I really don't understand this idea that we "can't use multiple cores yet" because we don't have some magical, mythical necessary programming model that will make this come alive instantly. The fact is, we've had the necessary models for decades now. Adding multiple cores doesn't necessarily mean we need to change our programs at all, but rather it means we need to change our Operating Systems.
To the point: right now, we typically schedule applications to run on time-slices, to virtually expand one processor to every single process we have running. With multi-core, we need to change the way we schedule to be more granular, and to assign better core affinity (to the point where we can address specific cores directly from the operating system, always running the same application on the same core). Every task gets its own core, and can then use threading (or spawning another process) to request/force more core-time if necessary.
Ordinary desktops have been parallel for a long, long time, we've just hidden it from the users and from the programmers because it's hideously complex when it comes to timing and scheduling. The whole idea of the Operating System was to hide this complexity from the users to begin with, and to put it instead on the shoulders of smarter, better software that has been combed over and refined. To the point: our OSes have emulated parallel machines because we didn't have parallel machines, real-time (or at least near-real-time) multitasking would be impossible without it. Now, we have parallel machines, and we can stop emulating it or at least minimize our need to.
...Yet. You're right in the fact that these cores are incredibly simplistic, so much so that they make DSPs look functional, but really what's going on here is a science project to develop the on-chip network, not to develop the CPU cores as much. Intel envisions lifting the networking component out of this design and applying it to various different cores, so that a general computing core can be mixed in with DSP cores and other "Application Specific Accelerator" cores.
So no, this model you're not going to be running Firefox or your text editor on (in fact, I doubt you even _could_ do this, these cores currently are very, very stripped down in their capacity to do work, to where they're basically two MACs tied to a small SRAM and a "network adapter"), but never-say-never, this style of chip is right around the corner.
AMD's response was buying ATi in order to work on their future chip, "Fusion", which will incorporate somehow a GPU-type accelerator on-die or at least in-package with a traditional x86 CPU.
GPUs already have "many cores", if you can really call them that; 16 ROPs, 80 texture units, 64 shader cores, etc. Intel's approach is a much simpler architecture (in fact, "too simple" right now, the cores are practically feature-less), but DAAMIT's makes more business-sense (re-use what we've already got vs. invent something new).
Video of a table-based music interaction screen that's existed since around 2005. More-or-less, Microsoft combined this with Han's FTIR system and is now acting like they invented something, likely in response to Apple's iPhone and its multi-touch interface.
The one thing that's not detailed is the fact that Apple's multi-touch sensor can be spread over virtually any surface, whereas the one Microsoft's attempting to market has to be built into a table or something with substantial depth due to the need for a projector, camera, and IR optics. The capacitive sensor is a tad bit less accurate, but I'll take that for being able to be manufactured on thin-films and thusly be put on any device (multi-touch laptop mouse-pads ahoy).
So no, I'll pass on this one, I'll wait for my multi-touch portable, or at least something I can use upright.
You realize it took two quarters for Microsoft to sell a million zunes. It took one quarter for Apple to sell 10.5 million iPods. Even if you do that funky voodoo you do to the end of those numbers, you still have to take the percentage they "sold" and cut that in half (now we're looking at more like 5% of market share, at the absolute most optimistic).
That doesn't counteract the fact that Microsoft's "sales" numbers are to stores, and not to consumer's pockets.
Wouldn't Cairo (cairographics.org) be the perfect fit for a software 2D rasterizer? Might not be the fastest but it's there, it's usable, even Firefox is jumping on the boat.
I wish Apple would have bought both BeOS and NeXT; paring the interface bliss of Mac OS X with the backend of Be would make quite a formidable operating system.
The thalamus is a HUGE bank of relay switches in the brain- all these trunk cables go into it from all over. Basically anything you're paying attention to involves some circuit going through the thalamus, and the way the thalamus works is what limits your ability to focus on multiple things at once.
