If the consumer has specialty needs, then yes, I blame the consumer.
If a gamer goes and buys a netbook and then complains he can't play Crysis, do you blame the netbook maker?
The 24" iMac at the lowest end configuration shipped with a GeForce 9400, which is perfectly decent, even for gaming, for most average consumers. For consumers who wanted more gaming power, they gave the option of a Radeon 4850 upgrade, which is a perfectly good card for games, especially when it came out a year ago. I'm pretty sure they even stocked the higher end GPU models in the stores, but it's hard to check now that the models have changed.
Any way you look at it, the guy had to go into a store, ignore the different machines, and just go for the cheapest one.
I don't really mind if you buy PC's because they meet your needs better. But don't claim ignorance as a good reason as to why Apple is horrible.
So your friend was a moron and didn't do any research?
You can buy PC's that don't support graphics upgrades either. I'm not sure what your point is. Your idiot friend could have done the same thing with a Windows box.
Not to mention the 24" iMac graphics cards are not all that bad, AND can be upgraded to a gaming level card at purchase time.
Seriously. So many things wrong with this post.
ATI has always written the Macintosh drivers as well. In fact, you used to have to use the latest drivers directly from ATI to get a retail Mac card to work.
"You are confusing NeXT and Apple's approaches, I think. Apple puts both all of the different architectures in the same file. Your code is compiled twice, but it's only linked once. The PowerPC {32,64} and x86 {32,64} code all goes in different segments in the binary, but data is shared between all of them, so it takes less space than having 2-4 independent binary files."
Actually, this isn't true. The code is compiled four times (for a 32/64 bit unibin), linked four times, and then all four executables are stitched together into one executable file.
With regards to disk space, Apple thought ahead, and the format supports stripping out of versions of the binary you don't want to keep around. For example, some Intel owners run tools on their machines that strip out the PPC versions of binaries to preserve disk space. Some PowerPC owners strip out the Intel versions of the binaries, but then usually run into trouble when they try to migrate their disk to an Intel machine.:) Stripping out a version of the binary will even keep a signed binary valid.
FYI: Apple has a very similar sort of setup for language dependent resources.
Um. QuickTime IS a DLL (a very large one) with a media player.
QuickTime is an API that includes a media player. I work in the industry, and I do programming with the QuickTime API. The largest use of QuickTime is likely software using the QuickTime API. Adobe ships very large pieces of software on Windows that include QuickTime because of the QuickTime API, for example.
Again, the components of QuickTime that seem to annoy people are very small, and easy to remove. Do you honestly think a half dozen audio codecs, and another half dozen video codecs would make for a "small" DLL?
QuickTime is what iTunes uses for it's MP3/AAC decoding engine, which is why it's installing QuickTime. It's not just installing it to force it on you, it's actually a dependency.
This is why iTunes on Mac OS X is still a QuickTime 7 app. It can't move to QuickTime X because QuickTime X is not cross platform.
Runs faster, better, stronger for me on my two Mac Pros, Macbook and my Macbook Pro, I don't see any messages like that in the logs.
Googling turns up that it's likely a firmware issue with the drives on the new unibody Macbook Pros, which I'm assuming you have. Safari can't lock up the whole system, but a drive issue could, which makes sense. And supposedly Apple is working on a fix.
I added a GeForce 120 GT to my Mac Pro the other day, and under Windows the NVidia drivers automatically set themselves up to use it as a dedicated physics card in games.
Look, I lived in the city at the time, and I knew people there. I'm telling you, people showed up who's only intention was to cause trouble. I'll be the first to admit there were many innocent people down there. But there were people who totally weren't innocent. You can tell me Jesus himself was pulled from a car downtown and arrested. It doesn't change that there were people there who had stated intentions of destroying property.
Having lived in Seattle, and known people who were in the WTO Seattle protests, I'd have to tell you that you are full of crap. The Seattle PD is one of the best in the country. Our former police chief is even more making marijuana legal. The groups that caused the trouble in the Seattle WTO protests were already very active. They weren't incited, they came with the intention of causing trouble. Normal people weren't incited, as you suggest, into literally destroying specific pre-targeted downtown businesses. It's actually somewhat insulting you'd suggest so.
