Find a Quad Xeon for $2995 that compares: All Xserve configurations include: two 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" microprocessors, eight fully buffered DIMM slots, two PCI Express expansion slots, three hard drive bays with support for SATA or SAS Apple Drive Modules, one optical drive, two USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire 800 ports, one FireWire 400 port, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, one DB9 serial port, one 650W power supply with support for dual redundant power supplies, rack mounting rails, integrated lights-out management hardware with Server Monitor software, and an unlimited-client license of Mac OS X Server. You can run your favorite LINUX on it, instead of the unlimited client OS X Server or rum VMware on it and install Windows servers, if you have the desire. They have 24/7 support and you can purchase any level of support you like. Do you honestly think there is any system with unlimited client Windows server that even comes close?
A Dell PE1950 configured similarly to a base Xserve costs about 2/3 as much - and that's without any special deals (which Dell run very regularly) and a warranty 3x as long. As you move up the power scale, the discrepancy only gets bigger. Further, a PE1950 tops out at a substantially higher-performing configuration (32G RAM, dual quad-core CPUs, 4*2.5" 15k RPM drives[0]). About the only areas the Xserve wins are the firewire ports (of questionable utility on a rackmounted server) and maximum possible disk space (3*750G vs 2*750G). Everywhere else it loses. Badly.
However, dual-socket 1U servers wasn't the market I was talking about when I said "low end 1U machines". I was talking about things like the Dell PE860, where you can get a 2.13Ghz quad-core, 1G RAM, 80G HDD server with a 3yr warranty for ca. US$1400. Or damn close to the hardware of a base-level Xserve for around half the price.
Similarly, when talking about 2U machines, I was thinking of a PE2950 equivalent that can take up to 8 internal 2.5" SAS drives and has 3 PCIe slots. Apple simply has nothing that can even come close to competing with that.
This is before getting into somewhat more esoteric and high-end hardware like Blade servers and 4-8 socket systems. However, I can't really criticise a company like Apple with such a small presence in the market not catering to those areas.
Like I said. The Xserve is ok if you want an OS X Server - albeit primarily because there's no alternatives - but you'd be mad to buy one just because you needed a 1U server when other vendors sell hardware that is cheaper, faster and better supported.
[0] I also feel compelled to point out that maxing out a PE1950 with such a configuration costs less than 1/3 - only a bit more than 1/4 - as much as a fully-specced Xserve, with the latter likely offering less than 1/2 the performance. Of particular insult is Apple charging nearly US$24,000 for 32G of RAM when Dell only charges US$4,000.
Remember Microsoft's numerous attempts to define a networking standard so that they could crush the TCP/IP network protocol? NetBUI anyone?
Uh, no. Perhaps you'd like to tell the story of how Microsoft supposedly tried to "crush" TCP/IP with a broadcast-heavy, unroutable network protocol designed for small, unmanaged workgroups ?
Why do Slashdotters so often fail to differentiate between a company's business decisions and its technical capabilities?
For the same reason they don't differentiate between "security problems" that are the result of actual design and/or coding flaws and "security problems" that are the result of end-user and developer error.
Care to cite any example of how removing IE will break the base install?
There are quite a few things in Windows that use the IE components. The Add/Remove Programs applet, for example. Any time Explorer shows you a thumbnail or media preview. The help system. Etc.
Of course, code re-use is, well, kind of the *point* of having a modular system, so it's a struggle to see why any rational person would consider doing that to be bad. Unless, of course, they were blinded by their anti-Microsoft zealotry (like a sizable proportion of Slashdot) that anything Microsoft did was bad, even when it was the same thing as everyone else.
Finally, I'm pretty sure there are a handful of OS X "base install" components that use WebKit (the help system springs to mind) - and if not, there certainly will be soon since, as I said, the whole point of having a chunk of modular code is so that you can re-use it.
Which ones? I just tried unsuccessfully to access the web through Finder, and when I try to access the local file system through Safari it was smart enough to call Finder, but doesn't access the file system itself.
Explorer doesn't "access the web", either, it just loads up the IE components inside the Explorer window (in the same way you can embed an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document and it fires up Excel from within Word).
I mentioned KDE in my original post, which does integrate the browser and UI tools, but since that's a desktop, not an OS, it's a different matter.
No, it's exactly the same "matter". You are creating a false dichotomy.
I suppose it's arguable that "Explorer" is only a UI level system in Windows, but that seems disingenuous since unlike in Linux Windows has only one supported UI, and the UI is coded and provided by the OS maker as part of the OS.
You are conflating a marketing issue (Windows only comes with one shell) with a technical issue (how the various components run and interact).
