Now this gets confusing. Qt is also an abbreviation for the media framework that iTunes uses.
Yes, I know, that's why I made the first reference to "Qt" a link to the Nokia page for developers using Qt; I considered explicitly saying "no, not QuickTime". Apple tends to spell it "QT" rather than "Qt".
What is speculative about a fact that they used code that was already licensed as open-source and so they had to release source?
"Was already licensed as open-source" wasn't the reason why they had to release source. For example:
Developing your own engine is much harder, just like developing your own OS layer is harder when BSD is sitting there all ready with the basics.
...the BSD license is an free software/open source license but doesn't require you to make source to derived code available. KHTML was licensed under the LGPL, so Apple did have to make source to their derived-from-KHTML WebKit available (but, as it's the LGPL rather than the GPL, didn't have to make source to anything using WebKit available, or require all third-party code that links with WebKit to have its source code available).
Only because they HAD to. They made Webkit from opensource Konqueror (KDE) code
Open-source LGPLed Konqueror code, that being why they had to.
which ran on POSIX,
Try running it on an OS that implements POSIX and nothing else.:-) Perhaps the non-GUI calls it made were only POSIX calls, but it also made a ton of calls to Qt and KDE, which Apple had to redo.
to use in their new POSIX style OS.
"It runs on POSIXy OSes" probably wasn't a major reason for choosing KHTML; I think most of the open-source rendering engines available at the time ran on Linux etc..
Are you trying to say that Apple is using a USB plug, but it's not USB-compatible? I'd love to hear the details.
No, he's saying that the iPods/iPhones/iPads have a connector that's not a USB connector; they also come with a cable that has a dock connector plug on one end, to plug into an iPod/iPhone/iPad, and a USB connector on the other end, to plug into a standard USB port. The cable does not carry all signals from the dock connector, as not all of them map to USB.
I don't know, I've enjoyed watching more Linux and Windows users fiddling with their laptops trying to make the right video output through the projector to know plugging it in is at most only 25% of the fun.
I've enjoyed enough Linux and Windows and Mac OS X users fiddling with their laptops to make them run a projector to wonder why the fuck nobody's gotten enough of their shit together to make it, well, "just work". Unfortunately, to solve it in the "general proprietary" case probably involves network adapters on projectors (I have seen at least one projector with an Ethernet plug, but what you really want is probably Wi-Fi or maybe Bluetooth) and some format and protocol that Microsoft and Apple are willing to sign up for; to solve it in the general case means doing that and keeping the formats and protocols open enough that free-software presentation programs can support them (without having to pay licensing fees or sign NDAs or...).
I couldn't care less about "just works". Half of the fun of running Linux laptops is the challenge to set them up to do all those things you want.
Not everybody enjoys the same things you do. Perhaps the person who asked the question doesn't. Randall Munroe probably doesn't.:-) I certainly don't - I'm more interested in developing software on a machine than bashing the OS running on it into supporting the hardware it came with.
(I'm assuming here you're not actually insulting Linux by implying that the only way to have fun running a Linux laptop is to take pleasure in banging on the OS to get it to support your hardware.)
(And if by "[setting it] up to do all those things you want" you're talking about configuring it to use dragons and half-naked warrior women as window borders, or whatever, rather than setting it up to do such exotic things as sleep when you close the damn lid, that's not what "just works" means to most people, I suspect; even a Linux distribution that "just works" on a given laptop, in the sense that you don't have to track down The Right Driver for your Wi-Fi adapter and video card and sound hardware and trackpad and... and find and run the right random configuration options and tweak the right lines in the Xorg.conf file and..., can probably be configured to make your desktop look like the cover of your favorite heavy metal band's album, or whatever. Heck, I could probably do a lot more to configure my Mac OS X desktop than I've done; I just don't give enough of a shit to bother. I don't even use Spaces, just as I didn't use any of the virtual desktop stuff when my primary machine was running FreeBSD+KDE, and I haven't installed any of the various piles-o-haxies and other add-ons of that sort, either.)
