I suppose Apple will want to have the "1st Dual Core Laptop" and the only way that's gonna happen is with Intel. AMD is knocking the socks off the current Intel dual core chips but the second generation of those chips is ready for imminent release. The first generation of those Intel Dual Core chips are not keeping with the power usage that Apple wants and needs. Apple would most likely be going for the second generation of Intel Dual Core chips. Until then they are running Quad PowerMac G5's which will hold over the die-hards until they can do the same with Intel chips. I've seen a screenshot showing a Quad Intel box running OS X so they are probably already prototyping the next generation of Intel chips. We've also got Quad Intel 1U XServes to look forward to. Fantastic for Application Servers and Database Clusters. Then we've got SATA-II Disk Arrays most likely in the works as well.
If Apple pulls this switch-over off the right way, and slams the competition in the process, then it will change a great many minds. FreeBSD 6 just shipped and the next iteration of Mac OS X will most likely ship with it and the kernel will be optimized for the Intel dual core chips. An exciting time for Apple and a worrying time for Microsoft and Dell.
VMWare will most likely be able to run natively under an Intel chipset and you will finally be able to run WinXP or dare I say even Win2k3 in a virtual machine as well as you can run it under Linux today. It's an exciting time to be an Apple true believer...
I haven't had an office in 10 years! Not since getting a high paying job for one of the Fortune 100. Nothing but cubicles for as far as the eye can see! Office space is reserved on the outer perimeter where the windows are. Anyone with an office is a manager of at least 100 people. If they have a corner office then they have those managers reporting to them and they are ultimately responsible for several hundred employees. Were it not for the skylights there would be no sunlight in the cubical farm. The good thing is conference rooms are on the outer wall as well so you can kinda stare out the window during boring meetings.
IT people are in cubicles and have been for at least 20 years. The servers are locked up in secured environmentally controlled data centers. You wouldn't want to work there, it sucks typing when your hands are freezing. The noise of the cooling fans and air conditioning is pretty darn loud too.
Due to Sarbanes/Oxley the customer data is secured to such a ridiculous degree that the IT staff doesn't have access to production data anymore! Yeah, that's right, the IT staff cannot see production data! When there is a problem we have to request a special temporary user name that expires in like 8 eight hours. That id is issued to you and the password is reset. You then use that account to examine the production system. Everything that account sees or does is logged extensively. When you are done, you give the account back and it's reset. If you forget, it will expire soon enough. Those with access to issue the accounts and reset them are at the highest levels of security and are located in our mainframe operations center where they are under constant surveillance including by closed circuit digital cameras. These guys have to go through several card access points to reach the data center. They are not even in cubicles but what looks like a college lecture hall of desks on stepped risers with projection screens on the main wall. Looks like a NASA control center. This helps a lot in major outages to have all the experts in the same room.
The call center staff obviously has access to production client data because they need to. But that doesn't mean they aren't being watched all the time. Every read is logged and if it's found that they should not be reading that customers data at that time, they will be caught. Random audits are performed constantly. We have a special investigations team which is constantly on the lookout for potential fraudsters, etc.
Security performs periodic physical security audits. i.e. going around looking for people who keep their ID/Passwords under their keyboards or on post-it notes; leaving their desks unlocked, leaving confidential information out in the open, etc. This happens at night after most people go home.
Cell phones with cameras and USB devices are forbidden in some places. The call center computers USB ports have been filled with an insulating epoxy from a hot glue gun. Of course that doesn't stop someone from writing down notes and sticking it in their pants. I mean if Sandy Berger can enter the national archives and stuff top secret documents down his pants and walk right out then so can a call center employee who makes less then $15 / hour. What the hot glue in the USB / Firewire slot does is stop someone from moving gigabytes of data out the door in one move. There are also no CD/DVD burners in the call center for the same reason.
Arguing security isn't a good thing, it will just lead to a security crackdown that isn't going to stop someone whose diligent and determined. It will just inconvenience you further... Take a look at those 4 Chinese Spies they just caught in California! They worked for defense contractors and gave away military secrets to the Chinese. I mean if we can't stop our military secrets from walking how can we stop everyday business data theft and industrial or corporate espionage?
19" or 20" is really too big for a laptop, however one can have a high resolution screen in 15" width that is a wide screen ratio. I am not concerned by application window height, I need screen width and a high enough resolution to make it practical. It's also good for watching widescreen DVD's! I've got a 15" Apple PowerBook which is 1280 x 854 and the new 15" PowerBooks are now 1440 x 960 which is plenty.
This give you more elbow room to place windows side by side on the screen. This is really nice because now I can place a PDF on the side of the screen (an eBook) and have a text editor and some console windows next to it.
Now there may be a market for 20" laptops but it's not gonna be all that big. Especially for mobile users. However, if you must have a huge screen and you are willing to carry a heavy laptop around be my guest and buy one. Perhaps you will just use it like a desktop computer on your desk ala Star Trek TNG or something. Whatever floats your boat.
Bottom Line:
1. Wide screen gives you more horizontal screen real estate. 2. It will make laptops bigger and thereby heavier. 3. It will look fabulous with widescreen DVD's.
I think I will wait for 5.1x before I switch my production PostgreSQL to MySQL 5.0... I certainly will not base a Slashdot threaded flameware to sway my decision one way or the other.
"Loading songs onto an axim is not much more complex. If I had my mom do either one she'd be vexed either way."
Actually, if your Mom had a Mac, it would be much simpler then the Axim. Just plug it in! iTunes, pops up and it syncs. Boom, done! Buy music with iTunes, point click, easy baby! Rip existing CD's? Stick the disc in and click the Import button. Mix up a playlist and click Burn, then insert a blank CD. It's so very very easy!
The Windows version of iTunes is very very close to the Mac version but the Mac version just runs slightly better and is more consistent with the OS.
The reason Apples iPod is so darn successful is because of the following:
1. It's really really really easy to use! 2. It looks very stylish and cool. 3. It just plain 'Works!" 4. Apple iTunes Store is the only legitimate place where you can actually buy music in an easy affordable way. Others either rent or give you WMA files. Sure AAC files are DRM'd but the DRM generally doesn't get in the way all that much unless you try to share one on a P2P network. 5. Apple stores located in shopping malls play a big part in exposing customers to the products. Go into any Apple store in an Mall in America on a Saturday and you will find tons of people buying iPods and accessories, they also hang around and drool over the computers. Some of them buy Mac's. 6. Marketing, marketing, marketing. The only other music player marketing I've seen is Napster ads but Napster is a rental service not a purchase service and they don't even state what players they support (multiple ones, like Axim, Creative, etc.). 7. Apple has achieved total mindshare with the iPod.