It's also true that unlike in KDE where nothing can execute with elevated privileges without a password being entered (either the user's password through sudo or the root password through an su), Explorer can and has been known to execute code as 'system' without checking first.
That's a pretty serious bug. Evidence ?
I'm also not clear on how two different executables that access the exact same dlls, and perform in an identical fashion are not the same thing. The fact that Internet Explorer loads the "bookmark" module, and the "Google Search Bar" module, and Windows Explorer loads the "jump around the file system" module doesn't make them different software. They are functionally identical except for a few modules that are loaded differently depending on how they are called.
Try thinking about how many different programs do exactly the same thing using glibc (because, well, that's the point of having a shared library to do it).
I realize that Vista needs some serious horsepower but I'm avoiding it.
No, it doesn't. For most people's needs, Vista runs quite adequately on modestly upgraded 6-7 year old hardware. If you've got a 1+ Ghz CPU (really dictated by your applications (or games)), a gig of RAM (more helps, but is not necessary) and a video card less than 3 years old (for Aero/video acceleration), Vista will run fine.
Heck, even for an "optimal Vista experience", the hardware required hasn't been "serious horsepower" for years.
Lots of people and businesses are doing the same. Have we reached the place where most people and businesses don't have to upgrade every couple of years? Will environmental concerns put a brake on new computer sales?
We reached that point ca. 2000 (even earlier for people whose web-browsing doesn't involve Flash). Most people don't do anything that needs large amounts of CPU power (more than a ca. 1Ghz P3). They benefit most from RAM and (to a lesser extent) video card upgrades.
PC gamers are a niche market. Heavy multitaskers are a niche market. Business users doing anything more demanding than email, simple web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets and presentations are a niche market. Probably the most CPU intensive task the average PC does today is watch Youtube videos and play Flash games.
Seriously. What is with the lack of uptake on 64-bit?
Severe lack of motivation from the majority of consumers to whom it offers no benefits (and, due to frequently buggy and/or nonexistant hardware and/or drivers, numerous disadvantages).
[...] and even the X-serve trumps similar servers using the same chips from Intel.
How's that, exactly ? They're more expensive, have shorter warranties, fewer support options, fewer configuration options and a lower-specced top-end configuration. This is before getting into the bits of the commodity server market that Apple simply has no product to cater for (low-end 1U machines, 2U machines - I ignore 4u+ machines and Blades because they're relatively uncommon).
The Xserve is OK if you want a rackmounted OS X machine (although even that's mainly due to lack of alternatives), but you'd be nuts to buy one for any other reason.
I know many people happy with XP. Ignorance is bliss. XP was designed poorly. Microsoft has written a better operating system, and so my previous post recommends Windows 2003.
XP is Windows NT 5.1. 2003 is Windows NT 5.2. I'd be interested to hear why you think they're so different when the differences are, in fact, relatively minor (and from a *design* perspective, nonexistant).
Since they sell general-purpose computers, they should be forced to sell computers with no operating system (as an option at least).
Why should they be forced to bear the extra costs of catering to a market they have no interest in ?
Had they sold appliance computers, which would be technically impossible to load with something else than Windows, they wouldn't have to offer a no OS option.
No, all they need to do is advertise and sell a "Windows PC", just like Apple advertise and sell a "Macintosh". What other people may choose to do with that machine is neither their concern, nor something they should have to allow for in their business. That's how it is with pretty much every other product, why should computers be any different ?
It doesn't matter what "consumers" think.
It most certainly *does* matter what they think, because they're the ones who give you money in exchange for goods and services. Does "the customer is always right" ring any bells ?
A general-purpose computer is a general-purpose computer, regardless of whether they think that it is an appliance or not. It can run other operating systems, and thus should be offered (as an option) without Windows at the very least. Besides, appliances can usually not install extra applications, which pretty much proves my point.
Your "point" is that vendors with no interest in selling to a tiny niche of the market should be forced to bear the costs of doing so (and then pass them on to their customers), just because small-minded zealots like you can have their schadenfreude moment. I think the most appropriate response to that is "fuck you".
Even if you get a 32GB model, you can install windows on it and use the regular SATA2 HDD for movies/music storage. Think of the booting time.
I boot my PC maybe once a month. Usually while I'm out of the room doing something else. Further, most of the delay involved in booting has nothing to do with the devices' speed, but the time taken to initialise various bits of hardware and software.
I have never understood the fascination with using drives like this for installing the OS onto. Why ? The OS files are mostly accessed very rarely, and those that are frequently - unless you're using a 15-year od OS with incredibly bad memory management - will always be cached in RAM anyway.