So what you're saying is, the Thalamus isn't the kernel of the brain (a kernel would imply software which would imply the Thalamus is actually software and not hardware), it's a Programmable Interrupt Controller.
H.264 is an Open Standard, as a part of MPEG-4. Apple's implementation is not Open Source, but there are Open Source implementations of H.264, the most notable of which is X.264.
When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.
"If you want say quad or dual graphic cards you would need to replace the motherboard, if you want the top of the line ram you need to replace the motherboard, if you want the best processor you need go out and buy it because apple does not offer core duo 2 extreme edition like alienware and dell, the best sound cards are for PCs and things like watercooling or high end psu are only supported by PCs. In the end you have the top moderate products but if you want a customisable computer or the best money can buy you need to stick with PCs."
If you want Quad graphics, the Mac Pro can do it now, just not with 8x/16x PCI-Express. In fact, that's a selling point for the Mac Pro. If you want Dual graphics, again, the Mac Pro can do it now, just not with Crossfire or SLI (multi-monitor support with 3D on each monitor basically). So this makes the Mac Pro pretty bad for Gamers (which will always configure their machines anyways), but it makes it great for professionals who want to run CAD across multiple monitors.
Furthermore, Apple doesn't offer the Core 2 Extreme (as you murdered the name) because instead it offers Woodcrest/Xeon 51xx processors. Woodcrest is a supercharged Core 2 chip, with more cache and a faster clockspeed (3GHz). Also, you get two Core 2 Xeons with the Mac Pro, that's 4 cores if your counting.
"The Best Soundcards" are all PCI/PCI-Express, and they plug into the Mac just as easily as they plug into a PC. Given the right driver, all would be fine. And before you push that argument, you should realize that a great deal of audio producers work on the Mac, which means pro hardware, which means MUCH, MUCH better sound cards than you could even put into a PC are available for the Mac.
Oh, and the RAM: DDR2 FB-DIMMs are faster than DDR2 DIMMs, but are more latent; good for pro applications, bad for games. Once again, score Mac Pro. Hey, it's even named "Pro", think that has anything to do with where Apple targeted the machine?
Why are you posting that to Slashdot: send Apple an email, tell them your market segment and what you want for the price. Tell them you want their machines to be more configurable. Tell them you'd like a larger enclosure so you can have room for things like multiple hard drives.
If it's reasonable, and Apple gets enough requests, they'll do something about it. The Mac Mini is a direct implementation of this: the market demanded a portable machine that wasn't a laptop. The LCD on the iMac makes it a bit difficult to transport, so they came up with the Mini, which is the iBook without an LCD and keyboard. What you're asking for is an iMac without the LCD, and that's not all that unreasonable either.
But then again, you could always just go with the mini and dump on some external HDs. But I guess some people need more graphics power than that. [rumor] Then again, you should probably expect a Mini with an updated graphics card and a Merom as the iG2 Mac Mini. [/rumor]
"So really, it is the price. Apple won't beat Dell at the bottom, but in the middle and top, Apple's already got them beat."
And of course, there's the fallacious point of "Apple's computers starting at $1000". Apparently you haven't heard of the Mac Mini, coming in at $599, just $199 more than Dell's "Bottom Line" and offering a ton more features.
Price is only the deciding factor right now because Dell set that one up a couple years back. Now Dell's cut so many corners on their machines their profits are beginning to fall, they're on the other side of the price slashing curve where quality isn't beating out quantity anymore. Apple's only cut margins slightly, and completely rebuilt their platform to make their machines entirely more marketable. All they have to do is show you the differences and let you play with the machines a bit.
With 50% of new purchasers being new to the Mac, we can assert their plan is working.
Your post is only slightly more funny than it is a troll. But, we'll go through the points.
"The Windows PC is a more or less open plattform."
