Apple has not released OS X for open systems for 1 primary reason: they don;t want to support your junk kit, and they don;t want to get the blame for OS X having stability issues.
No, they haven't released it because they know that vendors will swamp the market with machines that do the 90% of stuff people actually want from their Mac, but at 50% of the price tag. This is especially true for the high margine Mac Pro line, especially at the lower end, where Dell have a machine (Studio XPS) that is essentially equivalent to the single-socket Mac Pro, but with a starting price tag of about 1/3 as much.
The differences between, say, the iMac and Mac Pro:
0. Doesn't have a screen welded to it.
What would you really want to use those PCIe slots for that you couldn't find reasonably equivalent functionality via USB or Firewire? Bonus points if there are mac drivers available.
Replacing the video card (or simply having the BTO option for a better one) is the most obvious example of why the slots are useful.
Not having to clutter your desk with external hard drives and the like (or the security implications of requiring external devices) is probably the most obvious answer why USB and Firewide are undesirable.
And I am honestly struggling to think of why those PCIe slots are missed.
I expect most of the people clamouring for a Mac tower would be happy with half a Mac Pro:
* Single optical drive bay
* Single-socket, quad-core CPU option
* 3-4 DIMM slots
* 2 internal drive slots
* 1x PCIe x16 and 1x PCIe x4 spare. Heck, even a single PCIe x16 spare would probably be sufficient.
In my experience, there are three main reasons someone wants a Mac tower:
1. They want to consolidate multiple computers (Windows PC for gaming, Mac for other stuff) into a single box.
2. They want more performance than an iMac.
3. They don't want a built-in screen (and/or want to connect 2+ screens and/or need to connect particular types of screens).
We, for example, considered moving our staff onto Macs to take advantage of some Mac-only software. But since a) all our staff use dual screens in a portrait configuration and b) quite a few of them need to have "medically certified" screens, that would mean everyone has to get a Mac Pro, which is ridiculous when in every other way, a Mac Mini would have been sufficient. Having to cough up an extra ~$2000 per desktop (thus adding around half a million dollars in overall cost) just didn't fly.
Apple *could* have made everyone happy by pricing their bottom-end single-socket Mac Pro at about $1200 (or an equivalent just called "Mac" to protect their Mac Pro brand). They wouldn't have been able to make them fast enough - and given Dell sell a nearly identical machine for under a grand, still collect a healthy Apple Tax. They won't, of course, because a) it would slaughter high-end Mac Pro sales and b) The Steve has deep contempt for that class of machine.
There's always the iMac... Quite frankly, Apple needs a Powermac G4 equivalent-- an Core i7 with a few slots.
Oh, they have one. The bottom end single-processor Mac Pro is that machine.
But by pricing it the way they have, Apple is basically flipping the bird to all those people who have been begging them to sell a mid-range tower. It's hard to think of a better example of The Steve's contempt for "power users".
The price difference between a PC with windows and one without is about SFR 200 -- about USD 170.
Then you're shopping in the wrong place. Digitec sells Vista Home Premium from for less than CHF140, and rest assured that high volume OEMs don't pay anything close to that amount.
Windows would add 20 - maybe 30 - CHF to the cost of a cheap desktop or laptop PC from a vendor like Dell, tops. For smaller vendors it's obviously higher, but that's just economics.
With a proper typesetter like LaTeX you get a PDF that's a dot-for-dot match with what you'd get in a calibrated printer, without ever having to assume any particular printer.
But that may not match what's on-screen, thus completely defeating the purpose of a WYSIWYG program.
The Swiss Department of Public Instruction, which has the motto "Long Live Free Software" and is responsible for IT policy in Swiss schools, has encouraged Linux boots in the interests of leveling the playing field for students unable to afford new computers with the latest Microsoft software, a policy in place since late 2008.
Do you realise you're talking about Switzerland, a country with one of the highest average incomes and standards of living in the world ? The price difference here between a PC without Windows, and a PC with Windows, would barely buy you a couple of Big Mac Meals, if that.
I still don't think re-using a 15-year old VM is non-trivial though. Why is porting the VM software easier than other software?Because porting the VM only has to be done once. Porting the other software has to be done for however many pieces of old software there are.