Riiight.. Remote desktop? Piece of cake! Howabout hacking the non-Server termsrv.dll? Terminal Server? For what? Office? Have 10MB of RAM per user ready. Ouch. Virtual Server? Not ready for production.
WTF are you on about ? Are those links supposed to prove something ?
And none of this addresses my original point: Out of the box, users get a small bit of handholding to guide them through XP's detailed permissions. Either it's the dumb-down interface or the whole kaboodle. XP is a solid OS for stability.
Typical users should never have to mess with permissions. Permissions _are_ complex - both in concept and execution - and no amount of fancy interface can change that fact. Expecting the end user to both understand the concept of a multiuser OS *and then* manually change to an appropriate user context before carrying out certain actions is neither realistic, nor good UI. The OS can - and should - determine what privilege level is necessary for an operation to complete and if the current user does not have them, prompt to elevate. "Permissions" should be transparent to the end user unless they specifically go looking for them (by which point, they should understand the concepts).
Look, I'm coding up a large office Automation server and get to enjoy their help files like this. No office app designed for multi-user, server-based hosting. Nice. The MVC pattern is what, 15 years old now?
No office app designed for server-side automation the way I read it. An assumption of an interactive user for office does not seem unreasonable - and office has been used through Terminal Services for years. I'm still not quite sure what point you're trying to make here, anyway, Office != Windows.
As to the rest of my rant, I see your retort explains everything. Perhaps you like XP's GDI, Win32. Funny sense of design, you. Vista is a necessary upgrade - it was simply done wrong.
Next time you write something, stop and take 5 minutes to read it afterwards. You may know exactly what you mean, but all we get on this end is a bunch of vague assertions.
It's always been an option, assuming all the applications supported it, and it may have even been the default for the server versions like NT. However it must not have been the default for all post-NT versions of Windows or no one would be complaining about them starting to write protect program files in Vista.
It's got nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with badly written applications.
Even in DOS-based Windows 9x, per-user profiles (and the APIs to use them) have existed since ca. 1997. Obviously without file permissions there was no way to enforce the separation (in Windows 9x, NT could, of course), but that doesn't give developers an excuse for not using them.
Every version of Windows has had per-user profiles for basically a decade now (NT, being multiuser, has had them for longer). The only people to blame for applications not being "mulituser friendly" are the developers.
Impossible. At the very least, the OS has to check whether or not the user is authorised to play the media. That this check comes up clean on unencumbered media is irrelevant, it still takes sytem resources. And given that an adequate DRM system has to make this check multiple times and not just for user authorisation, but for overall system integrity, that resource usage is going to add up.
"Checking" is only done if the image constraint token is set by the player. Which only happens if you have DRM-encumbered media.
In other words, no DRM-encumbered media, no "DRM checking".
And it is Microsofts own presentations on Palladium, Secure Audio Path and all related crap that continue to show cryptographic elements in the I/O stream. So why are you treating us as idiots, expecting us to believe your drivel?
You don't have to believe me if you don't want to, but it's glaringly obvious you haven't the slightest idea about how DRM works - either in Vista, or in other players that have it.
The facts are pretty simple. If you aren't using DRM-encumbered content, all of Vista's DRM-related technology effectively doesn't exist.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or you are misinformed. However each version of OS X has had more features and ran better not worse on the exact same hardware.
When you start that slow, there's not really anywhere to go but up.
A fair number of their customers have ZERO INTEREST WHATSOEVER as using the platform as a glorified HD DVD player. The OS should not be contaminated with that crap.
And it's not. If you're not watching DRM-encumbered media, none of the DRM functionality is being used.
- About half the guys in a high school or university want the top 10 super-models. Move a bit lower and about 90% of the guys want the top 10% girls. Some might eventually get realistic enough to settle for a bit less, but only grudgingly.
- About the same applies to the girls. Half the girls want the top 10 jocks. Some 90% of the girls want the top 10% most desirable guys.
Interestingly enough, according to a recent study, girls seem to be a bit more realistic as to who they can actually get. Guys will tend to aim above what they can get.
Do you have a source for that ? I'd be interested to read it, because - along with your conclusion - the result certainly seems arse-about-face to me.
On a related note, I also recall some study done recently (on a university campus, maybe ?), basically on how successful the "Wanna fuck" pickup line works on males vs females (obviously they werent quite that crude, but it sums up the objective). From memory, the "success rate" of males vs females was something like 20% vs 80% (ie: 80% of women received a positive answer to their attempt, only 20% of men did - certainly the difference was dramatic). Further, of the men who declined, the reason was almost always due to some form of outside restriction on their ability to say agree (spouse/significant other, unavailable at the requested time, inappropriate relationship, etc) rather than not being interested in the sex. For women, the reasons were basically reversed - most said no because they weren't interested.
