Unfortantly, OpenOffice for mac still isn't native, requires FINK or X11 to run. Bad choice on their part. OpenOffice on Windows works quite nicely, little slow on first load, but after than pretty snappy.
SuSE 6.4, in my expirence, was useable as a desktop. SuSE 9 is much better and things like my sound card actually work now. I should have been more clear on this, not only did the students use the Linux labs, but most had dual boot laptops in Germany as well.
I switched to mac because still needed Photoshop and a few other applications and still had a native Unix enviroment in which to develop in PERL and PHP/MySQL.
At any rate, Apple is still going to be a niche player. The PC hardware market is commodity based these days making large scale deployment of Linux on white box generic PC hardware extremely cheap, especially for businesses. Apple is always going to be at a premium just because of their nature.
Unfortunately, unless the world of geekdom pulls it together and figures out a way to stop this spam problem on its own, guess what, a centralized controlled network is what your going to get. We've been able to tweak Spam Assassin to catch about 98% of spam comming to our server and then we use Mac Mail's Junk filter for the rest and the number of spam we get is extremely low. Usually one or two get past all that a day, but I used to get at least 150 spams a day. Now we error on the side of caution and much rather get two spam messages a day rather than risk a customer's email not getting through. However, Spam is not dead yet. Their tactics are getting much more extreme such as using trojans and viruses to create open relays on home/office computers. Us in the anti-spam world are saying things look to be over and we won...and I am saying the battle is probably going to heat back up. Next will probably be IM Spam. Hell I started getting that back in 1997 in ICQ, why I quit using it.
Yes this does pose a problem because people like IBM, Yahoo, and others are developing their own "solutions" which could result in several different protocols that may not end up "talking" to each other thus enters the possiblity of the Internet breaking into subnets that might talk to each other, but not everyone on the same page if you will.
Second off, repeat after me: People are stupid. If they weren't, they wouldn't click on these messages to begin with and there wouldn't be any profit in the industry.
Lastly I do propose a way of dealing with the spammers themselves. Two words: trial lawyers. Since many spam messages have some fraudulant items, like a false opt-out link, etc. why not sue the spammers themselves. Not in your country or the US? Then sue the manufactures/distributers of the product for false advertising or a number of other actions? Make litigation, even if it is frivilous (spelling, its 4AM, please forgive), so expensive that there is no profit left in the spamming. Just a thought...
Oddly enough, I love MS Office on Mac better than windows and I beta tested Office 2000 and XP. To our small business, the lack of access is mute. We run 95% macs, with BSD or Linux on our servers. I refuse to use Access and run either PostgreSQL or MySQL that handles all of our CRM/ERP. But that's overkill really. We get buy with Mac Mail and Quickbooks Pro quite nicely. We have less than 10 employees, but when things like MyDoom come along we don't worry about it.
Also, even if Office goes away for Mac I don't think its going to be much a problem. OpenOffice is making great strides, I have had several clients switch to OpenOffice and save thousands of dollars as opposed to going to Office 2003. Most of my clients don't need anything other than a word processor and spread sheet on most of their desktops.
On the other note, of my clients, the video production folks are buying macs in droves and spending an average of $7000 a peice for them. Why? Final Cut Pro is the defacto small shop editing software for video production companies. Even major motion pictures are being edited on the machines and that market's not going away so long as Apple continues producing excellent software.
Furthermore, there is something going on your not reading about much: The rest of the world is going to LINUX as their OS of choice. Microsoft maybe able to bribe some back to their side, but largely, I think the desktop market over the next five years outside of the United States is going to Linux. I also see some larger companies going to Linux as well as soon as a clear defacto desktop enviroment emerges.
Discovered this while working and studying in Germany. The german college I attended for a semester had two Linux labs and one Windows XP lab. The students spent more time usually typing up papers in StarOffice on SuSE Linux than in MS office and Windows.
