This article is just incendiary. It's pure flamebait, and you fell for it. I highly doubt that Apple "fans" are complaining about having to buy a copy of Vista because I highly doubt many of them are running Windows.
I highly doubt they are complaining about batteries. The iPod is hugely popular and has never had a replaceable battery. Same goes for the iPhone. The MacBook Air is 50% battery by volume and 80% by weight. Even if there were available, there would be few if any buyers.
Apple fans also couldn't care less about the stock price. They care about cool stuff.
People who don't like Apple (which can hardly be described as "fans") like to complain about Apple are disappointed that they have to buy Windows from a third party (what? iPhoto doesn't come with a Nokia D80? HOW COULD APPLE DO THIS TO ME?!?!).
People who don't carry spare batteries for their PC laptops complain that you can't get a spare battery for Apple devices (an extra battery costs how much??).
Day traders who were hoping to cash in on Macworld care about Apple's stock price. Journalists who want to write about how much money you can make as a day trader during the week of Macworld care about Apple's stock price (Apple stock didn't jump 30 points?? I'm ruined! SELL!!! SELL!!! SELL!!!).
As someone who used the old (oops, "Classic") Mac OS from versions 6-9, while I do think there was a certain level of curmudgeonness among the people who swore they wouldn't switch, there were very legitimate concerns about the OS X Finder and GUI, which I'm not sure have really been resolved.
See, now I also used Mac OS 7.5-9.1, and I hated the old Finder. I turned off all of the spacial stuff and used single window "expandable triangle" folder view. I also think that the column view Finder is far superior to the classic Finder.
I would be all for fixing the Finder, except that I can't find anything particularly wrong with it. You'll probably disagree with me because you like the spacial Finder. That's OK, but as the grandparent post said, it's not better, you just like it.
I'm the senior systems administrator for Anonymizer.
The reason Private Surfing was discontinued is because it was designed almost 10 years ago using Apache modules coded in C and some horrible Lex. All of our flagship products since then (Privacy Manager, Anonymizer 2004/2005, Total Privacy Suite and Anonymous Surfing) have been evolutions of that code base. Today our Anonymous Surfing server looks nothing like the old Private Surfing. PS was badly showing its age, and the reality of the situation was that it was becoming increasingly difficult to compile current versions of Apache with that old code. Every Apache security update provided more headaches for us. It didn't really work with any of the newer Web 2.0 AJAX stuff either. Javascript is extremely difficult to anonymize in a web based client and still continue to work. Gmail and Google Maps, just to name two, were completely unusable. This is also the case with any other web based proxy that I have ever seen.
Also, PS had very few subscribers, and an extremely low conversion rate for the free PS to any other product, even though free PS was very overloaded, slow, had rate limits, request count limits, blocking of many major websites (including Slashdot) and our pay services are very cheap. Total Net Shield is less than $9/month, and Anonymous Surfing is $2.50/month (seriously, how much of a tightwad do you have to be to put up with using the free version of PS every day and not pay for AS?). After all, Anonymizer is a business, and from the business side of the company it wasn't cost effective to continue maintaining PS any longer. We didn't kill it, so much as it died a slow lingering death of natural causes.
Contrary to popular belief, our products are not Windows only. Unfortunately, the Anonymous Surfing and Total Net Shield clients we produce are Windows based. However, Total Net Shield uses pure and simple SSH tunneling. That means any SSH compliant client (including the handy dandy (and bundled with your favorite Linux distribution, Mac OS X, Solaris and *BSD), and open source, OpenSSH) can be used with TNS. That also means that for people experienced with setting up SSH tunnels you can configure it to use any TCP port, or OpenSSH's built in SOCKS proxy. Nyms (disposable e-mail addresses) is fully web based. All of our enterprise level products (check our website if you're curious what this is) are platform independent and require no software installation.
We also have some benefits over TOR. Because we combine multi-layer proxies with multi-layer NAT our users can't be tracked by clock skews, there's no exit node snooping vulnerability (yes, technically we can see everything but all of our products are either not logged or logs are purged after 2 days), and we have a lot better speed/reliability than TOR.
One last thing, is that we the Anonymizer administrators are a part of this community. We work for Anonymizer because we're concerned about privacy, free speech, etc. We see and hear what's going on. Most of us read sites like slashdot, digg and del.icio.us every day. We don't always comment and sometimes we can't. But we're anonymously standing here right next to you.
