Remember the flash they're talking about here for the Zune is an iPod nano-like device, and similarly there is the iPod nano from Apple. These are the devices that you guys really are targeted at. Really the only thing that I can see that might be different is putting in a CF, SD or other kind of card slot so that you can upgrade the capacity if you want, but I guarantee you most people wouldn't upgrade it at all, they'd just get a new player when they wanted more space (remember that a large portion of the public have a 4-6MP digital camera and still use the 16MB card that came with it, and change the resolution down to 640x480 or 1600x1200 to be able to take more pictures, thus negating the fact that they chose a 6MP camera instead of a 1-2MP camera).
You're confusing flash memory with flash memory cards (such as SD, MMC, CF, xD, someonepleasestopitwiththeformats). iPod nanos and shuffles as well as many other players have flash memory in them, not hard drives. the iPod video and Zune have hard drives, but it's not feasible because the flash *is* too expensive for these players for the capacity they need (movies take up a lot of space, and replacing a 80GB with an 8GB device isn't feasible, which is why they have different lines of players). Just because YOU only need 2-8GB of storage doesn't mean everyone is the same, and that is also why Apple's iPod nano is the top selling player.
Because umm... flash is OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSIVE? Hard drives let manufacturers sell these things for $3-400 with 30-80GB of storage, a 64GB flash drive is still in the $6-800 range in and of itself. Granted, prices will go down, but people want their storage now, and don't care so much about having to replace the thing every couple of years.
Read some of the history on the VATech cluster (and re-read what I said) - they used PowerMac G5's at first (what the Mac Pro now replaced) because the XServes didn't come in a fast enough configuration. The thing is, if you want something with 8 cores, you HAVE to go with the Mac Pro. The XServe only comes in dual-dual core models (they were updated to 3.0GHz as well, so the 8 core is not coming, yet).
As for your "use what everyone else uses" argument, there is a reason why VATech went with PowerMacs and then later XServes - they are massively cheaper on that scale than anything else. And, until the Intel XServe update, the XServes did NOT even include dual PSUs, or baseboard management. Remember here - this is a compute cluster, redundant power supplies are not really that important becasue if a node goes down because of a dead power supply, it doesn't hurt you much to have that node offline until you can replace it.
Yes, Apple pushes the Workgroup cluster for bioinformatics. This is for good reason - it's a simple all-in-one box for compute clustering. However, if you only have a need for 1-3 compute nodes, and you're on a budget, a couple Mac Pros are a good idea (especially because you can enable XGrid on the machines, network them together, and still use them as regular workstations that can use their extra cycles to kill off your computing, this allows you to not have to buy workstations AND compute nodes, without much loss in computing power most of the time (remember, most apps are not multithreaded enough to take advantage of 4+ cores, so most of the time 2 or more cores are going to be almost completely idle when using one of these as a workstation too).
Exactly. That, and Math/physics with MATLab and Mathematica in a cluster. For visualization, yes you will need the better card, but you don't need it in the 20 machines that are doing the grunt work as well, and that can save you many thousands of dollars.
See my other reply as well, but the idea is that this machine is a base configuration, not an end-all-be-all solution that fits everyone. Yes, damn near everyone that orders one of these will have to change the configuration a bit, but Apple is now not just about graphics and video on the high-end... they have to let the science folks get what they want too (and since the adoption of OS X, Apple is now one of the leading science vendors... just take a look at a lot of Computer Science department nowadays and see what they replaced their Sun machines with). Like it or not, Apple now has to cater to a lot of different markets, and the best way to do that is to let the pro users configure the machines themselves. Everyone wants the cheapest machine that can do their job, and most pro users know what type of machine fits that bill.
Apple targets all of the markets I mentioned with this machine. Which is why the 7300GT is still the default card in this machine. If you want a better card, BUY a better card, don't bitch at Apple because it's not in the base level machine, because that's exactly what it is - a base level machine. The idea of the single configuration is that since different markets use it, they can put what they need in, if you don't want the graphics card, great, don't buy it, but here's a cheap card we'll throw in to get you going on it.
And what are my references for what I said before? How about here and here? You see, the Mac Pro is used as a compute cluster as well as the XServe, since the Mac Pro gets more power earlier. Note that the VATech cluster is now G5 XServes, but it started as a cluster of 1100 PowerMac G5's because the XServes were not fast enough. They only later converted when the XServes got up to snuff.
For a 1-2 (or a couple more) node compute cluster, the Mac Pro is the perfect machine, because it can be used as a regular computer as well. As I mentioned before, if you're looking to do graphics work on it, then configure it how YOU will want it - the Mac Pro is designed to be as flexible as possible; the base model is likely not going to be right for anyone. With a few changes, however, it can be perfect for you (for example - doing heavy graphics work? put a better video card, some more ram, and fill up the disk bays with fast disks; doing heavy computing and have storage elsewhere? throw in a fiber channel card, gobs of ram, and up the CPU; doing visualization? put the best graphics card in there with gobs of ram and a decent CPU, with enough disk space to store your visualization data set).
I think the reason people have so much trouble with this, is that Apple has traditionally set up their configurations so that you could go in, pick the base model that you want, and it would be pretty much exactly what you need to do what you want to do on it. This is true still for the consumer models, but the pro models Apple has gotten from just catering to graphics and video editors and expanded into computer science, bioinformatics, engineering, and math (see MATLab and Mathematica). Now, the base configuration of the pro models aren't a perfect fit for the people that have traditionally bought them, because other people have other needs.
