoying most times; it's almost as if they willingly ignore things they were taught in third grade in the name of their own convenience. This is normal via SMS and Facebook, but not so much via e-mail.
The thing I dislike is when people have mile-long e-mail signatures that no one in the history of humanity has ever bothered to read.
IMHO, the whole Email thing is past its time. Letting just anyone send means spammers will. When people ask me for my email, I now give out a website where they can set me a message... after they login. But I don't give them an access name/password unless they ask for one (and no one knows to do that).
So by your very definition, few people, if any, contact you. The concept of human contact, even through digital means, will never be "past its time". Does E-mail have its issues? Of course it does. So does the phone. So does texting. So does BBM. So does postal mail. So does Facebook. The question is which set of pros and cons are enough to warrant the use of a particular means of communication. E-mail's strength is its sheer ubiquity and openness. Its weakness is its inability to intelligently determine desired communication and undesired communication. For most people, this is far more acceptable than a system that requires someone to contact you in order to have them contact you.
First, their Mac line will still run Intel CPUs, while the iOS line runs ARM based processors. You can't really merge the two for various reasons.
While another individual responded to this better, the point of being a "functional" difference in the context in which I was suggesting it could be better defined as "related to the end user experience independent of GUI-explicit elements". Most end users would believe Tim Cook when he says "It's fast", and that would basically be that (as long as they delivered, of course).
Second, the Macs are "open" devices, while the iPad is a walled garden. This is a fundamental problem that cannot be simply washed away. Either you run x86 binaries on iPad freely, or you run walled garden apps on yoru Mac.
What I was effectively getting at was that the Apple platform is indeed headed to walled garden apps. Now by "walled garden apps" I do also include things like Maya and Logic Pro and Aperture, not merely Angry Birds and Pixlr...but "walled garden" just the same.
Don't underestimate the implications of the second point - it would mean either the iPad runs applications under emulation but unsigned, or the Mac runs signed iPad apps. The latter doesn't accomplish much, while the former is a pretty huge thing (you can get around the App Store).
Why couldn't applications be both signed and emulated? Why couldn't a theoretical Macbook Air include an A7 processor to run iPad apps? Why couldn't Apple include an "auto recompile" in the SDK to allow developers to make an iPad app that will run on a MacBook Air? I don't pretend to be anything but ignorant in this regard, the point I'm grasping at is that I can't imagine Tim Cook saying, "you could run PowerPC programs on Intel chips that were half as powerful as what's running the current crop of iPhones, but running Temple Run on today's x86 chips is impractical? aww shucks, that's a real bummer."
There is no way Apple can really lock down the Mac platform, either - when jailbreaking is as simple as taking out the SSD and modifying the contents on a different machine.
1.) Because "taking out the SSD" means "prying open the unit and desoldering". 2.) Because even if it didn't, there are things called "Secure Boot" and "Signed Bootloaders" that seems to be pretty good at making a mess of things when it can't be disabled.
And there's enough software out there that losing compatibility with OS X is not an option, either.
There's enough Firewire based hardware to make a whole lot of film and music professionals pissed at Apple; between a $2,000 Macbook and a $10,000 video camera, which do you think is getting the boot? "It depends" is the correct answer, and for some, the Mac platform was the one to get shown the door. I'm not saying that future Macs will be utterly incapable of running anything but iPad apps, but I am saying that I don't see Apple remaining open "because Slashdot thinks it's a good idea". Better example: Rosetta emulation. There were plenty of incredibly expensive pieces of software that were written for the platform, but after a very long time, Apple deprecated it. what gave Apple the ability to do this was to provide an alternative path, wait until the overwhelming majority of high ticket software vendors had a release or two that supported Intel natively, then remove Rosetta going forward. This allows for "steps" - first, the writing is on the wall so that users can eyeball upgrades. Next, users can still use their existing hardware and OS releases, but as clock speeds and RAM amounts tick up, the performance of the aging machine along with the availability of new releases of the software makes it a "good idea" to get all the new features and better performance. By time Rosetta was deprecated, it wasn't missed enough to cause a revolt.
And the default option is to allow signed (but not app-store) apps and a
In a few years, what will really be the functional difference between the Macbook Air and an iPad with a clamshell keyboard? Additionally, as Apple continues to grow their marketshare in the laptop segment, OSX in its original iterations will become a more lucrative target for malware. Now before anyone gets pissed at me for saying that, I chose the word "lucrative" for a reason. 8 times out of ten, people with Macbooks will:
1.) Have some money to spend. 2.) Label themselves as "not computer people". 3.) Be of the persuasion that Macs can't get viruses.
