Graphics cards really need bandwidth only for texture uploads, and if you're shuttling images between the CPU and the GPU. For many high-performance games, the bandwidth requirement for the CPU-GPU links is rather models.
OS X server, a $20 purchase, lets you manage iOS devices and install whatever apps you want on them. Yes, without having to obtain App Store blessing. I don't think that the walled garden concept can be reasonably still thought applicable. Given that you get a reasonable device management capability for $20, I'd tend to think of it as a bargain, actually.
"My late 2009 i7 iMac is unfortunately still going strong" Unfortunately? You're getting your money's worth! Enjoy it. With 16G of ram and a fusion drive it's likely a screamer. I only upgraded the late '07 iMac to the latest model a few months ago since every once in a while I need to do ports builds and they took a day on that '07 model and I got tired of waiting:)
Apple products have excellent resale value, I don't think of it as ridiculous at all. You're reaping the benefits of a solid brand, even many years after the purchase. What's not to like?
A buddy of mine is evaluating a design of a small 32 node HPC cluster with nothing but thunderbolt as point-to-point interconnect. So far the results are very positive, and it's a huge bang for the buck. I don't think you quite know what you're talking about, because the presence of an ethernet controller "somewhere in the system" would be immaterial.
First of all, Firewire was never able to transfer arbitrary PCI traffic, thus you couldn't use it to attach external PCI/PCIe devices to your portable device. When PCIe "extender" solutions became available, they were expensive and bulky. The connectors were huge, and the cable thick, and sometimes it would just refuse to work in a particular setup. Thunderbolt provides this kind of functionality on a manageable, off-the-shelf interconnect that you can buy in nearby Walmart. A brand name thunderbolt single x16 PCIe card cage runs about $500, and you can buy off-brand ones for half that. This lets you pull off stunts like adding two graphics cards to your laptop. I'd say calling it a "bigger flop than firewire" is borderline trolling.
Connecting "directly" to PCIe for expansion/extension purposes is setting the clock 10 years back - if you have any PCIe to attach to begin with. Fewer and fewer laptops have expressCard slots, and some high end laptops rightfully (IMHO) got rid of them. I don't really miss expressCard on MacBooks. Thunderbolt is much easier to deal with.
Thunderbolt lets you do things that were never possible with firewire, even if we ignore the speed disparity. You can, for example, attach a card cage with PCIe (and PCI) slots for whatever specialized hardware you need. Then you hook this up to your laptop. Before thunderbolt, you had to have a laptop with expressCard slots, and use expensive (think $1k for one card bay for good brand name products), bulky, finicky and rather short range PCIe extender solutions. This wasn't possible at all with FireWire.
If your desk is 5 feet deep and you put your 15" VGA monitor at the far end, then sure, a VGA display is "retina".
Now, back in the real life, the viewing distance is what people normally have on their desks. Normal desks. Heck, there are even standards that specify what the "normal" viewing distance is for a computer monitor. IOW: You're making up imaginary problems.
It is a semi-technical term. It pretty much means that when you foveate at the middle of the display, at a normal book-reading distance for mobile devices, and normal monitor distance for desktops, there's roughly no more than one photosensitive element on your retina per one screen pixel.
I love the times we live in. This all reads like yesteryear's science-fiction. We're fast approaching a cinema quality display in an iMac - a simple to use piece of off-the-shelf consumer hardware. In an aluminum chassis that would be considered viable only for military grade hardware a mere decade ago. One can bitch all they want about "Apple tax", but if it weren't for Apple, we wouldn't have that hardware. Never mind that nobody else makes a PC in the aluminum iMac-style chassis, AFAIK. Or at least not in the volume that'll ensure ample supply of replacement parts a decade from now.
The one-time-use token is very clever and backwards-compatible, too. It's a one-time-use credit card number, generated on the fly for that particular transaction. That way the merchants can keep using legacy infrastructure - they still deal with credit card numbers etc. Just that those numbers are ephemeral, and are useless when they get stolen/leaked (as they all eventually are, it seems).
I don't think there's anything particularly 1st gen about retina iMac. It's just an iMac with a higher-resolution screen. I'm sure some enterprisey folk will start "backporting" those screens to older iMacs in a few years as the used-screen supply gets going on eBay.