But wouldn't most those drivers actually have been first time drivers?
It would be one thing if Linux was trying to compete in a world where everyone is a new computer user. You're not wasting the users time when they have to learn how to use a computer from scratch anyway.
But Linux exists in a world where they are trying to convert Linux users. If Ford came out with a car today with different pedal positions, do you think they'd get people driving Hondas or GM cars to buy their product? Any other user of any other car would get in the car, not know how to use it, and promptly spend their money on a car that they don't have to commit time to learning how to drive.
Look at it this way. Whenever I look at an OSS product, I take the amount of time it would take me to learn that product, multiply that by my hourly income, and weigh that against a non-free product that I already know how to use. If the non-free product is cheaper based on how much my time costs, then I buy the non-free product.
Would you buy a car that didn't have a steering wheel?
Sure, certain software vendors have set certain standards for software interfaces. But the user is king. It doesn't matter who trained the user what to expect, if the user expects something, you should tailor your software to their expectations.
If you think it's the users job to learn your interface, the user is just going to keep using Windows because they don't want to spend time learning the Linux way of doing things. Respect your users time.
And neither of these solutions answer the OP's question. Open Directory is user management, not deployment. Remote Desktop can do deployment, but it kind of sucks at that (as someone who used it full time for two years), and the machines already have to be deployed and added to an ARD master server to make it at all useful.
The OP wants to use tools like multicast ASR. Multicast ASR just blasts out machine images over a network broadcast, so you don't get any performance degradation by adding more clients. We've done 64 machines at once, over gigabit ethernet, and it took 10-15 minutes per machine for a fairly hefty image (OS X/iLife/Office/etc). The only trick is if a machine misses a portion of the broadcast, in since they are just passively listening, they have to wait for that portion of the broadcast to come around again, but if you tune things right that is rare. You could, as long as you had decent switches, definitely push multicast ASR way beyond 64 machines.
Multicast ASR is what Apple themselves use at the factory btw.
Huh? Have you ever used a Mac? I've got non-Apple RAM, non-Apple hard drives, and a non-Apple graphics card in my machine. I could go to Frys and buy a new processor if I wanted. Apple hasn't approved any of the software on my machine, and I can also boot into Windows or Linux. My motherboard was designed by Intel here Portland, OR, USA. (Yes, I do know that for sure.)
In other words, it's the exact opposite of everything you just said.
"But the biggest difference is that with the Pre, you're on equal footing with Palm's developers - all of Palm's applications are written with the same HTML/CSS/JavaScript toolkit as third-party applications"
I'm pretty gosh darn sure this is not true.
If it is, Palm must have employed a lot of geniuses to write a Palm emulator under JavaScript, among other applications.
I worked with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team a few months back to bring their Virtual Earth platform to the iPhone/Mac in native OpenGL and Objective C. I released my work under the BSD license.
http://consonancesw.com/developers/virtualearthkit/
The map view is still closed source, as it was done for a client who wanted it to remain closed source for a bit to give his app an advantage, but it should be released soon. The app has been in the app store for a while, it's called NMobile. It's featured an OpenGL map view with full gesture support.
The framework I open sourced also does a lot of nifty stuff like geocoding, reverse geocoding, static maps, and I'm adding supporting for finding locations like nearby restaurants and so forth.
The route-me folks should keep in mind that their framework looks to implement support for talking to Virtual Earth without authenticating, which is in complete violation of the Virtual Earth terms. Using the Virtual Earth tiles requires sending a SOAP request for a transaction token, and then attaching that transaction token to every request. Their code does not seem to be doing that. Microsoft has warned that people who try to grab their tiles for free will likely be cut off. The route-me folks are welcome to borrow some code from my project (BSD licensed) to bring themselves within spec. At least Microsoft's terms are better than Google's, who doesn't seem to even allow that sort of behavior at all...