Certainly, the idea that men are more selective than women goes against everything I've ever read about (and experienced, but that's anecdotal) so I'd be interested to read your source for suggesting otherwise.
Basically anyone who says that someone can get laid anytime she wishes and by anyone she wishes because she's a girl, probably is doing the same daydreaming: thinking about those top 10 most popular girls in the whole damn college. Noone thinks of the shy, flat, nerdy girl in the back row when they make such generalization. That's her problem in a nutshell: to 90% of the guys she's just short of invisible, or little more than a piece of decor.
Actually, no, I'm thinking about the ~50% of average women out there, plus the ~25% of "more desirable" women.
However, with the slower OS X release cycles, it's possible that they dump the PPC and x86-32 at once, and make 10.7 x86-64 only.
This doesn't seem unreasonable. It's unlikely 10.7 will be released until ca. 2012. By then the last 32 bit MacBook will be ~6 years old. That's well and truly "old" hardware.
But "Time Machine" is the killer app. Time Machine is like Windows Backup, except it has a starry background, it backs up everything instead of backing up only what you specify, and it doesn't support scheduling and different kinds of backups for different situations.
I can agree with the rest of your assessment, but Time Machine is, indeed, very cool. Not so much because of what it does, but because of how it does it. Backups have, historically, been difficult and/or tedious to do.
The only weakness I've seen is that, as I understand it, Time Machine requires an additional hard disk to work.
Tiger 10.4 is not even backwardly compatible with NeXTSTEP 4.
Is this supposed to prove something ? If it is, how does Tiger being "backwardly compatible" with MacOS Classic fit into the picture ?
So even Microsoft fails to agree with your assessment that Vista is more than a significant retooling of Windows XP.
Huh ? That's exactly what Vista is. A major revision of NT. I never suggested otherwise.
It's also all that OS X is. A "significant retooling" of NeXT/OPENSTEP. A updated kernel (Mach), an new display system, a new GUI and a new API. Sound familiar ?
You would be hard-pressed to find any change of greater scale comparing NeXT/OPENSTEP 4 with the latest version of OS X, then similarly comparing XP and Vista. Vista is a *major* Windows NT update. Big kernel changes. New display system. Updated GUI. New sound stack. New Network stack. Etc, etc.
Suggesting that Microsoft has accomplished more to deliver Vista that Apple has to deliver several generations of Mac OS X [...]
Fortunately, I made no such suggestion. I pointed out that the changes are very similar in scale, concept, execution and timeframe. The big difference is Apple has made smaller, incremental, intermediate releases, whereas Microsoft - probably because they were in a better starting position - has not.
Incidentally, your NT versioning chart - unsurprisingly - has errors, omissions and exaggerations. Here's a corrected version:
NT 3.1 = 1993
NT 3.5 = 1994
NT 3.51 = 1995
NT 4.0 = 1996
NT 5.0 = 2000
NT 5.1 = 2001
NT 5.2 = 2003
NT 6 = 2006
[...] is particularly comical given that most of the significant features in Vista were copied wholesale from Mac OS X, including its new graphic engine and the fundamentals of its development frameworks.
I suggest you visit a dictionary and look up the word "copied". It doesn't mean what you seem to think it means (which is apparently "similar in concept"). Because by your definition of "copied", a fairly large chunk of OS X is "copied" from Windows, and I'm sure that's not what you want to imply.
If Vista runs so well on 7 year old PCs, why are so many consumers demanding to roll back to XP on their brand new ones? What, don't tell me.
It just might have something to do with the unprecented volumes of FUD^H^H^Hbullshit flooding out of the anti-Microsoft crowd. It makes Microsoft's marketing compaigns against Linux look like pictures of truth and honesty.
Vista runs usably on a ~1Ghz machine with an Aero capable video card (~$30 brand new, practically free second hand) and 1GB+ RAM. That's hardware dating from ~7 years ago, plus very modest (and cheap) upgrades. It certainly runs *at least* as well on such vintage hardware as OS X does on similarly aged Macs and, IMHO, better (Apple's relatively less powerful hardware does not help here). Microsoft has always been kinder to older machines than Apple - they do, after all, have pretty much the opposite vested interests in that area.
Slashdot Mirror
Find a Quad Xeon for $2995 that compares: All Xserve configurations include: two 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" microprocessors, eight fully buffered DIMM slots, two PCI Express expansion slots, three hard drive bays with support for SATA or SAS Apple Drive Modules, one optical drive, two USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire 800 ports, one FireWire 400 port, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, one DB9 serial port, one 650W power supply with support for dual redundant power supplies, rack mounting rails, integrated lights-out management hardware with Server Monitor software, and an unlimited-client license of Mac OS X Server. You can run your favorite LINUX on it, instead of the unlimited client OS X Server or rum VMware on it and install Windows servers, if you have the desire. They have 24/7 support and you can purchase any level of support you like. Do you honestly think there is any system with unlimited client Windows server that even comes close?