Mac and BSD dying threads just aren't true. I switched myself from Linux to Mac about two years ago and never looked back. So far I have been very impressed with my iBook and now Powerbook.
I switched two years ago from Linux to Mac OS X. Yes I have had the iBook logic board problems, but we also have about 10 other macs around in our office. I am typing this on my new 12.1" powerbook that replaced my 14.1" iBook with the failed logic board. While Apple should own up to its hardware failure and offer an extention on warrenty, its a fact of life that if you buy an apple product, buy the the extended warrenty, always.
Sorry, be we could not run our business on Linux if we wanted too. Why? We are a marketing and publishing company and programs like InDesign, Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Illustrator are a way of life for us. Our only other "real" option is Windows and everytime one of these MyDoom's or SoBig's come around, we don't have to worry about it. That has saved us a lot in time and overhead despite the upfront costs of the Mac's.
I know that one reason we can usually undercut local compeition is that we don't have the technology issues. Another comeptitor dumped Macs for Dell's about two years ago and quickly learned that it was far more costly in terms of viruses, system crashes (running W2k Pro), that allowed us to woo away two of his bigger clients because we knew we could meet the deadlines.
As for servers, we do have a 1TB Xraid with fiber cards for video production and storage, everything else are PC white boxes with FreeBSD installed including a print server that was a Pentium Pro 200 with FBSD 3.4 that had an uptime of over 2 years until yesterday when it was unplugged to be moved to our new offices.
FreeBSD not designed as a desktop
on
FreeBSD 5.2 Review
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"FreeBSD....The power to serve" has been its tagline for years. FreeBSD is designed as a server OS first, and if you really want too, you can turn it into an effective desktop. FreeBSD has always been a bit behind the technology curve, but do you really need drivers for the latest ATI or nVidia cards on a machine designed to run as a server?
We still have a couple print servers around here that are running Pentium Pro's with FreeBSD 3.4 from five years ago. Yeah its probably time we replaced them, but they've been reliable.
I mean for desktop, we use Mac OS X because that what its designed for, at the end of the day its the right tool for the right job.
that SCO hasn't pissed off in the technology industry? I know they were/are a dying company, but from owning my own business, I always found that trying to find a win-win senerio to be the best plan.
We've had issues with copyright infringement and only once had to resort to any type of legal action. The other times, they removed content when asked and apologized and that was enough for us.
But then again...many business models still don't make sense to me.
Its funny now any time in front of a Windows based computer with MSIE and to see all the pop-ups. I use Safari and Mozilla on Mac and forget about the pop-ups. I've been using the technology for over two years now and the web has become a better place to visit.
When our company or clients want to do online advertising, we Google Ad Words and on a couple hobby sites I run, I use exclusively Ad Words and I've the best Click Thru rates and ROI on both ends. And I have used every form including pop ups before. I found most clicks from pop-ups are acidental. People go to close them and click on them.
Kudos to Google for figuring out an excellent method of delivering non-intrusive targeted keywords.
I'd have to agree with you, but the biggest mistake the kid made was not making it a parodie site. If he had, there are provisions in Media law that would allow him to use something that sounds like a trademark for parodie.
If the kid had come back and said, "But the site cost me $70 to regiester for two years" and M$ was sueing him, then I might say Microsoft was being a little over bearing.
I have to agree. I went back last fall as a consultant to an arcitecture/graphics firm that was switching from their older systems running ALPHA processors for rendering to IBM Blade servers running Linux. Not only that, but they were switching from their old modelling applications to Maya deployed on Linux. Hell, Maya is still like $3k a seat, so saving thousands of dollars on OS licenses is something they jumped at. Plus everyone using the program thought it worked as good if not better than on Windows.
The problem for small businesses is that if they had something as easy to use as quickbooks, I know a lot of people that would be willing to dump Windows because they are fed up with viruses, crashes, upgrade cycles, etc.. In our own business, we run Macintosh OSX on the desktop. Why? It allows the flexiablity of a native Unix enviroment for geeks like me, and gives us access to main stream applications people are familar with like Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, QuarkXpress, Microsoft Office (Which I like on the Mac btw), and a few great applications you won't find other places, like Final Cut Pro.