Now yes, I know there are plenty of slashdotters here who got a hand-me-down Mac from work, spend as much time in the Terminal as in Safari, and run Sophos on it because you never know. However, let's say that these qualifications apply to even a third of the people who buy a Macbook, and pretend you're a malware writer. You've got millions of people who you KNOW have money, who you KNOW are not technologically savvy enough to discern a real warning message from a fraudulent one, and who are all but certain that they are invulnerable to the very type of attack you plan on performing. It sounds like the perfect storm to me.
Apple is aware that these types of people are amongst their customers, and in many cases, amongst their loudest evangelists - you'll never get better advertising than to say "Other computers were complicated, but I can finally Facebook my kids!". For these kinds of people, the walled garden is a feature, not a bug. For these people, there needs to be a solution. Apple gave one: the Mac App Store.
At first, it was optional. Then, it was a part of the OS. Then, it was enabled by default. Then, you get a warning if you turn off the OS's blocking of sideloading.
Meanwhile, Apple is making money hand over fist on software for their mobile platform. For the majority of their demographic, being able to run iOS apps on their laptop is a quantum leap forward.
Even if they don't merge, there will be a point at which the lines are so blurry it won't matter.
Surely things may change if and when I actually get my hands on one of these, but it seems like most of the core features could still work just fine by blocking access to nest.com at the router level. Sure, most folks won't actually run out and do that, but most folks don't care as much about privacy as they say they do...which leaves the Slashdot crowd, most of whom certainly know how to prevent WAN access to stuff on their LAN. If you're particularly paranoid, why not dust off the ancient 802.11g router and let the Nest devices connect to that at the exclusion of the actual internet connection?
Can anyone confirm or refute whether this unit will work exclusively on a LAN? Because I would love a smoke alarm that will double as a conditional night light and give me a warning before it scares the crap out of anyone when I open the oven.
However, I did not know about the ten year operational life of smoke detectors; being as the one in my bedroom is nearly thirty years old, perhaps I should look for...something...
I generally agree with you, but I would add that air travel and communication are pretty clearly subject to "interstate commerce" regulation
Though I phrased it poorly, I was attempting to say just that. What I was trying to say was that the FAA and FCC very clearly fall under the interstate commerce clause because they explicitly do regulate interstate commerce, but they wouldn't have been stated specifically in the same way that the post office was in the Constitution for fairly obvious reasons.
1.) Wired ethernet will give you more than that; as another responder said you're likely to be limited by the write speed of your storage devices. If you really want to test it, create a RAM disk on both machines, and transfer a file from one RAM disk to another - you'll see yourself saturate the line pretty quickly.
2.) Wireless is inherently half-duplex, because you can't transmit and receive at the same time on the same frequency. Dual-band technology was supposed to help out with that, but it only works if everything on the LAN supports it. Else, one band will be more crowded than the other, and messes will still be made. Additionally, the more devices you've got running on your wireless network, the greater a collision domain you've got.
3.) Pursuant to 1 and 2, when you've got large numbers of devices, it's where wired really shines. no one gets a good signal with a hundred other access points and endpoints on a LAN, but if you've got everyone wired to a half decent switch, everyone can communicate much more efficiently. Additionally, you may be seeing poor speeds if your gigabit switch is low quality and has a poor amount of backplane bandwidth.
afterall google revealed a good amount on how they go about building their data centers and keeping it cool. But then again, contractors...
Rule #1 of government spending: why by one, when you can have two at twice the price? Rule #2 of government spending: a penny saved is a spending oversight.
Slashdot Mirror
I have noticed that Apple always picks parts carefully to make comparisons difficult or favour itself. If you relax the requirements slightly and just pick similar but not identical parts you can make huge savings.
The thing that always niggles at me is the idea of saving money on the computer. If all things are equal, sure, go less expensive.But I almost went down this road with a supervisor, who really wanted me to use a Windows solution to my Video and Audio work.
It's not only about cost savings. You say that you do video editing; ever heard of a Black Magic Decalink card? They are awesome if you're doing real-time capture, or broadcast grade output in which you need an alpha channel or genlocking. They're also PCI-Express. How about a Matrix Mojito Max system? Sure, they've got offboard variants, but if you have one of those $1,500 PCI-Express cards, you can do an impressive amount of stacked effects that won't hit your CPU nearly as much as the bundled plug-ins. At the risk of sounding like a broken record on this thread, what about storage? The external Thunderbolt RAID arrays cost upwards of $1,000, and that's not including the cost of the drives. It sounds like you're doing this in a corporate setting so it's probably less of a thing in your situation, but delivering Blu-Ray discs or DVDs requires yet another off-board purchase.