An open source router has open source software/firmware and hardware. You can't claim that with an off-the-shelf hardware, unless that hardware was open-source to start with.
MSDN's value proposition is a bit murky. If all the value you get out of it is to have OSes to test on, and you target consumer systems, then it's much cheaper to buy said OSes individually on eBay/Amazon. Quite a few things from Visual Assist exist in Creator, I'm told, with more on the way:) Anyway, you only need VS Professional to use extensions. That doesn't cost $2k.
What you'll find though, as far as those "can't be done" arguments are concerned, is that - at least the old ones I've looked at - don't use any math to back anything up. With fusion power it's rather easy to quantitatively demonstrate what the problems are. As far as hot air ballons etc. are concerned, if one actually use the math and physics available back then, one would see that precisely the opposite conclusion has to be drawn. Fluid dynamics have been figured out long before heavier-than-air flight.
Admittedly, though, 7x10' plans are kinda small as far as nuclear-anything goes. Must be all the hawk-eyed interns that have worked on that project, 'cuz man, they must have printed this shit at 3000 dpi and used Paint to tweak every pixel to fit it on 7x10' of paper:)
cannot be pinned down to a certain string of digits
What? It is pinned down to a certain string of digits. That string of digits is even constructively defined, and constructivist approach to mathematics is about as uptight as one can get in philosophy of mathematics. It's just not a finite string of digits, but it's most certainly a completely well defined string. The BBP formula even lets you compute arbitrary digits without having to compute the preceding ones. Yes, admittedly, it's linearithmetic, ho-hum.
circumvent their random SMC half-assed secure boot nonsense
I have no clue what you're talking about. Seriously.
Your ramblings can be rephrased as: I've got an Intel Core I machine and I bitch that they don't support it anymore. Sell it. Get a Core II macbook or imac, anything from 2008 will give you wonderful performance. If you give yourself a month or two to look around, you'll find a good one for around $200. Stop bitching. Seriously. You expect them to bend over backwards to support hardware that was essentially transitional, that was made back in 2006. Geez. I'm a cheapskate when it comes to Apple hardware, I get most of their Macs used, and even I don't complain that much. A $200 used Mac with about $100-$150 in upgrades will perform quite admirably.
Lion refuses to install, says the hardware is unsupported.
Then you have a Core I CPU, and you're out of luck. I don't really blame Apple for not supporting those early CPUs.
This is terrible advice.
Why? It demonstrably increases performance. I've found it to be great advice.
Mavericks works fine from a traditional hard drive
Your expectation with regards to "working fine" will dramatically change once you give an SSD a try. People complaining about Mavericks being "slow" are completely right, but that slowness is simply due to the hard drive access patterns. Probably the paging policies have changed significantly between Mountain Lion and Mavericks. With an SSD, Mavericks works amazingly well even with 2GB of RAM. Sure, if you've got 8GB of RAM so that everything needed eventually gets cached, you'll have usable Mavericks even with a piss-poor mechanical hard drive.
Given how relatively easy it is to get OS X to work well on what amounts to unsupported hardware, I'd say you need to rethink that line of thought. Apple has to drop support for hardware eventually, and the first-gen Intel machines with non-replaceable graphics are essentially impossible to support in any reasonable fashion. Note that Apple's notion of support means that you have a supported hardware accelerated composited desktop and 3D. So it's not merely sufficient to get the thing to boot up and show you a desktop - it's no problem getting Mavericks to do that on almost any oddball piece of Core II hardware. It's no different with modern Windows - if there are no drivers available for legacy hardware, you're stuck.
I don't believe in fairies and pixie dust. Someone still has to get paid for the development. If it's a serious app, it needs serious man-hours to be developed, and you can't fund that if you have $4.99 price tag and merely thousands of users. Minecraft sells for ~$20 and they sold tens of millions of copies. They wouldn't make it if they sold for $5, and that's a hugely popular and successful project.
Wine takes about the same amount of effort per bottle to produce no matter what kind of a wine it is. Comparing it to software is silly.
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Graphics cards really need bandwidth only for texture uploads, and if you're shuttling images between the CPU and the GPU. For many high-performance games, the bandwidth requirement for the CPU-GPU links is rather models.
