Apple, like any responsible corporation (e.g. one with the ultimate goal of making a profit) cares about DRM/Copy Protection because it protects their revenue stream; same reason the entertainment industry cares about it it.
If Apple didn't care about copy protection, they wouldn't bother going to great lengths to keep their professional-grade software (Logic, Shake, FCP, etc) from being copied and illegally redistributed. They have a vested interest in keeping the music industry happy, as the iTunes music store sells a lot of hardware for them.
Apple's DRM is by far the most user-friendly form out there so far as legally downloaded music goes, and all crap like this does is force them to implement something more restrictive, or charge more for the service as a result of being forced to do server-side DRM.
As usual, the 0.01% 'free as in beer' crowd screws up the works for everyone else.
I did, because you accused all Republicans of thinking the same way and believing the same way. If you're going to hold them to that mantle, be prepared to have something similar held to yourself.
We are witnessing a revival of fascism in the United States.
Whoa there, Sonny! Your tin foil hat seems to have slipped off!
I strongly suggest you research exactly what facism is, then compare it to the entire history of the United States. If you can honestly conclude that there are any realistic similarities, please conduct yourself to the nearest mental hospital or University of California campus.
Prisms don't do a whole lot against very high powered lasers. Even if it were possible to scatter 80 or 90 percent of the beam's power, the remaining 10-20 percent would be more than enough to melt the prism and detonate the shell.
And, as has already been said, it would be kind of hard to launch a shell cased in prisms through a conventional artillery barrel.
Amen. Fuck Ogg. MP4/AAC offers me things I actually give a damn about.
Woo. Ogg can encode smaller files with higher quality at low bitrates. Care factor zero. Hard drives are cheap, and all my mp3's are 320kbit. All 200GB of them.
Sure, for some people, a gas mileage indicator would change their driving habits. In fact, a number of cars already have such technology (BMW, to name one), and similary functionality can be added to any car by using a manifold vacuum gauge.
However, some people, like me, do not care what gas mileage they get. In fact, I'd be lucky to get 10mpg in the city. Namely as my car is highly modified and puts out about three times its stock rated horsepower.
In short: I don't care what it costs. It's fun to drive, and goes really fast. If I wanted boring and slow, I'd take the bus.
Interesting... you'd think they'd set their sights a bit higher. This "MHz Myth" thing, while true in some respects, isn't going to sell more computers.
Why bother? The Pentium4 is at the end of its life cycle, and Intel will be moving to the Itanium fairly soon... which will come out in the 800mhz range.
Yes, yes you are. As a result, I'm ignoring your post save one point:
Everyone says look how stable the Apple OS is, of course, it only achived that by dropping all their old code and building upon BeOS.
Mac OS X has absolutely nothing to do with BeOS. Darwin is a combination of FreeBSD 3.2 and NeXTStep. BeOS got bought up by Palm, not Apple.
Assuming that statement in itself wasn't a troll to begin with, you may want to actually check your facts before forming yet another "Apple is only good because..." statement; like every other moron who dumps on Apple while not having actually used a Mac in the last five years.
It really depends what aspect of video you mean. If you mean rendering and 3D work, sure, SGI is still the industry leader there, if not only for their reputation and amazing hardware. But, if you're talking NLE post-- the Mac has a very large userbase. I've worked in a few post houses myself, and everything is either a Mac, a SGI box, or an avid windows box.
As to your comment of linux being the most cost effective, there is a two sided arguement to that. From a cost of software aspect, it certainly is the most cost effective. However, linux has no accountability what so ever. Large film houses don't have anyone to sue of a linux app pukes on a large project, costing them money. That is why mac, sgi, and even windows platforms get preference. They are considerably more accountable.
As for your comment that linux is faster and more stable... that is true when it comes to windows, however very untrue if you're talking mac or sgi solutions. IRIX on an octane2 will blow the freaking doors off of any linux box you wish to build, especially as we're talking graphics intensive post work.