I know others have said it, and you even hinted at it yourself. There is a key thing that most people miss when looking at the Mac Pro (or G5's when they were out), which is they are specifically a WORKSTATION. The kind of WORKSTATION that does the kind of WORK that involves a *lot* of processing power, such as physics, bioinformatics, and video/image crunching. These machines, as much as people ogle over how well they could play a game if they only had a better video card, are not gaming machines. Apple has yet to kick into that market, because there really and truly aren't many (if any) games that would require the power of a Mac Pro to work well that run under OS X. Also, I personally would have to say from my experience with Apple, that any game publisher that wanted to target just the Mac Pro for a particular game would not be something that Apple would really care for - they want the games to be left to the consumers, and for consumers that means iMac, Mac Mini, or MacBook. If it can't run well on one of those, then they don't really want to get into it.
Also, as much as people bitch about the price of a spec'd out Mac Pro - remember that again this is a WORKSTATION that BUSINESSES would be buying for WORK. Businesses don't generally care that much about the price as long as the computer can get the job done as fast as possible. This also means that the largest part of the market for these machines don't care about getting the best deal on RAM or hard drives or video cards. They want to be able to go to one place, click a few options, and get their computer as soon as possible, and get it up and running with as little amount of effort as possible to make it do the WORK they bought it for.
If you are so sensitive about the price of it that you have to go out and find RAM, disks, and a video card to put in it that will save you a couple hundred dollars on a $4-5000 purchase, you're either a total penny pincher, or you don't need to be buying the machine in the first place.
Remember - this machine won't run almost all of the games and programs on the market any faster than a dual or quad core machine, it's for a particular market with the needs of lots of CPU power. In general, the people that want these machines don't care about the video card (unless they're using it for video editing, but then they want a VERY high end one specific for that), sometimes don't care about the RAM (unless a large data set needs to be available in RAM), and a lot of times don't care about the disk space (usually they have a lot of space on a network setup on an XServe or the like). This means that Apple is going to put up the bare bones configuration with all the CPU power, and let the businesses pick how much RAM, disk, and what kind of video card they want. Yes, this machine is for a niche market, but it's for a LOT of niche markets that all have different needs. Instead of having 20 different "base" configurations, they have one, and assume that if you're buying one you know enough about what you need to pick the parts individually.
That way you don't have someone who is going to set these things up in a headless environment with an XServe RAID buying a machine with a $600 video card and $400 worth of disk drive they don't need, since all that is going to be on the disk anyhow is the operating system (think compile farm or computation cluster).
Even though they have a very small hardware list to support (comparitively), they still provide the drivers for the older hardware with the new software, which is the point I'm trying to make here. For Vista, Microsoft gutted out a ton of drivers that shipped with XP, and in doing so alienated a LOT of relatively recent hardware, and to make matters worse, they didn't put in much effort to get drivers for hardware released since XP. If I had a relatively recent computer, say, purchased since XP was released, and it is hardware CAPABLE of running Vista (CPU, memory, disk), I would very much so expect for all of the hardware if it was all name-brand stuff (Creative, NVidia, ATI, etc) to work out of the box.
The thing that makes it even more pointing at Microsoft, is that ATI, NVidia and Creative have all moved to unified drivers for their hardware, making the number of individual drivers to be verified for Windows to be much lower. The primary difference here (as you hinted at) is that Microsoft provides incredibly vague "requirements" for their software, in an attempt to make it less scary for the average consumer. What this results in, is that if a basic requirement of Vista is "Sound Card", and I have a 3 year old sound card that works fine (I mean really, at best they're hooked up to a mediocre set of computer speakers for most people), but yet it doesn't work in Vista. Who's fault is that? Is it Microsoft's for not clarifying the *actual* supported hardware, or is it the device manufacturer's for not providing drivers for the new operating system?
Yes, I did upgrade the ram - with old memory laying around from a PC I no longer used (it was just normal PC100 SDRAM). And as for that, that memory is about 7 years old (came from a PC I got in 2000).
Big thing to remember here though - the original iMacs were *built* to have the RAM upgraded (and that was about it, if you were lucky you can also put in an Airport card, since it's right next to the memory). You don't even have to take the case off or have a screwdriver, the memory slots are accessible via a coin-turn lock door on the bottom. Literally, power down roll it over, turn a coin, pop the memory in, close the door, and turn it back over and back on.
Now, one thing I did upgrade that isn't a "normal" upgrade was the hard drive - it shipped with a 13GB one. While this is big enough to run Tiger, I figured I had the extra one (also from my PC) laying around and ready to put in.
So the answer is, I am being real. For this iMac, Apple *expected* users to upgrade the ram, otherwise they wouldn't have made it so easy or have provided 2 slots. The point of the matter is, I can run a 1.5 year old operating system on an 8 year old computer with minimum upgrades, and have the video card, sound card, network, DVD-ROM, firewire, USB, external video port and more work out of the box with no additional drivers.
Except that, Vista appears to ship with LESS hardware support out of the box than even XP did. I would fully expect that hardware bought since XP was released and far before Vista was released should be supported out of the box in Vista, especially things such as sound and video cards from major manufacturers.