Although there are several small businesses, with fewer than 10 employees, that are fed up and I have overseen switching their computers from older windows machines to Macintosh, and the most common complaint is that there is no Solitare. Other than that they are happy things don't crash and Mac is easier to use. Drag 'n drop actually works.
Enough about Mac and back to Linux. The other thing that is taughted as Linux's great strength is also its achellis heel: flexablity. The fact that you could have 100 boxes with 100 different configurations is a nightmare for developers. Which desktop do you develop for, Gnome or KDE? How many users out there would understand that Gnome and KDE both are on Linux? One time at a local seminar we took 3 computers. 1 running RH/Gnome, 1 runnng SuSE/KDE, and 1 FreeBSD running KDE, and almost everyone in the room though the two running KDE were the same OS. They don't understand the difference nor care too, they just need it to work.
I have had one paper published online in the EU and a second paper that maybe published next year at the end of a study regaurding technology and law. While I would want credit where is due, that's even the basis of the GPL and moreover the BSD licenses, I wouldn't want another company profiting from those words even if its in a database to compare against.
While generally paper mills are despised in academics, its is not uncommon to have one of my business partners ghost write white papers where I dictate the ideas and then they write up the papers. Often because I don't have the time and second of all, they are professional writers and write twice as well as I ever could. We quickly found out its faster if I set in front of a video camera or tape recorder what needs to be said and then have them write it in the first place rather than I write it up and then have them rewrite it because it sucked that bad.
Enterprise level datacenters...raise their hand! If your running a SUN certified program and you upgrade and it no longer works, SUN will send someone to toubleshoot and fix it. How many other companies garuntee that? Does Red Hat? Novell? Microsoft? Um....that would be a big fat no. Too many companies, that level support is critical because the loss of say an ERP or even CRM system could mean the loss of thousands if not hundreds of the thousands of dollars.
Trust me, you can spend 5x's as much trouble shooting old software on new systems then it would have cost for "equal" performance if you had spent 3x's as much on the hardware in the first place...
PERL is great, but the reason why it became extremely popular for the Internet was you had two choices to make a webpage dynamic back in the day: PERL and C/C++. PERL is an extremely power text parsing tool and I still use it in today over the more common PHP for webpage design for certain things.
But it would seem like JAVA would be more ideal for cell phones for basic programs, however I am sure we'll see a 1001 nokia address orgainizing scripts here soon.
Anyone seen Vega Strike, check sourceforge b/c I don't have time to look it up at the moment, which is a GPL Privateer clone. While the game is more of an "engine" right now without much of a plot and the fact that its still WIP, its pretty impressive. There are a couple other game engines out there that are impressive, just waiting for a small indy company to form and use them to create the next Id...someone will figure out a way.
On a side note, I haven't purchased any new games in over a year except for Ghost Recon for the PS2, and that was only after it was under $20.
I've been working with 64-bit chips since 1998 (DEC ALPHA systems and now G5's) and there has always been problems with heat and power. What's the battery life going to be on one of these machine?
One thing I dislike about Linux community
on
BSD For Linux Users
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Is that the community itself has more negative things to say about other products instead of showing the virtues of Linux. I think its a major problem with a few in the OSS community that hold the vocal opinion that its "US vs. the World and we're right damnit!". That turns off a lot of people, especially non-techies, away from Linux.
The first page stated that BSD is for those who like Unix and Linux is for those that hate microsoft, and that last statment is not going to win support for Linux.
Take the Wikipedia asking for donations last week, half the posts here at slashdot were, "Why don't they go salvage a few old PIII 600's and cluster them together. Should only cost about two grand". Hell, an worthwhile opensource project needs some help paying the bills and they get ripped apart here. Sorry geeks, but Econ 101: There is no free lunch. It costs someone something somewhere. (Yes I did donate $25. Not much, but all that I could afford at the moment.)