Macs are not used bo a large group of artists who simply don't know any better. Macs are used by a large group of people because they are the best platform for many tasks, especially audio and video work. They use them because the excellent UI of the mac is by far the most productive to use when it comes to artistic functions.
This does make the Mac the standard, as the userbase is considerably larger then any other unix, and probably even exceeds that of windows. I don't have any solid numbers to back that up, but based on my experience in the few post houses I have worked in, almost everyone uses a mac at some point, and another box (SGI or windows) only when necessary.
Sure the linux kernel is complex. A complex hack job, to which there are better alternaitves. But that aside... my meaning of "complex" was not "lots of code". It was "a lot of different functions working with many vendor-specific APIs, third party codecs, and user interface elements". Like, for example, Photoshop.
As for the GIMP, sure, it's a great tool. Unfortunately it has a nearly useless UI, still doesn't have many of photoshop's features, and has a significant barrier to use in that it requires someone spend a lot of time learning how to use it. Photoshop, on the other had, is much easier to learn, because it has a UI that actually makes sense and is somewhat intuative. Not a mess of consecutive right-click menus.
However, as you've only managed to come up with two examples, each of which misses my point about free software, I won't bother debating those issues.
My original point is that something like Shake would not exist in the OSS world. My support of this statement is the fact that nothing like Shake DOES exist in the OSS world. If OSS is so great and spiffy when it comes to cranking out highly complex rendering tools, why is there no open source version of Shake? Perhaps because it takes money to develop these tools.
I have not missed your point, you have missed mine in an effort to convince me that open source software is good at something it clearly is not good at.
As for your comment about server software, I said open source DOES work very well in these applications, but DOES NOT work well in complex desktop applications. Try actually reading my post next time before trying to claim the non-existant moral high ground in a debate by spewing a bunch of names of large corporations who use linux at me.
Almost every post or broadcast house uses Macs for most of their NLE work, with Final Cut Pro and other similar tools for audio work, like MOTU's Digital Performer.
Apple always has been the defacto standard in audio, graphcis, and video work in professional circles. The only competition is windows, and due to its wrath of instability and security issues, the nod generally goes the way of the mac. It has for many years.
1) This kind of thing can never happen with free software, because something like Shake probably would not exist in the form of free software. High quality complex (note, complex) software takes money to build, and revenues to support.
Free software is great for simple things, like web, smtp, and other serving daemons. All they have to do is spew out data in accordance with an RFP, and most of them are so mature that they are vastly supperior to commercial alternaitves, simply because they are usually not bloated with useless features.
Case in point, sendmail. (Or qmail, whatever) It's faster then, say, exchange server, more stable, more secure, and just generally works better. Same with Apache vs. say, IIS or iPlanet. In those cases, free software works very, very well.
However, when it comes to complex things like desktop environments, free/open source software generally does not work. Things like non-linear editing suites, 2D manipulation tools like photoshop, and a wrath of other applications that pros use need to be commercial. They need to be protected from their competitors (please don't mention the GPL) and they need to be developed by people who get paid. This is due to the fact that they are very complex, have to deal with proprietary codecs, and provide user interfaces that are easy and intuative to use.
Free software historically does not handle complex apps, proprietary codecs, nor usable interfaces very well at all.
Open-source people do fun stuff that works quickly
and doesn't require UI work or licensing or hardware-specific APIs, like
servers. They don't do tedious stuff.
2) Apple is denying itself a very tiny market of windows users (don't think they would be doing this if there were 10,000+ users) so they can sell that very tiny market new macs. They are, after all, a hardware company at heart.
Apple may be denying themselves a few bucks in software sales, but they'll make it five times over back in hardware sales, with the bonus of getting a few thousand new users of its platform.
People who make movies are almost never loyal to a given platform (except the mac, ironically). They simply want something that works so they can meet their deadlines.
Linux is becoming a good rendering platform, not a "movie making" platform.