Maybe he just likes Linux and not OS X? Yeah, I know some people would never get that...
Given that he said "I'm an OS X user looking to switch to a Linux laptop. I like the Unix/BSD aspect of OS X.", it's probably not that simple. I'm curious why he wants to switch to Linux (in a non-judgemental way; I'm not saying he's silly to switch, I'm just curious what he sees as more desirable about Linux, even if it's just "I'd just like to try Linux for a while to see what it's like"), but it's not because he doesn't like Mac OS X at all.
I know Windows Is Evil on Slashdot, but honestly what in the submission is specifically a "Unix/BSD aspect"?
The Unix/BSD aspect is.:-) The stuff he cited after "the Unix/BSD aspect" are additional things he likes about MacBook *'s running Mac OS X and that he'd like to see on a {whatever} running Linux. "The Unix/BSD aspect" is the reason why he doesn't want a Windows laptop; you might get a bit more of the "BSD aspect" from Mac OS X than Linux, but you're going to get a lot more of the "Unix aspect" from either of those two choices than from Windows, even with Cygwin.
Submitter just seems biased
Yup - he likes Unix. Perhaps he likes it enough, for familiarity or whatever, that it's a good reason in his case. He may well have considered the Windows option and rejected it.
There are people who like Windows. I don't, but that doesn't mean I'm going to reject their preference for Windows out of hand. I will, however, reject any out-of-hand dismissal of my personal preference for Unix in general, and Mac OS X in particular.
Doesn't Ubuntu support Ctrl-INS and Shift-INS for copy & paste respectively? B'cos in Windows, that's the other way of doing it.
It might, but it's a lot harder, at least for me, to remember those two than to remember "it's just like any other app except that, to allow the default interrupt and control-character-escaping characters to work, you have to do Shift+Control+{C,V} rather than just Control+{C,V} in a terminal emulator". In those rare occasions when I'm using Windows, where the sequences you cite are the only option, I just use the menu in cmd.exe rather than remembering said sequences.
When using a terminal, everyone knows you drag button one to copy and press button two to paste. It even works on a text only console if everything (i.e. gpm) was setup correctly by your distro. That is almost certainly how God Himself does it on His workstation
God Himself knows that if you drag button one you're selecting and, on most UN*X desktops, if you press button two you're pasting the current selection. This is distinct from copying (to the clipboard/pasteboard/whatever you call it) and pasting (from the clipboard/pasteboard/whatever), which are done with Command+C and Command+V on Mac OS (X and non-X), Control+C and Control+V on in almost all apps on Windows and in most apps on most other UN*X desktops, Shift+Control+C and Shift+Control+V in at least some terminal emulators on most (non-Mac OS X) UN*X desktops, and whatever the hell the sequence is in Windows' terminal emulator.
Exactly. And you can upgrade it with commodity hardware, readily available from any retailer.
Oh wait.
To a perhaps lesser degree, that also applies to non-Apple laptops (and, as per the title of the article, the person who Asked Slashdot the question wants a laptop).
This particular thread appears largely to be about software, not hardware, and the use of "walled" and "curated" in close proximity to "garden" several postings up in this thread suggests that the person who made that posting may have confused Mac OS X with iOS. (Cue the "yeah, and you can be certain Mac OS X is going there as well" followups in 5...4...3...)
Hell, if we don't require Windows, even the company everybody likes to beat up for making horrible overpriced machines will sell you a 16GB Core i5 iMac for USD 2100 (1TB disk rather than the 750GB disk on the HP, but a 2.7GHz quad-core Core i5 rather than a Core i7-2600 quad-core "up to 3.8GHz" with Turbo-Hydramatic, err, sorry, Turbo-Boost).
Ideally, it would be trivial for someone to download the source, modify it, recompile, test, and submit improvements.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for that, any more than I'm holding my breath waiting for everybody who has pain in a joint to open themselves up and replace the joint, or waiting for everybody who finds {their car, their bicycle, their local public transportation system,...} to open up their box of tools and fix it. No, I don't think most people will want to be developers, and I don't think most people would be able to be developers. I don't think that because I want to be a Highly Paid Member Of A Priesthood, I think it because I haven't seen anything to indicate that most people will want to be software developers - they have better things to do with their lives.