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If the consumer has specialty needs, then yes, I blame the consumer. If a gamer goes and buys a netbook and then complains he can't play Crysis, do you blame the netbook maker? The 24" iMac at the lowest end configuration shipped with a GeForce 9400, which is perfectly decent, even for gaming, for most average consumers. For consumers who wanted more gaming power, they gave the option of a Radeon 4850 upgrade, which is a perfectly good card for games, especially when it came out a year ago. I'm pretty sure they even stocked the higher end GPU models in the stores, but it's hard to check now that the models have changed. Any way you look at it, the guy had to go into a store, ignore the different machines, and just go for the cheapest one. I don't really mind if you buy PC's because they meet your needs better. But don't claim ignorance as a good reason as to why Apple is horrible.
So your friend was a moron and didn't do any research? You can buy PC's that don't support graphics upgrades either. I'm not sure what your point is. Your idiot friend could have done the same thing with a Windows box. Not to mention the 24" iMac graphics cards are not all that bad, AND can be upgraded to a gaming level card at purchase time. Seriously. So many things wrong with this post.
ATI has always written the Macintosh drivers as well. In fact, you used to have to use the latest drivers directly from ATI to get a retail Mac card to work.
"You are confusing NeXT and Apple's approaches, I think. Apple puts both all of the different architectures in the same file. Your code is compiled twice, but it's only linked once. The PowerPC {32,64} and x86 {32,64} code all goes in different segments in the binary, but data is shared between all of them, so it takes less space than having 2-4 independent binary files." Actually, this isn't true. The code is compiled four times (for a 32/64 bit unibin), linked four times, and then all four executables are stitched together into one executable file. With regards to disk space, Apple thought ahead, and the format supports stripping out of versions of the binary you don't want to keep around. For example, some Intel owners run tools on their machines that strip out the PPC versions of binaries to preserve disk space. Some PowerPC owners strip out the Intel versions of the binaries, but then usually run into trouble when they try to migrate their disk to an Intel machine. :) Stripping out a version of the binary will even keep a signed binary valid.
FYI: Apple has a very similar sort of setup for language dependent resources.
Um. QuickTime IS a DLL (a very large one) with a media player. QuickTime is an API that includes a media player. I work in the industry, and I do programming with the QuickTime API. The largest use of QuickTime is likely software using the QuickTime API. Adobe ships very large pieces of software on Windows that include QuickTime because of the QuickTime API, for example. Again, the components of QuickTime that seem to annoy people are very small, and easy to remove. Do you honestly think a half dozen audio codecs, and another half dozen video codecs would make for a "small" DLL?
But the plugin and player are what... 2-3 megabytes of 20 megs? Most of the download is the QuickTime library and the codecs...
QuickTime is what iTunes uses for it's MP3/AAC decoding engine, which is why it's installing QuickTime. It's not just installing it to force it on you, it's actually a dependency. This is why iTunes on Mac OS X is still a QuickTime 7 app. It can't move to QuickTime X because QuickTime X is not cross platform.
Runs faster, better, stronger for me on my two Mac Pros, Macbook and my Macbook Pro, I don't see any messages like that in the logs. Googling turns up that it's likely a firmware issue with the drives on the new unibody Macbook Pros, which I'm assuming you have. Safari can't lock up the whole system, but a drive issue could, which makes sense. And supposedly Apple is working on a fix.
I use VMWare Fusion on OS X and Windows 98 virtualizes perfectly.
I added a GeForce 120 GT to my Mac Pro the other day, and under Windows the NVidia drivers automatically set themselves up to use it as a dedicated physics card in games.
Look, I lived in the city at the time, and I knew people there. I'm telling you, people showed up who's only intention was to cause trouble. I'll be the first to admit there were many innocent people down there. But there were people who totally weren't innocent. You can tell me Jesus himself was pulled from a car downtown and arrested. It doesn't change that there were people there who had stated intentions of destroying property.
Having lived in Seattle, and known people who were in the WTO Seattle protests, I'd have to tell you that you are full of crap. The Seattle PD is one of the best in the country. Our former police chief is even more making marijuana legal. The groups that caused the trouble in the Seattle WTO protests were already very active. They weren't incited, they came with the intention of causing trouble. Normal people weren't incited, as you suggest, into literally destroying specific pre-targeted downtown businesses. It's actually somewhat insulting you'd suggest so.
