I can confirm that Apple's repair rates are nothing less than abusive. I wanted to upgrade our Mac Minis to SSDs from HDDs. The official repair centre I contacted quote me at $1000CAN for a 256GB SSD. And that's not counting labour. I told them that that was ridiculous and asked about using a non-official drive, and they said that they weren't allowed to. For comparison, the single most expensive consumer-level 256GB SSD I could find was $350CAN. The median price was approximately $150CAN.
So yeah, Apple charges absolutely obscene rates for repairs. I could literally buy a brand new mac mini/w the upgraded drive ($240 on their website) for less than it would cost me to repair an existing computer.
People worry about ridiculous things like aliens and AI, when the single biggest threat to our existence is ourselves. In particular, our own greed, self-importance, and complete unwillingness to think about the long term consequences of our actions are already doing far more damage than pretty much everything else combined.
But people don't like thinking about that, so we invent nonsense scenarios to be afraid of instead.
The only reason they're even doing this is cause their image got a black eye.
I tried to get a couple of mac minis upgraded, replacing the HDD drive with a 256GB SSD. I was quoted at $1000 just for the drive . This doesn't even include the labour for taking the thing apart!
If I were to purchase a brand new Mac Mini, an upgrade to SSD is still $240. Still more expensive than just buying an SSD from the store, but that's 1/4 of the price I was quoted for the repair.
You do have the option of converting the music to certain non-AAC formats like mp3, but the choices are limited. FLAC for example, isn't an option in itunes.
It's successful because that's what you use if you wanna sync music to your iPhone.
I do have an iPhone and I agree, iTunes sucks 500 fetid donkey scrotums per square inch. It mangles my music, and the music sync selection window is so shockingly poorly designed that I can only assume it was designed that way so that Apple could harvest free energy from Steve Job's spinning corpse.
Wrong. You can script setup of the entire solution, ujt the exact methods may differ (depending on how you deploy the manager, as a VM or stand-alone server, and previously also whether you installed the nodes from image or on top of RHEL (answer file or kickstart).
Key part bolded. Again, (and this is based on a very cursory viewing of the admin docs) this isn't provided by them. You have to write your own scripts and set up your own automation. That means you now have to learn to manage and use not only oVirt, but Ansible and other tools as well.
The primary target of the commercial versipn is to replace VMWare. But that doesn't always mean expensive (see hyper-converged).
Okay, fair enough. Enterprises with elaborate VMWare setups are going to already have the resources to set something like oVirt up.
Unfortunately that's a handicap for smaller companies that are just getting started with their VM infrastructure and don't necessarily have the expertise or the manpower available to do that level of setup. Having the tools already available OOTB would be extremely valuable to such organizations.
As it stands, it's hard to say how strong Citrix' position is going to be 5 years from now. Having lost AWS as a major vendor was a big blow. Citrix doing this feature removal in the Free version, while understandable, I fear will hurt them more than it will help, mindshare-wise. Especially since KVM's ecosystem is clearly maturing rapidly.
Quite possibly. One doesn't up and change their entire VM infrastructure at the drop of a hat, so there's little incentive to keep up on up and coming technologies unless you're explicitly looking to make a change. Or if something comes up that so newsworthy that it manages to punch through all the noise.
oVirt has definitely improved a lot since I last looked. However, one of my biggest complains still stands. You have to configure a frightening amount by hand without any tools to automate. I am leary of doing things manually because for every step a person has to perform in a process, that's a step that can get screwed up somehow. While it does give you a lot of power, it's also extremely high risk. Considering that it explicitly targets RHEL/Centos7 and only that, there should be no reason why there isn't a whole bunch of best practise automation mechanisms to set up key elements like hooking up the ISCSI (or NFS) backend. It seems like oVirt is designed primarily for orgs with very deep pockets and can afford things like an extensive FC infrastructure, and large IT department with enough manpower capacity to dedicate to setting the thing up.