I do use Linux, but mostly I do use some kind of BSD, whether it be Mac OS X, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD.
I see the people trying to either be funny or karma whoring state: Well if he can show me a freeBSD server that can survive a/.ing...and I have to ask, "How many sites are taken down a week by slashdotting running Linux?" Hell I know our little 2.Ghz Xeon box with 1GB of Ram wouldn't survive no matter what OS we had on there, it is Linux btw.
Bottom line...the negativity needs to go out of OSS. Linux cannot have the banner, "Microsoft Sucks! and use us because...Microsoft Sucks!" and hope to really make it into the desktop arena. OSS and Linux needs a banner of, "Hey our system works, has fewer viruses, easy to use, and it will do any thing Windows will do, except play games."
And to the "any thing you can do, I can do for free" dot communist crowd: In order to make Linux viable, its going to need programs written for it like games, quickbooks, quicken, adobe products, that people are willing to spend money on and need before it will truely be accepted main stream.
I love it when two bit whiny geeks with no experience in the business world post this stuff. I know because I've been doing work with medium sized companies, like 100 employees or so, that have been looking at Linux and its something they have to consider.
Especially at the smaller end of the scale where you'll meet the most resistance from people. The most common arguement I hear is, "At least with Microsoft, if they would get sued, its their Ass, not mine". And its pretty damn hard to combat that mentality because I agree with them.
Without the support of people like IBM, HP, and Novell, Linux would have remained in the hands of "elitest nerdy smucks" as three dead trolls in a baggie once said.
My HP 48G is almost 10 years old. It still does more than I need it too and it only has 32k of ram. Hell it was good enough to send us to the moon, it's good enough to add, subtract, multiply, and solve stress equations on the fly...
With Yahoo's recent purchases, this was expected
on
Yahoo to Dump Google
·
· Score: 1
After Yahoo bought Overature, everyone knew that Yahoo planned to dump Google and go with their own technology. The question was when. I don't think its time to rethink the IPO, but I wouldn't buy their stock, or hold it for a short time.
With both Yahoo and Microsoft throughing huge sums of money into developing other search solutions, and the amount of sheer crap on google, doesn't seem like I can find the results I once could, the market is ripe for a new engine to come along.
I still remember the days of Altavista being king of the search world...
I used to work at an architecture/graphics firm that's been running 64-bit chips since at least 1998. It was called DEC/Compaq/HP ALPHA chips running at 500mhz when the PII's were brand new at 350Mhz.
In fact they had 27 Quad 500Mhz Alpha chips with 4GB of RAM each configured into a renderfarm and one on one, still beat the replacement dual 2Ghz Xeon boxes which replaced them last year.
However, they condensed a 1500 sqr foot room full of servers and wires into two, and now getting a third, IBM blade unit in two cabinats for the price of just one of those Alpha servers a few years ago.
As for my current company, we're upgrading the video production unit to all G5's and they are great. We saw some dramatic improvement with the optimized FCP running on the dual 2Ghz G5 vs our older dual 1.25Ghz G4's.
We've built our company around Mac's from the ground up even with the horrible over priced XRaid for storage, but the amount of time we saved in having everything work together nicely has been worth the cost in dollars to us.
I had to fix my dad's computer after a good old melt down and it took a total of 20 hours. Granted a great deal of that time was downloading stuff as he has Win98 and soon thing's aren't going to be there.
Personal, and professionally, I switched to an iBook about 18 months ago because I was sick of dealing with x86 based computers and their Operating systems, yes even Linux.
Same at work. When we went to purchase computers for our office, we bought everything from apple. I am sure we spent several thousand dollars more upfront, but we don't have to deal with lost productivity due to crashes, viriuses and the like.
than traditional models. Frankly Amazon.com is nothing more than a large catalog mail order store. Its just that the catalog and much of the ordering process has been automated by computers.