What would prevent you from being able to boot off a ZFS drive?
I thought the same thing for a long time. Afterall, it's just a filesystem, right? That isn't the case though. ZFS is a file system, logical volume manager, RAID system and more. Suffice it to say that booting from ZFS isn't trivial.
But so what? What if, and I'm just speculating here, when you used DiskUtility to create a bootable Mac OS X partition it made a small HFS+ bootstrap partition for Mach that included all of the ZFS drivers before mounting the root? It would only need to be a few MB, so nobody would notice or even care if DiskUtility just silently created it on every disk. There are already plenty of things that Mac OS X does underneath its lickable interface that users never have to think about.
Bootable schmootable. They can still make ZFS the default.
That isn't true. Take for example Battlestar Galactica. The ships in BSG look like they've gotten the shit kicked out of them on more than one occasion, and they're all done in CGI. Scale models can look just as pristine as CGI. It's all about the level of detail the producer deems necessary. Ron Moore gives a shit about his product and George Lucas obviously doesn't. That's all there is to it.
My company has purchased about 100 Dell servers over the past year with "no operating system" because Dell only offers Windows or RedHat, and we run Debian. In the Windows world the only way to get your OS is to buy it. In the UNIX world there are many free ways to get it. If Windows just barely won, then I'd say they've probably got at least another 10% to go to make up for all those OS-less server purchases that get Linux or BSD installed on them.
Actually, I think technology is keeping up. I used to spend hours a day reading news sites, blogs, and whatever else. A lot of that time was spent simply checking for new stories. With RSS feeds I'm now alerted when there's something new that I haven't seen. Instead of wasting countless hours looking for information that I might find useful I now have it hand delivered to me in a nice little package and I find that when I'm bored I usually look to things other than the Internet to fill that time.
Maybe the article writer just needs to catch up to technology and get himself a good RSS reader.
the linked article doesn't even bother to list them
I was also rather disappointed at the lack of a list. TFA even italicizes the name of the research paper, but doesn't link it. Even a Google search comes up with nothing, and everybody around here is too busy making "I've got one good reason" jokes to even realize it.
Not that I'm trying to stand up for Intel, I really have no feeling for them whatsoever.
But the stats quoted in this article are a load of crap. The average cost is $40, but chips retail for up to $637. Why don't they compare apples to apples here? Either talk about average cost and average retail, or talk about max cost and max retail. Better yet, include the sliding scale with the low and high end. Notice also that they don't say which chips. Is this only CPU's? Or does it include every chip they make (like Centrinos)?
It's pretty likely that Intel makes 100 or even 1000 times the number of tiny low power chips than they do their most powerful processors. Having a Centrino WiFi onboard only raises the cost of a laptop by about $50, so the cost to Intel is probably something like $20, maybe less. And perhaps a single Xeon 3.6 Ghz costs them $500. If they make 999 Centrinos and 1 Xeon, what's their "average" cost now? $20.48.
Starting to look quite a bit different, isn't it? Maybe $637 for that Xeon isn't such a terrible price afterall. Maybe some news article writer wants to make you think you're getting screwed by skewing some figures.
Like I said, I'm not defending Intel. The figures quoted in the article are just crap, that's all. Let's have someone do some detailed research as to Intel's costs and then give us full disclosure and let people make up their own minds as to wether they're getting screwed or not.
...and spare parts. There will still be PowerBooks under AppleCare service contracts in 2008
You hit the nail on the head. In fact, Apple's plans are to phase out the PPC by 2007, that means they will have PPC chips under AppleCare at least until 2010, and I'm sure they'll have many out of warranty repairs for many years to come after that.
Anybody who tries to twist this into "Apple isn't so sure about Intel" is just fooling themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can crack this safe we'll reward you with a shiny new George Washington Golden* Dollar!
* Golden Dollar is not made of real gold.
Because there's no money to be made in porting it to Linux, that's why.
A fully valid SSL cert can be obtained for $15 a year.
Fully valid S/MIME certs can be obtained for free.
If you can't afford it then you're too cheap to need one.
Stop bitching.
Two. Not more than two.