Compare that against XenCenter, where you can almost fully admin the host itself from the GUI. It's incredibly easy and straightforward to get up and running, and you don't need to touch command line at all unless you're doing something unusual. This includes setting up ISCSI storage, networking, etc. Furthermore, and this is more a mark of maturity rather than a ding against quality, but XenServer has an HCL and best practises information available for setting things up. If you don't have the resources to spare for futzing with configuration settings 'n whatnot, having established standards to based your setup on is extremely valuable.
That's actually not the comparison I was making. I was trying to point out not everyone who uses software, has the time AND the energy AND the skill to also maintain software. A heart surgeon, for example, cares about medicine. They care about saving lives. It is a demanding job that already requires a lot of time and energy and skill to master, and that doesn't leave much room for software development.
But according to the GP, because they don't ALSO know how to do software development, said heart surgeon can go fuck themselves. And that's just idiotic.
To your point, yes, medical knowledge is based on generations of doctors each standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. But the analogy still breaks down badly because if we tried to continue it, you would have small groups of heart surgeons divvying themselves up into different camps who all proclaim that their software is the best and insist on re-inventing the same medical procedures over and over again because of NIH syndrome.
XenServer has a full set of tools and a comprehensive GUI for doing anything and everything with the host and VMs. And this is the free version. The Paid version is very generously priced and provides a few more really nice features.
The last time I tried using KVM, there wasn't a single decent management app for KVM that didn't also cost an absurd amount of money and still couldn't do everything that XenCenter/XenServer could do without extreme fiddling. Whether that's still the the case, I'm not sure.
Remember that when you're next in a hospital and need heart surgery. I don't know about you but I'd rather have someone specialized to the task.
Software development requires a specific skill set, time, and energy that not everyone has. Despite all that bullshit Bill Gates et al are spewing about everyone learning to code, not everyone can code. Even if they had the talent, they may not have the time to learn it on top of whatever else they're doing.
Your argument is breathtakingly ignorant, and a perfect example of the self-important attitude that keeps Linux and most other OSS projects from going mainstream.
The problem is that you're hardware choices will become more and more limited. For example, Microsoft has gone so far as to cripple windows updates for any non-win10 computer running a kaby lake or newer processor.
Out of all the various versions of Photoshop, only *two* are marked as Platinum. The last one being CS5 from 2010. Everything else is less, which means everything else is problematic to a varying degree.
And this doesn't even consider the OTHER key aspects of Photoshop usage, such as using a wacom tablet. Want pressure sensitive strokes? HAHAHAHAHA FOOL!
Systemd is a fantastic example of why Linux hasn't taken off, and it's exactly for not the reasons you mention.
Look at the massive shitstorm that Systemd has caused. Now consider how much impact that actually has on the average user. How much? A big fat goose egg. That's how much.
But the linux community et al care more about fighting over bullshit and being special snowflakes than actually putting out products that would be valuable for people.
Hell, the fact that there are to this day, religious wars between emacs vs vi tells you all you need to know about why Linux has failed as a desktop.
It's pure anarchy. The community claims to be meritocratous but when you look at actual behaviour, it's all emotion and ego.
In the end you have an operating system that is so shockingly fragmented that you could have two different computers both running "Linux", but are completely and utterly different in almost every conceivable way. Nobody cares about the LSB, which makes it that much more difficult to develop against all the various possible distributions out there. Nobody can agree on anything, so instead of having a couple of solid options for doing a given thing, there are 5 dozen half-assed ones that only handle their niche use case. The end result is that nothing runs particularly well, or only works well as long as you stay within the borders of the cultivated garden someone had set up. It may not be a walled garden, but when you discover that stepping out of that carefully manicured garden takes you immediately to a minefield of obscure commands and config files, it may as well be. And that walled garden is too small and too exclusive to do anyone any good.
