This is unfortunate, but it's a support issue. AOL, AT&T and Qwest have all found that the more platforms you support, the more you have to spend on technical support. Which means they take a long hard look at the market, and decide they can live without the ~10% of home users who are not using an MS operating system. My mom went through the same thing with a local ISP, and she's got a Mac. _After_ purchasing a year's worth of the service, when she announced to them that their connection software didn't work, and the ISP found out that she was on a Mac, their first suggestion was, "Buy a Windows 98 PC."
What I'd like to see is one of the Linux Support vendors step up and build a contract with some of the major ISPs. That way, if you are having Linux problems, you call AOL, and AOL refers you to their Linux Support Vendor.
In my experience (and I've only had a few ISPs, and one of them was my old college), they only _say_ that you have to use WinXX to access their systems, because that's all they support. I've always been able to figure out what their software was doing and configure ppp to work, but then again I've never had a national ISP.
The NSA may just be a bunch of geeks, but the power of geekhood may be used for good or for evil. Don't forget that Hitler had a huge crypto department, too, with Enigma and all. Just because an organization employs geeks doesn't mean that they're doing things true geeks/hackers would approve of. It just means they require skills that only geeks have (math & coding primarily) and are willing to pay for those skills.
Crypto in the hands of the mafia, or kiddie porn peddlers, does society no good. Crypto in the hands of honest citizens who value their privacy does society no harm. It's a shame that the NSA, the treasury department, and our government have taken the first as a reason to hinder the second.
You're right. However, I think my point is still valid. I just didn't explain myself well enough. Apple's best customers have always been in the media business. 5 years ago, you could be in the media business and do a lot of good work with photoshop with only a 500 meg or 1 gig drive. These drives were small enough to ship internally, and many media customers didn't buy aftermarket drives. Now, on the other hand, if you're doing media work you need a lot more disk space than that, on the order of multiple drive volume sets. Most people do not choose to purchase computers with internal hardware RAID configurations. So, for the majority of Apple customers working in media design and manipulation, aftermarket drives are a necessity for storing the media they work with. Because all of the important stuff is going to be stored on independent aftermarket solutions, whether the internal drive is IDE or SCSI is less important. Capisch?
Also, the main reason noone's doing internal firewire is that Apple has sold firewire with the promise that it's incredibly hot-swappable; plug it in, wait 10 seconds, and you have access to the drive. No external power source needed. So if you're buying a technology because it's hot-swappable, why would you enclose it?
One more thing: different RAID levels mean different things. Only a few RAID configurations allow for redundancy. RAID0, for example, is merely a volume set, with no parity.
I disagree. Most of Apple's best customers are in the media business, which means that you _have_ to work with high quality and fast drives. Apple has always used SCSI in its high-end machines because graphic designers need reliable, fast storage. They certainly aren't storing term papers or business plans on their disks.
Apple has committed to FireWire as the high-speed, high-fidelity storage and data transfer mechanism of choice for the future. The fact that vendors haven't jumped on the bandwagon is no doubt a bit dissapointing to Apple, but I think the choice is a good one.
Also, anyone needing very high performance, reliable disks nowdays goes with RAID.
There's nothing like multiple vendors making the same hardware to help spread the knowledge. Also, as other have mentioned, control of chip supply has always been Apple's bane. It'll be nice to see continued stability for Apple, if only so that I'll still be able to buy kick-butt hardware to run linux/ppc on.
What I _really_ want is a compiler that's efficient and that builds fast code, like gcc/ix86. But I don't want to run linux/ix86. The gcc/ppc people are doing nice work, but need more support.
The concept of screwing up our environment in order to fix the fact that we've already screwed up our environment is pretty stupid. About as stupid as the idea of building a harbor in alaska with hydrogen bombs. I'm not even going to go into the insanity of building massively destructive weapons and calling it an effort at defense, deterrence and peace.
It sounds to me like Teller's socio-political world view was totally defined by a couple of events relating to the Fascists, the Communists, and both of them mistreating his father. Which just goes to show that people whose world views are formed by catastrophic circumstances become either inherently conservative (if the circumstances they are in are OK... like Isreal right now) or revolutionary (if the circumstances they are in suck... like Lebanon for the past 20 years).