Saving money is but one aspect of the equation. The other is the fact that there is some pretty nice - and expensive - hardware choices out there that either are only possible internally, or are possible externally at greater expense with little to no other benefit.
Additionally, as a guy who cut his teeth on a Premiere workflow myself, the switching editing platforms conundrum is an understandable one - because I would have similar issues moving over to Final Cut if I were to try to. The Adobe Production Studio has always come with some form of audio editing, be it either Soundbooth (single track audio mastering somewhat resembling Sound Forge or Wavelab) or Audition (most of Soundbooth's features, but also does multitrack editing and better 5.1 mastering). Still, there is plenty of value in muscle memory and previously done project files that isn't always obvious, so I do feel that.
All of that being said, yes I edit on Windows, and no, I haven't had a major issue with that...but that's also because I administer Windows systems professionally as well. I'm not at all suggesting that getting a Mac Pro was a bad idea in your specific case (existing knowledge, presumably existing copies of Final Cut), but "saving money" isn't the sole reason to get a Windows-based alternative. It's the combination of "exactly the hardware I need, even if it's not possible on a Mac", "ditching the hardware I don't, even if it's required on a Mac", and "between the two I can usually save a significant amount of money" that make a Windows system enticing.
P.S. To answer your question as to "who's going to stake their job on the PC working right", I know that Origin PC is incredible in that regard, and that B&H builds turnkey systems which also include some high quality support as well. Just throwing it out there that there are ways to have your cake and eat it, too.
You realise that running 4x 256 GB SSDs in RAID0 (to keep up with the PCIe 1TB SSD) that you have quadrupled your expected failure rate, yes?
I never intended to use OCZ drives :-P.
But seriously, I do understand that that's the case. It was a quick and dirty example, and it's really Pandora's box that can be sliced any number of ways. For example, a pair of 500GB drives is still cheaper than Apple's upgrade cost. For cost parity, My local Microcenter has had a healthy supply of refurbed Corsair M4's on the shelf for $130 a pop; you could buy half a dozen of them, plus an LSI RAID controller to connect 'em, and then you've got 1TB of storage in RAID-6. Also for just-a-smidge-higher-than-cost-parity, Samsung's got 1TB drives you can put in a RAID-1 in order to halve your expected failure rate, with a single drive still being hundreds of dollars cheaper than Apple's cost. All of this ignores the elephant in the room, that lots of people - including me, on the very computer on which I write this response - are very well taken care of with a 256GB system drive and a terabyte (or two, or three, or four) of spinning rust storage, which is obviously significantly cheaper than an all-or-nothing SSD approach.
The point I was trying to make is that the Mac Pro doesn't even have these as conceivable options. If you want a terabyte of storage, you're paying through the nose for it. If you want more than a terabyte, you'll need a thunderbolt cable. Depending on how much more storage you need (i.e. if you need some sort of storage tower to hold 4/6/8 drives [that could otherwise be fit, along with the rest of the computer, in a regular computer case]), you'll need to spend at least another $1,000 on one of those, and you'll still need drives on top of that. For all of this added expense, the benefit was the form factor, and ONLY the form factor.
This is a business level product.
While you can build one cheaper using DYI parts, however the time spent in wages, for souring the hardware, software and doing the software can add up very quickly
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Once you've got Windows and drivers installed, you're at a relatively even playing field. Whether you're installing Premiere or Final Cut, you're still stuck doing software installations no matter what you buy.
Then there is also support and maintenance - will having a custom built machine cost more in the long run?
The more you spent on the machine - the bigger the margin for the DYI version - however at the end of the day - is the cost worth it for business?
The crux of the difference - and why the comparison is all but impossible to make - is the fact that you get to truly choose your parts, based on exactly what you need. Entry level Quadro card? $600 or so for one of them. Uncle-Sam-is-picking-up-the-tab model? $5,000 each, I think they support triple SLI.
64GB of ECC RAM? For a handful of use cases, sure. for the vast majority of workstation work? 16 or 32GB can usually suffice, and saves a whole lot of coin.
1TB of SSD? There's that...and then there's a quartet of 256GB SSDs with a spanned partition or RAID-0, possibly with another quartet of 3TByte SATA drives in a RAID5, the latter of which is possible with either no expenditure (depending on the motherboard), or limited expenditure (anywhere from an inexpensive host bus adapter to an IBM or Adaptec RAID controller), which still ends up being less expensive than having to get one of those Thunderbolt drive bay towers that cost twice the price of a half decent SATA RAID controller. Even without that, Thunderbolt drives made by LaCie are nearly double the price of internal Western Digital drives, and you'll still need to shell out $40-$60 for cables.