A Dell PE1950 configured similarly to a base Xserve costs about 2/3 as much - and that's without any special deals (which Dell run very regularly) and a warranty 3x as long. As you move up the power scale, the discrepancy only gets bigger. Further, a PE1950 tops out at a substantially higher-performing configuration (32G RAM, dual quad-core CPUs, 4*2.5" 15k RPM drives[0]). About the only areas the Xserve wins are the firewire ports (of questionable utility on a rackmounted server) and maximum possible disk space (3*750G vs 2*750G). Everywhere else it loses. Badly.
However, dual-socket 1U servers wasn't the market I was talking about when I said "low end 1U machines". I was talking about things like the Dell PE860, where you can get a 2.13Ghz quad-core, 1G RAM, 80G HDD server with a 3yr warranty for ca. US$1400. Or damn close to the hardware of a base-level Xserve for around half the price.
Similarly, when talking about 2U machines, I was thinking of a PE2950 equivalent that can take up to 8 internal 2.5" SAS drives and has 3 PCIe slots. Apple simply has nothing that can even come close to competing with that.
This is before getting into somewhat more esoteric and high-end hardware like Blade servers and 4-8 socket systems. However, I can't really criticise a company like Apple with such a small presence in the market not catering to those areas.
Like I said. The Xserve is ok if you want an OS X Server - albeit primarily because there's no alternatives - but you'd be mad to buy one just because you needed a 1U server when other vendors sell hardware that is cheaper, faster and better supported.
[0] I also feel compelled to point out that maxing out a PE1950 with such a configuration costs less than 1/3 - only a bit more than 1/4 - as much as a fully-specced Xserve, with the latter likely offering less than 1/2 the performance. Of particular insult is Apple charging nearly US$24,000 for 32G of RAM when Dell only charges US$4,000.
There are still people who think that freedom is too precious to be given to the people they are protecting it for. Damn.
Indeed. Look no further than any GPL vs BSD discussion for evidence of that.
/Couldn't resist.
Remember Microsoft's numerous attempts to define a networking standard so that they could crush the TCP/IP network protocol? NetBUI anyone?
Uh, no. Perhaps you'd like to tell the story of how Microsoft supposedly tried to "crush" TCP/IP with a broadcast-heavy, unroutable network protocol designed for small, unmanaged workgroups ?
Why do Slashdotters so often fail to differentiate between a company's business decisions and its technical capabilities?
For the same reason they don't differentiate between "security problems" that are the result of actual design and/or coding flaws and "security problems" that are the result of end-user and developer error.
Funny that "threat mitigation" doesn't exist in the aerospace industry...
I think (hope) you have made a gross misinterpretation of the term "threat mitigation".
Care to cite any example of how removing IE will break the base install?
There are quite a few things in Windows that use the IE components. The Add/Remove Programs applet, for example. Any time Explorer shows you a thumbnail or media preview. The help system. Etc.
Of course, code re-use is, well, kind of the *point* of having a modular system, so it's a struggle to see why any rational person would consider doing that to be bad. Unless, of course, they were blinded by their anti-Microsoft zealotry (like a sizable proportion of Slashdot) that anything Microsoft did was bad, even when it was the same thing as everyone else.
Finally, I'm pretty sure there are a handful of OS X "base install" components that use WebKit (the help system springs to mind) - and if not, there certainly will be soon since, as I said, the whole point of having a chunk of modular code is so that you can re-use it.
Which ones? I just tried unsuccessfully to access the web through Finder, and when I try to access the local file system through Safari it was smart enough to call Finder, but doesn't access the file system itself.
Explorer doesn't "access the web", either, it just loads up the IE components inside the Explorer window (in the same way you can embed an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document and it fires up Excel from within Word).
I mentioned KDE in my original post, which does integrate the browser and UI tools, but since that's a desktop, not an OS, it's a different matter.
No, it's exactly the same "matter". You are creating a false dichotomy.
I suppose it's arguable that "Explorer" is only a UI level system in Windows, but that seems disingenuous since unlike in Linux Windows has only one supported UI, and the UI is coded and provided by the OS maker as part of the OS.
You are conflating a marketing issue (Windows only comes with one shell) with a technical issue (how the various components run and interact).
It's also true that unlike in KDE where nothing can execute with elevated privileges without a password being entered (either the user's password through sudo or the root password through an su), Explorer can and has been known to execute code as 'system' without checking first.