People start with simple things (e.g. misspelled words) and move to more advanced tasks as they gain familiarity.
If they gain familiarity.
By requiring several hundred dollars of hardware
How many of the people with the time, energy, and ability to become developers won't be able to afford the hardware at the prices many people here have cited?
and massive time investments
Making changes to the core of Android (or iOS or Mac OS X or Windows or the Linux core or...) is eventually going to require a significant time investment to understand the code in question. If you're making relatively minor tweaks a single application, you may not need a machine so Studly(TM) as to be able to compile the entirety of Android in a reasonable time.
you are ensuring that users never become developers, just needy consumers whining about feature requests.
It might be more like "you are ensuring that users never become needy developers whining that their poorly-conceived patch hasn't been accepted, just needy consumers whining about feature requests".:-) I might well consider a needy consumer whining about a feature request less annoying than a needy developer who cooked up some half-assed "solution" to a problem, causing more problems to the system as a whole than it fixes, bitching because their patch hasn't been accepted or was sent back with a large number of issues.
As far as I'm concerned, an ideal system is largely written at a high level that makes it hard to screw up, with that high level implemented at a lower level where angels fear to tread. This doesn't introduce a barrier to entry, it just moves the high barrier a little bit closer to the core, and perhaps makes it higher.
No one will have the hardware to compile the source code.
Do no evil?
As far as I'm concerned, demanding that all free software be simple enough that anybody could buy a machine capable of compiling it in a reasonable time isn't exactly evil, but it's massively assholic. "Free" doesn't mean "simple enough that a cheap machine can compile it in a reasonable amount of time".
The D programming language compiles much faster than C++. It was designed to be easier to lex & parse
So how much of the compile time for C/C++ code is spent processing the characters in the source code and how much is spent processing the intermediate representation and turning it into machine code? If the answer is "most of the time is spent doing the latter", then "designed to be easier to lex and parse" doesn't help much.
(And how much of Android is C/C++ and how much of it is in their Java dialect? How much of that time is spent translating C/C++ to machine code and how much of it is spent translating Java to Dalvik bytecode?)
Apple seemed to suffer from the same thing, limping along with an OS that lacked basic features like memory protection and preemptive multitasking until 2001, but look at them now.
It still barely has basic multitasking...
Either 1) you've confused Mac OS X with iOS and confused low-level OS multitasking of processes with UI-level support for switching between applications with UI or 2) you have somehow managed to think XNU only "barely has basic multitasking".
If you mean "the tz mailing list", there are messages that indicate that the Shanks atlases were among the documents consulted as references. Whether that's "copying" in a sense that renders it a violation of copyright is ultimately going to be up to the law to decide, I suspect.
a lack of supporting NTLMv2 by default (let's drop it in 10.7 and replace Samba!)
Can your non-Mac OS X 10.7 SMB clients and servers not support NTLMSSP? That, at least, should work with 10.7's non-Samba-based server and 10.7's (never was Samba-based, all the way back to it introduction in 10.2 or so) client. If it doesn't work, file a bug.
IT is definitely a market that Apple might do well in, although Apple's main success is with consumers.
What does "IT" mean in this context? I'm skeptical that Apple will do well in the marketplace for big honking 64+-processor enterprise servers running Oracle, say. Do you mean "departmental servers" or "workgroup servers", for example? Or do you mean "corporate end-user machines", in which case I think Apple's strategy is "corporations are moving towards a 'fuck it, buy your own damn machines, as long as they're not too hard to manage' strategy, and maybe people will start buying MacBook *'s".
If that means making a U-turn on how good Intel CPUs are, then that's what'll be done while shifting the focus from "it's a supercomputer!" (lol) to "a better experience".
For better or worse, what most users see is probably "the experience", not "the instruction set". One advantage of the switch to Intel is that Apple can't use "ZOMG WE'RE POWERPC RISC SO WE RULE AND X86 CISC DROOLS LOL" as a marketing point.