Super skinny case? Yeah, that's Apple's thing. Cases of every possible shape and size, anywhere from cheap, flimsy aluminum, to completely transparent plexiglass to neon lights to almost fully soundproofed to half a dozen case fans to having room for 13 hard drives or half a dozen Blu-Ray burners? Apple will never have that number of options.
The question of whether it's worth the cost really depends on what the business need is. If the business need is for cubic inches, then the Mac Pro is about the best desktop computing experience you're going to get per square inch. If any higher amount of storage is necessary, the pendulum quickly swings in favor of the PC route. If an optical drive is necessary (yes kids, there are video producers who still give DVDs or Blu-Ray discs to their clients), external drives are invariably more costly and slower than internal drives. If you've got something like a Presonus Firepod or any number of other Firewire peripherals (remember, Firewire was Apple's darling before Thunderbolt, so there's plenty of very expensive add-on gear that uses it), you're adding adapters for those on the Mac side, while plenty of PC motherboards still support it - and if they don't, a PCI(e) card that can support several pieces of hardware costs about the same as a single adapter from Apple.
The way I ultimately figure it is this: If Apple's product, as it ships, fits the bill, get it. No sense in spending time and money for redundant work. If you're looking for even the slightest amount of hardware variation, or you need any meaningful amount of onboard storage, or you can part with just a little bit of performance or the ECCness of its RAM or a nice GeForce card will fit your needs...it's incredibly trivial to avoid parting with that kind of money.
If you're looking to simply sync files between computers, Bittorrent Sync has been excellent for me. It's like Dropbox without the centralized storage I don't own, and it runs on Windows, OSX, I-think-Linux, and definitely BSD, since I have my laptop happily syncing with my FreeNAS box. It's simple, it's effective, and it doesn't make a mess. The only thing that OwnCloud does better (in theory, anyway) is the browser access part. BT Sync doesn't do browser access in any capacity, except the config panel on the BSD version. OwnCloud gives media playback, file browsing, and, apparently, document editing, in a browser if you point to the server. At the same time, the caveat to OwnCloud is the fact that there must be a server, as opposed to it being optional with BT Sync.
Facebook is the new Google.
Google is the new Apple.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
Microsoft is the new IBM.
IBM is the new Xerox.
Only the residue left? So you could add it to water and turn it into wine?
Given the nature of the sludge that was likely found, I'd wager that turning this into wine would involve a similarly miraculous feat as cutting the middleman and turning the water into wine directly.
And I think in most of those examples we have agreed that no matter how much it pisses us off and we know it is unethical, companies have no obligation to not rip you off: buyer beware.
The challenge in many of these instances is knowing, at what point, the sales rep is lying. Yes, you can go to Best Buy and buy a $50 HDMI cable. Even if it's the least expensive one they carry, it doesn't mean that they lied to you by not carrying a $5 or $10 cable. If the "speed up your pc by clicking this button" thing is attempted, and it doesn't speed up the computer, what's the difference between that button not working on that particular machine (but has worked on others), vs. a generally-well-meaning technician who genuinely can't get any meaningful amount of performance enhancement out of three hour's worth of work? Answer: the folks behind "the button" went into the deal /knowing/ that their button didn't work (or, at best, worked at a lower rate than their claims), the tech did not. Your Comcast example also involves a lie, albeit one that hinges upon the definition of "need". The warranty situation would obviously be obnoxious to not cover damage that the salesman led the buyer to believe it covered, but if the salesman said "it covers X", when only W, Y, and Z are covered, it's fraud.
Unethical companies are obviously under no obligation to cost themselves money to the benefit of their customers. However, it is a core tenet of the buyer/seller relationship for advertisements to be accurate, and promises to be upheld. Without these expectations in place, it's impossible to conduct good business, for buyers would pay with fool's gold, and sellers would sell snake oil. The word "scam", almost by definition, indicates that these expectations have not been met.
But legislators don't even know what an API is, so they wouldn't know a good spec from a cookbook.
Especially since they would both be called "To Serve Man".
A good and logical counter-argument. I respond with this. What about a non-google solution?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flvd5gVT7fg ...but seriously, a Google Glass-like apparatus independent of Google is technology of an entirely different order - only a handful of companies can meaningfully augment reality with internet data. Now if you're talking about something to the effect of "wearable video camera but stores everything to a MicroSD card", then most of the other issues still apply - no notice, and questionable motivation by the wearer.
Something you have much more total control of the data that flows in and out of it.
The use of the second person here is the crux of the issue: is "you" referring to "the wearer", or "the individuals being recorded"? If the former, the above issues are still in force, motives are still questionable, and it's entirely possible that one of the motives is "uploading to Google by hand". If "the individuals being recorded", then the implementation gets messy, and even if that is somehow solved, then if you have two people recorded, one wants the video uploaded to Facebook and the other does not, who wins?