Perfect example: In gnome, there is no easy way to add an application to the program menu if it didn't come out of the repository. Windows? Drag the exe to the start menu. Mac? Drag it onto the dock or into/Applications. Gnome? Google for the specifications of a.desktop file, construct it by hand with a text editor, then sudo to root and copy that file to somewhere in/usr/share.
Really? I mean seriously... Really? To paraphrase Linus Torvalds: That's fucking retarded. And Linux is *full* of these kinds of unbelievable gotchas.
Because the OS is such a fractious mess, the overall ecosystem became complete shit too. The average Linux app is mediocre at best. The best of the best that the linux world has to offer pales in comparison to the proprietary options available. For example, Thunderbird is considered THE email for linux, and yet it's horrible, with an ugly confusing interface and equally confusing behaviour.
Linux is great as a server. It's great for embedded applications. It's great for any application where someone skilled in Linux has the ability to take control of it, reign it in, and limit the functionality to what they want it to be. For anything open ended, like a user desktop, it's a completely hopeless mess.
I myself use a Mac because of the above reasons. Yes it's stupidly expensive. Yes, Apple pisses me off. But at the end of the day I have a job I need to do, and that job is stressful enough without having to worry that at any given moment, something strange will happen to the OS that requires me to spend several hours pouring through stackoverflow posts for some obscure command to solve.
You forgot one critical aspect: Microsoft has done a fantastic job of making people not trust Windows 10.
Right from the beginning, Windows 10 has been sketchy with it's dubious forced upgrades. Then there's their data mining of everything on your machine, the forced upgrades.... the list just goes on and on. The upgrade one is particularly bad, because Microsoft routinely screws up their updates, so you have a decent chance of discovering that your computer has been bricked due to no fault of your own.
So nobody who is reasonably informed, wants Windows 10.
Now, when you consider it's not possible, or at least it's incredibly difficult, to buy a machine that *doesn't* have Windows 10 on it, suddenly people now not only have no incentive to upgrade, the actually have a very strong incentive to NOT upgrade.
In essense, Microsoft is directly responsible for the collapse of the PC market the last few years.
Be careful with lightning cables. I got a couple of cheaper ones. After a while, _all_ the devices I was using them with could no longer charge properly. I switched to apple branded cables and the problems mostly went away, but not completely. I think the cable might have caused some kind of damage to the power system of said iDevices.
Never buying 3rd party cables again. Just can't trust them.
But something tasteful, like a quick fade-out/in, is extremely valuable to show the audience that a transition IS taking place. Without it, would be easy for an audience member to miss the fact that the slide changed (they just happened to glance away at the wrong moment, for example).
True. But that's not my point at all. The majority of the features are completely unnecessary for most people. But that doesn't change the fact that, despite the breathtaking number of flaws, it's one of the most polished office suites available.
Microsoft Office is the benchmark to which all other office suites are compared. Like it or not, this is it. If I have to choose between two suites, and each one has it's share of issues, an average person is most likely going to pick the one that everyone else is using. That's why Office is still, and will remain, the dominant office suite until something interesting happens.
That's a lousy metric for evaluating an Office suite.
The correct metric is: Does it do what you need it to do?
If it doesn't do what you need, then they could be _paying you_ to use it and you'd still be screwed. Impress for example, is hopelessly broken and still is in v6. If I need to do a professional presentation, I'd be better off writing a document and presenting the resulting PDF than using Impress.
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I can confirm that Apple's repair rates are nothing less than abusive. I wanted to upgrade our Mac Minis to SSDs from HDDs. The official repair centre I contacted quote me at $1000CAN for a 256GB SSD. And that's not counting labour. I told them that that was ridiculous and asked about using a non-official drive, and they said that they weren't allowed to. For comparison, the single most expensive consumer-level 256GB SSD I could find was $350CAN. The median price was approximately $150CAN.