The biggest problem is Microsoft wants total control over the driver stability and quality control, but yet wants nothing to do with the development of said drivers. This forces the device manufacturers to decide whether it's worth it to put in the extra effort to develop a driver that works, or deal with pissed off customers that can't use a 1-3 year old SOUND CARD in their computer with Vista, that worked perfectly fine in XP.
Re:A Trap for Idiots
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Is Vista a Trap?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Umm, at least a baseline support for that hardware? For a company so prided on backwards compatibility, Microsoft sure has given the finger hardcore to a lot of people when it comes to Vista.
For comparison: I have an Apple iMac G3 400MHz with 768MB RAM and a 40GB disk happily running OS X 10.4. This machine also has a (nonupgradeable) 8MB ATI video card. Note that this computer, at this moment, is almost 8 years old, and runs Tiger like a champ. Sure, I don't get all the cool effects, but the key is I didn't have to do a damn thing to make it work, it just did, and it doesn't even attempt the effects it can't handle. I can browse the internet, use iTunes, type in Word, Excel, Pages or Keynote, check my email, and even watch DVD's. And you know what? It runs 10.4 FASTER than it runs 10.3. Given, it's still a bit slower than OS 9, but given the added capabilities of it and it still being useable in OS X, that's a pretty damn good trade-off.
I didn't say that it's a 108Mbps standard, I said that with twin broadcasting radios (business class AP's), there would be a theoretical 108Mbps available from that *AP*. Yes, for a single radio on board an AP, there would only be 54Mbps available.
Obviously you don't know much about how wireless works. See, while 3 AP's may provide the proper *coverage* (ie: you can get a signal anywhere in the plane), it can't provide the *bandwidth*. Assuming they're using this for more than just some person's want to get online from the air, such as for in-flight entertainment (think screens at each seat) and possibly a VoIP phone-type setup to consolidate cabling (no seperate phone/video cables for each seat), it likely will use quite a bit of bandwidth. If each row has some 7-8+ seats (twin aisle configuration, likely it's 2/3/2 or 3/3/3), and designing for peak capacity (i'm sorry you can't watch your in-flight movie because your rowmates are all watching it already and those guys are online and that guy is on the phone), it's going to take a lot of bandwidth. Even at 802.11g/a speeds, you're talking at most 108Mbps (twin radio configuration) split across 7-8 people. Figure watching a movie uses 3-10Mbps, that's at nearly peak capacity right there, best case scenario.
If that's the case, then they damn well better make PlaysForSure illegal, as well as Zune Marketplace. It's one thing to say "it's that it locks you into a particular device, so it's illegal" (what they're saying) when what they really want to say is something else, more along the lines of "We're pissed that Apple is dominant, and want to hinder that". What they're doing now is restricting Apple in a way that they aren't restricting the other guys, for no particular reason. For instance, right now, I can't play any PlaysForSure music on my iPod. Sure, Apple could license it (and this is what they will argue, that Apple can license PlaysForSure, but noone can license FairPlay), but that doesn't do me as a consumer any good.
My problem here is that they're trying to make it out to be a play for the consumer, and word it in a way that will get consumers up in arms about it, when in fact every player on the market is tied to one of 3 DRM schemes, and only one, be it ZuneShit, PlaysForSure, or FairPlay. No player out supports more than one, even Microsoft's own player doesn't support PlaysForSure, a DRM scheme they designed.
Again, this is all avoiding the actual question I had, which was pointed as it was because of the situation I'm in, which is somewhat unique. No, I can't buy anything for each store, because even $100/store*100 stores is $10,000, which is about 1/2-1/3 of my yearly salary (I only do this job part time, 10-15 hours a week during the semester and 30 hours/week over the holidays). As I mentioned before, my budget is literally $0.
Also, I cannot remove/lock down IE any more than it already is, because they have to be able to place food orders at sites that are (sadly) IE only, and require specific components to work correctly (mostly, expecting a completely basic setup of IE, with no restrictions).
Proxy through our corporate office is also out, because as I mentioned before, we don't have the bandwidth there to support it (even a trickle of 10KB/sec from an average of 40 stores online at a time (40%) is still about a third of our bandwidth). Increasing our bandwidth is also not an option due to budget issues. Even if it's caching, it's still going ver our outbound pipe, which is still not good.
Really, the only options I have are A, write a program that will periodically check one of our servers for an updated hosts file, and overwrite it; B, set up each store to point to one of our servers for DNS, that will filter their requests and allow through only traffic we wish to allow (preferable); or C, continue what we're doing now, which is to set DNS to 1.1.1.1 and put everything they need in a hosts file, and keep their user from being able to modify that file or the network settings.
Right now the higher-ups are preferring C, because we have an army of district managers that are paid considerably less than myself that we can train to go to their sites and update manually. However, because like any trained monkey doing repetitive tasks they get bored and start slacking off, the stores haven't been getting updated lately and I'm looking for a way to take the human element out of it, which leaves me with options A and B currently.
Would love to. However, I'm not only locked into what we have, I have no budget at all, and I have to make sure that basically no one ever requires re-training (for example, some of the stores are in California, and myself and the other half are in Tennessee. Some of the CA stores have been using Outlook Express for several years, and although we have a solid case against it for security reasons, I'm still not allowed to force any store that has an existing computer to give up OE and use Outlook Web Access; I have to wait until they get a replacement computer from us).