That number of drives will make one awesome ZFS storage pool. In which case you could make mission critical storage with it.
This article is just incendiary. It's pure flamebait, and you fell for it. I highly doubt that Apple "fans" are complaining about having to buy a copy of Vista because I highly doubt many of them are running Windows. I highly doubt they are complaining about batteries. The iPod is hugely popular and has never had a replaceable battery. Same goes for the iPhone. The MacBook Air is 50% battery by volume and 80% by weight. Even if there were available, there would be few if any buyers. Apple fans also couldn't care less about the stock price. They care about cool stuff. People who don't like Apple (which can hardly be described as "fans") like to complain about Apple are disappointed that they have to buy Windows from a third party (what? iPhoto doesn't come with a Nokia D80? HOW COULD APPLE DO THIS TO ME?!?!). People who don't carry spare batteries for their PC laptops complain that you can't get a spare battery for Apple devices (an extra battery costs how much??). Day traders who were hoping to cash in on Macworld care about Apple's stock price. Journalists who want to write about how much money you can make as a day trader during the week of Macworld care about Apple's stock price (Apple stock didn't jump 30 points?? I'm ruined! SELL!!! SELL!!! SELL!!!).
I'm the senior systems administrator for Anonymizer.
The reason Private Surfing was discontinued is because it was designed almost 10 years ago using Apache modules coded in C and some horrible Lex. All of our flagship products since then (Privacy Manager, Anonymizer 2004/2005, Total Privacy Suite and Anonymous Surfing) have been evolutions of that code base. Today our Anonymous Surfing server looks nothing like the old Private Surfing. PS was badly showing its age, and the reality of the situation was that it was becoming increasingly difficult to compile current versions of Apache with that old code. Every Apache security update provided more headaches for us. It didn't really work with any of the newer Web 2.0 AJAX stuff either. Javascript is extremely difficult to anonymize in a web based client and still continue to work. Gmail and Google Maps, just to name two, were completely unusable. This is also the case with any other web based proxy that I have ever seen.
Also, PS had very few subscribers, and an extremely low conversion rate for the free PS to any other product, even though free PS was very overloaded, slow, had rate limits, request count limits, blocking of many major websites (including Slashdot) and our pay services are very cheap. Total Net Shield is less than $9/month, and Anonymous Surfing is $2.50/month (seriously, how much of a tightwad do you have to be to put up with using the free version of PS every day and not pay for AS?). After all, Anonymizer is a business, and from the business side of the company it wasn't cost effective to continue maintaining PS any longer. We didn't kill it, so much as it died a slow lingering death of natural causes.
Contrary to popular belief, our products are not Windows only. Unfortunately, the Anonymous Surfing and Total Net Shield clients we produce are Windows based. However, Total Net Shield uses pure and simple SSH tunneling. That means any SSH compliant client (including the handy dandy (and bundled with your favorite Linux distribution, Mac OS X, Solaris and *BSD), and open source, OpenSSH) can be used with TNS. That also means that for people experienced with setting up SSH tunnels you can configure it to use any TCP port, or OpenSSH's built in SOCKS proxy. Nyms (disposable e-mail addresses) is fully web based. All of our enterprise level products (check our website if you're curious what this is) are platform independent and require no software installation.
We also have some benefits over TOR. Because we combine multi-layer proxies with multi-layer NAT our users can't be tracked by clock skews, there's no exit node snooping vulnerability (yes, technically we can see everything but all of our products are either not logged or logs are purged after 2 days), and we have a lot better speed/reliability than TOR.
One last thing, is that we the Anonymizer administrators are a part of this community. We work for Anonymizer because we're concerned about privacy, free speech, etc. We see and hear what's going on. Most of us read sites like slashdot, digg and del.icio.us every day. We don't always comment and sometimes we can't. But we're anonymously standing here right next to you.
I thought the same thing for a long time. Afterall, it's just a filesystem, right? That isn't the case though. ZFS is a file system, logical volume manager, RAID system and more. Suffice it to say that booting from ZFS isn't trivial.
But so what? What if, and I'm just speculating here, when you used DiskUtility to create a bootable Mac OS X partition it made a small HFS+ bootstrap partition for Mach that included all of the ZFS drivers before mounting the root? It would only need to be a few MB, so nobody would notice or even care if DiskUtility just silently created it on every disk. There are already plenty of things that Mac OS X does underneath its lickable interface that users never have to think about.