Is it ok if i do face-matching on my own hardware to build a better picture of who i come near day-to-day?
Same problems - questionable motives of the wearer. Now if I were somehow confident that your only intention was to see how many people you pass by on the street more than once in a week, then yeah, I wouldn't have a problem with it. If you're a marketing rep for Clearchannel counting that data in order to directly state the number of impressions a given video billboard will get, then I'm a bit less enthused. This completely sidesteps the "think of the children" and "rule 34" issues presented...and even if I asked a given Glass wearer what their motive was, and assumed they were 100% truthful, I won't know who's the curious one who doesn't trust anything to the cloud, and who's the sketchy person who streams to Google by choice, until it's far too late.
Can i share the data?
Again, this is where messes come in. "with who", "why", "what will happen to it when it's over", and "even if I trust you, the other five people I do not" issues are still at play.
Aggregate it?
Amongst the issues is how we define "aggregate". If by "aggregate" you mean "compare my own footage with...my own footage", then sure...back in my day, we called that 'video editing'. Tying that in with a database of Facebook profiles? uploading data for distributed analysis amongst 10,000 other glass wearers who are curious as to who passes the same people in a day? Selling videos of city life as royalty free B-roll for news broadcasters?
Anonymize it?
If you're blurring everyone's face for the sake of anonymity, then it kinda defeats the purpose of videotaping in the first place in most respects.
Where are the lines?
Herein lies the true issue at hand. None presently exist. There is no societal construct, no precedence, and no feasibly-enforceable-legislation to adequately define the lines. Thus, we end up with what loosely amounts to anarchy - "I", the person being recorded, have a certain set of standards, and "you", the person recording, have another. When these collide, who wins, and why? In a 1:1 situation like that, I guess the answer would be "the one who's most imposing", which is a pretty poor set of circumstances under which to define what's socially acceptable. I'm certainly not opposed to the questions being posed, and discussions being had, but like I said - this is the heart of the matter.
Good luck with that. You lost this fight decades ago when CCTV was installed publicly and privately.
Slight difference...
The DVR systems that exist in bars and restaurants and convenience stores are generally isolated. They exist to ensure a neutral account of something that happened in the event of a dispute. They record to a tape or a hard drive that is usually isolated in its access to the owner themselves. They generally cover entrances, exits, and cash registers. In most states, a notice must be conspicuously posted.
Google Glass users are inherently connected to Google's services, with data easily categorized and indexed by Google, added to a massively interconnected database involving any number of relations and correlations. Glass exists for the benefit of the user, who's definition of "benefit" is undefined, at best. Things that are uploaded to Google are available to whoever Google deems appropriate, regardless of the wishes of anyone else - including the person taking the video and geolocating it. Glass is pointed wherever the viewer intends it to be pointed, and by time there is any "notice" to those being recorded, it is too late.
You can argue that the existence of CCTV has minimized the notion of privacy, and I can't disagree. Even so, being on a video that's only accessible by the owner of the camera system via court order and "geolocated" by the location of the establishment itself is entirely different than being in the field of view of someone who is wearing Google Glass.
If you're only changing out the hard disk or the RAM, you lack imagination. I bought a Thinkpad T61p off eBay for $99. For another $137, I doubled the RAM, got an Intel 6300N wireless chipset, extended battery, and DVD burner (which could have been a Blu-Ray drive if I wanted). The screen has a line through it now; I may need to spend another $50-$60 to change it out. I've had laptops with failed screen inverters that I've swapped out.
Why not max out RAM now? because 32GB of RAM is stupid expensive now, in a year it'll likely be half the price. No sense in letting the OEM mark it up and throw away your money. Also, RAM and hard disks are the two things most likely to die in a laptop, so being able to change them out is a VERY good thing. Extra storage capacity may not be immediately needed, but be incredibly useful a year or two out.
Saying that unibody = reliable is not necessarily a direct correlation. There may be some overlap, but the problem is that if something does break, you're completely screwed to the point where one must really, REALLY hope that Apple will hook you up, because Microcenter cannot.
Yes, because it would have been a much better proposition to start churning out more disposable Android phones in an already over saturated market. At least wp8 gives them some market differential.
Actually, it would have. It's a much better sell to have a 41 megapixel camera that can upload the pictures it takes to Instagram. They could differentiate themselves in the market by offering Nokia Music and Nokia Maps, yes, things duplicated by Google to some extent, but still worthy properties to help differentiate themselves. Nokia was legendary for having phones that were difficult to break, and while Lumias might not be as indestructible as some of their older candy bar phones, even if they beat out iPhones and Galaxy units by 15%, that would be significant enough to differentiate them.