Ebay has just taken the traditional auction and used the internet to automate much of the process.
Really, most internet businesses are just innovations, taking a new technology and using it to replace or suppliment an existing medium. The problem with most internet businesses in the dot com era was they didn't understand this and/or fell into the trap of "This is compeltely different" and it wasn't.
Now the internet has helped reduce cost in industries like mail order because it is possible to reach billons with one site unlike say a traditional catalog that would have to be mailed out which costs a lot of money in print and postage. However, there is no secert method to business models. Its still breaks down to: provide a product or service to fulfill a need. Do it well, keep down costs, and hopefully make a profit.
Slashdot Mirror
SuSE 6.4, in my expirence, was useable as a desktop. SuSE 9 is much better and things like my sound card actually work now. I should have been more clear on this, not only did the students use the Linux labs, but most had dual boot laptops in Germany as well.
I switched to mac because still needed Photoshop and a few other applications and still had a native Unix enviroment in which to develop in PERL and PHP/MySQL.
At any rate, Apple is still going to be a niche player. The PC hardware market is commodity based these days making large scale deployment of Linux on white box generic PC hardware extremely cheap, especially for businesses. Apple is always going to be at a premium just because of their nature.
Yes this does pose a problem because people like IBM, Yahoo, and others are developing their own "solutions" which could result in several different protocols that may not end up "talking" to each other thus enters the possiblity of the Internet breaking into subnets that might talk to each other, but not everyone on the same page if you will.
Second off, repeat after me: People are stupid. If they weren't, they wouldn't click on these messages to begin with and there wouldn't be any profit in the industry.
Lastly I do propose a way of dealing with the spammers themselves. Two words: trial lawyers. Since many spam messages have some fraudulant items, like a false opt-out link, etc. why not sue the spammers themselves. Not in your country or the US? Then sue the manufactures/distributers of the product for false advertising or a number of other actions? Make litigation, even if it is frivilous (spelling, its 4AM, please forgive), so expensive that there is no profit left in the spamming. Just a thought...
Also, even if Office goes away for Mac I don't think its going to be much a problem. OpenOffice is making great strides, I have had several clients switch to OpenOffice and save thousands of dollars as opposed to going to Office 2003. Most of my clients don't need anything other than a word processor and spread sheet on most of their desktops.
On the other note, of my clients, the video production folks are buying macs in droves and spending an average of $7000 a peice for them. Why? Final Cut Pro is the defacto small shop editing software for video production companies. Even major motion pictures are being edited on the machines and that market's not going away so long as Apple continues producing excellent software.
Furthermore, there is something going on your not reading about much: The rest of the world is going to LINUX as their OS of choice. Microsoft maybe able to bribe some back to their side, but largely, I think the desktop market over the next five years outside of the United States is going to Linux. I also see some larger companies going to Linux as well as soon as a clear defacto desktop enviroment emerges.
Discovered this while working and studying in Germany. The german college I attended for a semester had two Linux labs and one Windows XP lab. The students spent more time usually typing up papers in StarOffice on SuSE Linux than in MS office and Windows.
Mac and BSD dying threads just aren't true. I switched myself from Linux to Mac about two years ago and never looked back. So far I have been very impressed with my iBook and now Powerbook.
Sorry, be we could not run our business on Linux if we wanted too. Why? We are a marketing and publishing company and programs like InDesign, Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Illustrator are a way of life for us. Our only other "real" option is Windows and everytime one of these MyDoom's or SoBig's come around, we don't have to worry about it. That has saved us a lot in time and overhead despite the upfront costs of the Mac's.
I know that one reason we can usually undercut local compeition is that we don't have the technology issues. Another comeptitor dumped Macs for Dell's about two years ago and quickly learned that it was far more costly in terms of viruses, system crashes (running W2k Pro), that allowed us to woo away two of his bigger clients because we knew we could meet the deadlines.