"So they don't test anything? They just modify production code directly?"
Don't get Stuck on Stupid! Of course they test! RoR supports test, development, and production modes of operation. In addition, it has a full unit test architecture built right in. The moment you generate a new rails app, you already have unit test model templates ready for your tests. RoR supports all the development methods that preach code and test. Including Extreme Programming.
Really want to get XP humming? Code on an Apple PowerBook and run SubEthaEdit - http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ - This allows multiple programmers to code at the same time, so where XP recommends two or three programmers sitting next to each other working together, SubEthaEdit allows you to do that even over the Internet.
The bottom line is that the Concord failed because it was too expensive to operate. People were not willing to pay such a high price for the luxury of quick air travel. Once the novelty of flying from NY to Paris eating lunch and being home before dinner wore off it was the operating cost that impacted the Concord. In order to fly Concord you needed to be able to pay the price of a first class ticket. There were no discounts and the price was higher then traditional aircraft first class. The Internet, VoIP, and Teleconferencing killed the Concord as well. It was no longer as necessary to make face to face business meetings.
The Concord was old technology. Perhaps the Japanese and the Australians can pull this off. But they are going to have to make it cheaper somehow. The fuel cost is astronomical.
Oh... I see it works just fine on my Mac ripping into iTunes at full high quality with no DRM restrictions whatsoever.
However, if I am on a PC, I have to run the software included on the disc (because it only runs on Windows) to unlock the DRM so I can retreive low-grade quality music WMA files. Then if I want to use those with iTunes, burn a CD and then re-rip in iTunes thus degrading the quality further!
Then they ask that I bitch at Apple becasue Apple refused to license FairPlay! Better that I just buy an Apple Mac so I can naturally bypass the DRM in the first place. I suppose you could just rip it in Linux with little trouble as well if it works on a Mac the same way.
They must be doing something funky with the track layout that FUBAR's Windows ability to read the disc.
I've been pouring over the site for a while now. Very very interesting stuff, this Zimbra...
If you actually look at the details, it's a Linux based (Red Hat RPM distro at the moment) that appears to be the absolute best web email system I've seen to date. AJAX is only a very small part of what Zimbra does. AJAX simply improves the end user browser experience by making it feel more like a local application and less like a web app. AJAX allows for page updates without reloading the whole page so it can add features like drag and drop, right-clicking context menus, live searches, etc. i.e. faster instant feedback much more like a native app.
The person behind the site is the former CTO of BEA Systems (WebLogic). He wanted a better email system that was available anywhere. Grouping of discussion threads, saved searches (like Mac OS Tiger), etc. What this group has come up with is pretty darn interesting and if it's well designed will only get better.
The geek reading Slashdot ought to go read the Admin Guide available from Downloads_Documentation_Admin Guide (PDF or HTML). There are some real nice technical explanations not found in the marketing flash demo! Before you continue to bash it, go check out the technical details while keeping in mind that it's new and will be improved as time moves forward. Linux, Apache Tomcat, PostFix, MySQL, OpenLDAP, SMTP, LMTP, SOAP, XML, IMAP, POP, and AJAX. You can connect with IMAP and POP clients! This means you might be able to connect via IMAP with OS X Mail.app which supports much of the threading, sorting and search features not found in Outlook. iCal can use the calendar system. Addressbook can connect to the LDAP directory for GAL entries. Pretty darn slick! Zimbra has certainly gotten my attention. If you have to you could use Outlook, but I would rather use the web interface then use Outlook! Ugh...
Should be interesting if someone decides to do the same thing in Ruby On Rails! Might be easier to build and maintain and thus faster to market with new features. Same technology except substituting Java and Tomcat for Ruby, the Rails API, plus Lighttpd & FCGI. Go take a look at Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da List and you can see that http://www.37signals.com/ could easily build a similar system to Zimbra and make it sing! Or course the 37signals way of things is to host it for you and you subscribe to it. Zimbra is meant to be installed by your geeks with a support contract to Zimbra and consulting available. There also TextDrive's Strongspace Ruby on Rails app http://strongspace.com/. There is going to be an explosion of such applications being refreshed by AJAX powered feedback. AJAX is exciting as it can greatly improve the user experience. But that's all it does, the backend geekness is where the real fun begins. Whether it's Java or RoR things are going to start changing. Get ready for Web 2.0 without the Web 1.0 hype and dotbomb! You must have a viable business model to succeed with Web 2.0!
The very first thing Tony Soprano did to his Cadillac Escalade was to rip out the OnStar system and GPS unit! He was paranoid about the Fed's getting access to the data so they can track his movements.
1. Get a scanner with a document feeder. 2. Get software to scan to PDF format. 3. Get Google Desktop Search which will index the contents of PDF or get an Apple Mac with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Spotlight will index your PDF's. If you have a Mac, you may be able to scan to PDF without needing Adobe Acrobat.
Don't know about scanner services, but check around and you might find someone who can scan the documents to PDF and give you a DVD-R or CD-R's with the files. Kinko's? Print Shop?
We have highend Kodak scanners that are unbelievably quick (24ppm) and scan both sides of a page at the same time. Of course, they cost $15,000.00 USD. So that's not practical for most budgets.
So who pays for roads, traffic police, pollution control, and other traffic-related costs in your country then, if it's not coming from fuel tax?
That would be the state lottery and the Indian Casino slot machines that pay for roads in my state! I have no idea what the gas tax pays for... Gas tax is called 'sin tax' around here. It includes a tax on tobacco and alcohol as well.
1. Supply & Demand is all about being able to produce a product and deliver it. The cost to produce a product and great demand for the product; forcing it to be harder to get increases the price. i.e. if you can't supply the demand the price goes up.
2. Market force is competition, yet music labels sign an artist and all the distributors pretty much have the same price for the product. So no real competition except for exclusive deals like Garth Brooks and Walmart where the only place you can get the music is from Walmart. (Disclaimer -- I hate country music, so no Garth for me).
The trouble is that after the studio costs and promotional costs are paid, the electronic cost to duplicate and distribute via iTunes is practically nil! So sell enough songs and it's paid for, the rest is pure profit. This is how software works as well. So yeah, the music industry is just plain getting greedy!