Finally, if they wanted to stand out and not spend a mint, they could have given consumers the option, at least - allowing users to install either WP8 or Android, depending on which suited them better. Yes, it's a support nightmare and I understand that..but if we're talking about differentiating features, then you don't get much more different from the current crop of phones than to have the ability to pick your OS.
Being different is good. Being different in a way that the market has generally deemed undesirable is not a way to increase sales.
The majority of every long legal text is there to be explicitly precise about every detail of how it's supposed to work. As new loopholes are found in existing terms, new language is used in future texts to avoid them.
See, that's why I figure that the best way to address the situation is to divide up a bill like this:
Paragraph 1: The mission statement. What is the essence of the bill, and what is it ultimately trying to accomplish in broadest terms?
Paragraph 2: The general rules. State what the bill says is or is not acceptable, as it would apply to the overwhelming majority of cases. Rules that do not directly reflect the mission statement are dismissed from the bill (no more riders or earmarks).
Paragraph 3: Funding and enforcement. Who is paying for it, and who is ensuring that the rule is enforced?
Paragraph 4: Duration. How long will this bill last before it needs to be renewed? 15 years, tops.
Pages 2-10: Exceptions and legal speak. These are the pages intended to close loopholes, answer for as many exotic cases as possible, and be the part that is referenced if a court case needs examining. All statements made here must explicitly clarify and apply to Paragraph 2, and are subject to Paragraphs 3 and 4.
This way, the bill is divided up into the parts that are legible by any reasonable person, and the parts that ensure that define the rules of the court cases involving more unique situations.
it's just more probable someone fuzzed up the first calc and they recounted it just now.
...So the first count was taken in Florida in the year 2000, and was fudged due to a discrepancy regarding the dimpled shell?
Let's count the issues here...
1.) Microsoft backing CD-ROM at the time isn't as horrifying at it might seem. If they were backing CD-ROM in 2013, yes, that's dumb. In 1992 though, when 28.8kbps was considered "pretty quick" for a home user, there was no way that a browser-based Encarta would have been a good thing. Steam couldn't have gained any meaningful traction in a dial-up world, and anyone who would want to go online to write a book report for school would have been laughed out of the room in 1992. Proliferant broadband makes backing optical media a bad idea today, but check out some of the software that Microsoft made in 1992 - CD-ROM was the only way to do it.
2.) Microsoft "missed the boat" with search because they started out following the "Yahoo Model" instead of the "Google Model". Each had good points and bad points, but they tried selling a landing page to customers that wanted more advanced and powerful search parameters, and assumed that people would search in computer-friendly ways, rather than adapting their computers to searching in people-friendly ways. Bing is still pretty good for pop culture searches, but pathetic at searching even Microsoft's own knowledge base for Windows and Office errors. Depending on what you're looking for, this might be an acceptable tradeoff.
3.) If you're referring to freely available operating systems, office suites, and server software, you're half-right. An alternative OS is free. An alternative OS that runs Serato or AutoCAD or ProTools or Photoshop is not. An alternative office suite is free. An alternative office suite that supports any one of the dozens of very-expensive, business-running plug-ins like F9 or Crystal Reports is not. Server software is free. Server software that runs Exchange is not. "Free" is great where it can be great, but "free" can also be "incredibly expensive" as well.
4.) Xbox does indeed worry me with regards to its ability to spy. I wonder if some sort of simple mechanism that gives a physical on/off switch to an ethernet port will catch on...
5.) I have been hoping that ReactOS would gain solid traction for some time; in my opinion it's the thing that has the most possibility of actually dethroning Windows, because it's intended to be a drop-in replacement for Windows itself, using the same drivers and software models, for better or worse. However, their inability to get out of the "alpha" stage (something I'll certainly blame Microsoft for making difficult) means that the title giving Microsoft an honest run for their money is still a long way's off. Additionally, what Microsoft has going for them is a whole lot of people with a whole lot of procedural memory. People who understand the concepts of word processing have a minimal learning curve going between Microsoft Word and WordPerfect and LibreOffice Writer and Abiword. People who "know Word" will never switch. The OSS groups have diametrically opposed objectives here: the more they look like Office, the more flack they get from existing users who "would have used Word if they wanted Word", while the more uniquely designed the program is, the greater learning curve from users who only know to "click the blue 'W'".