And since you brought up phones, I have a Nexus One. When I got it it would go about 1.5 days on a charge. Then I installed an application to kill background apps. Now the phone goes easily 2.5 days and is generally more responsive.
So what exactly is it that a background app needs to do when it's not presenting a UI that causes it to consume any system resources whatsoever?
They removed Samba, but their replacement sucks. For example, my printer can write to an SMB share - Windows or Samba - but it won't write to one that 10.7 exports, because 10.7 doesn't support the authentication mechanism that it wants to use.
So why would a printer (in the sense of "a device with a toner cartridge, a paper path, and a laser that writes to a selenium-coated roller") need to write to an SMB share? Or are you talking about an SMB client talking to your printer?
If it's really writing to an SMB share, hopefully Apple's new SMB server gets open-sourced at some point, so the people who actually want LM or other crufty old easily-crackable authentication mechanism, or can't be bothered implementing NTLMSSP, can go backport them and work with crappy old SMB implementations (and so that vendors of printers and NAS boxes who don't want GPLed code in their devices can use a server over which Apple and the rest of the community have at least some influence, rather than some random lump of software whose interaction with {pick your client} ends up needing an additional pile of debugging).
If it's talking to an SMB client, the client's been open-source for a while, so if you need to enable crufty old authentication mechanisms, you can.
Slashdot Mirror
Since it is made of gold, this coin is actually money and not the fiat currency like the US dollar which is on the way to collapse in the near future.
What is it that people have against Fiats? There are also some other fine vehicles from the Fiat Group....
Now this gets confusing. Qt is also an abbreviation for the media framework that iTunes uses.
Yes, I know, that's why I made the first reference to "Qt" a link to the Nokia page for developers using Qt; I considered explicitly saying "no, not QuickTime". Apple tends to spell it "QT" rather than "Qt".
What is speculative about a fact that they used code that was already licensed as open-source and so they had to release source?
"Was already licensed as open-source" wasn't the reason why they had to release source. For example:
Developing your own engine is much harder, just like developing your own OS layer is harder when BSD is sitting there all ready with the basics.
...the BSD license is an free software/open source license but doesn't require you to make source to derived code available. KHTML was licensed under the LGPL, so Apple did have to make source to their derived-from-KHTML WebKit available (but, as it's the LGPL rather than the GPL, didn't have to make source to anything using WebKit available, or require all third-party code that links with WebKit to have its source code available).
Only because they HAD to. They made Webkit from opensource Konqueror (KDE) code
Open-source LGPLed Konqueror code, that being why they had to.
which ran on POSIX,
Try running it on an OS that implements POSIX and nothing else. :-) Perhaps the non-GUI calls it made were only POSIX calls, but it also made a ton of calls to Qt and KDE, which Apple had to redo.
to use in their new POSIX style OS.
"It runs on POSIXy OSes" probably wasn't a major reason for choosing KHTML; I think most of the open-source rendering engines available at the time ran on Linux etc..
Are you trying to say that Apple is using a USB plug, but it's not USB-compatible? I'd love to hear the details.
No, he's saying that the iPods/iPhones/iPads have a connector that's not a USB connector; they also come with a cable that has a dock connector plug on one end, to plug into an iPod/iPhone/iPad, and a USB connector on the other end, to plug into a standard USB port. The cable does not carry all signals from the dock connector, as not all of them map to USB.
I don't know, I've enjoyed watching more Linux and Windows users fiddling with their laptops trying to make the right video output through the projector to know plugging it in is at most only 25% of the fun.
I've enjoyed enough Linux and Windows and Mac OS X users fiddling with their laptops to make them run a projector to wonder why the fuck nobody's gotten enough of their shit together to make it, well, "just work". Unfortunately, to solve it in the "general proprietary" case probably involves network adapters on projectors (I have seen at least one projector with an Ethernet plug, but what you really want is probably Wi-Fi or maybe Bluetooth) and some format and protocol that Microsoft and Apple are willing to sign up for; to solve it in the general case means doing that and keeping the formats and protocols open enough that free-software presentation programs can support them (without having to pay licensing fees or sign NDAs or...).