What's different is that electronic distribution is now within the reach of just about anyone! Musicians can now produce studio quality recordings in their garage or basement (with some rather easy sound engineering modifications to the walls, etc. -- think recycled cardboard egg containers stapled to plywood walls). Along with computers and software, you've got something just as good as a professional studio! Then you digitize the media and upload it to a service like iTunes and wait for the dough to come in.
(an off-topic related issue is blogs and the way they are changing the mainstream media scene. Just look at all the watchdog issues raised by blogs that then exploded into the MSM once the noise got loud enough. The MSM would have ignored it due to bias but the blogs demand the topics gain attention and if the MSM won't cover it, then it runs the MSM over like an 18 wheeled semi-truck! Just look at what happened to Dan Rather! Left or Right, watch out, blogs will bite you in the ass someday!)
Where does that leave the music labels? Out in the cold, I say! They have been screwing artists and the general public for years and years. The only advantage is their promotional power which they abuse by manufacturing piss poor artists and target the largest group of music buyers (young teenage girls). Sorry, but Spears, Simpson, etc. are not real artists, they are sluts with a microphone and the deep pockets of the music label.
The music industry must adapt or die. They must make money on booking large tours and drawing huge crowds from their promotions.
I don't have any answers, but I know that things will continue to change until it balances itself out. Change is the only constant. Those who keep up will survive those who don't will die in denial. I haven't bought music CD's in years but I do buy now and then from iTunes. However, I have passed the age of 30 so that means I wouldn't be buying CD's anyway. As a person ages, their tastes change and the promotional new music is just noise. The older you get the more you start looking for more interesting music. I've developed a taste for Jazz and other music that I didn't pay attention to when I was a teenager in my early 20's.
Indie artists should band together in the blogosphere to promote their music and sell it through iTunes or a whatever the future may bring. Apple should embrace the Indie and I am talking truly Indie, anyone should be able to subscribe to iTunes and upload their music for a reasonable startup fee. Apple will make more money from Indies then they will from professional music labels.
Bottom line: im never going to USA or other similar country of "freedom". Ever.
So stay in the Czech Republic then!
Just remember that you are next door to Germany where some of the 9/11 terrorists trained and planned. You probably have Muslims living amoungst you who will rise up eventually. Bin Laden gave a temporary pass to Spain when they elected the Leftist who withdrew Spanish troops after the Madrid bombings. This does not mean they are safe, it just means they will be dealt with later. Bin Laden stated that he did not think it possible to attack America until we pulled out of Somalia when a small local warlord managed to down a Black Hawk helicopter and kill a few Americans. He did not expect America to come after him even after 9/11!
Make no mistake, the terrorists want to kill ALL infidels and that includes the European leftists who support the culture they most despise.
You are too young to remember the Nazi's or even the Communists. You have relative freedom now, but it could be a whole lot worse. Unless you are willing to convert to Wahabbi Islam, swearing allegiance to Allah and Mohammed you had better wake up soon! A global Caliphate is their ultimate goal with worldwide Islamic rule and the death of all Infidels.
The fools in Hollywood would have you believe that we can make friends with these monsters, but the enemy would only laugh and kill them last!
Unix admins are gobbling up Mac laptops like mad! They get MS Office plus all the X11 / BS-nix they need to admin any Unix system (Solaris, AIX, etc.). The old school formal UNIX is dying, we are running Solaris boxes that are more then 10 years old. We need to replace them and the cost of new UNIX servers is ridiculous, we will probably switch to Linux for the legacy stuff. But XServes have the advantage of being easy to maintain, so easy we can have our Windows LAN Center manage them with minimal training!
Most new internal systems are now web based Intranet solutions, which can be run on Linux, Unix, or Mac OS X. With the exception of.NET, ASP, Notes, and Netware. The *Nix based systems scale much better and using Linux or even Mac OS X, the licensing is cheaper (XServes have unlimited OS X Server licenses!).
Those users not running native Windows applications to perform their job functions could be switched to Mac OS X Desktop easily. This includes most developers and Unix SysAdmins. When the Intel switch is complete, the ability to run a Virtual Machine Windows system in near realtime native performance becomes reality.
The tipping point is rapidly approaching, I give it about 5 years, providing Apple doesn't screw it up. This relies on Apple switching to Intel and reducing the hardware cost in the process. As well as VMWare porting their solutions to Mac OS X in the event Microsoft refuses to port VirtualPC. However, if Microsoft does that they could also kill MS Office as a threatening weapon. So Apple had better have an ACE up their leave like a much better version of Keynote, Pages, and a spreadsheet and database that will kick MS Office's ass and be fully document compatible (providing MS continues to move towards and open document format).
A coworker had his car serviced so he was dropped off at the service station by his wife in her car. He pays for the service receives a receipt with a date/time stamp and drives his car home, following his wife. The road was an average two lane road with stop lights and stop signs and heavy traffic. A police officer on the side of the road pulled him over and said he was doing 60 miles an hour in a 25 mile an hour zone. He accepted the ticket and signed it. Knowing it was not possible for him to have been doing that speed he returned to the site the next day with his GPS unit and laptop in the car along with his wife driving. They drove the route 5 times and mapped the distance by using the GPS and mileage odometer on the car. They were careful to do it at the same time during the day (rush hour) so the traffic conditions would be at least similar and the timing on the lights would be similar.
When his case came up, he was denied a deferral and a court date was set. He took all of the evidence and put it together and made sure his math calculations were correct and that the flow was as clear and logical as it could be. It was not possible for him to have traveled that distance at that speed. Another driver had passed him at about the same time the officer was clocking him. The gun must have picked up that car or one traveling the other direction.
His case was called and he got up and argued his case after the officers testimony. The officer stuttered in response and Less then 2 minutes later, the judge declared him not responsible and dismissed the city's case against him. He stood there for a few seconds stunned. The bailiff directed him to the back of the court room and explained he was good to go, no need to see the clerk or sign anything, etc.
This is rare. However, you stand a very good chance in busy districts fighting a ticket. Most people don't bother and just pay the fine and the system depends on this. The more people who show up to contest a ticket will strain the system and they will be forced to dismiss cases before they come to court. There is only so much staff and only so much time. The costs involved in running the court and paying the staff is higher then the court fees. Whatever you do, DO NOT plead not guilty on a ticket and then not show up for court, your license will get suspended and if you get pulled over again you will be arrested. They might not even notify you that your license is suspended depending on where you live. If you are positive you can defend yourself, then give it a try, worst case scenario you will end up paying the fine plus court and clerk fees but it's still cheaper then what your insurance company will do to you. If you are guilty you may luck out and get a deferral or you may get to court and they are so busy that the judge will tell you to plead guilty and they will seal your record if you pay the fines. That will keep your insurance company from finding out about your ticket.