Bootable schmootable. They can still make ZFS the default.
That isn't true. Take for example Battlestar Galactica. The ships in BSG look like they've gotten the shit kicked out of them on more than one occasion, and they're all done in CGI. Scale models can look just as pristine as CGI. It's all about the level of detail the producer deems necessary. Ron Moore gives a shit about his product and George Lucas obviously doesn't. That's all there is to it.
GNOME 1.2 anyone?
Mozilla 1.0?
Fedora Core 1?
And now for the obligatory MS bashing:
DOS 1.0?
Windows 1.0?
NT 4, Win98/ME/XP without service packs?
Generation 1 of anything sucks.
Not only is Safari compliant, but it was first. Not to mention that Konquerer and iCab are also Acid 2 compliant, and were also before Opera.
Why not just check it on Apple's website?
You have a very high opinion of gold.
My company has purchased about 100 Dell servers over the past year with "no operating system" because Dell only offers Windows or RedHat, and we run Debian. In the Windows world the only way to get your OS is to buy it. In the UNIX world there are many free ways to get it. If Windows just barely won, then I'd say they've probably got at least another 10% to go to make up for all those OS-less server purchases that get Linux or BSD installed on them.
For comparison purposes, here are also:
The reference rendering.
Safari rendering I captured with Grab.
Right, they'll be using a customized version of VLC that only runs on Windows and a proprietary codec that is only usable with their version of VLC.
Yea, that's real great. Thanks. Expect it to end up the same way their video service did.
Actually, I think technology is keeping up. I used to spend hours a day reading news sites, blogs, and whatever else. A lot of that time was spent simply checking for new stories. With RSS feeds I'm now alerted when there's something new that I haven't seen. Instead of wasting countless hours looking for information that I might find useful I now have it hand delivered to me in a nice little package and I find that when I'm bored I usually look to things other than the Internet to fill that time.
Maybe the article writer just needs to catch up to technology and get himself a good RSS reader.
I was also rather disappointed at the lack of a list. TFA even italicizes the name of the research paper, but doesn't link it. Even a Google search comes up with nothing, and everybody around here is too busy making "I've got one good reason" jokes to even realize it.
So...um...anybody got a link to the reasons?
Why will playing CDs on my computer cause me to butt heads with Direct Memory Access?
But Linus also has a history of only following the spec so far as it suits him. I believe the word he used for POSIX's threading model was "stupid".
They weren't so much hunted down and killed as stood there with dumb looks on their faces while they pathetically keeled over when faced with danger.
Not that I'm trying to stand up for Intel, I really have no feeling for them whatsoever.
But the stats quoted in this article are a load of crap. The average cost is $40, but chips retail for up to $637. Why don't they compare apples to apples here? Either talk about average cost and average retail, or talk about max cost and max retail. Better yet, include the sliding scale with the low and high end. Notice also that they don't say which chips. Is this only CPU's? Or does it include every chip they make (like Centrinos)?
It's pretty likely that Intel makes 100 or even 1000 times the number of tiny low power chips than they do their most powerful processors. Having a Centrino WiFi onboard only raises the cost of a laptop by about $50, so the cost to Intel is probably something like $20, maybe less. And perhaps a single Xeon 3.6 Ghz costs them $500. If they make 999 Centrinos and 1 Xeon, what's their "average" cost now? $20.48.
Starting to look quite a bit different, isn't it? Maybe $637 for that Xeon isn't such a terrible price afterall. Maybe some news article writer wants to make you think you're getting screwed by skewing some figures.
Like I said, I'm not defending Intel. The figures quoted in the article are just crap, that's all. Let's have someone do some detailed research as to Intel's costs and then give us full disclosure and let people make up their own minds as to wether they're getting screwed or not.
Go to "www.microsoft.com" in my browser and turn up my computer's volume?
You hit the nail on the head. In fact, Apple's plans are to phase out the PPC by 2007, that means they will have PPC chips under AppleCare at least until 2010, and I'm sure they'll have many out of warranty repairs for many years to come after that.
Anybody who tries to twist this into "Apple isn't so sure about Intel" is just fooling themselves.