6.) "Fast enough" processing seems to creep up more quickly than most people seem to realize. Anyone here want to give their mom a P4 with 512MB of RAM for a main desktop? A few might, using Puppy Linux or similar, but for the most part, single-core processors aren't powerful enough for things anymore. For most people, Flash is indeed the most CPU intensive application their computer realizes, but even casual users will notice choppiness on Candy Crush Saga. "Good Enough Audio" is effectively free now and offboard audio interfaces are indeed a niche space, but that was one of the first problems solved with desktop computing; "good enough audio" easily existed in 1994; the only place left for it to go was miniaturized and priced to nothingness; audio playback processing has been minimally processor intensive for decades. GPU performance st
I needed to view a Word document in a hurry. I got a copy of QuickOffice from Amazon when it was a free app-of-the-day last year, but opted to try Google's more recent flavor. Google insisted I logged in, and refused to do anything if I just wanted to use a Word document on my SD card. There was NO reason for this. I, for one, disapprove of this change, regardless of any of the others.
Most of the people I know who dislike E-mail don't like the "formality" of having to write complete sentences
I think this is basically it. With e-mail, it's still the digital analogue of a handwritten letter. Punctuation and sentence structure still counts. The amount of grammatical mistakes that my friends make on Facebook and via SMS is outright annoying most times; it's almost as if they willingly ignore things they were taught in third grade in the name of their own convenience. This is normal via SMS and Facebook, but not so much via e-mail.
The thing I dislike is when people have mile-long e-mail signatures that no one in the history of humanity has ever bothered to read.
IMHO, the whole Email thing is past its time. Letting just anyone send means spammers will. When people ask me for my email, I now give out a website where they can set me a message ... after they login. But I don't give them an access name/password unless they ask for one (and no one knows to do that).
So by your very definition, few people, if any, contact you. The concept of human contact, even through digital means, will never be "past its time". Does E-mail have its issues? Of course it does. So does the phone. So does texting. So does BBM. So does postal mail. So does Facebook. The question is which set of pros and cons are enough to warrant the use of a particular means of communication. E-mail's strength is its sheer ubiquity and openness. Its weakness is its inability to intelligently determine desired communication and undesired communication. For most people, this is far more acceptable than a system that requires someone to contact you in order to have them contact you.
First, their Mac line will still run Intel CPUs, while the iOS line runs ARM based processors. You can't really merge the two for various reasons.
While another individual responded to this better, the point of being a "functional" difference in the context in which I was suggesting it could be better defined as "related to the end user experience independent of GUI-explicit elements". Most end users would believe Tim Cook when he says "It's fast", and that would basically be that (as long as they delivered, of course).
Second, the Macs are "open" devices, while the iPad is a walled garden. This is a fundamental problem that cannot be simply washed away. Either you run x86 binaries on iPad freely, or you run walled garden apps on yoru Mac.
What I was effectively getting at was that the Apple platform is indeed headed to walled garden apps. Now by "walled garden apps" I do also include things like Maya and Logic Pro and Aperture, not merely Angry Birds and Pixlr...but "walled garden" just the same.
Don't underestimate the implications of the second point - it would mean either the iPad runs applications under emulation but unsigned, or the Mac runs signed iPad apps. The latter doesn't accomplish much, while the former is a pretty huge thing (you can get around the App Store).
Why couldn't applications be both signed and emulated? Why couldn't a theoretical Macbook Air include an A7 processor to run iPad apps? Why couldn't Apple include an "auto recompile" in the SDK to allow developers to make an iPad app that will run on a MacBook Air? I don't pretend to be anything but ignorant in this regard, the point I'm grasping at is that I can't imagine Tim Cook saying, "you could run PowerPC programs on Intel chips that were half as powerful as what's running the current crop of iPhones, but running Temple Run on today's x86 chips is impractical? aww shucks, that's a real bummer."
There is no way Apple can really lock down the Mac platform, either - when jailbreaking is as simple as taking out the SSD and modifying the contents on a different machine.
1.) Because "taking out the SSD" means "prying open the unit and desoldering".
2.) Because even if it didn't, there are things called "Secure Boot" and "Signed Bootloaders" that seems to be pretty good at making a mess of things when it can't be disabled.
And there's enough software out there that losing compatibility with OS X is not an option, either.
There's enough Firewire based hardware to make a whole lot of film and music professionals pissed at Apple; between a $2,000 Macbook and a $10,000 video camera, which do you think is getting the boot? "It depends" is the correct answer, and for some, the Mac platform was the one to get shown the door. I'm not saying that future Macs will be utterly incapable of running anything but iPad apps, but I am saying that I don't see Apple remaining open "because Slashdot thinks it's a good idea". Better example: Rosetta emulation. There were plenty of incredibly expensive pieces of software that were written for the platform, but after a very long time, Apple deprecated it. what gave Apple the ability to do this was to provide an alternative path, wait until the overwhelming majority of high ticket software vendors had a release or two that supported Intel natively, then remove Rosetta going forward. This allows for "steps" - first, the writing is on the wall so that users can eyeball upgrades. Next, users can still use their existing hardware and OS releases, but as clock speeds and RAM amounts tick up, the performance of the aging machine along with the availability of new releases of the software makes it a "good idea" to get all the new features and better performance. By time Rosetta was deprecated, it wasn't missed enough to cause a revolt.