If you just pay a ticket, you are guilty and your insurance will increase. If you don't pay the ticket and plead not guilty you have a chance at getting it dismissed either due to heavy workload at the courts or due to your innocence and your presentation skills. You generally have little to lose once you've been ticketed for speeding. You will pay one way or the other, the difference being the amount you will pay and a loss of time out of work.
That $178 dollar ticket is not the trouble. The trouble begins when your insurance company finds out about your speeding ticket and automatically raises your insurance rates on your next renewal. Even one speeding ticket will increase your insurance rate for the next 3-4 years. Get a second speeding ticket and it will bump it up even more. Get a third ticket and most companies will drop you like a hot tomalley. Some companies will drop you on the first ticket!
Another thing, have an accident at 110mph in a German made car such as an Audi or BMW that includes all the latest safety features and you are still probably going to die. The airbags, seat belts and crumple zone impact absorption won't save you at those speeds. Plus, you will probably hit other cars and potentially kill or injure others!
The State Trooper did you a favor and saved himself some extra paper work when he clocked you at 110mph! He would have had to impound your car and arrest you then file hours of paperwork and go to court later on. Perhaps you were on a straight flat road with little to no traffic around you. If he saw you weaving around cars at that speed he probably would have taken you down and threw the book at you.
Love him or hate him, Rush Limbaugh just recently started publishing a Podcast for his 24/7 subscribers. He had a team of lawyers look into all the 'issues' and ended up not playing any music whatsoever on his Podcasts. That includes his musical parodies.
The concern was how would they handle paying royalties, etc. They already pay them for radio broadcast but to put it into an MP3 and distribute it over the net allows anyone to edit it out and literally steal the song. So there is no model in place to handle the licensing, at least not one that is as reliable as the radio broadcasts.
So to avoid getting your butt sued, especially after that Supreme Court P2P decision you ought not distribute licensed music within your Podcast without written permission and even then it's not entirely clear if you are 'safe'.
OS X will prompt the user with a login prompt when attempting to do something that needs an Admin account. In OS X root is disabled by default and Admin accounts are used instead. You can sudo only if you are an admin. But everything else prompts with a GUI authentication prompt.
OS X even provides a more limited account that can be locked down even further which is ideal for KIOSK setups and young children.
Figuring the cost of redundancy and trying to save money by deciding not to have a redundant backup is the key. The trouble begins when the cost is explained to management and they freak and decide it's too expensive. Then when the thing that almost never happens, happens (Mr. Murphy's Law) the cost of the downtime is usually much higher.
Take for example a network SAN used to store 30+ Unix servers data. Talking about web servers and various DB's. Sure the SAN is redundant but the network switch leading to the SAN was not. i.e. instead of two switches in a failover configuration there was only one. That switch went berserk and everything went down. We're talking about all of the public side mission critical websites along with the databases and several Intranet systems that were also mission critical. The outage lasted most of the day while we waited on Cisco to rush a replacement switch driven by a technician from the next state over.
In the meantime, customers could not view their valuable data, third party business users could not access the data. Internal workflow was impacted. I suspect it cost a few million all said and done. All for the cost of an extra Cisco Fiber Channel switch which would have cost an additional $25,000.00. Sure hindsight is always 20/20. The risk was not properly calculated...
Now scale this up to what New Zealand went through, the outage seriously impacted the economy! Sure it would have cost millions more to have extra redundancies but then again, the outage caused by rats chewing through some cables wouldn't have brought the country to a halt either!
I believe the case was started in Connecticut, New London to be exact. There are a bunch of houses on the shoreline that the town wants to take, tear down and build a commercial complex. This is because they can extract more tax dollars and the developer convinced them it was good for the local economy.
These are the homes of tax paying and voting citizens, they are not the POOR but either middle to upper middle class citizens. Some have lived there for many years and they refused to sell their homes for even fair market value. The view is spectacular!
The argument for the town/state/government is being argued that it's to protect the poor. I mean why tear down crack houses and sections of town that are an eyesore when you can have beach front shoreline property for a steal! i.e. we can't take the shelter being used by the homeless and drug addicts.
This is ludicrous, take the boarded up houses and abandoned factories and tear them down and build the complex there! Revitalize and revamp the run down areas of town and you will improve the entire area. Ever see that Bank of America advertisement? They show BOA rebuilding bad neighborhoods into quality neighborhoods. If you ever travel to CT, be sure to check out the city of Bridgeport. This is where Donald Trump grew up. It's full of boarded up homes, there is an entire neighborhood completely boarded up. Drugs and crime run rampant. It's the armpit of CT! Trump wanted to come in and tear down the old rundown neighborhood and build a casino and amusement park. It would have created more then 10,000 jobs for the locals, not to mention all the contractors (electricians, plumbers, etc.) and all the local mom and pop shops that could spring up to sell to the extra people traveling in from NYC, etc. But no, only the Indians can have casino's in CT. We can't take the homes away from the rats and the crackheads! Oh no! we can't do that!
This comes down to government theft! If someone tried to take land that I fully owned (already paid for) and the only excuse is the betterment of the local economy and not society (not a new highway, not a new power plant, not a new school, etc.) then they had better be prepared for a gunfight!
Microsoft could very well fall down when customer backlash peeks. i.e. suppose Apple does decide to ship OS X for any x86 at just the right time. i.e. I just spent 6 hours cleaning CoolWebSearch and HomeSearch off a computer. I still don't think I've got all of it yet. There are now duplicates of every file in the C:\Windows directory with a random slight change to each one. I also have tons of TXT and LOG files with bizarre random names.
If I a professional has to struggle so hard to remove this Trojan/Spyware/Malware then the end user has no chance in hell of getting rid of it short of a format and re-install!
Enough of these consumers get infected with this stuff or worse (it always gets worse) and there will be a huge backlash against MS. Apple could just be waiting for that to peek and then WAMMO, sell the OS X for x86 clones and drop the price! Then flood the mainstream primetime hours with commercial after commercial advertising it.
They would certainly steal Microsoft's retail market rather quickly! Of course, business will take longer but if your developers get their hands on the OS X development kit and see what they can do with it and the end will come quicker.
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I suppose Apple will want to have the "1st Dual Core Laptop" and the only way that's gonna happen is with Intel.