Also, there are a few programs they use for training purposes that are Windows-only, which would require using Crossover or Wine. Honestly, even if I came up with a perfect fit for what they are used for, I still wouldn't be able to roll it out. We also have an issue where our systems are dying because of greasy dust from the fryers all day getting stuck in the fans and other moving components, but the higher ups would rather us throw money at the existing machines than to get some small fanless machines with flash disks (which only cost about 2-3 times a single cleaning/imaging costs).
You're exactly right, I can control DNS server, but not what's on the machine (and the DNS is just a situation where the users aren't smart enough to know better, but even then only a manager would be able to change it). Where is this weird place, you might ask? It's a fast food restaurant. The reason we're doing this is mostly to prevent adware/spyware infections. Prior to doing our hosts file hack, we had 2-3 stores a week getting infected. Now, it's down to 1 every 2-3 months. There are 2 accounts on the machine, an admin account that is passworded, and a "store" account that is not, and is a limited user.
I mentioned this to a previous comment, but you may not see it. I wasn't very clear on this point; the computers we're restricting are at 100 (literally) different locations, and we only have a tiny T1 pipe at the central office. In other words, it's not efficient for us to do caching/proxying. Right now we're using DNS set to 1.1.1.1 and a hosts file to do the same thing, but it's getting annoying updating 100 sites when a host changes or needs to be added.
In our situation, DNS is the easiest way to limit it, because we have about 100 computers spread out among 100 locations, with no VPN or such things. Also, we don't want their actual traffic eating up our internet connection at the main office, since we only have a T1.
We all know Apple is incredibly protective of their IP. Part of that IP is keeping everyone from just being able to get a copy of what they have in development, so as to keep some things closed and hidden until *they* want to talk about it.
Note: I AM an Apple employee, and I would expect that if I did the same, I would face the same punishment. Apple's new hire training actually goes over all of this, and states exactly the punishment for doing anything against their policy. Part of that policy is that if you use or divulge unreleased software or information without the proper authority, you *will* be fired, at the least. I'm sure if they wanted to, they could have taken this much further.
Think here for a minute, these guys downloaded an illicit copy of Leopard, knowing that just that was grounds for being fired, *and then* proceded to talk about it at work, where they were overheard. Surprising to me would be if they *didn't* get canned.
It's more of a "we don't support this at all" and "install will fail unless it's SP2".
I'm not sure what makes the difference, but something does. You can slipstream SP2 into a SP or SP1 disk and reburn it using a program like nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/).
No, you're apparently thinking of the wrong problems, and didn't read all of my prior post. The problems Windows has are mostly with the reconfiguring of the *windows* you have open, not gracefully changing resolutions. Most of the drivers do the best they can (remember when you had to reboot the computer to change resolutions in Windows?) nowadays. In no way can anyone blame the fact that when a display drops off on a Windows machine, windows doesn't realize this and reposition the windows to the current available display space. It's just something that never got implemented, because the got it working, and that was "good enough", which is basically all Windows is; the "good enough" OS.
This is why inveterate PC-type people such as yourself would do better to stay off the Mac, a computer that was designed for Mac types.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure that Apple disagrees with you. Trying to say that the mac is only for the elite few that possess some sort of hidden knowledge that the rest of us don't have (which apparently has to do with knowing what some animated QuicktimeVR animal is).
In other words, shut the fuck up and go back to your little hole of a perfect world where only you and your friends can reside. For me, I'll keep using my Macs, and I'll keep switching people over from the hell that is Windows. Oh, and you might consider not posting as anonymous if you want to flame people about stupid shit all the time.
Wow. I just don't know what to say to that. Amazing, really, how much of a prick you make yourself sound. Especially since if you were a "born" mac user you would have been born post-1984, making you pretty young in relation to the computer industry.
To reply to you statements there, Firefox *is* a good app, although it's not the best Mac browser. I personally don't user, actually I use Safari. And remember, up until a couple of years ago, the only browsers for Mac that were decent were IE and Netscape, not something Apple-made.
I switched to the Mac because I used to maintain them, and have used them since the 5200CD days, running OS 7.6.1, I just never owned one personally, because they didn't really fit my lifestyle. I like to be able to tinker in the command line, so I had a PC which I could install Linux/BSD on and have some fun. OS X gives me that power, while still keeping me from having to painfully do day to day tasks.
I love my Macs (I have a PowerBook, Mac Mini G4, and a Graphite iMac DV), but I'm also realistic about how the business world works. Where I work, there is no way we could run on all Macs today, but I hope that in the future it will be possible. The whole idea of having a Mac is to make things easier. Sticking a Mac where it doesn't belong on principle just goes against the whole idea of owning and using Macs. The best solution for the task is what should be used, and in my case it's Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Microsoft Dynamics/Great Plains, and Microsoft Office, with RedHat Linux where possible on the server side.
Oh, and btw, I think you meant Claris, the company that was split off from Apple to produce ClarisWorks, later remerged back into Apple and rebranded AppleWorks. Yes, I do know my Apple history as well.
I am quite in the same boat as you. I deal with Windows every day (Server 2003, XP, 2000) and have to put up with all of it's bullshit (just read some of the posts on my blog, and you'll know what exactly I deal with), but I also have to put up with a lot of bullshit from Linux (configuring winbindd to allow logons via Active Directory, anyone?). Just search for "winbind error" on your favorite search engine, and you'll get an idea there. And to make it worse, so many people have just posted "me too"'s, that searching for the error you have doesnt ever really give you anything useful.