As for servers, we do have a 1TB Xraid with fiber cards for video production and storage, everything else are PC white boxes with FreeBSD installed including a print server that was a Pentium Pro 200 with FBSD 3.4 that had an uptime of over 2 years until yesterday when it was unplugged to be moved to our new offices.
We still have a couple print servers around here that are running Pentium Pro's with FreeBSD 3.4 from five years ago. Yeah its probably time we replaced them, but they've been reliable.
I mean for desktop, we use Mac OS X because that what its designed for, at the end of the day its the right tool for the right job.
We've had issues with copyright infringement and only once had to resort to any type of legal action. The other times, they removed content when asked and apologized and that was enough for us.
But then again...many business models still don't make sense to me.
Rope, tree, worked for the cowboy's, works for me!
When our company or clients want to do online advertising, we Google Ad Words and on a couple hobby sites I run, I use exclusively Ad Words and I've the best Click Thru rates and ROI on both ends. And I have used every form including pop ups before. I found most clicks from pop-ups are acidental. People go to close them and click on them.
Kudos to Google for figuring out an excellent method of delivering non-intrusive targeted keywords.
If the kid had come back and said, "But the site cost me $70 to regiester for two years" and M$ was sueing him, then I might say Microsoft was being a little over bearing.
Yeah, but I don't have to pay $10 a month to goto a mall. Probably a better idea is what can Costco or SAM's allow on their properity.
The problem for small businesses is that if they had something as easy to use as quickbooks, I know a lot of people that would be willing to dump Windows because they are fed up with viruses, crashes, upgrade cycles, etc.. In our own business, we run Macintosh OSX on the desktop. Why? It allows the flexiablity of a native Unix enviroment for geeks like me, and gives us access to main stream applications people are familar with like Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, QuarkXpress, Microsoft Office (Which I like on the Mac btw), and a few great applications you won't find other places, like Final Cut Pro.
Although there are several small businesses, with fewer than 10 employees, that are fed up and I have overseen switching their computers from older windows machines to Macintosh, and the most common complaint is that there is no Solitare. Other than that they are happy things don't crash and Mac is easier to use. Drag 'n drop actually works.
Enough about Mac and back to Linux. The other thing that is taughted as Linux's great strength is also its achellis heel: flexablity. The fact that you could have 100 boxes with 100 different configurations is a nightmare for developers. Which desktop do you develop for, Gnome or KDE? How many users out there would understand that Gnome and KDE both are on Linux? One time at a local seminar we took 3 computers. 1 running RH/Gnome, 1 runnng SuSE/KDE, and 1 FreeBSD running KDE, and almost everyone in the room though the two running KDE were the same OS. They don't understand the difference nor care too, they just need it to work.
While generally paper mills are despised in academics, its is not uncommon to have one of my business partners ghost write white papers where I dictate the ideas and then they write up the papers. Often because I don't have the time and second of all, they are professional writers and write twice as well as I ever could. We quickly found out its faster if I set in front of a video camera or tape recorder what needs to be said and then have them write it in the first place rather than I write it up and then have them rewrite it because it sucked that bad.
Trust me, you can spend 5x's as much trouble shooting old software on new systems then it would have cost for "equal" performance if you had spent 3x's as much on the hardware in the first place...
But it would seem like JAVA would be more ideal for cell phones for basic programs, however I am sure we'll see a 1001 nokia address orgainizing scripts here soon.
On a side note, I haven't purchased any new games in over a year except for Ghost Recon for the PS2, and that was only after it was under $20.
I've been working with 64-bit chips since 1998 (DEC ALPHA systems and now G5's) and there has always been problems with heat and power. What's the battery life going to be on one of these machine?
The first page stated that BSD is for those who like Unix and Linux is for those that hate microsoft, and that last statment is not going to win support for Linux.