AMD is knocking the socks off the current Intel dual core chips but the second generation of those chips is ready for imminent release. The first generation of those Intel Dual Core chips are not keeping with the power usage that Apple wants and needs. Apple would most likely be going for the second generation of Intel Dual Core chips. Until then they are running Quad PowerMac G5's which will hold over the die-hards until they can do the same with Intel chips. I've seen a screenshot showing a Quad Intel box running OS X so they are probably already prototyping the next generation of Intel chips. We've also got Quad Intel 1U XServes to look forward to. Fantastic for Application Servers and Database Clusters. Then we've got SATA-II Disk Arrays most likely in the works as well.
If Apple pulls this switch-over off the right way, and slams the competition in the process, then it will change a great many minds. FreeBSD 6 just shipped and the next iteration of Mac OS X will most likely ship with it and the kernel will be optimized for the Intel dual core chips. An exciting time for Apple and a worrying time for Microsoft and Dell.
VMWare will most likely be able to run natively under an Intel chipset and you will finally be able to run WinXP or dare I say even Win2k3 in a virtual machine as well as you can run it under Linux today. It's an exciting time to be an Apple true believer...
I haven't had an office in 10 years! Not since getting a high paying job for one of the Fortune 100. Nothing but cubicles for as far as the eye can see! Office space is reserved on the outer perimeter where the windows are. Anyone with an office is a manager of at least 100 people. If they have a corner office then they have those managers reporting to them and they are ultimately responsible for several hundred employees. Were it not for the skylights there would be no sunlight in the cubical farm. The good thing is conference rooms are on the outer wall as well so you can kinda stare out the window during boring meetings.
IT people are in cubicles and have been for at least 20 years. The servers are locked up in secured environmentally controlled data centers. You wouldn't want to work there, it sucks typing when your hands are freezing. The noise of the cooling fans and air conditioning is pretty darn loud too.
Due to Sarbanes/Oxley the customer data is secured to such a ridiculous degree that the IT staff doesn't have access to production data anymore! Yeah, that's right, the IT staff cannot see production data! When there is a problem we have to request a special temporary user name that expires in like 8 eight hours. That id is issued to you and the password is reset. You then use that account to examine the production system. Everything that account sees or does is logged extensively. When you are done, you give the account back and it's reset. If you forget, it will expire soon enough. Those with access to issue the accounts and reset them are at the highest levels of security and are located in our mainframe operations center where they are under constant surveillance including by closed circuit digital cameras. These guys have to go through several card access points to reach the data center. They are not even in cubicles but what looks like a college lecture hall of desks on stepped risers with projection screens on the main wall. Looks like a NASA control center. This helps a lot in major outages to have all the experts in the same room.
The call center staff obviously has access to production client data because they need to. But that doesn't mean they aren't being watched all the time. Every read is logged and if it's found that they should not be reading that customers data at that time, they will be caught. Random audits are performed constantly. We have a special investigations team which is constantly on the lookout for potential fraudsters, etc.
Security performs periodic physical security audits. i.e. going around looking for people who keep their ID/Passwords under their keyboards or on post-it notes; leaving their desks unlocked, leaving confidential information out in the open, etc. This happens at night after most people go home.
Cell phones with cameras and USB devices are forbidden in some places. The call center computers USB ports have been filled with an insulating epoxy from a hot glue gun. Of course that doesn't stop someone from writing down notes and sticking it in their pants. I mean if Sandy Berger can enter the national archives and stuff top secret documents down his pants and walk right out then so can a call center employee who makes less then $15 / hour. What the hot glue in the USB / Firewire slot does is stop someone from moving gigabytes of data out the door in one move. There are also no CD/DVD burners in the call center for the same reason.
Arguing security isn't a good thing, it will just lead to a security crackdown that isn't going to stop someone whose diligent and determined. It will just inconvenience you further... Take a look at those 4 Chinese Spies they just caught in California! They worked for defense contractors and gave away military secrets to the Chinese. I mean if we can't stop our military secrets from walking how can we stop everyday business data theft and industrial or corporate espionage?
19" or 20" is really too big for a laptop, however one can have a high resolution screen in 15" width that is a wide screen ratio. I am not concerned by application window height, I need screen width and a high enough resolution to make it practical. It's also good for watching widescreen DVD's! I've got a 15" Apple PowerBook which is 1280 x 854 and the new 15" PowerBooks are now 1440 x 960 which is plenty.
This give you more elbow room to place windows side by side on the screen. This is really nice because now I can place a PDF on the side of the screen (an eBook) and have a text editor and some console windows next to it.
Now there may be a market for 20" laptops but it's not gonna be all that big. Especially for mobile users. However, if you must have a huge screen and you are willing to carry a heavy laptop around be my guest and buy one. Perhaps you will just use it like a desktop computer on your desk ala Star Trek TNG or something. Whatever floats your boat.
Bottom Line:
1. Wide screen gives you more horizontal screen real estate.
2. It will make laptops bigger and thereby heavier.
3. It will look fabulous with widescreen DVD's.
I think I will wait for 5.1x before I switch my production PostgreSQL to MySQL 5.0... I certainly will not base a Slashdot threaded flameware to sway my decision one way or the other.
"Loading songs onto an axim is not much more complex. If I had my mom do either one she'd be vexed either way."
Actually, if your Mom had a Mac, it would be much simpler then the Axim. Just plug it in! iTunes, pops up and it syncs. Boom, done! Buy music with iTunes, point click, easy baby! Rip existing CD's? Stick the disc in and click the Import button. Mix up a playlist and click Burn, then insert a blank CD. It's so very very easy!
The Windows version of iTunes is very very close to the Mac version but the Mac version just runs slightly better and is more consistent with the OS.
The reason Apples iPod is so darn successful is because of the following:
1. It's really really really easy to use!
2. It looks very stylish and cool.
3. It just plain 'Works!"
4. Apple iTunes Store is the only legitimate place where you can actually buy music in an easy affordable way. Others either rent or give you WMA files. Sure AAC files are DRM'd but the DRM generally doesn't get in the way all that much unless you try to share one on a P2P network.
5. Apple stores located in shopping malls play a big part in exposing customers to the products. Go into any Apple store in an Mall in America on a Saturday and you will find tons of people buying iPods and accessories, they also hang around and drool over the computers. Some of them buy Mac's.
6. Marketing, marketing, marketing. The only other music player marketing I've seen is Napster ads but Napster is a rental service not a purchase service and they don't even state what players they support (multiple ones, like Axim, Creative, etc.).