That's why I bought a Mac. Call me a fanboy if you want, but it really makes my life so much more peaceful when I get home and don't have to put up with any shit from my computer. And in the last year, I've gotten my immediate family all using macs, as well as a lot of my friends, so I deal with issues from people I know less and less now to boot.
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Remember the flash they're talking about here for the Zune is an iPod nano-like device, and similarly there is the iPod nano from Apple. These are the devices that you guys really are targeted at. Really the only thing that I can see that might be different is putting in a CF, SD or other kind of card slot so that you can upgrade the capacity if you want, but I guarantee you most people wouldn't upgrade it at all, they'd just get a new player when they wanted more space (remember that a large portion of the public have a 4-6MP digital camera and still use the 16MB card that came with it, and change the resolution down to 640x480 or 1600x1200 to be able to take more pictures, thus negating the fact that they chose a 6MP camera instead of a 1-2MP camera).
You're confusing flash memory with flash memory cards (such as SD, MMC, CF, xD, someonepleasestopitwiththeformats). iPod nanos and shuffles as well as many other players have flash memory in them, not hard drives. the iPod video and Zune have hard drives, but it's not feasible because the flash *is* too expensive for these players for the capacity they need (movies take up a lot of space, and replacing a 80GB with an 8GB device isn't feasible, which is why they have different lines of players). Just because YOU only need 2-8GB of storage doesn't mean everyone is the same, and that is also why Apple's iPod nano is the top selling player.
Because umm... flash is OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSIVE? Hard drives let manufacturers sell these things for $3-400 with 30-80GB of storage, a 64GB flash drive is still in the $6-800 range in and of itself. Granted, prices will go down, but people want their storage now, and don't care so much about having to replace the thing every couple of years.
Read some of the history on the VATech cluster (and re-read what I said) - they used PowerMac G5's at first (what the Mac Pro now replaced) because the XServes didn't come in a fast enough configuration. The thing is, if you want something with 8 cores, you HAVE to go with the Mac Pro. The XServe only comes in dual-dual core models (they were updated to 3.0GHz as well, so the 8 core is not coming, yet).
As for your "use what everyone else uses" argument, there is a reason why VATech went with PowerMacs and then later XServes - they are massively cheaper on that scale than anything else. And, until the Intel XServe update, the XServes did NOT even include dual PSUs, or baseboard management. Remember here - this is a compute cluster, redundant power supplies are not really that important becasue if a node goes down because of a dead power supply, it doesn't hurt you much to have that node offline until you can replace it.
Yes, Apple pushes the Workgroup cluster for bioinformatics. This is for good reason - it's a simple all-in-one box for compute clustering. However, if you only have a need for 1-3 compute nodes, and you're on a budget, a couple Mac Pros are a good idea (especially because you can enable XGrid on the machines, network them together, and still use them as regular workstations that can use their extra cycles to kill off your computing, this allows you to not have to buy workstations AND compute nodes, without much loss in computing power most of the time (remember, most apps are not multithreaded enough to take advantage of 4+ cores, so most of the time 2 or more cores are going to be almost completely idle when using one of these as a workstation too).
Exactly. That, and Math/physics with MATLab and Mathematica in a cluster. For visualization, yes you will need the better card, but you don't need it in the 20 machines that are doing the grunt work as well, and that can save you many thousands of dollars.
See my other reply as well, but the idea is that this machine is a base configuration, not an end-all-be-all solution that fits everyone. Yes, damn near everyone that orders one of these will have to change the configuration a bit, but Apple is now not just about graphics and video on the high-end... they have to let the science folks get what they want too (and since the adoption of OS X, Apple is now one of the leading science vendors... just take a look at a lot of Computer Science department nowadays and see what they replaced their Sun machines with). Like it or not, Apple now has to cater to a lot of different markets, and the best way to do that is to let the pro users configure the machines themselves. Everyone wants the cheapest machine that can do their job, and most pro users know what type of machine fits that bill.
Apple targets all of the markets I mentioned with this machine. Which is why the 7300GT is still the default card in this machine. If you want a better card, BUY a better card, don't bitch at Apple because it's not in the base level machine, because that's exactly what it is - a base level machine. The idea of the single configuration is that since different markets use it, they can put what they need in, if you don't want the graphics card, great, don't buy it, but here's a cheap card we'll throw in to get you going on it.
And what are my references for what I said before? How about here and here? You see, the Mac Pro is used as a compute cluster as well as the XServe, since the Mac Pro gets more power earlier. Note that the VATech cluster is now G5 XServes, but it started as a cluster of 1100 PowerMac G5's because the XServes were not fast enough. They only later converted when the XServes got up to snuff.
For a 1-2 (or a couple more) node compute cluster, the Mac Pro is the perfect machine, because it can be used as a regular computer as well. As I mentioned before, if you're looking to do graphics work on it, then configure it how YOU will want it - the Mac Pro is designed to be as flexible as possible; the base model is likely not going to be right for anyone. With a few changes, however, it can be perfect for you (for example - doing heavy graphics work? put a better video card, some more ram, and fill up the disk bays with fast disks; doing heavy computing and have storage elsewhere? throw in a fiber channel card, gobs of ram, and up the CPU; doing visualization? put the best graphics card in there with gobs of ram and a decent CPU, with enough disk space to store your visualization data set).