Thankfully, it acts as a PCIe bridge, too :)
OS X server, a $20 purchase, lets you manage iOS devices and install whatever apps you want on them. Yes, without having to obtain App Store blessing. I don't think that the walled garden concept can be reasonably still thought applicable. Given that you get a reasonable device management capability for $20, I'd tend to think of it as a bargain, actually.
Why would I care? :)
"My late 2009 i7 iMac is unfortunately still going strong" Unfortunately? You're getting your money's worth! Enjoy it. With 16G of ram and a fusion drive it's likely a screamer. I only upgraded the late '07 iMac to the latest model a few months ago since every once in a while I need to do ports builds and they took a day on that '07 model and I got tired of waiting :)
Apple products have excellent resale value, I don't think of it as ridiculous at all. You're reaping the benefits of a solid brand, even many years after the purchase. What's not to like?
A buddy of mine is evaluating a design of a small 32 node HPC cluster with nothing but thunderbolt as point-to-point interconnect. So far the results are very positive, and it's a huge bang for the buck. I don't think you quite know what you're talking about, because the presence of an ethernet controller "somewhere in the system" would be immaterial.
First of all, Firewire was never able to transfer arbitrary PCI traffic, thus you couldn't use it to attach external PCI/PCIe devices to your portable device. When PCIe "extender" solutions became available, they were expensive and bulky. The connectors were huge, and the cable thick, and sometimes it would just refuse to work in a particular setup. Thunderbolt provides this kind of functionality on a manageable, off-the-shelf interconnect that you can buy in nearby Walmart. A brand name thunderbolt single x16 PCIe card cage runs about $500, and you can buy off-brand ones for half that. This lets you pull off stunts like adding two graphics cards to your laptop. I'd say calling it a "bigger flop than firewire" is borderline trolling.
Connecting "directly" to PCIe for expansion/extension purposes is setting the clock 10 years back - if you have any PCIe to attach to begin with. Fewer and fewer laptops have expressCard slots, and some high end laptops rightfully (IMHO) got rid of them. I don't really miss expressCard on MacBooks. Thunderbolt is much easier to deal with.
Thunderbolt lets you do things that were never possible with firewire, even if we ignore the speed disparity. You can, for example, attach a card cage with PCIe (and PCI) slots for whatever specialized hardware you need. Then you hook this up to your laptop. Before thunderbolt, you had to have a laptop with expressCard slots, and use expensive (think $1k for one card bay for good brand name products), bulky, finicky and rather short range PCIe extender solutions. This wasn't possible at all with FireWire.
If your desk is 5 feet deep and you put your 15" VGA monitor at the far end, then sure, a VGA display is "retina".
Now, back in the real life, the viewing distance is what people normally have on their desks. Normal desks. Heck, there are even standards that specify what the "normal" viewing distance is for a computer monitor. IOW: You're making up imaginary problems.
It is a semi-technical term. It pretty much means that when you foveate at the middle of the display, at a normal book-reading distance for mobile devices, and normal monitor distance for desktops, there's roughly no more than one photosensitive element on your retina per one screen pixel.
I love the times we live in. This all reads like yesteryear's science-fiction. We're fast approaching a cinema quality display in an iMac - a simple to use piece of off-the-shelf consumer hardware. In an aluminum chassis that would be considered viable only for military grade hardware a mere decade ago. One can bitch all they want about "Apple tax", but if it weren't for Apple, we wouldn't have that hardware. Never mind that nobody else makes a PC in the aluminum iMac-style chassis, AFAIK. Or at least not in the volume that'll ensure ample supply of replacement parts a decade from now.
The one-time-use token is very clever and backwards-compatible, too. It's a one-time-use credit card number, generated on the fly for that particular transaction. That way the merchants can keep using legacy infrastructure - they still deal with credit card numbers etc. Just that those numbers are ephemeral, and are useless when they get stolen/leaked (as they all eventually are, it seems).
I don't think there's anything particularly 1st gen about retina iMac. It's just an iMac with a higher-resolution screen. I'm sure some enterprisey folk will start "backporting" those screens to older iMacs in a few years as the used-screen supply gets going on eBay.
I don't read "CDC should be all over the hospital" the same as "hey, we've come to help, but feel free to turn us away".