7. Apple has achieved total mindshare with the iPod.
"So they don't test anything? They just modify production code directly?"
Don't get Stuck on Stupid! Of course they test! RoR supports test, development, and production modes of operation.
In addition, it has a full unit test architecture built right in. The moment you generate a new rails app, you already
have unit test model templates ready for your tests. RoR supports all the development methods that preach code and test.
Including Extreme Programming.
Really want to get XP humming? Code on an Apple PowerBook and run SubEthaEdit - http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ - This allows multiple programmers to code at the same time, so where XP recommends two or three programmers sitting next to each other working together, SubEthaEdit allows you to do that even over the Internet.
The bottom line is that the Concord failed because it was too expensive to operate. People were not willing to pay such a high price for the luxury of quick air travel. Once the novelty of flying from NY to Paris eating lunch and being home before dinner wore off it was the operating cost that impacted the Concord. In order to fly Concord you needed to be able to pay the price of a first class ticket. There were no discounts and the price was higher then traditional aircraft first class. The Internet, VoIP, and Teleconferencing killed the Concord as well. It was no longer as necessary to make face to face business meetings.
The Concord was old technology. Perhaps the Japanese and the Australians can pull this off. But they are going to have to make it cheaper somehow. The fuel cost is astronomical.
Oh... I see it works just fine on my Mac ripping into iTunes at full high quality with no DRM restrictions whatsoever.
However, if I am on a PC, I have to run the software included on the disc (because it only runs on Windows) to unlock the DRM so I can retreive low-grade quality music WMA files. Then if I want to use those with iTunes, burn a CD and then re-rip in iTunes thus degrading the quality further!
Then they ask that I bitch at Apple becasue Apple refused to license FairPlay! Better that I just buy an Apple Mac so I can naturally bypass the DRM in the first place. I suppose you could just rip it in Linux with little trouble as well if it works on a Mac the same way.
They must be doing something funky with the track layout that FUBAR's Windows ability to read the disc.
I've been pouring over the site for a while now. Very very interesting stuff, this Zimbra...
If you actually look at the details, it's a Linux based (Red Hat RPM distro at the moment) that appears to be the absolute best web email system I've seen to date. AJAX is only a very small part of what Zimbra does. AJAX simply improves the end user browser experience by making it feel more like a local application and less like a web app. AJAX allows for page updates without reloading the whole page so it can add features like drag and drop, right-clicking context menus, live searches, etc. i.e. faster instant feedback much more like a native app.
The person behind the site is the former CTO of BEA Systems (WebLogic). He wanted a better email system that was available anywhere. Grouping of discussion threads, saved searches (like Mac OS Tiger), etc. What this group has come up with is pretty darn interesting and if it's well designed will only get better.
The geek reading Slashdot ought to go read the Admin Guide available from Downloads_Documentation_Admin Guide (PDF or HTML). There are some real nice technical explanations not found in the marketing flash demo!
Before you continue to bash it, go check out the technical details while keeping in mind that it's new and will be improved as time moves forward. Linux, Apache Tomcat, PostFix, MySQL, OpenLDAP, SMTP, LMTP, SOAP, XML, IMAP, POP, and AJAX. You can connect with IMAP and POP clients! This means you might be able to connect via IMAP with OS X Mail.app which supports much of the threading, sorting and search features not found in Outlook. iCal can use the calendar system. Addressbook can connect to the LDAP directory for GAL entries. Pretty darn slick! Zimbra has certainly gotten my attention. If you have to you could use Outlook, but I would rather use the web interface then use Outlook! Ugh...
Should be interesting if someone decides to do the same thing in Ruby On Rails! Might be easier to build and maintain and thus faster to market with new features. Same technology except substituting Java and Tomcat for Ruby, the Rails API, plus Lighttpd & FCGI. Go take a look at Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da List and you can see that http://www.37signals.com/ could easily build a similar system to Zimbra and make it sing! Or course the 37signals way of things is to host it for you and you subscribe to it. Zimbra is meant to be installed by your geeks with a support contract to Zimbra and consulting available. There also TextDrive's Strongspace Ruby on Rails app http://strongspace.com/. There is going to be an explosion of such applications being refreshed by AJAX powered feedback. AJAX is exciting as it can greatly improve the user experience. But that's all it does, the backend geekness is where the real fun begins. Whether it's Java or RoR things are going to start changing. Get ready for Web 2.0 without the Web 1.0 hype and dotbomb! You must have a viable business model to succeed with Web 2.0!
The very first thing Tony Soprano did to his Cadillac Escalade was to rip out the OnStar system and GPS unit! He was paranoid about the Fed's getting access to the data so they can track his movements.
1. Get a scanner with a document feeder.
2. Get software to scan to PDF format.
3. Get Google Desktop Search which will index the contents of PDF or get an Apple Mac with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Spotlight will index your PDF's. If you have a Mac, you may be able to scan to PDF without needing Adobe Acrobat.
Don't know about scanner services, but check around and you might find someone who can scan the documents to PDF and give you a DVD-R or CD-R's with the files. Kinko's? Print Shop?
We have highend Kodak scanners that are unbelievably quick (24ppm) and scan both sides of a page at the same time. Of course, they cost $15,000.00 USD. So that's not practical for most budgets.
So who pays for roads, traffic police, pollution control, and other traffic-related costs in your country then, if it's not coming from fuel tax?
That would be the state lottery and the Indian Casino slot machines that pay for roads in my state! I have no idea what the gas tax pays for... Gas tax is called 'sin tax' around here. It includes a tax on tobacco and alcohol as well.
1. Supply & Demand is all about being able to produce a product and deliver it. The cost to produce a product and great demand for the product; forcing it to be harder to get increases the price. i.e. if you can't supply the demand the price goes up.
2. Market force is competition, yet music labels sign an artist and all the distributors pretty much have the same price for the product. So no real competition except for exclusive deals like Garth Brooks and Walmart where the only place you can get the music is from Walmart. (Disclaimer -- I hate country music, so no Garth for me).
The trouble is that after the studio costs and promotional costs are paid, the electronic cost to duplicate and distribute via iTunes is practically nil! So sell enough songs and it's paid for, the rest is pure profit. This is how software works as well. So yeah, the music industry is just plain getting greedy!
What's different is that electronic distribution is now within the reach of just about anyone! Musicians can now produce studio quality recordings in their garage or basement (with some rather easy sound engineering modifications to the walls, etc. -- think recycled cardboard egg containers stapled to plywood walls). Along with computers and software, you've got something just as good as a professional studio! Then you digitize the media and upload it to a service like iTunes and wait for the dough to come in.