That's a pretty serious bug. Evidence ?
I'm also not clear on how two different executables that access the exact same dlls, and perform in an identical fashion are not the same thing. The fact that Internet Explorer loads the "bookmark" module, and the "Google Search Bar" module, and Windows Explorer loads the "jump around the file system" module doesn't make them different software. They are functionally identical except for a few modules that are loaded differently depending on how they are called.
Try thinking about how many different programs do exactly the same thing using glibc (because, well, that's the point of having a shared library to do it).
I realize that Vista needs some serious horsepower but I'm avoiding it.
No, it doesn't. For most people's needs, Vista runs quite adequately on modestly upgraded 6-7 year old hardware. If you've got a 1+ Ghz CPU (really dictated by your applications (or games)), a gig of RAM (more helps, but is not necessary) and a video card less than 3 years old (for Aero/video acceleration), Vista will run fine.
Heck, even for an "optimal Vista experience", the hardware required hasn't been "serious horsepower" for years.
Lots of people and businesses are doing the same. Have we reached the place where most people and businesses don't have to upgrade every couple of years? Will environmental concerns put a brake on new computer sales?
We reached that point ca. 2000 (even earlier for people whose web-browsing doesn't involve Flash). Most people don't do anything that needs large amounts of CPU power (more than a ca. 1Ghz P3). They benefit most from RAM and (to a lesser extent) video card upgrades.
PC gamers are a niche market. Heavy multitaskers are a niche market. Business users doing anything more demanding than email, simple web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets and presentations are a niche market. Probably the most CPU intensive task the average PC does today is watch Youtube videos and play Flash games.
Seriously. What is with the lack of uptake on 64-bit?
Severe lack of motivation from the majority of consumers to whom it offers no benefits (and, due to frequently buggy and/or nonexistant hardware and/or drivers, numerous disadvantages).
[...] and even the X-serve trumps similar servers using the same chips from Intel.
How's that, exactly ? They're more expensive, have shorter warranties, fewer support options, fewer configuration options and a lower-specced top-end configuration. This is before getting into the bits of the commodity server market that Apple simply has no product to cater for (low-end 1U machines, 2U machines - I ignore 4u+ machines and Blades because they're relatively uncommon).
The Xserve is OK if you want a rackmounted OS X machine (although even that's mainly due to lack of alternatives), but you'd be nuts to buy one for any other reason.
I know many people happy with XP. Ignorance is bliss. XP was designed poorly. Microsoft has written a better operating system, and so my previous post recommends Windows 2003.
XP is Windows NT 5.1. 2003 is Windows NT 5.2. I'd be interested to hear why you think they're so different when the differences are, in fact, relatively minor (and from a *design* perspective, nonexistant).
Since they sell general-purpose computers, they should be forced to sell computers with no operating system (as an option at least).
Why should they be forced to bear the extra costs of catering to a market they have no interest in ?
Had they sold appliance computers, which would be technically impossible to load with something else than Windows, they wouldn't have to offer a no OS option.
No, all they need to do is advertise and sell a "Windows PC", just like Apple advertise and sell a "Macintosh". What other people may choose to do with that machine is neither their concern, nor something they should have to allow for in their business. That's how it is with pretty much every other product, why should computers be any different ?
It doesn't matter what "consumers" think.
It most certainly *does* matter what they think, because they're the ones who give you money in exchange for goods and services. Does "the customer is always right" ring any bells ?
A general-purpose computer is a general-purpose computer, regardless of whether they think that it is an appliance or not. It can run other operating systems, and thus should be offered (as an option) without Windows at the very least. Besides, appliances can usually not install extra applications, which pretty much proves my point.
Your "point" is that vendors with no interest in selling to a tiny niche of the market should be forced to bear the costs of doing so (and then pass them on to their customers), just because small-minded zealots like you can have their schadenfreude moment. I think the most appropriate response to that is "fuck you".
Even if you get a 32GB model, you can install windows on it and use the regular SATA2 HDD for movies/music storage. Think of the booting time.
I boot my PC maybe once a month. Usually while I'm out of the room doing something else. Further, most of the delay involved in booting has nothing to do with the devices' speed, but the time taken to initialise various bits of hardware and software.
I have never understood the fascination with using drives like this for installing the OS onto. Why ? The OS files are mostly accessed very rarely, and those that are frequently - unless you're using a 15-year od OS with incredibly bad memory management - will always be cached in RAM anyway.
Riiight.. Remote desktop? Piece of cake! Howabout hacking the non-Server termsrv.dll? Terminal Server? For what? Office? Have 10MB of RAM per user ready. Ouch. Virtual Server? Not ready for production.