An open source router has open source software/firmware and hardware. You can't claim that with an off-the-shelf hardware, unless that hardware was open-source to start with.
MSDN's value proposition is a bit murky. If all the value you get out of it is to have OSes to test on, and you target consumer systems, then it's much cheaper to buy said OSes individually on eBay/Amazon. Quite a few things from Visual Assist exist in Creator, I'm told, with more on the way :) Anyway, you only need VS Professional to use extensions. That doesn't cost $2k.
There's no reason whatsoever to mine more of them for the system to be successful. A finite supply would be perfectly acceptable.
What you'll find though, as far as those "can't be done" arguments are concerned, is that - at least the old ones I've looked at - don't use any math to back anything up. With fusion power it's rather easy to quantitatively demonstrate what the problems are. As far as hot air ballons etc. are concerned, if one actually use the math and physics available back then, one would see that precisely the opposite conclusion has to be drawn. Fluid dynamics have been figured out long before heavier-than-air flight.
Admittedly, though, 7x10' plans are kinda small as far as nuclear-anything goes. Must be all the hawk-eyed interns that have worked on that project, 'cuz man, they must have printed this shit at 3000 dpi and used Paint to tweak every pixel to fit it on 7x10' of paper :)
IOW, according to you lawlessness is fine and dandy as long as "lives are on the line". Think of the children, too.
cannot be pinned down to a certain string of digits
What? It is pinned down to a certain string of digits. That string of digits is even constructively defined, and constructivist approach to mathematics is about as uptight as one can get in philosophy of mathematics. It's just not a finite string of digits, but it's most certainly a completely well defined string. The BBP formula even lets you compute arbitrary digits without having to compute the preceding ones. Yes, admittedly, it's linearithmetic, ho-hum.
circumvent their random SMC half-assed secure boot nonsense
I have no clue what you're talking about. Seriously.
Your ramblings can be rephrased as: I've got an Intel Core I machine and I bitch that they don't support it anymore. Sell it. Get a Core II macbook or imac, anything from 2008 will give you wonderful performance. If you give yourself a month or two to look around, you'll find a good one for around $200. Stop bitching. Seriously. You expect them to bend over backwards to support hardware that was essentially transitional, that was made back in 2006. Geez. I'm a cheapskate when it comes to Apple hardware, I get most of their Macs used, and even I don't complain that much. A $200 used Mac with about $100-$150 in upgrades will perform quite admirably.
Lion refuses to install, says the hardware is unsupported.
Then you have a Core I CPU, and you're out of luck. I don't really blame Apple for not supporting those early CPUs.
This is terrible advice.
Why? It demonstrably increases performance. I've found it to be great advice.
Mavericks works fine from a traditional hard drive
Your expectation with regards to "working fine" will dramatically change once you give an SSD a try. People complaining about Mavericks being "slow" are completely right, but that slowness is simply due to the hard drive access patterns. Probably the paging policies have changed significantly between Mountain Lion and Mavericks. With an SSD, Mavericks works amazingly well even with 2GB of RAM. Sure, if you've got 8GB of RAM so that everything needed eventually gets cached, you'll have usable Mavericks even with a piss-poor mechanical hard drive.
Given how relatively easy it is to get OS X to work well on what amounts to unsupported hardware, I'd say you need to rethink that line of thought. Apple has to drop support for hardware eventually, and the first-gen Intel machines with non-replaceable graphics are essentially impossible to support in any reasonable fashion. Note that Apple's notion of support means that you have a supported hardware accelerated composited desktop and 3D. So it's not merely sufficient to get the thing to boot up and show you a desktop - it's no problem getting Mavericks to do that on almost any oddball piece of Core II hardware. It's no different with modern Windows - if there are no drivers available for legacy hardware, you're stuck.
I don't believe in fairies and pixie dust. Someone still has to get paid for the development. If it's a serious app, it needs serious man-hours to be developed, and you can't fund that if you have $4.99 price tag and merely thousands of users. Minecraft sells for ~$20 and they sold tens of millions of copies. They wouldn't make it if they sold for $5, and that's a hugely popular and successful project.
Wine takes about the same amount of effort per bottle to produce no matter what kind of a wine it is. Comparing it to software is silly.