I think the reason people have so much trouble with this, is that Apple has traditionally set up their configurations so that you could go in, pick the base model that you want, and it would be pretty much exactly what you need to do what you want to do on it. This is true still for the consumer models, but the pro models Apple has gotten from just catering to graphics and video editors and expanded into computer science, bioinformatics, engineering, and math (see MATLab and Mathematica). Now, the base configuration of the pro models aren't a perfect fit for the people that have traditionally bought them, because other people have other needs.
I know others have said it, and you even hinted at it yourself. There is a key thing that most people miss when looking at the Mac Pro (or G5's when they were out), which is they are specifically a WORKSTATION. The kind of WORKSTATION that does the kind of WORK that involves a *lot* of processing power, such as physics, bioinformatics, and video/image crunching. These machines, as much as people ogle over how well they could play a game if they only had a better video card, are not gaming machines. Apple has yet to kick into that market, because there really and truly aren't many (if any) games that would require the power of a Mac Pro to work well that run under OS X. Also, I personally would have to say from my experience with Apple, that any game publisher that wanted to target just the Mac Pro for a particular game would not be something that Apple would really care for - they want the games to be left to the consumers, and for consumers that means iMac, Mac Mini, or MacBook. If it can't run well on one of those, then they don't really want to get into it.
Also, as much as people bitch about the price of a spec'd out Mac Pro - remember that again this is a WORKSTATION that BUSINESSES would be buying for WORK. Businesses don't generally care that much about the price as long as the computer can get the job done as fast as possible. This also means that the largest part of the market for these machines don't care about getting the best deal on RAM or hard drives or video cards. They want to be able to go to one place, click a few options, and get their computer as soon as possible, and get it up and running with as little amount of effort as possible to make it do the WORK they bought it for.
If you are so sensitive about the price of it that you have to go out and find RAM, disks, and a video card to put in it that will save you a couple hundred dollars on a $4-5000 purchase, you're either a total penny pincher, or you don't need to be buying the machine in the first place.
Remember - this machine won't run almost all of the games and programs on the market any faster than a dual or quad core machine, it's for a particular market with the needs of lots of CPU power. In general, the people that want these machines don't care about the video card (unless they're using it for video editing, but then they want a VERY high end one specific for that), sometimes don't care about the RAM (unless a large data set needs to be available in RAM), and a lot of times don't care about the disk space (usually they have a lot of space on a network setup on an XServe or the like). This means that Apple is going to put up the bare bones configuration with all the CPU power, and let the businesses pick how much RAM, disk, and what kind of video card they want. Yes, this machine is for a niche market, but it's for a LOT of niche markets that all have different needs. Instead of having 20 different "base" configurations, they have one, and assume that if you're buying one you know enough about what you need to pick the parts individually.
That way you don't have someone who is going to set these things up in a headless environment with an XServe RAID buying a machine with a $600 video card and $400 worth of disk drive they don't need, since all that is going to be on the disk anyhow is the operating system (think compile farm or computation cluster).
Even though they have a very small hardware list to support (comparitively), they still provide the drivers for the older hardware with the new software, which is the point I'm trying to make here. For Vista, Microsoft gutted out a ton of drivers that shipped with XP, and in doing so alienated a LOT of relatively recent hardware, and to make matters worse, they didn't put in much effort to get drivers for hardware released since XP. If I had a relatively recent computer, say, purchased since XP was released, and it is hardware CAPABLE of running Vista (CPU, memory, disk), I would very much so expect for all of the hardware if it was all name-brand stuff (Creative, NVidia, ATI, etc) to work out of the box.
The thing that makes it even more pointing at Microsoft, is that ATI, NVidia and Creative have all moved to unified drivers for their hardware, making the number of individual drivers to be verified for Windows to be much lower. The primary difference here (as you hinted at) is that Microsoft provides incredibly vague "requirements" for their software, in an attempt to make it less scary for the average consumer. What this results in, is that if a basic requirement of Vista is "Sound Card", and I have a 3 year old sound card that works fine (I mean really, at best they're hooked up to a mediocre set of computer speakers for most people), but yet it doesn't work in Vista. Who's fault is that? Is it Microsoft's for not clarifying the *actual* supported hardware, or is it the device manufacturer's for not providing drivers for the new operating system?
Yes, I did upgrade the ram - with old memory laying around from a PC I no longer used (it was just normal PC100 SDRAM). And as for that, that memory is about 7 years old (came from a PC I got in 2000).
Big thing to remember here though - the original iMacs were *built* to have the RAM upgraded (and that was about it, if you were lucky you can also put in an Airport card, since it's right next to the memory). You don't even have to take the case off or have a screwdriver, the memory slots are accessible via a coin-turn lock door on the bottom. Literally, power down roll it over, turn a coin, pop the memory in, close the door, and turn it back over and back on.
Now, one thing I did upgrade that isn't a "normal" upgrade was the hard drive - it shipped with a 13GB one. While this is big enough to run Tiger, I figured I had the extra one (also from my PC) laying around and ready to put in.
So the answer is, I am being real. For this iMac, Apple *expected* users to upgrade the ram, otherwise they wouldn't have made it so easy or have provided 2 slots. The point of the matter is, I can run a 1.5 year old operating system on an 8 year old computer with minimum upgrades, and have the video card, sound card, network, DVD-ROM, firewire, USB, external video port and more work out of the box with no additional drivers.