WTF are you on about ? Are those links supposed to prove something ?
And none of this addresses my original point: Out of the box, users get a small bit of handholding to guide them through XP's detailed permissions. Either it's the dumb-down interface or the whole kaboodle. XP is a solid OS for stability.
Typical users should never have to mess with permissions. Permissions _are_ complex - both in concept and execution - and no amount of fancy interface can change that fact. Expecting the end user to both understand the concept of a multiuser OS *and then* manually change to an appropriate user context before carrying out certain actions is neither realistic, nor good UI. The OS can - and should - determine what privilege level is necessary for an operation to complete and if the current user does not have them, prompt to elevate. "Permissions" should be transparent to the end user unless they specifically go looking for them (by which point, they should understand the concepts).
Look, I'm coding up a large office Automation server and get to enjoy their help files like this. No office app designed for multi-user, server-based hosting. Nice. The MVC pattern is what, 15 years old now?
No office app designed for server-side automation the way I read it. An assumption of an interactive user for office does not seem unreasonable - and office has been used through Terminal Services for years. I'm still not quite sure what point you're trying to make here, anyway, Office != Windows.
As to the rest of my rant, I see your retort explains everything. Perhaps you like XP's GDI, Win32. Funny sense of design, you. Vista is a necessary upgrade - it was simply done wrong.
Next time you write something, stop and take 5 minutes to read it afterwards. You may know exactly what you mean, but all we get on this end is a bunch of vague assertions.
It's always been an option, assuming all the applications supported it, and it may have even been the default for the server versions like NT. However it must not have been the default for all post-NT versions of Windows or no one would be complaining about them starting to write protect program files in Vista.
It's got nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with badly written applications.
Even in DOS-based Windows 9x, per-user profiles (and the APIs to use them) have existed since ca. 1997. Obviously without file permissions there was no way to enforce the separation (in Windows 9x, NT could, of course), but that doesn't give developers an excuse for not using them.
Every version of Windows has had per-user profiles for basically a decade now (NT, being multiuser, has had them for longer). The only people to blame for applications not being "mulituser friendly" are the developers.
Impossible. At the very least, the OS has to check whether or not the user is authorised to play the media. That this check comes up clean on unencumbered media is irrelevant, it still takes sytem resources. And given that an adequate DRM system has to make this check multiple times and not just for user authorisation, but for overall system integrity, that resource usage is going to add up.
"Checking" is only done if the image constraint token is set by the player. Which only happens if you have DRM-encumbered media.
In other words, no DRM-encumbered media, no "DRM checking".
And it is Microsofts own presentations on Palladium, Secure Audio Path and all related crap that continue to show cryptographic elements in the I/O stream. So why are you treating us as idiots, expecting us to believe your drivel?
You don't have to believe me if you don't want to, but it's glaringly obvious you haven't the slightest idea about how DRM works - either in Vista, or in other players that have it.
The facts are pretty simple. If you aren't using DRM-encumbered content, all of Vista's DRM-related technology effectively doesn't exist.
Look, XP is a nightmare of permissions and a free-for-all single-user system.
XP is multiuser. You are wrong from your first statement (and the rest of your rant is no better).
Windows was (very) late to implement this measure [...]
Uh, what ? Windows NT was doing this more than half a decade before OS X was even released.
I doubt Microsoft will take Don Reisinger up on his suggestion, if for no reason other than sheer arrogance.
That may be true, however, there are many *good* reasons not to "take Don Reisinger up on his suggestion", that it's hardly relevant.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or you are misinformed. However each version of OS X has had more features and ran better not worse on the exact same hardware.
When you start that slow, there's not really anywhere to go but up.
A fair number of their customers have ZERO INTEREST WHATSOEVER as using the platform as a glorified HD DVD player. The OS should not be contaminated with that crap.
And it's not. If you're not watching DRM-encumbered media, none of the DRM functionality is being used.
- About half the guys in a high school or university want the top 10 super-models. Move a bit lower and about 90% of the guys want the top 10% girls. Some might eventually get realistic enough to settle for a bit less, but only grudgingly.
- About the same applies to the girls. Half the girls want the top 10 jocks. Some 90% of the girls want the top 10% most desirable guys.
Interestingly enough, according to a recent study, girls seem to be a bit more realistic as to who they can actually get. Guys will tend to aim above what they can get.
Do you have a source for that ? I'd be interested to read it, because - along with your conclusion - the result certainly seems arse-about-face to me.
