I really want to believe this. I'd love to get a Mac, but have found they were far out of my price range. How about some links to back up this claim?
It's easy. Go to Dell.com or Apple.com and configure a system. In my case, it was an iMac versus a Dell similarly configured with Superdrive, Firewire etc.... and the iMac was $200 cheaper. With the Dual 1.25Ghz G4 and 20in Cinema display versus the Dell option, the Mac option was more than $400 cheaper.
You just specced out my old web server that was doing about 500K hits a day, with SQL Server and a web server for several years. I'm not sure what you did, but I was running that config for about 2 years....
I ask again, was it also running Office, Photoshop and allowing the computational load equivalent of Java based image capture at the same time as hosting your web site?
Hmmm. That's funny considering I tried installing W2k on a P233 with 256MB RAM along with Office a while ago and it choked badly. Yeah, you could install a linux distro on it, but then you would be without good plug and play support, could not run M$ Office or Photoshop and Java support would be spotty. I surplused the system and decided that $650 for the iMac was a pretty good deal.
No offense dude, but 35K hits can be handled by a 486 with 32 MB RAM... Seriously. That's not much of a comparison.
Yeah, but can a 486 with 32 MB of RAM run in addition to the webserver, M$ Office, run a email server, do light Photoshop work, browse web pages and run Java apps for image capture on a modern OS with a nice GUI all at the same time?
I should also add that they are incredibly flexible machines and can take the heat when it comes to performance. For instance, check out Webvision. This site is being run on a little G3 iMac and gets about 35k hits/day and handles it just fine. Go ahead click. It can take it. I also run our lab website from my primary G4 workstation making it truly a all purpose machine. (bioinformatics, Photoshop, Office, Safari, Apache, x-windows for all that UNIX stuff all in an elegant plug and play package.
It honestly defies all conventional wisdom that a company set beside a large monopoly can still survive with a profit and imbue such incredible loyalty from its consumer base. If there were a couple of big players and Apple was a niche player in left field it would be different. But still..
Most likely because they truly have driven innovation in the personal computer market. We could go on and on, but Apple created the portable format that we now use (keyboard in back, wristpads in front), were the first company to: ship CD-ROM drives in computers (remember installing Office on floppies)? They were the first company to ship USB standard, they created and shipped Firewire, they were the first company to ship with plug and play interface card slots (NUBUS), were the first company to ship their computers with built in networking (presaging the internet future by years), they were the first company to ship a GUI, the first company to ship WYSIWYG printing, the first company to ship a laser printer, etc...etc...etc... We could go on and on all day here, but you get my point.
They cost more.
Actually, I just priced out a couple of machines to replace imaging workstations here in the lab with a preference for the Mac, but a limited budget. To my surprise, the Macs were less expensive than Dell, HP or even our local grey box builder.
hey are generally slower (I know this is getting better everytime they make the consumer cough up money for a new version Mac OS X).
I cannot argue here. I have a new P4 and a new dual G4 sitting in my lab and the P4 is generally faster at most tasks than the G4. However, for code that is Altivec optimized, there is no comparison. The G4 sweeps the floor with the P4 with bioinformatics programs and others that are Altivec optimized. Additionally, I should say that OS X does make for a more efficient workflow and I am much more productive on it than in other environments.
I am actually curious. Macheads with the computer world so very Windows focused why do you still buy macs?
I suppose that someone could write a dissertation on the differences and the ideological approaches to solving the same problems that Apple and Microsoft have taken, but Apple computers simply work and tend to be much more flexible and provide a better return on investment.
I have used a variety of computer platforms in my life including Solaris, IRIX, Windows and the MacOS, and I always seem to come back to the Macintosh. It's just better here. Especially with OS X. I can have cli living right along with the GUI and x-windows allowing me to run all of my code on one machine. When I got the G4, I replaced a Wintel box, an SGI and an older Mac with one elegant box with the most beautiful flat panel display I have ever seen and I've not looked back.
To give you an idea of anothers experience, let me relate a story of my neighbor accross the street. This guy is a VP at a local bioinformatics company here and just purchased a 17in iMac for his home after using Wintel PC's for years. I asked him the other day how things were going and he replied ".......Well,.......the damn thing just works. I can't explain it entirely, but the user experience is beautiful and everything I have tried to do........just seems to work."