I couldn't care less about "just works". Half of the fun of running Linux laptops is the challenge to set them up to do all those things you want.
Not everybody enjoys the same things you do. Perhaps the person who asked the question doesn't. Randall Munroe probably doesn't. :-) I certainly don't - I'm more interested in developing software on a machine than bashing the OS running on it into supporting the hardware it came with.
(I'm assuming here you're not actually insulting Linux by implying that the only way to have fun running a Linux laptop is to take pleasure in banging on the OS to get it to support your hardware.)
(And if by "[setting it] up to do all those things you want" you're talking about configuring it to use dragons and half-naked warrior women as window borders, or whatever, rather than setting it up to do such exotic things as sleep when you close the damn lid, that's not what "just works" means to most people, I suspect; even a Linux distribution that "just works" on a given laptop, in the sense that you don't have to track down The Right Driver for your Wi-Fi adapter and video card and sound hardware and trackpad and... and find and run the right random configuration options and tweak the right lines in the Xorg.conf file and..., can probably be configured to make your desktop look like the cover of your favorite heavy metal band's album, or whatever. Heck, I could probably do a lot more to configure my Mac OS X desktop than I've done; I just don't give enough of a shit to bother. I don't even use Spaces, just as I didn't use any of the virtual desktop stuff when my primary machine was running FreeBSD+KDE, and I haven't installed any of the various piles-o-haxies and other add-ons of that sort, either.)
Maybe he just likes Linux and not OS X? Yeah, I know some people would never get that...
Given that he said "I'm an OS X user looking to switch to a Linux laptop. I like the Unix/BSD aspect of OS X.", it's probably not that simple. I'm curious why he wants to switch to Linux (in a non-judgemental way; I'm not saying he's silly to switch, I'm just curious what he sees as more desirable about Linux, even if it's just "I'd just like to try Linux for a while to see what it's like"), but it's not because he doesn't like Mac OS X at all.
I know Windows Is Evil on Slashdot, but honestly what in the submission is specifically a "Unix/BSD aspect"?
The Unix/BSD aspect is. :-) The stuff he cited after "the Unix/BSD aspect" are additional things he likes about MacBook *'s running Mac OS X and that he'd like to see on a {whatever} running Linux. "The Unix/BSD aspect" is the reason why he doesn't want a Windows laptop; you might get a bit more of the "BSD aspect" from Mac OS X than Linux, but you're going to get a lot more of the "Unix aspect" from either of those two choices than from Windows, even with Cygwin.
Submitter just seems biased
Yup - he likes Unix. Perhaps he likes it enough, for familiarity or whatever, that it's a good reason in his case. He may well have considered the Windows option and rejected it.
There are people who like Windows. I don't, but that doesn't mean I'm going to reject their preference for Windows out of hand. I will, however, reject any out-of-hand dismissal of my personal preference for Unix in general, and Mac OS X in particular.
Doesn't Ubuntu support Ctrl-INS and Shift-INS for copy & paste respectively? B'cos in Windows, that's the other way of doing it.
It might, but it's a lot harder, at least for me, to remember those two than to remember "it's just like any other app except that, to allow the default interrupt and control-character-escaping characters to work, you have to do Shift+Control+{C,V} rather than just Control+{C,V} in a terminal emulator". In those rare occasions when I'm using Windows, where the sequences you cite are the only option, I just use the menu in cmd.exe rather than remembering said sequences.
When using a terminal, everyone knows you drag button one to copy and press button two to paste. It even works on a text only console if everything (i.e. gpm) was setup correctly by your distro. That is almost certainly how God Himself does it on His workstation
God Himself knows that if you drag button one you're selecting and, on most UN*X desktops, if you press button two you're pasting the current selection. This is distinct from copying (to the clipboard/pasteboard/whatever you call it) and pasting (from the clipboard/pasteboard/whatever), which are done with Command+C and Command+V on Mac OS (X and non-X), Control+C and Control+V on in almost all apps on Windows and in most apps on most other UN*X desktops, Shift+Control+C and Shift+Control+V in at least some terminal emulators on most (non-Mac OS X) UN*X desktops, and whatever the hell the sequence is in Windows' terminal emulator.