That's gotta be one of the largest trolls I've ever heard in my entire life. Remember the whole "Anti-Trust" thing we went through years ago? Remember Microsoft being convicted of abusing their monopoly powers because of the fact that crucial parts of their platforms are closed? Ever tried to use NTFS on any other platform? Windows is as open as Aqua, and that is to say: NOT AT ALL.
"We often blame Microsoft but have to keep in mind that real mess is created by ugly third party drivers. Apple does not aim to support the whole hardware universe."
We often blame Microsoft for the same reason we should blame Microsoft; they sat back and let this happen to them. Microsoft could have been much more proactive from drivers from the start, including vendor certification and testing, and making their kernel hell to support devices. Things have gotten much better with a much better standardized OS (simply because it hasn't changed in 6 years), but the point remains.
Apple doesn't need to support all of the hardware under the sun; they're Apple, they sell Computing Platforms, not Computers and Operating Systems alone. Furthermore, other companies write drivers for Apple's operating system, and it honestly couldn't be much easier, as the Operating System is extremely friendly to driver writers (and there's extensive documentation on it). And of course, at the end of things, supporting every piece of obscure hardware in the world isn't the end of the world. We've got Linux for that.
"It is a interoperability hell from a competition perspective and a interoperability paradise from a plattform perspective. Happiness in proprietary slavery?"
Hypocrite much? Microsoft pushes Trusted Computing on you, is threatening to lock users out of hardware space altogether, and you're going to talk to us about Open Standards and Proprietary Slavery?
It is technically possible to port Mac OS X in order to be executable on general cheap Intel-Computers. But they do not want it. You know that GNUstep aimed at creating a runtime platform for Linux, Windows and Mac. So it should not be a problem for Apple to provide software which makes OS X apps run on Windows but they just don't want it.
It's technically possible to make monkeys fly out of people's asses too. But most people don't want that either. Apple could port the rest of Carbon and all of Cocoa to Windows for supporting Mac OS X applications to run on Windows if they cared to, but they're not caring to because, even though there are plenty of applications being written, they want to re-enforce the behavior, not restrict it. Maybe in the future when we have applications on the Mac that we absolutely "cannot live without", would Apple consider it again. In fact, there's rumors going around that Apple's had the code for ages, and that they're just waiting for the right moment to spring it on us, and it makes perfect sense.
What are the advantages of Apple?
- a strong, often specialised, user community, esp. in media and design
- many commercial applications esp. Video, graphic and Microsoft Office. Earlier IE was an argument.
- a fame of good usability
- some well designed applications such as iTunes
- marketing
You forgot "an extremely flexible API", a great set of Open Tools and Open Standards, and extremely reliable hardware/software integration. Then again you have the disadvantage of being limited to one segment of the market, but that really hasn't stopped any programmers nor purchasers. And now that you can run Windows on your Mac, there's a lot less reason not to buy it.
On the long run I do not think Apple's Operating Systems will survive. If the Open source community chose GNUstep instead of GNOME Apple would be history or liberated today.
On the long run, I don't think Microsoft's OS will survive, and I'm basing my point on the same crazy speculation as you are. That is, of course, if Apple got an injunction on Microsoft from selling Windows.
What Quicktime files can't you play on Linux? Apple's used MPEG-4 for ages now, and has strongly championed H.264 in both HD media and in iPod Video format. The container format's even more standard now, as they're using the.mp4 container more and more.
"At the top if you look at Alienware or High End dell systems dell is beating apple because apple just does not offer the best technology possible where they really thrive is the middle and media creators."
Be so kind as to explain this to me. Apple offers a very, very competitively configured and priced machine in the Mac Pro. The only thing that literally isn't the best on the Mac Pro is the hard disk (configurable, self manageable to save some bucks), and the video card (again, configurable, and self manageable if you want to save a few dollars and install yourself).
The software is top notch (and runs Windows if you just don't care for Mac OS X), the platform is incredibly feature rich using the newest processors, RAM, not a sign of old PCI (unlike most boards), Firewire 400 and 800, hell, Apple put so much attention into the design they spaced the video card port out on the motherboard as to not block a PCI-Express port if you need a dual-lane video card.