So yeah, Apple charges absolutely obscene rates for repairs. I could literally buy a brand new mac mini /w the upgraded drive ($240 on their website) for less than it would cost me to repair an existing computer.
People worry about ridiculous things like aliens and AI, when the single biggest threat to our existence is ourselves. In particular, our own greed, self-importance, and complete unwillingness to think about the long term consequences of our actions are already doing far more damage than pretty much everything else combined.
But people don't like thinking about that, so we invent nonsense scenarios to be afraid of instead.
There's a quick, easy solution to this.
How do they taste?
That's Canadian $, just to be clear.
The only reason they're even doing this is cause their image got a black eye.
I tried to get a couple of mac minis upgraded, replacing the HDD drive with a 256GB SSD. I was quoted at $1000 just for the drive . This doesn't even include the labour for taking the thing apart!
If I were to purchase a brand new Mac Mini, an upgrade to SSD is still $240. Still more expensive than just buying an SSD from the store, but that's 1/4 of the price I was quoted for the repair.
Apple sure loves their shenanigans.
You do have the option of converting the music to certain non-AAC formats like mp3, but the choices are limited. FLAC for example, isn't an option in itunes.
Vox does it. You need to install a helper service for it to work, but it does. Works just fine on MacOS.
It's successful because that's what you use if you wanna sync music to your iPhone.
I do have an iPhone and I agree, iTunes sucks 500 fetid donkey scrotums per square inch. It mangles my music, and the music sync selection window is so shockingly poorly designed that I can only assume it was designed that way so that Apple could harvest free energy from Steve Job's spinning corpse.
Wrong. You can script setup of the entire solution, ujt the exact methods may differ (depending on how you deploy the manager, as a VM or stand-alone server, and previously also whether you installed the nodes from image or on top of RHEL (answer file or kickstart).
Key part bolded. Again, (and this is based on a very cursory viewing of the admin docs) this isn't provided by them. You have to write your own scripts and set up your own automation. That means you now have to learn to manage and use not only oVirt, but Ansible and other tools as well.
The primary target of the commercial versipn is to replace VMWare. But that doesn't always mean expensive (see hyper-converged).
Okay, fair enough. Enterprises with elaborate VMWare setups are going to already have the resources to set something like oVirt up.
Unfortunately that's a handicap for smaller companies that are just getting started with their VM infrastructure and don't necessarily have the expertise or the manpower available to do that level of setup. Having the tools already available OOTB would be extremely valuable to such organizations.
As it stands, it's hard to say how strong Citrix' position is going to be 5 years from now. Having lost AWS as a major vendor was a big blow. Citrix doing this feature removal in the Free version, while understandable, I fear will hurt them more than it will help, mindshare-wise. Especially since KVM's ecosystem is clearly maturing rapidly.
Quite possibly. One doesn't up and change their entire VM infrastructure at the drop of a hat, so there's little incentive to keep up on up and coming technologies unless you're explicitly looking to make a change. Or if something comes up that so newsworthy that it manages to punch through all the noise.
oVirt has definitely improved a lot since I last looked. However, one of my biggest complains still stands. You have to configure a frightening amount by hand without any tools to automate. I am leary of doing things manually because for every step a person has to perform in a process, that's a step that can get screwed up somehow. While it does give you a lot of power, it's also extremely high risk. Considering that it explicitly targets RHEL/Centos7 and only that, there should be no reason why there isn't a whole bunch of best practise automation mechanisms to set up key elements like hooking up the ISCSI (or NFS) backend. It seems like oVirt is designed primarily for orgs with very deep pockets and can afford things like an extensive FC infrastructure, and large IT department with enough manpower capacity to dedicate to setting the thing up.
Compare that against XenCenter, where you can almost fully admin the host itself from the GUI. It's incredibly easy and straightforward to get up and running, and you don't need to touch command line at all unless you're doing something unusual. This includes setting up ISCSI storage, networking, etc. Furthermore, and this is more a mark of maturity rather than a ding against quality, but XenServer has an HCL and best practises information available for setting things up. If you don't have the resources to spare for futzing with configuration settings 'n whatnot, having established standards to based your setup on is extremely valuable.