Take the Wikipedia asking for donations last week, half the posts here at slashdot were, "Why don't they go salvage a few old PIII 600's and cluster them together. Should only cost about two grand". Hell, an worthwhile opensource project needs some help paying the bills and they get ripped apart here. Sorry geeks, but Econ 101: There is no free lunch. It costs someone something somewhere. (Yes I did donate $25. Not much, but all that I could afford at the moment.)
I do use Linux, but mostly I do use some kind of BSD, whether it be Mac OS X, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD.
I see the people trying to either be funny or karma whoring state: Well if he can show me a freeBSD server that can survive a /.ing...and I have to ask, "How many sites are taken down a week by slashdotting running Linux?" Hell I know our little 2.Ghz Xeon box with 1GB of Ram wouldn't survive no matter what OS we had on there, it is Linux btw.
Bottom line...the negativity needs to go out of OSS. Linux cannot have the banner, "Microsoft Sucks! and use us because...Microsoft Sucks!" and hope to really make it into the desktop arena. OSS and Linux needs a banner of, "Hey our system works, has fewer viruses, easy to use, and it will do any thing Windows will do, except play games."
And to the "any thing you can do, I can do for free" dot communist crowd: In order to make Linux viable, its going to need programs written for it like games, quickbooks, quicken, adobe products, that people are willing to spend money on and need before it will truely be accepted main stream.
Get your offical "Mars time" watch replica for $99 today at thinkgeek.com...
Especially at the smaller end of the scale where you'll meet the most resistance from people. The most common arguement I hear is, "At least with Microsoft, if they would get sued, its their Ass, not mine". And its pretty damn hard to combat that mentality because I agree with them.
Without the support of people like IBM, HP, and Novell, Linux would have remained in the hands of "elitest nerdy smucks" as three dead trolls in a baggie once said.
My HP 48G is almost 10 years old. It still does more than I need it too and it only has 32k of ram. Hell it was good enough to send us to the moon, it's good enough to add, subtract, multiply, and solve stress equations on the fly...
With both Yahoo and Microsoft throughing huge sums of money into developing other search solutions, and the amount of sheer crap on google, doesn't seem like I can find the results I once could, the market is ripe for a new engine to come along.
I still remember the days of Altavista being king of the search world...
In fact they had 27 Quad 500Mhz Alpha chips with 4GB of RAM each configured into a renderfarm and one on one, still beat the replacement dual 2Ghz Xeon boxes which replaced them last year.
However, they condensed a 1500 sqr foot room full of servers and wires into two, and now getting a third, IBM blade unit in two cabinats for the price of just one of those Alpha servers a few years ago.
As for my current company, we're upgrading the video production unit to all G5's and they are great. We saw some dramatic improvement with the optimized FCP running on the dual 2Ghz G5 vs our older dual 1.25Ghz G4's.
We've built our company around Mac's from the ground up even with the horrible over priced XRaid for storage, but the amount of time we saved in having everything work together nicely has been worth the cost in dollars to us.
Personal, and professionally, I switched to an iBook about 18 months ago because I was sick of dealing with x86 based computers and their Operating systems, yes even Linux.
Same at work. When we went to purchase computers for our office, we bought everything from apple. I am sure we spent several thousand dollars more upfront, but we don't have to deal with lost productivity due to crashes, viriuses and the like.
Ebay has just taken the traditional auction and used the internet to automate much of the process.
Really, most internet businesses are just innovations, taking a new technology and using it to replace or suppliment an existing medium. The problem with most internet businesses in the dot com era was they didn't understand this and/or fell into the trap of "This is compeltely different" and it wasn't.
Now the internet has helped reduce cost in industries like mail order because it is possible to reach billons with one site unlike say a traditional catalog that would have to be mailed out which costs a lot of money in print and postage. However, there is no secert method to business models. Its still breaks down to: provide a product or service to fulfill a need. Do it well, keep down costs, and hopefully make a profit.