This has got to be one of the most flexible and innovative "toolboxes" around. The cool thing about Macs for years has been the ease and flexibility with which they boot. One can boot any Mac going back years from the CD. Additionally, as the previous poster illustrated, one can also boot from a variety of devices like the iPod (Verrrry cool), to other computers functioning as boot drives. I used to use my old Powerbook 5300cs as a "rescue toolkit" for other Macs since I could boot from it via a SCSI connection treating it as an external hard drive.
Macs are so flexible that in fact, a couple of years ago I was accross the country at a scientific meeting when one of the other graduate students had a Windows harddrive melt down, corrupting her registry thus preventing her from booting or rescuing her Powerpoint presentation scheduled for early the next morning. (always bring a back-up of your presentation on CD) She was in absolute agony and on the verge of a total emotional breakdown. At any rate, I simply took her hard drive out of the Windows laptop, replaced my internal hard drive on my Powerbook with hers, and booted from a colleagues iBook via Firewire allowing us to rescue the presentation. Day saved and she became another Apple convert.
Lots of people here who are bigtime Linux/Unix advocates
I also, am one of them.
have made the case that one of the big problems with Windows NT is that the GUI is built in, whereas with Linux/Unix the GUI is seperate and not even necessary to the functionality of the whole. When Microsoft went from NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 one of the bad things they did was integrate the Graphics into the NT kernel, which reduced reliability considerably, and sabatogued the microkernel design.
This is one of the nice things about OS X. I can run it from a terminal or even boot into the cli and never have to invoke the GUI. Honestly, this is rare these days as for 95% of tasks, the GUI is more efficient.
That last paragraph sounds like you read it off a fax direct from Apple Marketing.
Nope, just a satisfied customer. You should try them out before being so critical. Even from a server perspective, I have been quite impressed. For instance, check out Webvision. This site is averaging approximately 35 thousand hits/day from all over the world, is graphics intensive, and is running off of an old G3 iMac running OS X. Maintenance is minimal, setting it up was trivial, its completely silent as it has no fan so it can sit next to my desk without bothering me, and it was cheap.
I was responding to your comment: I wouldn't say that MacOS was really an 'os' anymore than the Windows 1.0 shell running on top of MS-DOS. My question still stands, and my point was that the MacOS was very different from Windows 1.0 running on DOS.
What difference does it make if it's a shell running on top of an OS, or an OS that has the shell embedded in it. Either one is an OS, and MacOS (before they gave up and just bought NextStep, the same way Microsoft bought the first version of MS-DOS, from an outside vendor) is pretty much just as anaemic, or more so, than MS-DOS with Windows on top as a shell.
You are backtracking from your earlier statements now. It could be argued that having a GUI interface running on top of the operating system is much less efficient than having the GUI as a fundamental part of the OS. All those years of running IRIX and X-windows environments in IRIX and now OS X and X-windows environments on OS X have made that more than clear to me. Where Classic MacOS really excelled was the integration that the GUI had with the OS. The Classic MacOS GUI was not a shell. Take networking for example: Networking with the original Macintosh was a breeze. Simply plug the machines in to the network click maybe three or four times and you are connected to the network. Doing this with Windows 1.0 was an exercise in frustration, so calling the MacOS anemic with respect to Windows 1.0 even with this one example is more than a little disingenuous. Hell, even with modern versions of Windows, getting on a network is much more labor intensive than it needs be.
Your Mac zeal is showing.
After 20 or so years of using personal computers and workstations of many kinds including Sun, SGI, Wintel, Osbourne, Altair, TRS-80's and Apple ]['s, I have since the 80's preferred the MacOS, and I continue to do so with OS X. It is simply a more efficient way of getting work accomplished combined with a greater return on investment. If one has a job to perform, and they make more than 10 or 20 $$'s/hour, they should not have to be spending time trying to make their computers do what they want and minimal time should be spent on keeping them up and running. Apple computers have proven themselves to be efficient tools and as such I will continue to use them in my research career and my personal life and am happy to do so.
Don't you mean XP/NT (depending on when you move "the OS" away from 9x.) or Win95?
Yes, indeed. You are most certainly correct. What I intended to say was that Win98 was the last of the Windows based systems running on DOS, but my statement apparently was badly constructed.