There's still nothing in the way of good NLE or 2D/3D image manipulation software floating around (and please don't mention the GNU stuff-- it's laughable to the pros). The main reason, aside from the fact that there's no standard linux desktop interface, is that intel hardware isn't that great for doing much more then crunching numbers.
Intel-oriented video hardware simply can't touch SGI visual workstations, among other things. However, it's cheap, and relatively easy to turn into a cheap rendering node. Thusly linux boxes are being adapted as such. Cheap rendering nodes.
Implying that movies are made on any linux based OS exclusively, however, is nothing short of BS. Take a tour of any broadcast or post house sometime and see what the editors use. Macs, SGI boxen, or intel machines running windows (E.g. Avid)
Kind of like how Microsoft was about to terminate office for the mac a few years ago, if Apple didn't agree to bundle IE as the default browser for their OS?
In short, no. There's a difference between terminating a supported platform for a valid business reason, and threatening to terminate a supported platform unless the company developing it does what you say.
That's an entirely different matter. I'm referring to American troops invading Iraq to get rid of Saddam.
If he uses biological or chemical agents against American troops, then America turns him into so much glowing dust. That's a more powerful deterrant then some may think.
The 9/11 issue was entirely different. If we went around and started blowing very large holes in Afghanistan, we not only would have had next to no idea who we were nuking, and would have destroyed all of the resulting evidence and information that was found. Nukes were not needed in that case, as the ground troops and airforce blew the hell out of them in short order. There was also nothing to deter-- they had already done what they had intended to do.
Besides, the point here is not that the US will use Nuclear Weapons. The point is that it CAN use them and that it WILL use them if chemical/bio/etc agents are used against its people.
The threat of force is not something to be taken lightly, least of all from the USA.
Simple. It's an intentional leak. Its purpose is to get inside the minds of certain people so that when we invade Iraq, the reprisal for use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon use against US troops is known.
In a nutshell, we nuke and pave their asses.
The whole point of these little information splurges is to reduce the risk to American soldiers and citizens.
I don't need a SuperDrive. I don't want a SuperDrive. Apple won't give you a 933 or 1GHz DP machine without a SuperDrive. Sorry but I'd rather save hundreds of dollars by simply not buying one!
Historically, removing the Superdrive from the powermac configuration to the lowest possible option (cd/dvd) was a $250 savings. Apple made the Superdrive a non-option as 90% of the people buying high end powermacs wanted them. Frankly, $250 for DVD-write capability is a freaking bargan. That being said, if enough people want them without a superdrive, they'll add lower model options. Apple is not Dell. Apple actually listens to their customers.
THEREFORE Your system can only work with one Apple display, because only one card slot has this power connection.
Note that both card options, the ATI and GeForce4 both come with dual display support on the freaking card. If you need more, apple still sells the radeons that existed in their multi display option previously.
To my knowledge there is no adaptor that will give you a VGA output from the ADC port.
Go to the apple store website and click "displays" under the accessories listing on the site. The ADC to DVI connector is $39 bucks. That will allow basically anyone's display to work with an ADC card. Need to go to VGA? Well, aside from it being a pointless waste of time to go to a crappy analog signal, any number of companies make DVI->VGA adapters for a couple dollars. Most ATI cards come with them in the box.
You can go the opposite way as well, and connect an apple display to a DVI card with the Dr Bott DVIator. For $149.99.
So, in essence you are going to pay an extra 250 bucks or so to hook up a second Apple Display to the single card powermac. Big whoop. If you can afford an extra grand for a second display, that "premium" shouldn't be such a shock.
A waste of PCI slots? It has four. With two video cards, a SCSI card, and a high end audio card, you can run up to four displays as well as handle everything else even the most professional user could ever want.
In terms of a support box, or coffee table box, or what-have-you-not-a-main-box box, one could simply buy an iMac and have twice the machine, with a LCD monitor. iMacs (and everything else Apple makes) take standard HDD's, standard (if you want) CDroms, standard PCI cards, and standard RAM.