Except that, Vista appears to ship with LESS hardware support out of the box than even XP did. I would fully expect that hardware bought since XP was released and far before Vista was released should be supported out of the box in Vista, especially things such as sound and video cards from major manufacturers.
The biggest problem is Microsoft wants total control over the driver stability and quality control, but yet wants nothing to do with the development of said drivers. This forces the device manufacturers to decide whether it's worth it to put in the extra effort to develop a driver that works, or deal with pissed off customers that can't use a 1-3 year old SOUND CARD in their computer with Vista, that worked perfectly fine in XP.
Umm, at least a baseline support for that hardware? For a company so prided on backwards compatibility, Microsoft sure has given the finger hardcore to a lot of people when it comes to Vista.
For comparison: I have an Apple iMac G3 400MHz with 768MB RAM and a 40GB disk happily running OS X 10.4. This machine also has a (nonupgradeable) 8MB ATI video card. Note that this computer, at this moment, is almost 8 years old, and runs Tiger like a champ. Sure, I don't get all the cool effects, but the key is I didn't have to do a damn thing to make it work, it just did, and it doesn't even attempt the effects it can't handle. I can browse the internet, use iTunes, type in Word, Excel, Pages or Keynote, check my email, and even watch DVD's. And you know what? It runs 10.4 FASTER than it runs 10.3. Given, it's still a bit slower than OS 9, but given the added capabilities of it and it still being useable in OS X, that's a pretty damn good trade-off.
I didn't say that it's a 108Mbps standard, I said that with twin broadcasting radios (business class AP's), there would be a theoretical 108Mbps available from that *AP*. Yes, for a single radio on board an AP, there would only be 54Mbps available.
Obviously you don't know much about how wireless works. See, while 3 AP's may provide the proper *coverage* (ie: you can get a signal anywhere in the plane), it can't provide the *bandwidth*. Assuming they're using this for more than just some person's want to get online from the air, such as for in-flight entertainment (think screens at each seat) and possibly a VoIP phone-type setup to consolidate cabling (no seperate phone/video cables for each seat), it likely will use quite a bit of bandwidth. If each row has some 7-8+ seats (twin aisle configuration, likely it's 2/3/2 or 3/3/3), and designing for peak capacity (i'm sorry you can't watch your in-flight movie because your rowmates are all watching it already and those guys are online and that guy is on the phone), it's going to take a lot of bandwidth. Even at 802.11g/a speeds, you're talking at most 108Mbps (twin radio configuration) split across 7-8 people. Figure watching a movie uses 3-10Mbps, that's at nearly peak capacity right there, best case scenario.
If that's the case, then they damn well better make PlaysForSure illegal, as well as Zune Marketplace. It's one thing to say "it's that it locks you into a particular device, so it's illegal" (what they're saying) when what they really want to say is something else, more along the lines of "We're pissed that Apple is dominant, and want to hinder that". What they're doing now is restricting Apple in a way that they aren't restricting the other guys, for no particular reason. For instance, right now, I can't play any PlaysForSure music on my iPod. Sure, Apple could license it (and this is what they will argue, that Apple can license PlaysForSure, but noone can license FairPlay), but that doesn't do me as a consumer any good.
My problem here is that they're trying to make it out to be a play for the consumer, and word it in a way that will get consumers up in arms about it, when in fact every player on the market is tied to one of 3 DRM schemes, and only one, be it ZuneShit, PlaysForSure, or FairPlay. No player out supports more than one, even Microsoft's own player doesn't support PlaysForSure, a DRM scheme they designed.
Again, this is all avoiding the actual question I had, which was pointed as it was because of the situation I'm in, which is somewhat unique. No, I can't buy anything for each store, because even $100/store*100 stores is $10,000, which is about 1/2-1/3 of my yearly salary (I only do this job part time, 10-15 hours a week during the semester and 30 hours/week over the holidays). As I mentioned before, my budget is literally $0.
Also, I cannot remove/lock down IE any more than it already is, because they have to be able to place food orders at sites that are (sadly) IE only, and require specific components to work correctly (mostly, expecting a completely basic setup of IE, with no restrictions).
Proxy through our corporate office is also out, because as I mentioned before, we don't have the bandwidth there to support it (even a trickle of 10KB/sec from an average of 40 stores online at a time (40%) is still about a third of our bandwidth). Increasing our bandwidth is also not an option due to budget issues. Even if it's caching, it's still going ver our outbound pipe, which is still not good.
Really, the only options I have are A, write a program that will periodically check one of our servers for an updated hosts file, and overwrite it; B, set up each store to point to one of our servers for DNS, that will filter their requests and allow through only traffic we wish to allow (preferable); or C, continue what we're doing now, which is to set DNS to 1.1.1.1 and put everything they need in a hosts file, and keep their user from being able to modify that file or the network settings.
Right now the higher-ups are preferring C, because we have an army of district managers that are paid considerably less than myself that we can train to go to their sites and update manually. However, because like any trained monkey doing repetitive tasks they get bored and start slacking off, the stores haven't been getting updated lately and I'm looking for a way to take the human element out of it, which leaves me with options A and B currently.
Would love to. However, I'm not only locked into what we have, I have no budget at all, and I have to make sure that basically no one ever requires re-training (for example, some of the stores are in California, and myself and the other half are in Tennessee. Some of the CA stores have been using Outlook Express for several years, and although we have a solid case against it for security reasons, I'm still not allowed to force any store that has an existing computer to give up OE and use Outlook Web Access; I have to wait until they get a replacement computer from us).