I wouldn't say that MacOS was really an 'os' anymore than the Windows 1.0 shell running on top of MS-DOS.
Oh? And why not? I would be interested in what your definition of an OS is. It is true that the Classic MacOS (MacOS through System 9.2.2) had some serious problems in terms of its architecture compared with other operating systems (UNIX based), but it most certainly WAS an operating system inclusive of its GUI which was not simply a shell running on top of the OS.
The concepts prototyped in the Xerox Alto contributed to the development of the Xerox Star, the Apple Lisa, the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows 1.0."
I believe the pedigree should read: "the Xerox Alto and Star pioneered the GUI and mouse navigation in 1980 and 1981. these elements of the operating system while brought to the business mainstream by the Apple Lisa in 1982 (one year behind schedule), were brought to the common PC user in 1984 with the Macintosh."
Including Windows 1.0 in this company is a joke as Windows 1.0 was nothing more than a shell and not a true OS. In fact, it could be argued that Windows was a shell with DOS being the real OS up until Windows 98.
It's not your machine, it is the company's. As such, those MP3s are not legal because you can't transfer the licenses to your company while still listening to them.
No, it is my workstation purchased for my use. It just so happens I use the workstation for research into vision loss, retinal remodeling and circuitry in addition to functioning as our lab webserver. I spend alot of time in the lab, so i loaded some of my purchased music on it for my personal use. OS X is soooo sweet.
Ok, so I believe that the article is off in their calculations and it should be billion with a "B". At any rate, it seems that given the silly amount of money they are going after, the "accused" would simply laugh that sort of claim off. Yes, stealing is stealing. However, this sort of suit does nothing to help the RIAA's case. They would be far more effective by bringing more realistic suits in terms of dollar amounts that would actually perhaps frighten folks and keep them from posting media to the net for download.
This whole music suit thing brings up another interesting exchange I had last week. One of the campus network guys was asking if I had any music on my workstation. I said yes, about thirty gigs or so, to which he replied, I had to take it off as the RIAA was "querying" systems on the network to determine if they contained music files. I replied as every song on there was purchased, paid for, and personally ripped from CD via iTunes, and I had every CD for which there was music for, I was not going to remove the music. Additionally, while my workstation was on the network, it was not open, the songs were not available to the outside world and anyone wanting those songs would have to hack into my system. So, no. I would not remove them. Even if the RIAA does somehow "query" my system, (Is this somehow possible if the system is "secure"?) they would be barking up the wrong tree.
A magnetic (or maybe optical) stabilizer would be possible. Something that compensates for small shakes. This would improve accuracy tremendously.
I have already seen prototypes of gyroscopic stabilization on standard ballistic rifles. It works quite well.
Re:a better finder?
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Now seriously, I've been thinking in buying a Mac to port software to MacOS... I wish they had some more market share so my decission would be a bit safer.
Actually, a smaller market share means fewer potential competitors that you will have to worry about. In the Windows market, you have to worry about competing with dozens of other developers and companies. There are many other advantages to developing for OS X as well, and if your code is already written for another UNIX platform, in many cases, much of the code can be brought over through a simple recompile. I am running code originally written for SGI that was simply recompiled for OS X and it runs in an X windows environment. Easy peasy.
Perhaps. However, the gas generated lasers I have seen tend to be quite noisy due to pumps and compressors and injectors.
* no recoil
True, but someone with good marksmanship training can easily and quickly reacquire a target with even heavier caliber (7.62mm) light platforms. However, having a rifle with no recoil would be an advantage.
* less resupply problems (lay a power cable to the forward camp instead of moving trucks full of ammo)
Geez, can you imagine the logistics of this? This may work for defined areas of control, but this proposal is for light infantry. If that were the case light infantry would have to protect their power cable in addition to performing their mission. Given the current tactics of light infantry (in the USMC at least), there is no way this approach will work.
* if constructed right, can be enclosed completely = less susceptable to dirt, dust and water
Absolutely true, however optics would have to be protected and ruggedized, and any dirt on the optics would degrade performance significantly, possibly creating dangerous situations for those around the weapon.
* if using invisible light (IR/UV) doesn't give away your position through muzzle flashes
True enough for unsophisticated enemy forces. However, night vision optics are becoming more available and tuning them to "see" IR/UV is fairly trivial. Indeed there is evidence that Iraqi forces are using significant numbers of night vision devices.