Dunno. I had an Intel motherboard with EFI in 2006. Doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me. http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D975XBX/index.htm
But wouldn't most those drivers actually have been first time drivers? It would be one thing if Linux was trying to compete in a world where everyone is a new computer user. You're not wasting the users time when they have to learn how to use a computer from scratch anyway. But Linux exists in a world where they are trying to convert Linux users. If Ford came out with a car today with different pedal positions, do you think they'd get people driving Hondas or GM cars to buy their product? Any other user of any other car would get in the car, not know how to use it, and promptly spend their money on a car that they don't have to commit time to learning how to drive. Look at it this way. Whenever I look at an OSS product, I take the amount of time it would take me to learn that product, multiply that by my hourly income, and weigh that against a non-free product that I already know how to use. If the non-free product is cheaper based on how much my time costs, then I buy the non-free product.
Would you buy a car that didn't have a steering wheel? Sure, certain software vendors have set certain standards for software interfaces. But the user is king. It doesn't matter who trained the user what to expect, if the user expects something, you should tailor your software to their expectations. If you think it's the users job to learn your interface, the user is just going to keep using Windows because they don't want to spend time learning the Linux way of doing things. Respect your users time.
And neither of these solutions answer the OP's question. Open Directory is user management, not deployment. Remote Desktop can do deployment, but it kind of sucks at that (as someone who used it full time for two years), and the machines already have to be deployed and added to an ARD master server to make it at all useful. The OP wants to use tools like multicast ASR. Multicast ASR just blasts out machine images over a network broadcast, so you don't get any performance degradation by adding more clients. We've done 64 machines at once, over gigabit ethernet, and it took 10-15 minutes per machine for a fairly hefty image (OS X/iLife/Office/etc). The only trick is if a machine misses a portion of the broadcast, in since they are just passively listening, they have to wait for that portion of the broadcast to come around again, but if you tune things right that is rare. You could, as long as you had decent switches, definitely push multicast ASR way beyond 64 machines. Multicast ASR is what Apple themselves use at the factory btw.
They already have: http://kotaku.com/5099691/jasper-360-consoles-hit-the-market http://joeygadget.com/2009/02/22/one-minute-review-jasper-xbox-360/
Huh? Have you ever used a Mac? I've got non-Apple RAM, non-Apple hard drives, and a non-Apple graphics card in my machine. I could go to Frys and buy a new processor if I wanted. Apple hasn't approved any of the software on my machine, and I can also boot into Windows or Linux. My motherboard was designed by Intel here Portland, OR, USA. (Yes, I do know that for sure.) In other words, it's the exact opposite of everything you just said.
"But the biggest difference is that with the Pre, you're on equal footing with Palm's developers - all of Palm's applications are written with the same HTML/CSS/JavaScript toolkit as third-party applications" I'm pretty gosh darn sure this is not true. If it is, Palm must have employed a lot of geniuses to write a Palm emulator under JavaScript, among other applications.
I worked with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team a few months back to bring their Virtual Earth platform to the iPhone/Mac in native OpenGL and Objective C. I released my work under the BSD license. http://consonancesw.com/developers/virtualearthkit/ The map view is still closed source, as it was done for a client who wanted it to remain closed source for a bit to give his app an advantage, but it should be released soon. The app has been in the app store for a while, it's called NMobile. It's featured an OpenGL map view with full gesture support. The framework I open sourced also does a lot of nifty stuff like geocoding, reverse geocoding, static maps, and I'm adding supporting for finding locations like nearby restaurants and so forth. The route-me folks should keep in mind that their framework looks to implement support for talking to Virtual Earth without authenticating, which is in complete violation of the Virtual Earth terms. Using the Virtual Earth tiles requires sending a SOAP request for a transaction token, and then attaching that transaction token to every request. Their code does not seem to be doing that. Microsoft has warned that people who try to grab their tiles for free will likely be cut off. The route-me folks are welcome to borrow some code from my project (BSD licensed) to bring themselves within spec. At least Microsoft's terms are better than Google's, who doesn't seem to even allow that sort of behavior at all...