Anyways, sure, as a micro-server it has a bit of potential as I said. However, if space is a concern, one could just use a cheap 1U rack case and save even MORE space.
As for it being a media machine, I just don't see that. Crappy on-board video and audio doesn't really make the term "media box" leap out at me.
What I'm saying, is that all of the functions it is trying to perform can be done better with other hardware. Thusly making this thing cool, but pointless.
There are two kinds of company when it comes to hardware. The first kind innovate and design entirely new things. (See: Apple, SGI, Cray, etc).
In that light, if someone came along and cranked out a single board machine about the size of a few DVD cases which had a decently fast proc, onboard audio, room for a pair of 2.5" lappy drives, and a daughterboard for an AGP or PCI card.. THAT would be useful.
The other type replicates (see: Dell, Microsoft, any xyz intel box maker). These take existing technology and repackage it, be it in a 1/4 size case, or something that looks like one of the old Apple G3 tower cases. Their products are most always done better by existing companies.
Anyway, sure this thing is cool. But if you boil it down, it is simply a hacked up ATX board crammed into a 1/4 size ATX case.
"I find these gems cuter than any iMac I've ever seen!"
So.. a 1/4 sized boring grey intel box is in some way nicer then a full sized boring grey intel box? It's also 'cuter' then something that's faster with a moveable 15" LCD?
Somehow, I don't think the kind of CD burning you'd get by running a 1100Mhz high-voltage intel proc in something the size of a breadbox is what the average person has in mind.
Yeah, sure it's cool. If totally useless for a desktop application, which is what it's aimed at. (Show me one desktop geek who doesn't demand 64MB of video ram and two bigass monitors at a huge resolution)
As a small server, sure. It could be handy to stack a few in a corner somewhere. But why the hell bother when you can simply use a 1U rack case and get even better space utilization?
So what other uses could it possibly have? Competing in iMac country with a smaller footprint, while trading off performance and expandability? Sure. There are just two problems with that. First, if you dump a huge CRT beside it, it kind of defeats the purpose. Second, if you opt for a smaller LCD display with it, the thing ends up running you more then a top of the line iMac.
This thing is, in a word, useless. Other things do its job better. Aside from that, comparing it to an iMac is beyond stupidity. One may as well put a ford escort beside a Ferrari and proclaim it to be faster and better looking.
You're missing a key point here. With Windows code, you have to pay MS buckets of money and sign your life away to their lawyers... BUT, if you go and develop something spiffy and marketable, you can go along your merry way and use M$ code to further your own product and not release any of your modifications to the public.
The GPL does suck when it comes to retaining IP. No company in their right mind is going to toss zillions of dollars into development something just so they can go and release the fruits of their labor to their competitors.
The GPL is based on a pseudo-startrek idealistic reality that all humans should work to better themselves. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the world is run by cold hard cash, and it will be for the next significant future. Try explaining to a PHB how you're going to make a profit by building something, and then giving away the secret sauce.
So what is one to do? Can one avoid the borg and still retain their IP while giving a little something back to "the community"? Yes, with a BSD style licence and an Apple-style hybrid of OSS and Proprietary Code.
That way companies are able to release what is not critical IP, and would not hurt them should a competitor get their hands on it. As well, they can keep the Proprietary software under lock and key. Something for everyone. The OSS boys get device drivers and a trickle of performance/etc enhancements, and the company who spent all the funds making those things happen gets to keep the idea and profit by it.
Wow. Profitable companies that use open source. What a concept.
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Apple, like any responsible corporation (e.g. one with the ultimate goal of making a profit) cares about DRM/Copy Protection because it protects their revenue stream; same reason the entertainment industry cares about it it.
If Apple didn't care about copy protection, they wouldn't bother going to great lengths to keep their professional-grade software (Logic, Shake, FCP, etc) from being copied and illegally redistributed. They have a vested interest in keeping the music industry happy, as the iTunes music store sells a lot of hardware for them.