The US government has been doing this for decades.
Furthermore, the US government has been outsourcing all sorts of stuff to the private sector in order to get around certain "issues". For an interesting segue, check out a company called Dyncorp. These guys are the ones in the jungles of S. America fighting the drug war (to get around stuff like Iran Contra), taking care of police action in Bosnia, and guarding Hamid Karzai. Interesting stuff, because from the coverage, you might suspect that these guys are American soldiers. They're not.
Call me conservative here, but what exactly are the advantages of a laser weapon over more traditional methods or advancements to traditional ballistic weapons like caseless cartridges? I suppose that lasers *might* be silent and tuneable to different spectral frequencies, but the ballistic method is cheap, portable and quite effective over long distances that most light infantry will be engaged at (100-800 yds).
it seems clear that this blatant stalling tactic was undertaken for reasons of PR rather than national security.
I agree with you absolutely: Most of these sorts of releases (or lack thereof) more or less have to do with reasons of PR (or covering someones ass) rather than national security. For instance, even though my late grandfather has been out of the precursor of the CIA for 57 years, his work is *still* classified and my (limited) understanding is that national security has little to do with it. Rather, it has to do with not embarrasing the American government. I would have thought that after some of the players involved had passed on, getting information as to what went on and records documenting things would have been much easier, but.....
Already gone. Check on eBay for other Octanes. The absolute surprising bit though, is that I originally paid about $35k for the Octane, about $2500 for the Wintel box and $3200 for the Mac. All machines were purchased at the same time, and when they were sold, I got $800 for the Octane, $200 for the Wintel PC and get this.....$1300 for the Macintosh. That should tell you something about retained value and return on investment with Apple computers.
I recently visited several major grad schools to look at their biology programs, and at least two-thirds of the faculty were using either the Titanium or one of the new G4s with the Cinema display.
Very cool. I would be curious to know where you went as biology labs have historically been a stronghold for Macs. In fact, the Biology dept. here is almost exclusively Macintosh. Additionally, the vision meetings I attend yearly have seen a significant increase in the little glowing Apples up on the podiums in the last three years, whereas before it appeared that many vision scientists were using Wintel laptops.
They don't need a computer to be fast, they need it to work properly.
Actually, I NEED a computer to work properly AND work fast. I am hoping that the speed delta between Macs and Wintels is mitigated in the near future.
I have yet to see someone doing serious biology research on a Windows platform.
I know of quite a number of folks doing hard core research on Wintel platforms, however, they typically have more problems, cannot be as flexible in many of their applications and they end up replacing them far more often than users of Macintosh based machines. In fact, I just finished collaborating with a colleague on a manuscript comprising the last two years of my life's work and up until last month, she was running an old iMac G3 with MacOS 8.1!!! I was amazed to find out she had been quite prolific in publishing using that older basic level system.
Quite a few people, however, are doing serious research on OS X.
Indeed. From my experience, these folks tend to be the ones pushing the limits of science. It could be that they have simply been early adopters, and would push science anyway. Or, it could be that OS X makes them more productive.....
Well, I guess I would have to say that one is more productive within their platform environment of preference in general. Yes, my dual Ghz G4 with Cinema display is not as fast as the P4 system it replaced, but it is generally a much more productive environment in that I can run on one workstation, code originally written for SGI, Office for Mac, Adobe products galore, remote sensing code, the website for our lab etc...etc...etc... and I could not do all of this nearly as well or as easy with the three systems my OS X workstation replaced including an SGI Octane, a Wintel system and an older Mac.
2. Businesses arent going to buy iLamp servers: something with pretty colors but without RAID-5 isnt really a server, sorry.
Ummm, I have been running several fairly heavy duty web pages off of Macs for some time. However to respond directly to your statement, I have a webserver here that is running off of an old G3 iMac and OS X. Yeah, go ahead and click around all you want. This site is routinely getting about 30 thousand hits/day from around 1000 unique visitors. Any small business could use any Mac running OS X and function just fine with it as a webserver.
Slashdot Mirror
I really want to believe this. I'd love to get a Mac, but have found they were far out of my price range. How about some links to back up this claim?