Also, there are a few programs they use for training purposes that are Windows-only, which would require using Crossover or Wine. Honestly, even if I came up with a perfect fit for what they are used for, I still wouldn't be able to roll it out. We also have an issue where our systems are dying because of greasy dust from the fryers all day getting stuck in the fans and other moving components, but the higher ups would rather us throw money at the existing machines than to get some small fanless machines with flash disks (which only cost about 2-3 times a single cleaning/imaging costs).
You're exactly right, I can control DNS server, but not what's on the machine (and the DNS is just a situation where the users aren't smart enough to know better, but even then only a manager would be able to change it). Where is this weird place, you might ask? It's a fast food restaurant. The reason we're doing this is mostly to prevent adware/spyware infections. Prior to doing our hosts file hack, we had 2-3 stores a week getting infected. Now, it's down to 1 every 2-3 months. There are 2 accounts on the machine, an admin account that is passworded, and a "store" account that is not, and is a limited user.
I mentioned this to a previous comment, but you may not see it. I wasn't very clear on this point; the computers we're restricting are at 100 (literally) different locations, and we only have a tiny T1 pipe at the central office. In other words, it's not efficient for us to do caching/proxying. Right now we're using DNS set to 1.1.1.1 and a hosts file to do the same thing, but it's getting annoying updating 100 sites when a host changes or needs to be added.
In our situation, DNS is the easiest way to limit it, because we have about 100 computers spread out among 100 locations, with no VPN or such things. Also, we don't want their actual traffic eating up our internet connection at the main office, since we only have a T1.
We all know Apple is incredibly protective of their IP. Part of that IP is keeping everyone from just being able to get a copy of what they have in development, so as to keep some things closed and hidden until *they* want to talk about it.
Note: I AM an Apple employee, and I would expect that if I did the same, I would face the same punishment. Apple's new hire training actually goes over all of this, and states exactly the punishment for doing anything against their policy. Part of that policy is that if you use or divulge unreleased software or information without the proper authority, you *will* be fired, at the least. I'm sure if they wanted to, they could have taken this much further.
Think here for a minute, these guys downloaded an illicit copy of Leopard, knowing that just that was grounds for being fired, *and then* proceded to talk about it at work, where they were overheard. Surprising to me would be if they *didn't* get canned.
It's more of a "we don't support this at all" and "install will fail unless it's SP2".
I'm not sure what makes the difference, but something does. You can slipstream SP2 into a SP or SP1 disk and reburn it using a program like nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/).
No, you're apparently thinking of the wrong problems, and didn't read all of my prior post. The problems Windows has are mostly with the reconfiguring of the *windows* you have open, not gracefully changing resolutions. Most of the drivers do the best they can (remember when you had to reboot the computer to change resolutions in Windows?) nowadays. In no way can anyone blame the fact that when a display drops off on a Windows machine, windows doesn't realize this and reposition the windows to the current available display space. It's just something that never got implemented, because the got it working, and that was "good enough", which is basically all Windows is; the "good enough" OS.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure that Apple disagrees with you. Trying to say that the mac is only for the elite few that possess some sort of hidden knowledge that the rest of us don't have (which apparently has to do with knowing what some animated QuicktimeVR animal is).
In other words, shut the fuck up and go back to your little hole of a perfect world where only you and your friends can reside. For me, I'll keep using my Macs, and I'll keep switching people over from the hell that is Windows. Oh, and you might consider not posting as anonymous if you want to flame people about stupid shit all the time.
Wow. I just don't know what to say to that. Amazing, really, how much of a prick you make yourself sound. Especially since if you were a "born" mac user you would have been born post-1984, making you pretty young in relation to the computer industry.
To reply to you statements there, Firefox *is* a good app, although it's not the best Mac browser. I personally don't user, actually I use Safari. And remember, up until a couple of years ago, the only browsers for Mac that were decent were IE and Netscape, not something Apple-made.
I switched to the Mac because I used to maintain them, and have used them since the 5200CD days, running OS 7.6.1, I just never owned one personally, because they didn't really fit my lifestyle. I like to be able to tinker in the command line, so I had a PC which I could install Linux/BSD on and have some fun. OS X gives me that power, while still keeping me from having to painfully do day to day tasks.
I love my Macs (I have a PowerBook, Mac Mini G4, and a Graphite iMac DV), but I'm also realistic about how the business world works. Where I work, there is no way we could run on all Macs today, but I hope that in the future it will be possible. The whole idea of having a Mac is to make things easier. Sticking a Mac where it doesn't belong on principle just goes against the whole idea of owning and using Macs. The best solution for the task is what should be used, and in my case it's Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Microsoft Dynamics/Great Plains, and Microsoft Office, with RedHat Linux where possible on the server side.
Oh, and btw, I think you meant Claris, the company that was split off from Apple to produce ClarisWorks, later remerged back into Apple and rebranded AppleWorks. Yes, I do know my Apple history as well.
That's why I bought a Mac. Call me a fanboy if you want, but it really makes my life so much more peaceful when I get home and don't have to put up with any shit from my computer. And in the last year, I've gotten my immediate family all using macs, as well as a lot of my friends, so I deal with issues from people I know less and less now to boot.