Apple's DRM is by far the most user-friendly form out there so far as legally downloaded music goes, and all crap like this does is force them to implement something more restrictive, or charge more for the service as a result of being forced to do server-side DRM.
As usual, the 0.01% 'free as in beer' crowd screws up the works for everyone else.
I did, because you accused all Republicans of thinking the same way and believing the same way. If you're going to hold them to that mantle, be prepared to have something similar held to yourself.
We are witnessing a revival of fascism in the United States.
Whoa there, Sonny! Your tin foil hat seems to have slipped off!
I strongly suggest you research exactly what facism is, then compare it to the entire history of the United States. If you can honestly conclude that there are any realistic similarities, please conduct yourself to the nearest mental hospital or University of California campus.
So I guess if you don't like Reagan, you must be a socialist! I love the logic of Republicans.
Lump not, Lest ye be lumped.
Welcome to the "brain dead liberal" camp.
No. No, I don't want it.
For intel boxes, I have FreeBSD.
For PPC boxes, I have OS X.
This does nothing better than either of the above in either hardware situation. Well, it does add "GNU" to everything. Woo. Be still my beating heart.
Please do not buy one. As you wish to run Linux on it, you have totally missed the point of the Mac. They are not for you.
Stick with Intel.
Prisms don't do a whole lot against very high powered lasers. Even if it were possible to scatter 80 or 90 percent of the beam's power, the remaining 10-20 percent would be more than enough to melt the prism and detonate the shell.
And, as has already been said, it would be kind of hard to launch a shell cased in prisms through a conventional artillery barrel.
Amen. Fuck Ogg. MP4/AAC offers me things I actually give a damn about.
Woo. Ogg can encode smaller files with higher quality at low bitrates. Care factor zero. Hard drives are cheap, and all my mp3's are 320kbit. All 200GB of them.
Sure, for some people, a gas mileage indicator would change their driving habits. In fact, a number of cars already have such technology (BMW, to name one), and similary functionality can be added to any car by using a manifold vacuum gauge.
However, some people, like me, do not care what gas mileage they get. In fact, I'd be lucky to get 10mpg in the city. Namely as my car is highly modified and puts out about three times its stock rated horsepower.
In short: I don't care what it costs. It's fun to drive, and goes really fast. If I wanted boring and slow, I'd take the bus.
Oh, sure. And then they could find out first hand exactly how brutal Apple legal can be with stupid people.
What a kludge. If you want a Mac, get a real one. Yeesh.
Interesting ... you'd think they'd set their sights a bit higher. This "MHz Myth" thing, while true in some respects, isn't going to sell more computers.
Why bother? The Pentium4 is at the end of its life cycle, and Intel will be moving to the Itanium fairly soon... which will come out in the 800mhz range.
I'm sure Apple will enjoy the irony.
I'm not trolling...
Yes, yes you are. As a result, I'm ignoring your post save one point:
Everyone says look how stable the Apple OS is, of course, it only achived that by dropping all their old code and building upon BeOS.
Mac OS X has absolutely nothing to do with BeOS. Darwin is a combination of FreeBSD 3.2 and NeXTStep. BeOS got bought up by Palm, not Apple.
Assuming that statement in itself wasn't a troll to begin with, you may want to actually check your facts before forming yet another "Apple is only good because..." statement; like every other moron who dumps on Apple while not having actually used a Mac in the last five years.
It really depends what aspect of video you mean. If you mean rendering and 3D work, sure, SGI is still the industry leader there, if not only for their reputation and amazing hardware. But, if you're talking NLE post-- the Mac has a very large userbase. I've worked in a few post houses myself, and everything is either a Mac, a SGI box, or an avid windows box.
As to your comment of linux being the most cost effective, there is a two sided arguement to that. From a cost of software aspect, it certainly is the most cost effective. However, linux has no accountability what so ever. Large film houses don't have anyone to sue of a linux app pukes on a large project, costing them money. That is why mac, sgi, and even windows platforms get preference. They are considerably more accountable.