(an off-topic related issue is blogs and the way they are changing the mainstream media scene. Just look at all the watchdog issues raised by blogs that then exploded into the MSM once the noise got loud enough. The MSM would have ignored it due to bias but the blogs demand the topics gain attention and if the MSM won't cover it, then it runs the MSM over like an 18 wheeled semi-truck! Just look at what happened to Dan Rather! Left or Right, watch out, blogs will bite you in the ass someday!)
Where does that leave the music labels? Out in the cold, I say! They have been screwing artists and the general public for years and years. The only advantage is their promotional power which they abuse by manufacturing piss poor artists and target the largest group of music buyers (young teenage girls). Sorry, but Spears, Simpson, etc. are not real artists, they are sluts with a microphone and the deep pockets of the music label.
The music industry must adapt or die. They must make money on booking large tours and drawing huge crowds from their promotions.
I don't have any answers, but I know that things will continue to change until it balances itself out. Change is the only constant. Those who keep up will survive those who don't will die in denial. I haven't bought music CD's in years but I do buy now and then from iTunes. However, I have passed the age of 30 so that means I wouldn't be buying CD's anyway. As a person ages, their tastes change and the promotional new music is just noise. The older you get the more you start looking for more interesting music. I've developed a taste for Jazz and other music that I didn't pay attention to when I was a teenager in my early 20's.
Indie artists should band together in the blogosphere to promote their music and sell it through iTunes or a whatever the future may bring. Apple should embrace the Indie and I am talking truly Indie, anyone should be able to subscribe to iTunes and upload their music for a reasonable startup fee. Apple will make more money from Indies then they will from professional music labels.
The link to www.sysadminday.com is Blocked by Websense and classified as a Gambling site!
This is why I don't like web filtering!
Bottom line: im never going to USA or other similar country of "freedom". Ever.
So stay in the Czech Republic then!
Just remember that you are next door to Germany where some of the 9/11 terrorists trained and planned. You probably have Muslims living amoungst you who will rise up eventually. Bin Laden gave a temporary pass to Spain when they elected the Leftist who withdrew Spanish troops after the Madrid bombings. This does not mean they are safe, it just means they will be dealt with later. Bin Laden stated that he did not think it possible to attack America until we pulled out of Somalia when a small local warlord managed to down a Black Hawk helicopter and kill a few Americans. He did not expect America to come after him even after 9/11!
Make no mistake, the terrorists want to kill ALL infidels and that includes the European leftists who support the culture they most despise.
You are too young to remember the Nazi's or even the Communists. You have relative freedom now, but it could be a whole lot worse. Unless you are willing to convert to Wahabbi Islam, swearing allegiance to Allah and Mohammed you had better wake up soon! A global Caliphate is their ultimate goal with worldwide Islamic rule and the death of all Infidels.
The fools in Hollywood would have you believe that we can make friends with these monsters, but the enemy would only laugh and kill them last!
Ha! So much for PREVIEW - 'BS-nix' = 'BSD-nix'!
Unix admins are gobbling up Mac laptops like mad! They get MS Office plus all the X11 / BS-nix they need to admin any Unix system (Solaris, AIX, etc.). The old school formal UNIX is dying, we are running Solaris boxes that are more then 10 years old. We need to replace them and the cost of new UNIX servers is ridiculous, we will probably switch to Linux for the legacy stuff. But XServes have the advantage of being easy to maintain, so easy we can have our Windows LAN Center manage them with minimal training!
.NET, ASP, Notes, and Netware. The *Nix based systems scale much better and using Linux or even Mac OS X, the licensing is cheaper (XServes have unlimited OS X Server licenses!).
Most new internal systems are now web based Intranet solutions, which can be run on Linux, Unix, or Mac OS X. With the exception of
Those users not running native Windows applications to perform their job functions could be switched to Mac OS X Desktop easily. This includes most developers and Unix SysAdmins.
When the Intel switch is complete, the ability to run a Virtual Machine Windows system in near realtime native performance becomes reality.
The tipping point is rapidly approaching, I give it about 5 years, providing Apple doesn't screw it up. This relies on Apple switching to Intel and reducing the hardware cost in the process. As well as VMWare porting their solutions to Mac OS X in the event Microsoft refuses to port VirtualPC. However, if Microsoft does that they could also kill MS Office as a threatening weapon. So Apple had better have an ACE up their leave like a much better version of Keynote, Pages, and a spreadsheet and database that will kick MS Office's ass and be fully document compatible (providing MS continues to move towards and open document format).
A coworker had his car serviced so he was dropped off at the service station by his wife in her car. He pays for the service receives a receipt with a date/time stamp and drives his car home, following his wife. The road was an average two lane road with stop lights and stop signs and heavy traffic. A police officer on the side of the road pulled him over and said he was doing 60 miles an hour in a 25 mile an hour zone. He accepted the ticket and signed it. Knowing it was not possible for him to have been doing that speed he returned to the site the next day with his GPS unit and laptop in the car along with his wife driving. They drove the route 5 times and mapped the distance by using the GPS and mileage odometer on the car. They were careful to do it at the same time during the day (rush hour) so the traffic conditions would be at least similar and the timing on the lights would be similar.
When his case came up, he was denied a deferral and a court date was set. He took all of the evidence and put it together and made sure his math calculations were correct and that the flow was as clear and logical as it could be. It was not possible for him to have traveled that distance at that speed. Another driver had passed him at about the same time the officer was clocking him. The gun must have picked up that car or one traveling the other direction.
His case was called and he got up and argued his case after the officers testimony. The officer stuttered in response and Less then 2 minutes later, the judge declared him not responsible and dismissed the city's case against him. He stood there for a few seconds stunned. The bailiff directed him to the back of the court room and explained he was good to go, no need to see the clerk or sign anything, etc.
This is rare. However, you stand a very good chance in busy districts fighting a ticket. Most people don't bother and just pay the fine and the system depends on this. The more people who show up to contest a ticket will strain the system and they will be forced to dismiss cases before they come to court. There is only so much staff and only so much time. The costs involved in running the court and paying the staff is higher then the court fees. Whatever you do, DO NOT plead not guilty on a ticket and then not show up for court, your license will get suspended and if you get pulled over again you will be arrested. They might not even notify you that your license is suspended depending on where you live. If you are positive you can defend yourself, then give it a try, worst case scenario you will end up paying the fine plus court and clerk fees but it's still cheaper then what your insurance company will do to you. If you are guilty you may luck out and get a deferral or you may get to court and they are so busy that the judge will tell you to plead guilty and they will seal your record if you pay the fines. That will keep your insurance company from finding out about your ticket.