That's actually not the comparison I was making. I was trying to point out not everyone who uses software, has the time AND the energy AND the skill to also maintain software. A heart surgeon, for example, cares about medicine. They care about saving lives. It is a demanding job that already requires a lot of time and energy and skill to master, and that doesn't leave much room for software development.
But according to the GP, because they don't ALSO know how to do software development, said heart surgeon can go fuck themselves. And that's just idiotic.
To your point, yes, medical knowledge is based on generations of doctors each standing on the shoulders of the giants before them. But the analogy still breaks down badly because if we tried to continue it, you would have small groups of heart surgeons divvying themselves up into different camps who all proclaim that their software is the best and insist on re-inventing the same medical procedures over and over again because of NIH syndrome.
XenServer has a full set of tools and a comprehensive GUI for doing anything and everything with the host and VMs. And this is the free version. The Paid version is very generously priced and provides a few more really nice features.
The last time I tried using KVM, there wasn't a single decent management app for KVM that didn't also cost an absurd amount of money and still couldn't do everything that XenCenter/XenServer could do without extreme fiddling. Whether that's still the the case, I'm not sure.
Remember that when you're next in a hospital and need heart surgery. I don't know about you but I'd rather have someone specialized to the task.
Software development requires a specific skill set, time, and energy that not everyone has. Despite all that bullshit Bill Gates et al are spewing about everyone learning to code, not everyone can code. Even if they had the talent, they may not have the time to learn it on top of whatever else they're doing.
Your argument is breathtakingly ignorant, and a perfect example of the self-important attitude that keeps Linux and most other OSS projects from going mainstream.
The problem is that you're hardware choices will become more and more limited. For example, Microsoft has gone so far as to cripple windows updates for any non-win10 computer running a kaby lake or newer processor.
So first you accuse the parent of being factually wrong, and then proceed to point to an *emulator*.
And if that wasn't bad enough, lets look at the compatibility reports provided by Wine:
https://appdb.winehq.org/objec...
Out of all the various versions of Photoshop, only *two* are marked as Platinum. The last one being CS5 from 2010. Everything else is less, which means everything else is problematic to a varying degree.
And this doesn't even consider the OTHER key aspects of Photoshop usage, such as using a wacom tablet. Want pressure sensitive strokes? HAHAHAHAHA FOOL!
Systemd is a fantastic example of why Linux hasn't taken off, and it's exactly for not the reasons you mention.
Look at the massive shitstorm that Systemd has caused. Now consider how much impact that actually has on the average user. How much? A big fat goose egg. That's how much.
But the linux community et al care more about fighting over bullshit and being special snowflakes than actually putting out products that would be valuable for people.
Hell, the fact that there are to this day, religious wars between emacs vs vi tells you all you need to know about why Linux has failed as a desktop.
It's pure anarchy. The community claims to be meritocratous but when you look at actual behaviour, it's all emotion and ego.
In the end you have an operating system that is so shockingly fragmented that you could have two different computers both running "Linux", but are completely and utterly different in almost every conceivable way. Nobody cares about the LSB, which makes it that much more difficult to develop against all the various possible distributions out there. Nobody can agree on anything, so instead of having a couple of solid options for doing a given thing, there are 5 dozen half-assed ones that only handle their niche use case. The end result is that nothing runs particularly well, or only works well as long as you stay within the borders of the cultivated garden someone had set up. It may not be a walled garden, but when you discover that stepping out of that carefully manicured garden takes you immediately to a minefield of obscure commands and config files, it may as well be. And that walled garden is too small and too exclusive to do anyone any good.