Not lawsuits - workarounds. For those of us who remember, multi-tasking (after a fashion) was made possible on Windows 3.1 via the TSR - Terminate-and-Stay-Resident programs that left a stub, inert but still in RAM - that allowed a limited task-switching capability.
Those of us who _actually_ remember know you haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
You have a minor point, in that mission critical and/or server systems should be redundant. But, bearing in mind that a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, just how much redundancy do we NEED? With *nix, maybe we need an extra 5 machines per hundred? Your acceptance of constant rebooting helps to ensure that you will need an extra 10 or more machines per hundred.
You need as many machines as are necessary to provide sufficient performance, plus enough redundancy to carry any failures in the primaries.
A planned reboot is not a failure. If your architecture cannot sustain scheduled reboots, then it cannot provide 24/7 uptime. This is a fact completely and utterly irrelecant to what OS is being used. If you can't handle a scheduled reboot, then you most certainly cannot handle an unscheduled reboot.
If you care about individual machine uptimes past swinging your e-dick around, then you shouldn't be involved in trying to maintain high-availability services. In a properly configured and maintained environment, there is no reason for service uptime on Windows vs anything else to be different.
But, your response seems rather - out of character, shall we say? You cited one machine, originally, saying that despite rebooting, it is up 24/7, attempting to claim excellent "uptime". I offered a somewhat better definition of "uptime", and now you're making excuses for your machine's poor uptime. Something fishy here......... You don't work for MS FUD department, do you? Maybe not. This seems more like obfuscation, than it seems like FUD.
Even UAC is a bizarre hack of a permissive userland, and doesn't use the kernel's security features.
UAC is basically identical to sudo. It's even implemented in a conceptually similar manner (at least as much as the fundamentally different security models allow).
It's about as secure as Windows 98, thanks to Microsoft's butchery of the userland in the name of backwards compatibility.
WTF are you on about. UAC is *at least* as secure as sudo, and various other systems for temporarily raising privilege levels.
If the functionality is beyond the purchaser's need or desire, why do you need to lock it away from them? If they have to pay you extra for that functionality, doesn't that imply that they really did need and desire those rights or functionality.
Only if you assume the end-user requirements remain static.
How can they patent this? Microsoft has all sorts of prior art.
Forget Microsoft. Enterprise (software and hardware) vendors have been doing this for decades.
Heck, anyone who has even a passing familiarity with "enterprise" infrastructure like SANs will be familiar with paying tens of thousands for a piece of paper with a license key printed on it to, say, unlock the other 32 ports on their Fibre Switch.
Only if you define "Creationism" as the belief that a divine being somehow created the physical universe and either directly or indirectly everything within it.
Actually, no, I'm being *far* more generous and simply defining Creationism as believing that humans are the product of divine intervention.
However, the more popular definition of the word "Creationism" involves belief in a literial reading of the Book Genesis, something which the Catholic Church explicitly doesn't support. You are welcome to have your own personal definition of the term, but please recognize that in general parlance the Catholic Church's beliefs don't fit the definition of "Creationism".
No, the most popular definition of "Creationism" is not a literal interpretation of Genesis, but a belief that "god" created the species (mostly) as they exist today. That is to say, allowing for so-called "microevolution", but not "macroevolution".
You are suggesting that most people who are Creationists support the idea they typically refer to as "macroevolution", yet in truth one must usually search long and hard to find such a person.
The Catholic Church thinks God created man. That's Creationism. The only thing you are trying to argue about is the degree.
For that matter, the CPU in the XBox 360 - which of course is sold by a company that not many people would expect to be a supporter of RISC - has a PowerPC chip in it as well.
No-one who has enough interest in the topic to care should be at all surprised by Microsoft's "support" of RISC. They've been pursuing as CPU-agnostic a path of OS development as is possible for ~20 years now. Heck, their flagship OS was first written on a RISC chip, with the expectation that RISC would end up dominating the CPU world (which it eventually did, albeit in a somewhat unorthodox fashion).
You are sadly missinformed (and somehow highly moderated):
Am I quite well informed, and both the official information from the Church, as well as the very material you cite support my position.