Exactly. And you can upgrade it with commodity hardware, readily available from any retailer.
Oh wait.
To a perhaps lesser degree, that also applies to non-Apple laptops (and, as per the title of the article, the person who Asked Slashdot the question wants a laptop).
This particular thread appears largely to be about software, not hardware, and the use of "walled" and "curated" in close proximity to "garden" several postings up in this thread suggests that the person who made that posting may have confused Mac OS X with iOS. (Cue the "yeah, and you can be certain Mac OS X is going there as well" followups in 5...4...3...)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7 No Windows 7 Home Premium OEM 16 GB cheap box for dev soon :)
What's your definition of "cheap"? Yeah, Microsoft charges USD 200 for Windows 7 Home Premium retail, but HP's selling a 16GB system for $1,269.99 with Windows 7 Home Premium.
Hell, if we don't require Windows, even the company everybody likes to beat up for making horrible overpriced machines will sell you a 16GB Core i5 iMac for USD 2100 (1TB disk rather than the 750GB disk on the HP, but a 2.7GHz quad-core Core i5 rather than a Core i7-2600 quad-core "up to 3.8GHz" with Turbo-Hydramatic, err, sorry, Turbo-Boost).
Ideally, it would be trivial for someone to download the source, modify it, recompile, test, and submit improvements.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for that, any more than I'm holding my breath waiting for everybody who has pain in a joint to open themselves up and replace the joint, or waiting for everybody who finds {their car, their bicycle, their local public transportation system, ...} to open up their box of tools and fix it. No, I don't think most people will want to be developers, and I don't think most people would be able to be developers. I don't think that because I want to be a Highly Paid Member Of A Priesthood, I think it because I haven't seen anything to indicate that most people will want to be software developers - they have better things to do with their lives.
People start with simple things (e.g. misspelled words) and move to more advanced tasks as they gain familiarity.
If they gain familiarity.
By requiring several hundred dollars of hardware
How many of the people with the time, energy, and ability to become developers won't be able to afford the hardware at the prices many people here have cited?
and massive time investments
Making changes to the core of Android (or iOS or Mac OS X or Windows or the Linux core or...) is eventually going to require a significant time investment to understand the code in question. If you're making relatively minor tweaks a single application, you may not need a machine so Studly(TM) as to be able to compile the entirety of Android in a reasonable time.
you are ensuring that users never become developers, just needy consumers whining about feature requests.
It might be more like "you are ensuring that users never become needy developers whining that their poorly-conceived patch hasn't been accepted, just needy consumers whining about feature requests". :-) I might well consider a needy consumer whining about a feature request less annoying than a needy developer who cooked up some half-assed "solution" to a problem, causing more problems to the system as a whole than it fixes, bitching because their patch hasn't been accepted or was sent back with a large number of issues.
As far as I'm concerned, an ideal system is largely written at a high level that makes it hard to screw up, with that high level implemented at a lower level where angels fear to tread. This doesn't introduce a barrier to entry, it just moves the high barrier a little bit closer to the core, and perhaps makes it higher.
No one will have the hardware to compile the source code.
Do no evil?
As far as I'm concerned, demanding that all free software be simple enough that anybody could buy a machine capable of compiling it in a reasonable time isn't exactly evil, but it's massively assholic. "Free" doesn't mean "simple enough that a cheap machine can compile it in a reasonable amount of time".
And, in any case, I wouldn't go so far as to say "no one will have the hardware to compile the source code".
The D programming language compiles much faster than C++. It was designed to be easier to lex & parse
So how much of the compile time for C/C++ code is spent processing the characters in the source code and how much is spent processing the intermediate representation and turning it into machine code? If the answer is "most of the time is spent doing the latter", then "designed to be easier to lex and parse" doesn't help much.