It's easy. Go to Dell.com or Apple.com and configure a system. In my case, it was an iMac versus a Dell similarly configured with Superdrive, Firewire etc.... and the iMac was $200 cheaper. With the Dual 1.25Ghz G4 and 20in Cinema display versus the Dell option, the Mac option was more than $400 cheaper.
You just specced out my old web server that was doing about 500K hits a day, with SQL Server and a web server for several years. I'm not sure what you did, but I was running that config for about 2 years....
I ask again, was it also running Office, Photoshop and allowing the computational load equivalent of Java based image capture at the same time as hosting your web site?
Nope, you'd need a Pentium 90 for that.
Hmmm. That's funny considering I tried installing W2k on a P233 with 256MB RAM along with Office a while ago and it choked badly. Yeah, you could install a linux distro on it, but then you would be without good plug and play support, could not run M$ Office or Photoshop and Java support would be spotty. I surplused the system and decided that $650 for the iMac was a pretty good deal.
No offense dude, but 35K hits can be handled by a 486 with 32 MB RAM... Seriously. That's not much of a comparison.
Yeah, but can a 486 with 32 MB of RAM run in addition to the webserver, M$ Office, run a email server, do light Photoshop work, browse web pages and run Java apps for image capture on a modern OS with a nice GUI all at the same time?
I should also add that they are incredibly flexible machines and can take the heat when it comes to performance. For instance, check out Webvision. This site is being run on a little G3 iMac and gets about 35k hits/day and handles it just fine. Go ahead click. It can take it. I also run our lab website from my primary G4 workstation making it truly a all purpose machine. (bioinformatics, Photoshop, Office, Safari, Apache, x-windows for all that UNIX stuff all in an elegant plug and play package.
It honestly defies all conventional wisdom that a company set beside a large monopoly can still survive with a profit and imbue such incredible loyalty from its consumer base. If there were a couple of big players and Apple was a niche player in left field it would be different. But still..
.......the damn thing just works. I can't explain it entirely, but the user experience is beautiful and everything I have tried to do........just seems to work."
Most likely because they truly have driven innovation in the personal computer market. We could go on and on, but Apple created the portable format that we now use (keyboard in back, wristpads in front), were the first company to: ship CD-ROM drives in computers (remember installing Office on floppies)? They were the first company to ship USB standard, they created and shipped Firewire, they were the first company to ship with plug and play interface card slots (NUBUS), were the first company to ship their computers with built in networking (presaging the internet future by years), they were the first company to ship a GUI, the first company to ship WYSIWYG printing, the first company to ship a laser printer, etc...etc...etc... We could go on and on all day here, but you get my point.
They cost more.
Actually, I just priced out a couple of machines to replace imaging workstations here in the lab with a preference for the Mac, but a limited budget. To my surprise, the Macs were less expensive than Dell, HP or even our local grey box builder.
hey are generally slower (I know this is getting better everytime they make the consumer cough up money for a new version Mac OS X).
I cannot argue here. I have a new P4 and a new dual G4 sitting in my lab and the P4 is generally faster at most tasks than the G4. However, for code that is Altivec optimized, there is no comparison. The G4 sweeps the floor with the P4 with bioinformatics programs and others that are Altivec optimized. Additionally, I should say that OS X does make for a more efficient workflow and I am much more productive on it than in other environments.
I am actually curious. Macheads with the computer world so very Windows focused why do you still buy macs?
I suppose that someone could write a dissertation on the differences and the ideological approaches to solving the same problems that Apple and Microsoft have taken, but Apple computers simply work and tend to be much more flexible and provide a better return on investment.
I have used a variety of computer platforms in my life including Solaris, IRIX, Windows and the MacOS, and I always seem to come back to the Macintosh. It's just better here. Especially with OS X. I can have cli living right along with the GUI and x-windows allowing me to run all of my code on one machine. When I got the G4, I replaced a Wintel box, an SGI and an older Mac with one elegant box with the most beautiful flat panel display I have ever seen and I've not looked back.
To give you an idea of anothers experience, let me relate a story of my neighbor accross the street. This guy is a VP at a local bioinformatics company here and just purchased a 17in iMac for his home after using Wintel PC's for years. I asked him the other day how things were going and he replied ".......Well,
Re:On the other side of the fence... Indeed.