If you just pay a ticket, you are guilty and your insurance will increase. If you don't pay the ticket and plead not guilty you have a chance at getting it dismissed either due to heavy workload at the courts or due to your innocence and your presentation skills. You generally have little to lose once you've been ticketed for speeding. You will pay one way or the other, the difference being the amount you will pay and a loss of time out of work.
That $178 dollar ticket is not the trouble. The trouble begins when your insurance company finds out about your speeding ticket and automatically raises your insurance rates on your next renewal. Even one speeding ticket will increase your insurance rate for the next 3-4 years. Get a second speeding ticket and it will bump it up even more. Get a third ticket and most companies will drop you like a hot tomalley. Some companies will drop you on the first ticket!
Another thing, have an accident at 110mph in a German made car such as an Audi or BMW that includes all the latest safety features and you are still probably going to die. The airbags, seat belts and crumple zone impact absorption won't save you at those speeds. Plus, you will probably hit other cars and potentially kill or injure others!
The State Trooper did you a favor and saved himself some extra paper work when he clocked you at 110mph! He would have had to impound your car and arrest you then file hours of paperwork and go to court later on. Perhaps you were on a straight flat road with little to no traffic around you. If he saw you weaving around cars at that speed he probably would have taken you down and threw the book at you.
Love him or hate him, Rush Limbaugh just recently started publishing a Podcast for his 24/7 subscribers. He had a team of lawyers look into all the 'issues' and ended up not playing any music whatsoever on his Podcasts. That includes his musical parodies.
The concern was how would they handle paying royalties, etc. They already pay them for radio broadcast but to put it into an MP3 and distribute it over the net allows anyone to edit it out and literally steal the song. So there is no model in place to handle the licensing, at least not one that is as reliable as the radio broadcasts.
So to avoid getting your butt sued, especially after that Supreme Court P2P decision you ought not distribute licensed music within your Podcast without written permission and even then it's not entirely clear if you are 'safe'.
OS X will prompt the user with a login prompt when attempting to do something that needs an Admin account. In OS X root is disabled by default and Admin accounts are used instead. You can sudo only if you are an admin. But everything else prompts with a GUI authentication prompt.
OS X even provides a more limited account that can be locked down even further which is ideal for KIOSK setups and young children.
This from the people who would give up their passwords for a chocolate bar!
Figuring the cost of redundancy and trying to save money by deciding not to have a redundant backup is the key. The trouble begins when the cost is explained to management and they freak and decide it's too expensive. Then when the thing that almost never happens, happens (Mr. Murphy's Law) the cost of the downtime is usually much higher.
Take for example a network SAN used to store 30+ Unix servers data. Talking about web servers and various DB's. Sure the SAN is redundant but the network switch leading to the SAN was not. i.e. instead of two switches in a failover configuration there was only one. That switch went berserk and everything went down. We're talking about all of the public side mission critical websites along with the databases and several Intranet systems that were also mission critical. The outage lasted most of the day while we waited on Cisco to rush a replacement switch driven by a technician from the next state over.
In the meantime, customers could not view their valuable data, third party business users could not access the data. Internal workflow was impacted. I suspect it cost a few million all said and done. All for the cost of an extra Cisco Fiber Channel switch which would have cost an additional $25,000.00. Sure hindsight is always 20/20. The risk was not properly calculated...
Now scale this up to what New Zealand went through, the outage seriously impacted the economy! Sure it would have cost millions more to have extra redundancies but then again, the outage caused by rats chewing through some cables wouldn't have brought the country to a halt either!
I believe the case was started in Connecticut, New London to be exact. There are a bunch of houses on the shoreline that the town wants to take, tear down and build a commercial complex. This is because they can extract more tax dollars and the developer convinced them it was good for the local economy.
These are the homes of tax paying and voting citizens, they are not the POOR but either middle to upper middle class citizens. Some have lived there for many years and they refused to sell their homes for even fair market value. The view is spectacular!
The argument for the town/state/government is being argued that it's to protect the poor. I mean why tear down crack houses and sections of town that are an eyesore when you can have beach front shoreline property for a steal! i.e. we can't take the shelter being used by the homeless and drug addicts.
This is ludicrous, take the boarded up houses and abandoned factories and tear them down and build the complex there! Revitalize and revamp the run down areas of town and you will improve the entire area. Ever see that Bank of America advertisement? They show BOA rebuilding bad neighborhoods into quality neighborhoods. If you ever travel to CT, be sure to check out the city of Bridgeport. This is where Donald Trump grew up. It's full of boarded up homes, there is an entire neighborhood completely boarded up. Drugs and crime run rampant. It's the armpit of CT! Trump wanted to come in and tear down the old rundown neighborhood and build a casino and amusement park. It would have created more then 10,000 jobs for the locals, not to mention all the contractors (electricians, plumbers, etc.) and all the local mom and pop shops that could spring up to sell to the extra people traveling in from NYC, etc. But no, only the Indians can have casino's in CT. We can't take the homes away from the rats and the crackheads! Oh no! we can't do that!
This comes down to government theft! If someone tried to take land that I fully owned (already paid for) and the only excuse is the betterment of the local economy and not society (not a new highway, not a new power plant, not a new school, etc.) then they had better be prepared for a gunfight!
This really pisses me off...
Microsoft could very well fall down when customer backlash peeks. i.e. suppose Apple does decide to ship OS X for any x86 at just the right time.
i.e. I just spent 6 hours cleaning CoolWebSearch and HomeSearch off a computer. I still don't think I've got all of it yet. There are now duplicates of every file in the C:\Windows directory with a random slight change to each one. I also have tons of TXT and LOG files with bizarre random names.
If I a professional has to struggle so hard to remove this Trojan/Spyware/Malware then the end user has no chance in hell of getting rid of it short of a format and re-install!
Enough of these consumers get infected with this stuff or worse (it always gets worse) and there will be a huge backlash against MS. Apple could just be waiting for that to peek and then WAMMO, sell the OS X for x86 clones and drop the price! Then flood the mainstream primetime hours with commercial after commercial advertising it.
They would certainly steal Microsoft's retail market rather quickly! Of course, business will take longer but if your developers get their hands on the OS X development kit and see what they can do with it and the end will come quicker.