Another detractor could be said to be 16x PCI-Express SLI/Crossfire, but arguably the cards can't make use of that much bandwidth, and arguably it's not worth the price to who Apple configured the machines for: Professionals. Then again, either Intel will have to put out a 32x capable chipset, or Apple will have to go fishing for a new one (and there will be plenty to choose from).
So the fact is, as a professional workstation, there is nothing that is competitive with the Mac Pro. They've delivered more than anyone for the lowest price possible, and actually made it configurable enough to make it fit anyone's budget, even on the high end. Call me back when Dell stops slapping Intel design recommendation boards with Dell logos in their machines.
Hurray about those Open Standards huh? Good thing Apple's been a champion of them for years, with Quicktime supporting the book of Open Standards and VLC to support the rest of the nutso formats and encodings.
Oh, and for the record, not a lot of people are using WMV these days. XVID/DIVX do much better in encoding quality, iPod Video doesn't support WMV (and trust me, there are already a shitton not of only iPod video encoders, but people encoding people for it), and all of the big online sites are using weird Flash formats and there's a player on the Mac for that. I'd hate to make a guess on market penetration, but it's gotta be down there. If anything, it'll probably just make WMV->AVI encoders all that more prevalent.
Apparently, you missed it. Apple's new Mac Pro is cheaper than a comparatively configured Dell workstation machine.
But, on the overall, I agree; Apple's not fighting for the bottom dollar, Apple's positioned themselves as just a tad bit more expensive than the baselines from the Big Three, but with an enormous amount of extra features that make it that "bang for the buck". That factor alone could be considered a part of the "pricing war"; for all you get with an Apple computer, it'd take you not only longer to find a way to configure a competitive machine, but it's unlikely you could do it for cheaper without a ton of rebates, mail in coupons, etc.
So really, it is the price. Apple won't beat Dell at the bottom, but in the middle and top, Apple's already got them beat.
Before or after the quake, it changed Gravity, so.. it kind of matters.
Re:Plan 9 is cool
on
Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 4, Informative
Both are available today, and I can assure you Plan 9's Venti was first, and furthermore ZFS isn't really anything like it. Venti does data compression by removal of redundant data by (basically) writing a block, and then checksumming the block and using that sum to refer to the block in the future, so that if the software tries to write an identical block, it simply ignores the request. With an appropriate block size set, it can save lots and lots of space, however, it's very impractical as a day-to-day filesystem due to the datasets most people work with day-to-day (most of us work with lots of non-redundant data such as code files, video files, image files, etc.), though it would be a neat experiment to see what could be done with a modernized version of it.
Lots of things like this were/are revolutionary about Plan 9, simply because they were given the ability to do it. Some of them are great ideas (like Venti in conjunction with a database server, if the database server was tailored to the file system and didn't do stupid things...), and some of them could still use a great deal of work. Either way, I welcome our Plan 9 overlords from Outer Space.
uhh Dell? Sure, they probably won't use the OS themselves, but they damned sure will sell it!
To be truthful, that's the only way Vista will make money. Very few people will actually run out to buy Vista for the Wonderful New Technologies (tm) contained within.
That'll work just about as good as taking down all of the file sharers in the world. All of the popular OS software will turn into ghostwrite OS software with anonymous dropboxes in countries without absurd patent laws.
Beat that, they'll move to encryption. The company's can't win, and most of the patents are overtly obvious anyways and should be thrown out. If anything, Open Source will likely cause a patent revolution for that reason alone (just as downloaded music is changing the face of copyright as we know it).
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I really don't understand this idea that we "can't use multiple cores yet" because we don't have some magical, mythical necessary programming model that will make this come alive instantly. The fact is, we've had the necessary models for decades now. Adding multiple cores doesn't necessarily mean we need to change our programs at all, but rather it means we need to change our Operating Systems.