This has got to be one of the most flexible and innovative "toolboxes" around. The cool thing about Macs for years has been the ease and flexibility with which they boot. One can boot any Mac going back years from the CD. Additionally, as the previous poster illustrated, one can also boot from a variety of devices like the iPod (Verrrry cool), to other computers functioning as boot drives. I used to use my old Powerbook 5300cs as a "rescue toolkit" for other Macs since I could boot from it via a SCSI connection treating it as an external hard drive.
Macs are so flexible that in fact, a couple of years ago I was accross the country at a scientific meeting when one of the other graduate students had a Windows harddrive melt down, corrupting her registry thus preventing her from booting or rescuing her Powerpoint presentation scheduled for early the next morning. (always bring a back-up of your presentation on CD) She was in absolute agony and on the verge of a total emotional breakdown. At any rate, I simply took her hard drive out of the Windows laptop, replaced my internal hard drive on my Powerbook with hers, and booted from a colleagues iBook via Firewire allowing us to rescue the presentation. Day saved and she became another Apple convert.
Lots of people here who are bigtime Linux/Unix advocates
I also, am one of them.
have made the case that one of the big problems with Windows NT is that the GUI is built in, whereas with Linux/Unix the GUI is seperate and not even necessary to the functionality of the whole. When Microsoft went from NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 one of the bad things they did was integrate the Graphics into the NT kernel, which reduced reliability considerably, and sabatogued the microkernel design.
This is one of the nice things about OS X. I can run it from a terminal or even boot into the cli and never have to invoke the GUI. Honestly, this is rare these days as for 95% of tasks, the GUI is more efficient.
That last paragraph sounds like you read it off a fax direct from Apple Marketing.
Nope, just a satisfied customer. You should try them out before being so critical. Even from a server perspective, I have been quite impressed. For instance, check out Webvision. This site is averaging approximately 35 thousand hits/day from all over the world, is graphics intensive, and is running off of an old G3 iMac running OS X. Maintenance is minimal, setting it up was trivial, its completely silent as it has no fan so it can sit next to my desk without bothering me, and it was cheap.
I was responding to your comment: I wouldn't say that MacOS was really an 'os' anymore than the Windows 1.0 shell running on top of MS-DOS. My question still stands, and my point was that the MacOS was very different from Windows 1.0 running on DOS.
What difference does it make if it's a shell running on top of an OS, or an OS that has the shell embedded in it. Either one is an OS, and MacOS (before they gave up and just bought NextStep, the same way Microsoft bought the first version of MS-DOS, from an outside vendor) is pretty much just as anaemic, or more so, than MS-DOS with Windows on top as a shell.
You are backtracking from your earlier statements now. It could be argued that having a GUI interface running on top of the operating system is much less efficient than having the GUI as a fundamental part of the OS. All those years of running IRIX and X-windows environments in IRIX and now OS X and X-windows environments on OS X have made that more than clear to me. Where Classic MacOS really excelled was the integration that the GUI had with the OS. The Classic MacOS GUI was not a shell. Take networking for example: Networking with the original Macintosh was a breeze. Simply plug the machines in to the network click maybe three or four times and you are connected to the network. Doing this with Windows 1.0 was an exercise in frustration, so calling the MacOS anemic with respect to Windows 1.0 even with this one example is more than a little disingenuous. Hell, even with modern versions of Windows, getting on a network is much more labor intensive than it needs be.
Your Mac zeal is showing.
After 20 or so years of using personal computers and workstations of many kinds including Sun, SGI, Wintel, Osbourne, Altair, TRS-80's and Apple ]['s, I have since the 80's preferred the MacOS, and I continue to do so with OS X. It is simply a more efficient way of getting work accomplished combined with a greater return on investment. If one has a job to perform, and they make more than 10 or 20 $$'s/hour, they should not have to be spending time trying to make their computers do what they want and minimal time should be spent on keeping them up and running. Apple computers have proven themselves to be efficient tools and as such I will continue to use them in my research career and my personal life and am happy to do so.
Don't you mean XP/NT (depending on when you move "the OS" away from 9x.) or Win95?
Yes, indeed. You are most certainly correct. What I intended to say was that Win98 was the last of the Windows based systems running on DOS, but my statement apparently was badly constructed.