As for your comment that linux is faster and more stable... that is true when it comes to windows, however very untrue if you're talking mac or sgi solutions. IRIX on an octane2 will blow the freaking doors off of any linux box you wish to build, especially as we're talking graphics intensive post work.
Macs are not used bo a large group of artists who simply don't know any better. Macs are used by a large group of people because they are the best platform for many tasks, especially audio and video work. They use them because the excellent UI of the mac is by far the most productive to use when it comes to artistic functions.
This does make the Mac the standard, as the userbase is considerably larger then any other unix, and probably even exceeds that of windows. I don't have any solid numbers to back that up, but based on my experience in the few post houses I have worked in, almost everyone uses a mac at some point, and another box (SGI or windows) only when necessary.
Sure the linux kernel is complex. A complex hack job, to which there are better alternaitves. But that aside... my meaning of "complex" was not "lots of code". It was "a lot of different functions working with many vendor-specific APIs, third party codecs, and user interface elements". Like, for example, Photoshop.
As for the GIMP, sure, it's a great tool. Unfortunately it has a nearly useless UI, still doesn't have many of photoshop's features, and has a significant barrier to use in that it requires someone spend a lot of time learning how to use it. Photoshop, on the other had, is much easier to learn, because it has a UI that actually makes sense and is somewhat intuative. Not a mess of consecutive right-click menus.
However, as you've only managed to come up with two examples, each of which misses my point about free software, I won't bother debating those issues.
My original point is that something like Shake would not exist in the OSS world. My support of this statement is the fact that nothing like Shake DOES exist in the OSS world. If OSS is so great and spiffy when it comes to cranking out highly complex rendering tools, why is there no open source version of Shake? Perhaps because it takes money to develop these tools.
I have not missed your point, you have missed mine in an effort to convince me that open source software is good at something it clearly is not good at.
As for your comment about server software, I said open source DOES work very well in these applications, but DOES NOT work well in complex desktop applications. Try actually reading my post next time before trying to claim the non-existant moral high ground in a debate by spewing a bunch of names of large corporations who use linux at me.
Almost every post or broadcast house uses Macs for most of their NLE work, with Final Cut Pro and other similar tools for audio work, like MOTU's Digital Performer.
Apple always has been the defacto standard in audio, graphcis, and video work in professional circles. The only competition is windows, and due to its wrath of instability and security issues, the nod generally goes the way of the mac. It has for many years.
1) This kind of thing can never happen with free software, because something like Shake probably would not exist in the form of free software. High quality complex (note, complex) software takes money to build, and revenues to support.
Free software is great for simple things, like web, smtp, and other serving daemons. All they have to do is spew out data in accordance with an RFP, and most of them are so mature that they are vastly supperior to commercial alternaitves, simply because they are usually not bloated with useless features.
Case in point, sendmail. (Or qmail, whatever) It's faster then, say, exchange server, more stable, more secure, and just generally works better. Same with Apache vs. say, IIS or iPlanet. In those cases, free software works very, very well.
However, when it comes to complex things like desktop environments, free/open source software generally does not work. Things like non-linear editing suites, 2D manipulation tools like photoshop, and a wrath of other applications that pros use need to be commercial. They need to be protected from their competitors (please don't mention the GPL) and they need to be developed by people who get paid. This is due to the fact that they are very complex, have to deal with proprietary codecs, and provide user interfaces that are easy and intuative to use.
Free software historically does not handle complex apps, proprietary codecs, nor usable interfaces very well at all.
Open-source people do fun stuff that works quickly and doesn't require UI work or licensing or hardware-specific APIs, like servers. They don't do tedious stuff.
2) Apple is denying itself a very tiny market of windows users (don't think they would be doing this if there were 10,000+ users) so they can sell that very tiny market new macs. They are, after all, a hardware company at heart.
Apple may be denying themselves a few bucks in software sales, but they'll make it five times over back in hardware sales, with the bonus of getting a few thousand new users of its platform.