So long as the Catholics think there's something "special" about "man" that requires "divine intervention" - and they do - then they don't support Evolution. They're cherry picking the bits they don't give a shit about (Evolution of the poor, dumb animals) and ignoring the bits that they don't like (Evolution of humans).
For example: you could say randomness is directed by God because quantum mechanics can't explain it, but if we ever found an explanation for it, we could say God still could have directed the universe just by controlling the parameters out of the infinite possibilities of the big bang and predicting the results.
Yes, that is the standard response whenever religion is demonstrated as wrong - change the argument.
except that now, going from win2k/xp to vista/7 is about the same amount of relearning to go to gnome. if you have to relearn.. sometimes go free never come back.
Rubbish. The fundamentals of the Windows GUI haven't changed since 1995 (and are still the same in Windows 7).
Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.
Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that manâ(TM)s body developed from previous biological forms, under Godâ(TM)s guidance, [...]
That's Creationism.
I believe that any 'spiritual element' of the human beings logically must, of course, be an epiphenomenon of the hardware which in turn evolved naturally. But I still think that the Vatican's definition was a very smart move.
Well they have had a long, long time to refine their deception, hypocrisy and doubletalk, so you'd expect that.
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Apple has not released OS X for open systems for 1 primary reason: they don;t want to support your junk kit, and they don;t want to get the blame for OS X having stability issues.
No, they haven't released it because they know that vendors will swamp the market with machines that do the 90% of stuff people actually want from their Mac, but at 50% of the price tag. This is especially true for the high margine Mac Pro line, especially at the lower end, where Dell have a machine (Studio XPS) that is essentially equivalent to the single-socket Mac Pro, but with a starting price tag of about 1/3 as much.
The differences between, say, the iMac and Mac Pro:
0. Doesn't have a screen welded to it.
What would you really want to use those PCIe slots for that you couldn't find reasonably equivalent functionality via USB or Firewire? Bonus points if there are mac drivers available.
Replacing the video card (or simply having the BTO option for a better one) is the most obvious example of why the slots are useful.
Not having to clutter your desk with external hard drives and the like (or the security implications of requiring external devices) is probably the most obvious answer why USB and Firewide are undesirable.
And I am honestly struggling to think of why those PCIe slots are missed.
I expect most of the people clamouring for a Mac tower would be happy with half a Mac Pro:
* Single optical drive bay
* Single-socket, quad-core CPU option
* 3-4 DIMM slots
* 2 internal drive slots
* 1x PCIe x16 and 1x PCIe x4 spare. Heck, even a single PCIe x16 spare would probably be sufficient.
In my experience, there are three main reasons someone wants a Mac tower:
1. They want to consolidate multiple computers (Windows PC for gaming, Mac for other stuff) into a single box.
2. They want more performance than an iMac.
3. They don't want a built-in screen (and/or want to connect 2+ screens and/or need to connect particular types of screens).
We, for example, considered moving our staff onto Macs to take advantage of some Mac-only software. But since a) all our staff use dual screens in a portrait configuration and b) quite a few of them need to have "medically certified" screens, that would mean everyone has to get a Mac Pro, which is ridiculous when in every other way, a Mac Mini would have been sufficient. Having to cough up an extra ~$2000 per desktop (thus adding around half a million dollars in overall cost) just didn't fly.
Apple *could* have made everyone happy by pricing their bottom-end single-socket Mac Pro at about $1200 (or an equivalent just called "Mac" to protect their Mac Pro brand). They wouldn't have been able to make them fast enough - and given Dell sell a nearly identical machine for under a grand, still collect a healthy Apple Tax. They won't, of course, because a) it would slaughter high-end Mac Pro sales and b) The Steve has deep contempt for that class of machine.
There's always the iMac... Quite frankly, Apple needs a Powermac G4 equivalent-- an Core i7 with a few slots.
Oh, they have one. The bottom end single-processor Mac Pro is that machine.
But by pricing it the way they have, Apple is basically flipping the bird to all those people who have been begging them to sell a mid-range tower. It's hard to think of a better example of The Steve's contempt for "power users".
The price difference between a PC with windows and one without is about SFR 200 -- about USD 170.