On a related note, I also recall some study done recently (on a university campus, maybe ?), basically on how successful the "Wanna fuck" pickup line works on males vs females (obviously they werent quite that crude, but it sums up the objective). From memory, the "success rate" of males vs females was something like 20% vs 80% (ie: 80% of women received a positive answer to their attempt, only 20% of men did - certainly the difference was dramatic). Further, of the men who declined, the reason was almost always due to some form of outside restriction on their ability to say agree (spouse/significant other, unavailable at the requested time, inappropriate relationship, etc) rather than not being interested in the sex. For women, the reasons were basically reversed - most said no because they weren't interested.
Certainly, the idea that men are more selective than women goes against everything I've ever read about (and experienced, but that's anecdotal) so I'd be interested to read your source for suggesting otherwise.
Basically anyone who says that someone can get laid anytime she wishes and by anyone she wishes because she's a girl, probably is doing the same daydreaming: thinking about those top 10 most popular girls in the whole damn college. Noone thinks of the shy, flat, nerdy girl in the back row when they make such generalization. That's her problem in a nutshell: to 90% of the guys she's just short of invisible, or little more than a piece of decor.
Actually, no, I'm thinking about the ~50% of average women out there, plus the ~25% of "more desirable" women.
However, with the slower OS X release cycles, it's possible that they dump the PPC and x86-32 at once, and make 10.7 x86-64 only.
This doesn't seem unreasonable. It's unlikely 10.7 will be released until ca. 2012. By then the last 32 bit MacBook will be ~6 years old. That's well and truly "old" hardware.
But "Time Machine" is the killer app. Time Machine is like Windows Backup, except it has a starry background, it backs up everything instead of backing up only what you specify, and it doesn't support scheduling and different kinds of backups for different situations.
I can agree with the rest of your assessment, but Time Machine is, indeed, very cool. Not so much because of what it does, but because of how it does it. Backups have, historically, been difficult and/or tedious to do.
The only weakness I've seen is that, as I understand it, Time Machine requires an additional hard disk to work.
Tiger 10.4 is not even backwardly compatible with NeXTSTEP 4.
Is this supposed to prove something ? If it is, how does Tiger being "backwardly compatible" with MacOS Classic fit into the picture ?
So even Microsoft fails to agree with your assessment that Vista is more than a significant retooling of Windows XP.
Huh ? That's exactly what Vista is. A major revision of NT. I never suggested otherwise.
It's also all that OS X is. A "significant retooling" of NeXT/OPENSTEP. A updated kernel (Mach), an new display system, a new GUI and a new API. Sound familiar ?
You would be hard-pressed to find any change of greater scale comparing NeXT/OPENSTEP 4 with the latest version of OS X, then similarly comparing XP and Vista. Vista is a *major* Windows NT update. Big kernel changes. New display system. Updated GUI. New sound stack. New Network stack. Etc, etc.
Suggesting that Microsoft has accomplished more to deliver Vista that Apple has to deliver several generations of Mac OS X [...]
Fortunately, I made no such suggestion. I pointed out that the changes are very similar in scale, concept, execution and timeframe. The big difference is Apple has made smaller, incremental, intermediate releases, whereas Microsoft - probably because they were in a better starting position - has not.
Incidentally, your NT versioning chart - unsurprisingly - has errors, omissions and exaggerations. Here's a corrected version:
NT 3.1 = 1993
NT 3.5 = 1994
NT 3.51 = 1995
NT 4.0 = 1996
NT 5.0 = 2000
NT 5.1 = 2001
NT 5.2 = 2003
NT 6 = 2006
[...] is particularly comical given that most of the significant features in Vista were copied wholesale from Mac OS X, including its new graphic engine and the fundamentals of its development frameworks.
I suggest you visit a dictionary and look up the word "copied". It doesn't mean what you seem to think it means (which is apparently "similar in concept"). Because by your definition of "copied", a fairly large chunk of OS X is "copied" from Windows, and I'm sure that's not what you want to imply.
If Vista runs so well on 7 year old PCs, why are so many consumers demanding to roll back to XP on their brand new ones? What, don't tell me.
It just might have something to do with the unprecented volumes of FUD^H^H^Hbullshit flooding out of the anti-Microsoft crowd. It makes Microsoft's marketing compaigns against Linux look like pictures of truth and honesty.
Vista runs usably on a ~1Ghz machine with an Aero capable video card (~$30 brand new, practically free second hand) and 1GB+ RAM. That's hardware dating from ~7 years ago, plus very modest (and cheap) upgrades. It certainly runs *at least* as well on such vintage hardware as OS X does on similarly aged Macs and, IMHO, better (Apple's relatively less powerful hardware does not help here). Microsoft has always been kinder to older machines than Apple - they do, after all, have pretty much the opposite vested interests in that area.