To the point: right now, we typically schedule applications to run on time-slices, to virtually expand one processor to every single process we have running. With multi-core, we need to change the way we schedule to be more granular, and to assign better core affinity (to the point where we can address specific cores directly from the operating system, always running the same application on the same core). Every task gets its own core, and can then use threading (or spawning another process) to request/force more core-time if necessary.
Ordinary desktops have been parallel for a long, long time, we've just hidden it from the users and from the programmers because it's hideously complex when it comes to timing and scheduling. The whole idea of the Operating System was to hide this complexity from the users to begin with, and to put it instead on the shoulders of smarter, better software that has been combed over and refined. To the point: our OSes have emulated parallel machines because we didn't have parallel machines, real-time (or at least near-real-time) multitasking would be impossible without it. Now, we have parallel machines, and we can stop emulating it or at least minimize our need to.
"This isn't a general purpose processor."
...Yet. You're right in the fact that these cores are incredibly simplistic, so much so that they make DSPs look functional, but really what's going on here is a science project to develop the on-chip network, not to develop the CPU cores as much. Intel envisions lifting the networking component out of this design and applying it to various different cores, so that a general computing core can be mixed in with DSP cores and other "Application Specific Accelerator" cores.
So no, this model you're not going to be running Firefox or your text editor on (in fact, I doubt you even _could_ do this, these cores currently are very, very stripped down in their capacity to do work, to where they're basically two MACs tied to a small SRAM and a "network adapter"), but never-say-never, this style of chip is right around the corner.
AMD's response was buying ATi in order to work on their future chip, "Fusion", which will incorporate somehow a GPU-type accelerator on-die or at least in-package with a traditional x86 CPU.
GPUs already have "many cores", if you can really call them that; 16 ROPs, 80 texture units, 64 shader cores, etc. Intel's approach is a much simpler architecture (in fact, "too simple" right now, the cores are practically feature-less), but DAAMIT's makes more business-sense (re-use what we've already got vs. invent something new).
I remember when Pentium was the next huge chip from Intel that was a few years off.
I guess we all know how that one turned out.
They didn't even invent the interactions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thA_Oox1Cfc
Video of a table-based music interaction screen that's existed since around 2005. More-or-less, Microsoft combined this with Han's FTIR system and is now acting like they invented something, likely in response to Apple's iPhone and its multi-touch interface.
The one thing that's not detailed is the fact that Apple's multi-touch sensor can be spread over virtually any surface, whereas the one Microsoft's attempting to market has to be built into a table or something with substantial depth due to the need for a projector, camera, and IR optics. The capacitive sensor is a tad bit less accurate, but I'll take that for being able to be manufactured on thin-films and thusly be put on any device (multi-touch laptop mouse-pads ahoy).
So no, I'll pass on this one, I'll wait for my multi-touch portable, or at least something I can use upright.
You realize it took two quarters for Microsoft to sell a million zunes. It took one quarter for Apple to sell 10.5 million iPods. Even if you do that funky voodoo you do to the end of those numbers, you still have to take the percentage they "sold" and cut that in half (now we're looking at more like 5% of market share, at the absolute most optimistic).
That doesn't counteract the fact that Microsoft's "sales" numbers are to stores, and not to consumer's pockets.
Oddly enough, #134:
"Screw the salute--Diet Coke and Mentos jetpack!"
Killing two birds with one stone.
"malware program is commercial software." You admit you write malware, and use it commercially? On Slashdot? You are one brave soul. ;)
Wouldn't Cairo (cairographics.org) be the perfect fit for a software 2D rasterizer? Might not be the fastest but it's there, it's usable, even Firefox is jumping on the boat.
I wish Apple would have bought both BeOS and NeXT; paring the interface bliss of Mac OS X with the backend of Be would make quite a formidable operating system.