Then you're shopping in the wrong place. Digitec sells Vista Home Premium from for less than CHF140, and rest assured that high volume OEMs don't pay anything close to that amount.
Windows would add 20 - maybe 30 - CHF to the cost of a cheap desktop or laptop PC from a vendor like Dell, tops. For smaller vendors it's obviously higher, but that's just economics.
With a proper typesetter like LaTeX you get a PDF that's a dot-for-dot match with what you'd get in a calibrated printer, without ever having to assume any particular printer.
But that may not match what's on-screen, thus completely defeating the purpose of a WYSIWYG program.
The Swiss Department of Public Instruction, which has the motto "Long Live Free Software" and is responsible for IT policy in Swiss schools, has encouraged Linux boots in the interests of leveling the playing field for students unable to afford new computers with the latest Microsoft software, a policy in place since late 2008.
Do you realise you're talking about Switzerland, a country with one of the highest average incomes and standards of living in the world ? The price difference here between a PC without Windows, and a PC with Windows, would barely buy you a couple of Big Mac Meals, if that.
Practices like selecting some unique feature of the MS software [...]
"Must be able to run $WINDOWS_ONLY_APPLICATION in a vendor-support configuration."
Even though Internet throughput seems to be increasing (bandwidth) in leaps and bounds, the server is often a bottle-neck.
What ? You can buy a quad-core, multi-gigabytes-of-RAM machine for under US$500.
For web serving, if your webserver hardware is the bottleneck, You're Doing It Wrong.
I still don't think re-using a 15-year old VM is non-trivial though. Why is porting the VM software easier than other software?Because porting the VM only has to be done once. Porting the other software has to be done for however many pieces of old software there are.
Not lawsuits - workarounds. For those of us who remember, multi-tasking (after a fashion) was made possible on Windows 3.1 via the TSR - Terminate-and-Stay-Resident programs that left a stub, inert but still in RAM - that allowed a limited task-switching capability.
Those of us who _actually_ remember know you haven't got a clue what you're talking about.
You have a minor point, in that mission critical and/or server systems should be redundant. But, bearing in mind that a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, just how much redundancy do we NEED? With *nix, maybe we need an extra 5 machines per hundred? Your acceptance of constant rebooting helps to ensure that you will need an extra 10 or more machines per hundred.
You need as many machines as are necessary to provide sufficient performance, plus enough redundancy to carry any failures in the primaries.
A planned reboot is not a failure. If your architecture cannot sustain scheduled reboots, then it cannot provide 24/7 uptime. This is a fact completely and utterly irrelecant to what OS is being used. If you can't handle a scheduled reboot, then you most certainly cannot handle an unscheduled reboot.
If you care about individual machine uptimes past swinging your e-dick around, then you shouldn't be involved in trying to maintain high-availability services. In a properly configured and maintained environment, there is no reason for service uptime on Windows vs anything else to be different.
But, your response seems rather - out of character, shall we say? You cited one machine, originally, saying that despite rebooting, it is up 24/7, attempting to claim excellent "uptime". I offered a somewhat better definition of "uptime", and now you're making excuses for your machine's poor uptime. Something fishy here......... You don't work for MS FUD department, do you? Maybe not. This seems more like obfuscation, than it seems like FUD.
I am not the person you originally replied to.
Even UAC is a bizarre hack of a permissive userland, and doesn't use the kernel's security features.
UAC is basically identical to sudo. It's even implemented in a conceptually similar manner (at least as much as the fundamentally different security models allow).
It's about as secure as Windows 98, thanks to Microsoft's butchery of the userland in the name of backwards compatibility.
WTF are you on about. UAC is *at least* as secure as sudo, and various other systems for temporarily raising privilege levels.
You Microsoft apologists/shills are funnier than David Letterman. "Reliable" != "rarely crashes".
Not nearly as funny as the guys suggesting other OSes _don't_ crash.
Uptime is a critical criteria for MISSION CRITICAL systems.
If the uptime of a single system affects your service availability, then your architecture is broken and cannot deliver 24/7 uptime.
No-one - who matters, that is - cares about individual system uptime. What matters is whether your services are still available.
If the functionality is beyond the purchaser's need or desire, why do you need to lock it away from them? If they have to pay you extra for that functionality, doesn't that imply that they really did need and desire those rights or functionality.