I wouldn't say that MacOS was really an 'os' anymore than the Windows 1.0 shell running on top of MS-DOS.
Oh? And why not? I would be interested in what your definition of an OS is. It is true that the Classic MacOS (MacOS through System 9.2.2) had some serious problems in terms of its architecture compared with other operating systems (UNIX based), but it most certainly WAS an operating system inclusive of its GUI which was not simply a shell running on top of the OS.
The concepts prototyped in the Xerox Alto contributed to the development of the Xerox Star, the Apple Lisa, the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows 1.0."
I believe the pedigree should read: "the Xerox Alto and Star pioneered the GUI and mouse navigation in 1980 and 1981. these elements of the operating system while brought to the business mainstream by the Apple Lisa in 1982 (one year behind schedule), were brought to the common PC user in 1984 with the Macintosh."
Including Windows 1.0 in this company is a joke as Windows 1.0 was nothing more than a shell and not a true OS. In fact, it could be argued that Windows was a shell with DOS being the real OS up until Windows 98.
It's not your machine, it is the company's. As such, those MP3s are not legal because you can't transfer the licenses to your company while still listening to them.
No, it is my workstation purchased for my use. It just so happens I use the workstation for research into vision loss, retinal remodeling and circuitry in addition to functioning as our lab webserver. I spend alot of time in the lab, so i loaded some of my purchased music on it for my personal use. OS X is soooo sweet.
Ok, so I believe that the article is off in their calculations and it should be billion with a "B". At any rate, it seems that given the silly amount of money they are going after, the "accused" would simply laugh that sort of claim off. Yes, stealing is stealing. However, this sort of suit does nothing to help the RIAA's case. They would be far more effective by bringing more realistic suits in terms of dollar amounts that would actually perhaps frighten folks and keep them from posting media to the net for download.
This whole music suit thing brings up another interesting exchange I had last week. One of the campus network guys was asking if I had any music on my workstation. I said yes, about thirty gigs or so, to which he replied, I had to take it off as the RIAA was "querying" systems on the network to determine if they contained music files. I replied as every song on there was purchased, paid for, and personally ripped from CD via iTunes, and I had every CD for which there was music for, I was not going to remove the music. Additionally, while my workstation was on the network, it was not open, the songs were not available to the outside world and anyone wanting those songs would have to hack into my system. So, no. I would not remove them. Even if the RIAA does somehow "query" my system, (Is this somehow possible if the system is "secure"?) they would be barking up the wrong tree.
A magnetic (or maybe optical) stabilizer would be possible. Something that compensates for small shakes. This would improve accuracy tremendously.
I have already seen prototypes of gyroscopic stabilization on standard ballistic rifles. It works quite well.
Now seriously, I've been thinking in buying a Mac to port software to MacOS... I wish they had some more market share so my decission would be a bit safer.
Actually, a smaller market share means fewer potential competitors that you will have to worry about. In the Windows market, you have to worry about competing with dozens of other developers and companies. There are many other advantages to developing for OS X as well, and if your code is already written for another UNIX platform, in many cases, much of the code can be brought over through a simple recompile. I am running code originally written for SGI that was simply recompiled for OS X and it runs in an X windows environment. Easy peasy.
* silent
Perhaps. However, the gas generated lasers I have seen tend to be quite noisy due to pumps and compressors and injectors.
* no recoil
True, but someone with good marksmanship training can easily and quickly reacquire a target with even heavier caliber (7.62mm) light platforms. However, having a rifle with no recoil would be an advantage.
* less resupply problems (lay a power cable to the forward camp instead of moving trucks full of ammo)
Geez, can you imagine the logistics of this? This may work for defined areas of control, but this proposal is for light infantry. If that were the case light infantry would have to protect their power cable in addition to performing their mission. Given the current tactics of light infantry (in the USMC at least), there is no way this approach will work.
* if constructed right, can be enclosed completely = less susceptable to dirt, dust and water
Absolutely true, however optics would have to be protected and ruggedized, and any dirt on the optics would degrade performance significantly, possibly creating dangerous situations for those around the weapon.
* if using invisible light (IR/UV) doesn't give away your position through muzzle flashes
True enough for unsophisticated enemy forces. However, night vision optics are becoming more available and tuning them to "see" IR/UV is fairly trivial. Indeed there is evidence that Iraqi forces are using significant numbers of night vision devices.