The thalamus is a HUGE bank of relay switches in the brain- all these trunk cables go into it from all over. Basically anything you're paying attention to involves some circuit going through the thalamus, and the way the thalamus works is what limits your ability to focus on multiple things at once.
So what you're saying is, the Thalamus isn't the kernel of the brain (a kernel would imply software which would imply the Thalamus is actually software and not hardware), it's a Programmable Interrupt Controller.
H.264 is an Open Standard, as a part of MPEG-4. Apple's implementation is not Open Source, but there are Open Source implementations of H.264, the most notable of which is X.264.
When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.
"If you want say quad or dual graphic cards you would need to replace the motherboard, if you want the top of the line ram you need to replace the motherboard, if you want the best processor you need go out and buy it because apple does not offer core duo 2 extreme edition like alienware and dell, the best sound cards are for PCs and things like watercooling or high end psu are only supported by PCs. In the end you have the top moderate products but if you want a customisable computer or the best money can buy you need to stick with PCs."
If you want Quad graphics, the Mac Pro can do it now, just not with 8x/16x PCI-Express. In fact, that's a selling point for the Mac Pro. If you want Dual graphics, again, the Mac Pro can do it now, just not with Crossfire or SLI (multi-monitor support with 3D on each monitor basically). So this makes the Mac Pro pretty bad for Gamers (which will always configure their machines anyways), but it makes it great for professionals who want to run CAD across multiple monitors.
Furthermore, Apple doesn't offer the Core 2 Extreme (as you murdered the name) because instead it offers Woodcrest/Xeon 51xx processors. Woodcrest is a supercharged Core 2 chip, with more cache and a faster clockspeed (3GHz). Also, you get two Core 2 Xeons with the Mac Pro, that's 4 cores if your counting.
"The Best Soundcards" are all PCI/PCI-Express, and they plug into the Mac just as easily as they plug into a PC. Given the right driver, all would be fine. And before you push that argument, you should realize that a great deal of audio producers work on the Mac, which means pro hardware, which means MUCH, MUCH better sound cards than you could even put into a PC are available for the Mac.
Oh, and the RAM: DDR2 FB-DIMMs are faster than DDR2 DIMMs, but are more latent; good for pro applications, bad for games. Once again, score Mac Pro. Hey, it's even named "Pro", think that has anything to do with where Apple targeted the machine?
Why are you posting that to Slashdot: send Apple an email, tell them your market segment and what you want for the price. Tell them you want their machines to be more configurable. Tell them you'd like a larger enclosure so you can have room for things like multiple hard drives.
If it's reasonable, and Apple gets enough requests, they'll do something about it. The Mac Mini is a direct implementation of this: the market demanded a portable machine that wasn't a laptop. The LCD on the iMac makes it a bit difficult to transport, so they came up with the Mini, which is the iBook without an LCD and keyboard. What you're asking for is an iMac without the LCD, and that's not all that unreasonable either.
But then again, you could always just go with the mini and dump on some external HDs. But I guess some people need more graphics power than that. [rumor] Then again, you should probably expect a Mini with an updated graphics card and a Merom as the iG2 Mac Mini. [/rumor]
From my original post:
"So really, it is the price. Apple won't beat Dell at the bottom, but in the middle and top, Apple's already got them beat."
And of course, there's the fallacious point of "Apple's computers starting at $1000". Apparently you haven't heard of the Mac Mini, coming in at $599, just $199 more than Dell's "Bottom Line" and offering a ton more features.
Price is only the deciding factor right now because Dell set that one up a couple years back. Now Dell's cut so many corners on their machines their profits are beginning to fall, they're on the other side of the price slashing curve where quality isn't beating out quantity anymore. Apple's only cut margins slightly, and completely rebuilt their platform to make their machines entirely more marketable. All they have to do is show you the differences and let you play with the machines a bit.
With 50% of new purchasers being new to the Mac, we can assert their plan is working.
Your post is only slightly more funny than it is a troll. But, we'll go through the points.