(And how much of Android is C/C++ and how much of it is in their Java dialect? How much of that time is spent translating C/C++ to machine code and how much of it is spent translating Java to Dalvik bytecode?)
Apple seemed to suffer from the same thing, limping along with an OS that lacked basic features like memory protection and preemptive multitasking until 2001, but look at them now.
It still barely has basic multitasking...
Either 1) you've confused Mac OS X with iOS and confused low-level OS multitasking of processes with UI-level support for switching between applications with UI or 2) you have somehow managed to think XNU only "barely has basic multitasking".
What's wrong with time since the Unix epoch? I'm using that and I'm doing fine!
2038 called (it uses neutrinos). There is a bit of an issue.
So add another 32 high-order bits of "since the Unix epoch":
Yeah, if I compile it 32-bit, that has a Y2.038K issue:
but hopefully by 2038 vendors will have dropped support for 32-bit code if for no other reason than to help get rid of Y2.038K bugs.
The TZ list actually says they copied from them.
If you mean "the tz mailing list", there are messages that indicate that the Shanks atlases were among the documents consulted as references. Whether that's "copying" in a sense that renders it a violation of copyright is ultimately going to be up to the law to decide, I suspect.
a lack of supporting NTLMv2 by default (let's drop it in 10.7 and replace Samba!)
Can your non-Mac OS X 10.7 SMB clients and servers not support NTLMSSP? That, at least, should work with 10.7's non-Samba-based server and 10.7's (never was Samba-based, all the way back to it introduction in 10.2 or so) client. If it doesn't work, file a bug.
IT is definitely a market that Apple might do well in, although Apple's main success is with consumers.
What does "IT" mean in this context? I'm skeptical that Apple will do well in the marketplace for big honking 64+-processor enterprise servers running Oracle, say. Do you mean "departmental servers" or "workgroup servers", for example? Or do you mean "corporate end-user machines", in which case I think Apple's strategy is "corporations are moving towards a 'fuck it, buy your own damn machines, as long as they're not too hard to manage' strategy, and maybe people will start buying MacBook *'s".
If that means making a U-turn on how good Intel CPUs are, then that's what'll be done while shifting the focus from "it's a supercomputer!" (lol) to "a better experience".
For better or worse, what most users see is probably "the experience", not "the instruction set". One advantage of the switch to Intel is that Apple can't use "ZOMG WE'RE POWERPC RISC SO WE RULE AND X86 CISC DROOLS LOL" as a marketing point.
...had a...curve...instead of that...nonlinear monstrosity
You might want to look up "linear". (Yes, I know, a line is a special case of a curve....)
And since you brought up phones, I have a Nexus One. When I got it it would go about 1.5 days on a charge. Then I installed an application to kill background apps. Now the phone goes easily 2.5 days and is generally more responsive.
So what exactly is it that a background app needs to do when it's not presenting a UI that causes it to consume any system resources whatsoever?
They removed Samba, but their replacement sucks. For example, my printer can write to an SMB share - Windows or Samba - but it won't write to one that 10.7 exports, because 10.7 doesn't support the authentication mechanism that it wants to use.
So why would a printer (in the sense of "a device with a toner cartridge, a paper path, and a laser that writes to a selenium-coated roller") need to write to an SMB share? Or are you talking about an SMB client talking to your printer?
If it's really writing to an SMB share, hopefully Apple's new SMB server gets open-sourced at some point, so the people who actually want LM or other crufty old easily-crackable authentication mechanism, or can't be bothered implementing NTLMSSP, can go backport them and work with crappy old SMB implementations (and so that vendors of printers and NAS boxes who don't want GPLed code in their devices can use a server over which Apple and the rest of the community have at least some influence, rather than some random lump of software whose interaction with {pick your client} ends up needing an additional pile of debugging).
If it's talking to an SMB client, the client's been open-source for a while, so if you need to enable crufty old authentication mechanisms, you can.