Perfect example: In gnome, there is no easy way to add an application to the program menu if it didn't come out of the repository. Windows? Drag the exe to the start menu. Mac? Drag it onto the dock or into /Applications. Gnome? Google for the specifications of a .desktop file, construct it by hand with a text editor, then sudo to root and copy that file to somewhere in /usr/share.
Really? I mean seriously... Really? To paraphrase Linus Torvalds: That's fucking retarded. And Linux is *full* of these kinds of unbelievable gotchas.
Because the OS is such a fractious mess, the overall ecosystem became complete shit too. The average Linux app is mediocre at best. The best of the best that the linux world has to offer pales in comparison to the proprietary options available. For example, Thunderbird is considered THE email for linux, and yet it's horrible, with an ugly confusing interface and equally confusing behaviour.
Linux is great as a server. It's great for embedded applications. It's great for any application where someone skilled in Linux has the ability to take control of it, reign it in, and limit the functionality to what they want it to be. For anything open ended, like a user desktop, it's a completely hopeless mess.
I myself use a Mac because of the above reasons. Yes it's stupidly expensive. Yes, Apple pisses me off. But at the end of the day I have a job I need to do, and that job is stressful enough without having to worry that at any given moment, something strange will happen to the OS that requires me to spend several hours pouring through stackoverflow posts for some obscure command to solve.
You forgot one critical aspect: Microsoft has done a fantastic job of making people not trust Windows 10.
Right from the beginning, Windows 10 has been sketchy with it's dubious forced upgrades. Then there's their data mining of everything on your machine, the forced upgrades.... the list just goes on and on. The upgrade one is particularly bad, because Microsoft routinely screws up their updates, so you have a decent chance of discovering that your computer has been bricked due to no fault of your own.
So nobody who is reasonably informed, wants Windows 10.
Now, when you consider it's not possible, or at least it's incredibly difficult, to buy a machine that *doesn't* have Windows 10 on it, suddenly people now not only have no incentive to upgrade, the actually have a very strong incentive to NOT upgrade.
In essense, Microsoft is directly responsible for the collapse of the PC market the last few years.
No, they're not like Amazon. However, if you remove your copy, you won't be able to install it again.
Yes, you would think that. But it can happen anyway. A distraction. The audience member zones out for some reason.
Trying to assign blame on either the speaker or the audience member accomplishes nothing.
Instead, simply adding a small but very visible attention grabber can mitigate the problem.
You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
By Microsoft's definition, Kim Yong-Un is popular too.
Be careful with lightning cables. I got a couple of cheaper ones. After a while, _all_ the devices I was using them with could no longer charge properly. I switched to apple branded cables and the problems mostly went away, but not completely. I think the cable might have caused some kind of damage to the power system of said iDevices.
Never buying 3rd party cables again. Just can't trust them.
Facebook wants me to use facebook.
I want all of Facebooks upper management to commit slow sepuku using chainsaws.
I guess we can't get everything we want in life.
Only if you use the obscene ones.
But something tasteful, like a quick fade-out/in, is extremely valuable to show the audience that a transition IS taking place. Without it, would be easy for an audience member to miss the fact that the slide changed (they just happened to glance away at the wrong moment, for example).
True. But that's not my point at all. The majority of the features are completely unnecessary for most people. But that doesn't change the fact that, despite the breathtaking number of flaws, it's one of the most polished office suites available.
Microsoft Office is the benchmark to which all other office suites are compared. Like it or not, this is it. If I have to choose between two suites, and each one has it's share of issues, an average person is most likely going to pick the one that everyone else is using. That's why Office is still, and will remain, the dominant office suite until something interesting happens.
That's a lousy metric for evaluating an Office suite.
The correct metric is: Does it do what you need it to do?
If it doesn't do what you need, then they could be _paying you_ to use it and you'd still be screwed. Impress for example, is hopelessly broken and still is in v6. If I need to do a professional presentation, I'd be better off writing a document and presenting the resulting PDF than using Impress.