"The Windows PC is a more or less open plattform."
That's gotta be one of the largest trolls I've ever heard in my entire life. Remember the whole "Anti-Trust" thing we went through years ago? Remember Microsoft being convicted of abusing their monopoly powers because of the fact that crucial parts of their platforms are closed? Ever tried to use NTFS on any other platform? Windows is as open as Aqua, and that is to say: NOT AT ALL.
"We often blame Microsoft but have to keep in mind that real mess is created by ugly third party drivers. Apple does not aim to support the whole hardware universe."
We often blame Microsoft for the same reason we should blame Microsoft; they sat back and let this happen to them. Microsoft could have been much more proactive from drivers from the start, including vendor certification and testing, and making their kernel hell to support devices. Things have gotten much better with a much better standardized OS (simply because it hasn't changed in 6 years), but the point remains.
Apple doesn't need to support all of the hardware under the sun; they're Apple, they sell Computing Platforms, not Computers and Operating Systems alone. Furthermore, other companies write drivers for Apple's operating system, and it honestly couldn't be much easier, as the Operating System is extremely friendly to driver writers (and there's extensive documentation on it). And of course, at the end of things, supporting every piece of obscure hardware in the world isn't the end of the world. We've got Linux for that.
"It is a interoperability hell from a competition perspective and a interoperability paradise from a plattform perspective. Happiness in proprietary slavery?"
Hypocrite much? Microsoft pushes Trusted Computing on you, is threatening to lock users out of hardware space altogether, and you're going to talk to us about Open Standards and Proprietary Slavery?
It is technically possible to port Mac OS X in order to be executable on general cheap Intel-Computers. But they do not want it. You know that GNUstep aimed at creating a runtime platform for Linux, Windows and Mac. So it should not be a problem for Apple to provide software which makes OS X apps run on Windows but they just don't want it.
It's technically possible to make monkeys fly out of people's asses too. But most people don't want that either. Apple could port the rest of Carbon and all of Cocoa to Windows for supporting Mac OS X applications to run on Windows if they cared to, but they're not caring to because, even though there are plenty of applications being written, they want to re-enforce the behavior, not restrict it. Maybe in the future when we have applications on the Mac that we absolutely "cannot live without", would Apple consider it again. In fact, there's rumors going around that Apple's had the code for ages, and that they're just waiting for the right moment to spring it on us, and it makes perfect sense.
What are the advantages of Apple? - a strong, often specialised, user community, esp. in media and design - many commercial applications esp. Video, graphic and Microsoft Office. Earlier IE was an argument. - a fame of good usability - some well designed applications such as iTunes - marketing
You forgot "an extremely flexible API", a great set of Open Tools and Open Standards, and extremely reliable hardware/software integration. Then again you have the disadvantage of being limited to one segment of the market, but that really hasn't stopped any programmers nor purchasers. And now that you can run Windows on your Mac, there's a lot less reason not to buy it.
On the long run I do not think Apple's Operating Systems will survive. If the Open source community chose GNUstep instead of GNOME Apple would be history or liberated today.
On the long run, I don't think Microsoft's OS will survive, and I'm basing my point on the same crazy speculation as you are. That is, of course, if Apple got an injunction on Microsoft from selling Windows.
What Quicktime files can't you play on Linux? Apple's used MPEG-4 for ages now, and has strongly championed H.264 in both HD media and in iPod Video format. The container format's even more standard now, as they're using the .mp4 container more and more.
"At the top if you look at Alienware or High End dell systems dell is beating apple because apple just does not offer the best technology possible where they really thrive is the middle and media creators."
Be so kind as to explain this to me. Apple offers a very, very competitively configured and priced machine in the Mac Pro. The only thing that literally isn't the best on the Mac Pro is the hard disk (configurable, self manageable to save some bucks), and the video card (again, configurable, and self manageable if you want to save a few dollars and install yourself).