People who make movies are almost never loyal to a given platform (except the mac, ironically). They simply want something that works so they can meet their deadlines.
Linux is becoming a good rendering platform, not a "movie making" platform.
There's still nothing in the way of good NLE or 2D/3D image manipulation software floating around (and please don't mention the GNU stuff-- it's laughable to the pros). The main reason, aside from the fact that there's no standard linux desktop interface, is that intel hardware isn't that great for doing much more then crunching numbers.
Intel-oriented video hardware simply can't touch SGI visual workstations, among other things. However, it's cheap, and relatively easy to turn into a cheap rendering node. Thusly linux boxes are being adapted as such. Cheap rendering nodes.
Implying that movies are made on any linux based OS exclusively, however, is nothing short of BS. Take a tour of any broadcast or post house sometime and see what the editors use. Macs, SGI boxen, or intel machines running windows (E.g. Avid)
Kind of like how Microsoft was about to terminate office for the mac a few years ago, if Apple didn't agree to bundle IE as the default browser for their OS?
In short, no. There's a difference between terminating a supported platform for a valid business reason, and threatening to terminate a supported platform unless the company developing it does what you say.
That's an entirely different matter. I'm referring to American troops invading Iraq to get rid of Saddam.
If he uses biological or chemical agents against American troops, then America turns him into so much glowing dust. That's a more powerful deterrant then some may think.
The 9/11 issue was entirely different. If we went around and started blowing very large holes in Afghanistan, we not only would have had next to no idea who we were nuking, and would have destroyed all of the resulting evidence and information that was found. Nukes were not needed in that case, as the ground troops and airforce blew the hell out of them in short order. There was also nothing to deter-- they had already done what they had intended to do.
Besides, the point here is not that the US will use Nuclear Weapons. The point is that it CAN use them and that it WILL use them if chemical/bio/etc agents are used against its people.
The threat of force is not something to be taken lightly, least of all from the USA.
Simple. It's an intentional leak. Its purpose is to get inside the minds of certain people so that when we invade Iraq, the reprisal for use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon use against US troops is known.
In a nutshell, we nuke and pave their asses.
The whole point of these little information splurges is to reduce the risk to American soldiers and citizens.
Apple hardware is, in some cases, even cheaper then comparable PC hardware. Case in point: The new iMac.
Apple has come a long, long way recently in their retail pricing.
I don't need a SuperDrive. I don't want a SuperDrive. Apple won't give you a 933 or 1GHz DP machine without a SuperDrive. Sorry but I'd rather save hundreds of dollars by simply not buying one!
Historically, removing the Superdrive from the powermac configuration to the lowest possible option (cd/dvd) was a $250 savings. Apple made the Superdrive a non-option as 90% of the people buying high end powermacs wanted them. Frankly, $250 for DVD-write capability is a freaking bargan. That being said, if enough people want them without a superdrive, they'll add lower model options. Apple is not Dell. Apple actually listens to their customers.
THEREFORE Your system can only work with one Apple display, because only one card slot has this power connection.
Note that both card options, the ATI and GeForce4 both come with dual display support on the freaking card. If you need more, apple still sells the radeons that existed in their multi display option previously.
To my knowledge there is no adaptor that will give you a VGA output from the ADC port.
Go to the apple store website and click "displays" under the accessories listing on the site. The ADC to DVI connector is $39 bucks. That will allow basically anyone's display to work with an ADC card. Need to go to VGA? Well, aside from it being a pointless waste of time to go to a crappy analog signal, any number of companies make DVI->VGA adapters for a couple dollars. Most ATI cards come with them in the box.
You can go the opposite way as well, and connect an apple display to a DVI card with the Dr Bott DVIator. For $149.99.
So, in essence you are going to pay an extra 250 bucks or so to hook up a second Apple Display to the single card powermac. Big whoop. If you can afford an extra grand for a second display, that "premium" shouldn't be such a shock.