Only if you assume the end-user requirements remain static.
How can they patent this? Microsoft has all sorts of prior art.
Forget Microsoft. Enterprise (software and hardware) vendors have been doing this for decades.
Heck, anyone who has even a passing familiarity with "enterprise" infrastructure like SANs will be familiar with paying tens of thousands for a piece of paper with a license key printed on it to, say, unlock the other 32 ports on their Fibre Switch.
Electric motors make a lot of sense with trains, but not for hauling cargo on the road.
It's the long hauling of cargo on roads, itself, that doesn't make sense.
It's only tough competition because Microsoft hasn't brought anything new to the table with their OSs in the past decade.
By that measure, who has ?
Only if you define "Creationism" as the belief that a divine being somehow created the physical universe and either directly or indirectly everything within it.
Actually, no, I'm being *far* more generous and simply defining Creationism as believing that humans are the product of divine intervention.
However, the more popular definition of the word "Creationism" involves belief in a literial reading of the Book Genesis, something which the Catholic Church explicitly doesn't support. You are welcome to have your own personal definition of the term, but please recognize that in general parlance the Catholic Church's beliefs don't fit the definition of "Creationism".
No, the most popular definition of "Creationism" is not a literal interpretation of Genesis, but a belief that "god" created the species (mostly) as they exist today. That is to say, allowing for so-called "microevolution", but not "macroevolution".
You are suggesting that most people who are Creationists support the idea they typically refer to as "macroevolution", yet in truth one must usually search long and hard to find such a person.
The Catholic Church thinks God created man. That's Creationism. The only thing you are trying to argue about is the degree.
For that matter, the CPU in the XBox 360 - which of course is sold by a company that not many people would expect to be a supporter of RISC - has a PowerPC chip in it as well.
No-one who has enough interest in the topic to care should be at all surprised by Microsoft's "support" of RISC. They've been pursuing as CPU-agnostic a path of OS development as is possible for ~20 years now. Heck, their flagship OS was first written on a RISC chip, with the expectation that RISC would end up dominating the CPU world (which it eventually did, albeit in a somewhat unorthodox fashion).
You are sadly missinformed (and somehow highly moderated):
Am I quite well informed, and both the official information from the Church, as well as the very material you cite support my position.
So long as the Catholics think there's something "special" about "man" that requires "divine intervention" - and they do - then they don't support Evolution. They're cherry picking the bits they don't give a shit about (Evolution of the poor, dumb animals) and ignoring the bits that they don't like (Evolution of humans).
For example: you could say randomness is directed by God because quantum mechanics can't explain it, but if we ever found an explanation for it, we could say God still could have directed the universe just by controlling the parameters out of the infinite possibilities of the big bang and predicting the results.
Yes, that is the standard response whenever religion is demonstrated as wrong - change the argument.
Windows does hire design professionals, but also listens to marketroids for its UI decisions.
And you base this on ?
The mass market desktop in 2009 runs 64 bit Vista Home Premium on a quad core CPU with 4 to 8 GB RAM.
I think that's a little over the top. Dual-core, 2GB and 32-bit Vista Premium would be more realistic.
In about 12 months, I think that a quad-core x64 box with 4GB of RAM will be an average new computer, but it isn't now.
except that now, going from win2k/xp to vista/7 is about the same amount of relearning to go to gnome. if you have to relearn .. sometimes go free never come back.
Rubbish. The fundamentals of the Windows GUI haven't changed since 1995 (and are still the same in Windows 7).
AFAIK, the catholic church explicitly says that science and faith should not contradict one another.
Except, of course, when they do. In which case, Faith wins.
The only thing they 'cherry pick' as not being allowed as being a result from evolution is the human 'soul' (whatever that is).
False:
Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.
Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that manâ(TM)s body developed from previous biological forms, under Godâ(TM)s guidance, [...]
That's Creationism.
I believe that any 'spiritual element' of the human beings logically must, of course, be an epiphenomenon of the hardware which in turn evolved naturally. But I still think that the Vatican's definition was a very smart move.
Well they have had a long, long time to refine their deception, hypocrisy and doubletalk, so you'd expect that.