The software is top notch (and runs Windows if you just don't care for Mac OS X), the platform is incredibly feature rich using the newest processors, RAM, not a sign of old PCI (unlike most boards), Firewire 400 and 800, hell, Apple put so much attention into the design they spaced the video card port out on the motherboard as to not block a PCI-Express port if you need a dual-lane video card.
Another detractor could be said to be 16x PCI-Express SLI/Crossfire, but arguably the cards can't make use of that much bandwidth, and arguably it's not worth the price to who Apple configured the machines for: Professionals. Then again, either Intel will have to put out a 32x capable chipset, or Apple will have to go fishing for a new one (and there will be plenty to choose from).
So the fact is, as a professional workstation, there is nothing that is competitive with the Mac Pro. They've delivered more than anyone for the lowest price possible, and actually made it configurable enough to make it fit anyone's budget, even on the high end. Call me back when Dell stops slapping Intel design recommendation boards with Dell logos in their machines.
Hurray about those Open Standards huh? Good thing Apple's been a champion of them for years, with Quicktime supporting the book of Open Standards and VLC to support the rest of the nutso formats and encodings.
Oh, and for the record, not a lot of people are using WMV these days. XVID/DIVX do much better in encoding quality, iPod Video doesn't support WMV (and trust me, there are already a shitton not of only iPod video encoders, but people encoding people for it), and all of the big online sites are using weird Flash formats and there's a player on the Mac for that. I'd hate to make a guess on market penetration, but it's gotta be down there. If anything, it'll probably just make WMV->AVI encoders all that more prevalent.
Apparently, you missed it. Apple's new Mac Pro is cheaper than a comparatively configured Dell workstation machine.
But, on the overall, I agree; Apple's not fighting for the bottom dollar, Apple's positioned themselves as just a tad bit more expensive than the baselines from the Big Three, but with an enormous amount of extra features that make it that "bang for the buck". That factor alone could be considered a part of the "pricing war"; for all you get with an Apple computer, it'd take you not only longer to find a way to configure a competitive machine, but it's unlikely you could do it for cheaper without a ton of rebates, mail in coupons, etc.
So really, it is the price. Apple won't beat Dell at the bottom, but in the middle and top, Apple's already got them beat.
Before or after the quake, it changed Gravity, so.. it kind of matters.
Both are available today, and I can assure you Plan 9's Venti was first, and furthermore ZFS isn't really anything like it. Venti does data compression by removal of redundant data by (basically) writing a block, and then checksumming the block and using that sum to refer to the block in the future, so that if the software tries to write an identical block, it simply ignores the request. With an appropriate block size set, it can save lots and lots of space, however, it's very impractical as a day-to-day filesystem due to the datasets most people work with day-to-day (most of us work with lots of non-redundant data such as code files, video files, image files, etc.), though it would be a neat experiment to see what could be done with a modernized version of it.
Lots of things like this were/are revolutionary about Plan 9, simply because they were given the ability to do it. Some of them are great ideas (like Venti in conjunction with a database server, if the database server was tailored to the file system and didn't do stupid things...), and some of them could still use a great deal of work. Either way, I welcome our Plan 9 overlords from Outer Space.
uhh Dell? Sure, they probably won't use the OS themselves, but they damned sure will sell it!
To be truthful, that's the only way Vista will make money. Very few people will actually run out to buy Vista for the Wonderful New Technologies (tm) contained within.
This article was written by Bruce Perens, immediately invalidating its duplicate status.
"Which they will if they get sued into oblivion."
That'll work just about as good as taking down all of the file sharers in the world. All of the popular OS software will turn into ghostwrite OS software with anonymous dropboxes in countries without absurd patent laws.
Beat that, they'll move to encryption. The company's can't win, and most of the patents are overtly obvious anyways and should be thrown out. If anything, Open Source will likely cause a patent revolution for that reason alone (just as downloaded music is changing the face of copyright as we know it).