* more accuracy due to a reduce "time to impact"
Indeed. Agree completely.
The US government has been doing this for decades.
Furthermore, the US government has been outsourcing all sorts of stuff to the private sector in order to get around certain "issues". For an interesting segue, check out a company called Dyncorp. These guys are the ones in the jungles of S. America fighting the drug war (to get around stuff like Iran Contra), taking care of police action in Bosnia, and guarding Hamid Karzai. Interesting stuff, because from the coverage, you might suspect that these guys are American soldiers. They're not.
Call me conservative here, but what exactly are the advantages of a laser weapon over more traditional methods or advancements to traditional ballistic weapons like caseless cartridges? I suppose that lasers *might* be silent and tuneable to different spectral frequencies, but the ballistic method is cheap, portable and quite effective over long distances that most light infantry will be engaged at (100-800 yds).
This is a good thing since one of the two BSDs clearly sucked, and the other was clearly superior.
What, OS X?
it seems clear that this blatant stalling tactic was undertaken for reasons of PR rather than national security.
I agree with you absolutely: Most of these sorts of releases (or lack thereof) more or less have to do with reasons of PR (or covering someones ass) rather than national security. For instance, even though my late grandfather has been out of the precursor of the CIA for 57 years, his work is *still* classified and my (limited) understanding is that national security has little to do with it. Rather, it has to do with not embarrasing the American government. I would have thought that after some of the players involved had passed on, getting information as to what went on and records documenting things would have been much easier, but.....
Can I have your old Octane then?
Already gone. Check on eBay for other Octanes. The absolute surprising bit though, is that I originally paid about $35k for the Octane, about $2500 for the Wintel box and $3200 for the Mac. All machines were purchased at the same time, and when they were sold, I got $800 for the Octane, $200 for the Wintel PC and get this.....$1300 for the Macintosh. That should tell you something about retained value and return on investment with Apple computers.
I recently visited several major grad schools to look at their biology programs, and at least two-thirds of the faculty were using either the Titanium or one of the new G4s with the Cinema display.
Very cool. I would be curious to know where you went as biology labs have historically been a stronghold for Macs. In fact, the Biology dept. here is almost exclusively Macintosh. Additionally, the vision meetings I attend yearly have seen a significant increase in the little glowing Apples up on the podiums in the last three years, whereas before it appeared that many vision scientists were using Wintel laptops.
They don't need a computer to be fast, they need it to work properly.
Actually, I NEED a computer to work properly AND work fast. I am hoping that the speed delta between Macs and Wintels is mitigated in the near future.
I have yet to see someone doing serious biology research on a Windows platform.
I know of quite a number of folks doing hard core research on Wintel platforms, however, they typically have more problems, cannot be as flexible in many of their applications and they end up replacing them far more often than users of Macintosh based machines. In fact, I just finished collaborating with a colleague on a manuscript comprising the last two years of my life's work and up until last month, she was running an old iMac G3 with MacOS 8.1!!! I was amazed to find out she had been quite prolific in publishing using that older basic level system.
Quite a few people, however, are doing serious research on OS X.
Indeed. From my experience, these folks tend to be the ones pushing the limits of science. It could be that they have simply been early adopters, and would push science anyway. Or, it could be that OS X makes them more productive.....
Well, I guess I would have to say that one is more productive within their platform environment of preference in general. Yes, my dual Ghz G4 with Cinema display is not as fast as the P4 system it replaced, but it is generally a much more productive environment in that I can run on one workstation, code originally written for SGI, Office for Mac, Adobe products galore, remote sensing code, the website for our lab etc...etc...etc... and I could not do all of this nearly as well or as easy with the three systems my OS X workstation replaced including an SGI Octane, a Wintel system and an older Mac.
2. Businesses arent going to buy iLamp servers: something with pretty colors but without RAID-5 isnt really a server, sorry.
Ummm, I have been running several fairly heavy duty web pages off of Macs for some time. However to respond directly to your statement, I have a webserver here that is running off of an old G3 iMac and OS X. Yeah, go ahead and click around all you want. This site is routinely getting about 30 thousand hits/day from around 1000 unique visitors. Any small business could use any Mac running OS X and function just fine with it as a webserver.