And the default option is to allow signed (but not app-store) apps and a
Not at first. Give it time.
In a few years, what will really be the functional difference between the Macbook Air and an iPad with a clamshell keyboard? Additionally, as Apple continues to grow their marketshare in the laptop segment, OSX in its original iterations will become a more lucrative target for malware. Now before anyone gets pissed at me for saying that, I chose the word "lucrative" for a reason. 8 times out of ten, people with Macbooks will:
1.) Have some money to spend.
2.) Label themselves as "not computer people".
3.) Be of the persuasion that Macs can't get viruses.
Now yes, I know there are plenty of slashdotters here who got a hand-me-down Mac from work, spend as much time in the Terminal as in Safari, and run Sophos on it because you never know. However, let's say that these qualifications apply to even a third of the people who buy a Macbook, and pretend you're a malware writer. You've got millions of people who you KNOW have money, who you KNOW are not technologically savvy enough to discern a real warning message from a fraudulent one, and who are all but certain that they are invulnerable to the very type of attack you plan on performing. It sounds like the perfect storm to me.
Apple is aware that these types of people are amongst their customers, and in many cases, amongst their loudest evangelists - you'll never get better advertising than to say "Other computers were complicated, but I can finally Facebook my kids!". For these kinds of people, the walled garden is a feature, not a bug. For these people, there needs to be a solution. Apple gave one: the Mac App Store.
At first, it was optional.
Then, it was a part of the OS.
Then, it was enabled by default.
Then, you get a warning if you turn off the OS's blocking of sideloading.
Meanwhile, Apple is making money hand over fist on software for their mobile platform. For the majority of their demographic, being able to run iOS apps on their laptop is a quantum leap forward.
Even if they don't merge, there will be a point at which the lines are so blurry it won't matter.
Will be funded by Zales.
Surely things may change if and when I actually get my hands on one of these, but it seems like most of the core features could still work just fine by blocking access to nest.com at the router level. Sure, most folks won't actually run out and do that, but most folks don't care as much about privacy as they say they do...which leaves the Slashdot crowd, most of whom certainly know how to prevent WAN access to stuff on their LAN. If you're particularly paranoid, why not dust off the ancient 802.11g router and let the Nest devices connect to that at the exclusion of the actual internet connection?
Can anyone confirm or refute whether this unit will work exclusively on a LAN? Because I would love a smoke alarm that will double as a conditional night light and give me a warning before it scares the crap out of anyone when I open the oven.
However, I did not know about the ten year operational life of smoke detectors; being as the one in my bedroom is nearly thirty years old, perhaps I should look for...something...
I generally agree with you, but I would add that air travel and communication are pretty clearly subject to "interstate commerce" regulation
Though I phrased it poorly, I was attempting to say just that. What I was trying to say was that the FAA and FCC very clearly fall under the interstate commerce clause because they explicitly do regulate interstate commerce, but they wouldn't have been stated specifically in the same way that the post office was in the Constitution for fairly obvious reasons.
1.) Wired ethernet will give you more than that; as another responder said you're likely to be limited by the write speed of your storage devices. If you really want to test it, create a RAM disk on both machines, and transfer a file from one RAM disk to another - you'll see yourself saturate the line pretty quickly.
2.) Wireless is inherently half-duplex, because you can't transmit and receive at the same time on the same frequency. Dual-band technology was supposed to help out with that, but it only works if everything on the LAN supports it. Else, one band will be more crowded than the other, and messes will still be made. Additionally, the more devices you've got running on your wireless network, the greater a collision domain you've got.
3.) Pursuant to 1 and 2, when you've got large numbers of devices, it's where wired really shines. no one gets a good signal with a hundred other access points and endpoints on a LAN, but if you've got everyone wired to a half decent switch, everyone can communicate much more efficiently. Additionally, you may be seeing poor speeds if your gigabit switch is low quality and has a poor amount of backplane bandwidth.
afterall google revealed a good amount on how they go about building their data centers and keeping it cool. But then again, contractors...
Rule #1 of government spending: why by one, when you can have two at twice the price?
Rule #2 of government spending: a penny saved is a spending oversight.