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This is unfortunate, but it's a support issue. AOL, AT&T and Qwest have all found that the more platforms you support, the more you have to spend on technical support. Which means they take a long hard look at the market, and decide they can live without the ~10% of home users who are not using an MS operating system. My mom went through the same thing with a local ISP, and she's got a Mac. _After_ purchasing a year's worth of the service, when she announced to them that their connection software didn't work, and the ISP found out that she was on a Mac, their first suggestion was, "Buy a Windows 98 PC."
What I'd like to see is one of the Linux Support vendors step up and build a contract with some of the major ISPs. That way, if you are having Linux problems, you call AOL, and AOL refers you to their Linux Support Vendor.
In my experience (and I've only had a few ISPs, and one of them was my old college), they only _say_ that you have to use WinXX to access their systems, because that's all they support. I've always been able to figure out what their software was doing and configure ppp to work, but then again I've never had a national ISP.
The NSA may just be a bunch of geeks, but the power of geekhood may be used for good or for evil. Don't forget that Hitler had a huge crypto department, too, with Enigma and all. Just because an organization employs geeks doesn't mean that they're doing things true geeks/hackers would approve of. It just means they require skills that only geeks have (math & coding primarily) and are willing to pay for those skills.
Crypto in the hands of the mafia, or kiddie porn peddlers, does society no good. Crypto in the hands of honest citizens who value their privacy does society no harm. It's a shame that the NSA, the treasury department, and our government have taken the first as a reason to hinder the second.
You're right. However, I think my point is still valid. I just didn't explain myself well enough. Apple's best customers have always been in the media business. 5 years ago, you could be in the media business and do a lot of good work with photoshop with only a 500 meg or 1 gig drive. These drives were small enough to ship internally, and many media customers didn't buy aftermarket drives. Now, on the other hand, if you're doing media work you need a lot more disk space than that, on the order of multiple drive volume sets. Most people do not choose to purchase computers with internal hardware RAID configurations. So, for the majority of Apple customers working in media design and manipulation, aftermarket drives are a necessity for storing the media they work with. Because all of the important stuff is going to be stored on independent aftermarket solutions, whether the internal drive is IDE or SCSI is less important. Capisch?
Also, the main reason noone's doing internal firewire is that Apple has sold firewire with the promise that it's incredibly hot-swappable; plug it in, wait 10 seconds, and you have access to the drive. No external power source needed. So if you're buying a technology because it's hot-swappable, why would you enclose it?
One more thing: different RAID levels mean different things. Only a few RAID configurations allow for redundancy. RAID0, for example, is merely a volume set, with no parity.
I disagree. Most of Apple's best customers are in the media business, which means that you _have_ to work with high quality and fast drives. Apple has always used SCSI in its high-end machines because graphic designers need reliable, fast storage. They certainly aren't storing term papers or business plans on their disks.
Apple has committed to FireWire as the high-speed, high-fidelity storage and data transfer mechanism of choice for the future. The fact that vendors haven't jumped on the bandwagon is no doubt a bit dissapointing to Apple, but I think the choice is a good one.
Also, anyone needing very high performance, reliable disks nowdays goes with RAID.
There's nothing like multiple vendors making the same hardware to help spread the knowledge. Also, as other have mentioned, control of chip supply has always been Apple's bane. It'll be nice to see continued stability for Apple, if only so that I'll still be able to buy kick-butt hardware to run linux/ppc on.
What I _really_ want is a compiler that's efficient and that builds fast code, like gcc/ix86. But I don't want to run linux/ix86. The gcc/ppc people are doing nice work, but need more support.
The concept of screwing up our environment in order to fix the fact that we've already screwed up our environment is pretty stupid. About as stupid as the idea of building a harbor in alaska with hydrogen bombs. I'm not even going to go into the insanity of building massively destructive weapons and calling it an effort at defense, deterrence and peace.
It sounds to me like Teller's socio-political world view was totally defined by a couple of events relating to the Fascists, the Communists, and both of them mistreating his father. Which just goes to show that people whose world views are formed by catastrophic circumstances become either inherently conservative (if the circumstances they are in are OK... like Isreal right now) or revolutionary (if the circumstances they are in suck... like Lebanon for the past 20 years).