A waste of PCI slots? It has four. With two video cards, a SCSI card, and a high end audio card, you can run up to four displays as well as handle everything else even the most professional user could ever want.
A lot of things beat it, IMO.
In terms of a support box, or coffee table box, or what-have-you-not-a-main-box box, one could simply buy an iMac and have twice the machine, with a LCD monitor. iMacs (and everything else Apple makes) take standard HDD's, standard (if you want) CDroms, standard PCI cards, and standard RAM.
Anyways, sure, as a micro-server it has a bit of potential as I said. However, if space is a concern, one could just use a cheap 1U rack case and save even MORE space.
As for it being a media machine, I just don't see that. Crappy on-board video and audio doesn't really make the term "media box" leap out at me.
What I'm saying, is that all of the functions it is trying to perform can be done better with other hardware. Thusly making this thing cool, but pointless.
There are two kinds of company when it comes to hardware. The first kind innovate and design entirely new things. (See: Apple, SGI, Cray, etc).
In that light, if someone came along and cranked out a single board machine about the size of a few DVD cases which had a decently fast proc, onboard audio, room for a pair of 2.5" lappy drives, and a daughterboard for an AGP or PCI card.. THAT would be useful.
The other type replicates (see: Dell, Microsoft, any xyz intel box maker). These take existing technology and repackage it, be it in a 1/4 size case, or something that looks like one of the old Apple G3 tower cases. Their products are most always done better by existing companies.
Anyway, sure this thing is cool. But if you boil it down, it is simply a hacked up ATX board crammed into a 1/4 size ATX case.
... the crack on your planet?
"I find these gems cuter than any iMac I've ever seen!"
So.. a 1/4 sized boring grey intel box is in some way nicer then a full sized boring grey intel box? It's also 'cuter' then something that's faster with a moveable 15" LCD?
Somehow, I don't think the kind of CD burning you'd get by running a 1100Mhz high-voltage intel proc in something the size of a breadbox is what the average person has in mind.
Yeah, sure it's cool. If totally useless for a desktop application, which is what it's aimed at. (Show me one desktop geek who doesn't demand 64MB of video ram and two bigass monitors at a huge resolution)
As a small server, sure. It could be handy to stack a few in a corner somewhere. But why the hell bother when you can simply use a 1U rack case and get even better space utilization?
So what other uses could it possibly have? Competing in iMac country with a smaller footprint, while trading off performance and expandability? Sure. There are just two problems with that. First, if you dump a huge CRT beside it, it kind of defeats the purpose. Second, if you opt for a smaller LCD display with it, the thing ends up running you more then a top of the line iMac.
This thing is, in a word, useless. Other things do its job better. Aside from that, comparing it to an iMac is beyond stupidity. One may as well put a ford escort beside a Ferrari and proclaim it to be faster and better looking.
You're missing a key point here. With Windows code, you have to pay MS buckets of money and sign your life away to their lawyers... BUT, if you go and develop something spiffy and marketable, you can go along your merry way and use M$ code to further your own product and not release any of your modifications to the public.
The GPL does suck when it comes to retaining IP. No company in their right mind is going to toss zillions of dollars into development something just so they can go and release the fruits of their labor to their competitors.
The GPL is based on a pseudo-startrek idealistic reality that all humans should work to better themselves. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the world is run by cold hard cash, and it will be for the next significant future. Try explaining to a PHB how you're going to make a profit by building something, and then giving away the secret sauce.
So what is one to do? Can one avoid the borg and still retain their IP while giving a little something back to "the community"? Yes, with a BSD style licence and an Apple-style hybrid of OSS and Proprietary Code.
That way companies are able to release what is not critical IP, and would not hurt them should a competitor get their hands on it. As well, they can keep the Proprietary software under lock and key. Something for everyone. The OSS boys get device drivers and a trickle of performance/etc enhancements, and the company who spent all the funds making those things happen gets to keep the idea and profit by it.
Wow. Profitable companies that use open source. What a concept.