This isn't what the patent is about, though. It's trivial to put your home on removable media. The trick (and I hope the devil's in the details, because the concept isn't all that interesting) is to have the login info and credentials on the external media as well, and have the OS hook into it so you can walk up to a machine with your iPod (or firewire HD), plug it in, and log into the machine. Obviously there are some security implications yadda yadda, and without knowing what the final solution looks like I have no idea how that would be handled.
There's obviously prior art here; it seems Apple is citing a lot of it. I'm interested in what (if anything) new is brought to the table. No doubt it will be called the largest thing ever in a keynote;-)
Because with Parallels you need to pay for Parallels, and you need to pay for a Windows license. This is substantially more than the "$0" you pay to Microsoft for a Windows license with Crossover. Big difference, if all you need is one or two applications.
No, I understand why IT would dictate it. There are many reasons -- some good, some not so good.
It doesn't change the fact, though, that it really depends on IT's defined role in the organization. Are they there to support their users (and whatever their users see as necessary to be efficient), or to make IT's life of supporting the users easy? This is a balancing act -- and if supporting multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, whatever...) is important, then in many cases it will be necessary to add IT staff to perform this. This has a cost, of course -- one the company must be prepared to pay.
What do you mean? Lots of people use Macs for business, or *want* to use Macs for business. Usually (this is assuming an IT department who is reasonable, and more and more actually are), it boils down to one or two business critical applications that are Windows only. Some of the most common ones are:
* Microsoft Outlook (because Entourage is 98% of the way there... and that's not 100%) * Microsoft Project * Microsoft Visio * Microsoft Access (and custom databases that have become "business critical" * Internet Explorer 6 (with all its bastardized VBScript and.NUT client-side proprietary extensions) * CAD tools (Pro/E, SolidWorks, etc).
VM solutions like Parallels (and upcoming VMWare workstation) can do this, as can Boot Camp. But Crossover is lighter weight and works well also. Crossover is a very interesting and exciting option.
Again, this is predicated on whether IT permits it. I find IT departments are mostly divided into a couple groups:
* IT feels their job is to dictate technology -- they choose what's most convenient for them to control and manage, and put IT's needs in front of the users needs (i.e. users who want to run Linux or OS X on the desktop must fight and scratch and are sometimes locked out of the network altogether). CrossOver is no use here, nor is Parallels -- you offend the director of IT because he'll fall out of his l337 company with his Microsoft sales rep, and will also offend his staff of 43 MSCEs that are necessary to manage one Exchange instance;-)
* IT who feels IT's job is to serve the needs of the business... basically they are willing to deploy and support solutions that have business value (I even heard one CIO say he let users use Macs because it was a competitive differentator when hiring... if a user could run a Mac all day at work he got more productivity out of them... this company ships tens of millions of DVDs to people in the mail every year... they're progressive;-)
Businesses *still* have a problem with Linux on the desktop, because they're impossible to manage currently. Corporations have all their user info in Active Directory today. So you need Linux with a few things:
1) Ability to authenticate and authorize with AD. This means LDAP *and* Kerberos. Unfortunately, most Linux + LDAP currently stores passwords as crypt in LDAP. That won't fly.
2) Ability to do package management, handle closed-source packages and binaries, and lock users from fiddling with stuff. This is still largely "the wild west" on Linux today. The more freedom you give the individual user, the more effort it tends to be on IT.
OS X can handle both of these well today. Linux... generally doesn't yet, or else it costs too much for managed versions that *do* this. I regularly hear from people who have to pay hundreds of dollars per year for Linux versions that support this -- costs that are actually far in excess of Windows and OS X. Sure, you can get the free versions, but then you're back to "hard to manage.'
Linux works very well today in server environments. Desktop Linux is still very challenging for IT... and laptop Linux "just sucks" right now, due to poor support for wireless and sleep/resume. I'd find the 4 page article on enabling sleep/resume on a Linux + Thinkpad combo, if I wanted a good laugh;-)
I don't know. I was playing with an install of Suse Enterprise Linux in a Parallels VM last week. The display resolution was wrong (it was 1024x768 on a MacBook Pro; I wanted to get it to the native 1400x850 in full screen mode). There was no control panel for this, that I could find.
That is, there is STILL no GUI-based way to change the resolution. Am I SERIOUSLY expected to drop to a shell, run Xconfigurator (or equivalent), kill my X session (forget how to do that), and then fire it back up and pray that it works? Oh and if it doesn't, I have to find another machine, go surfing Google to find out which file to modify, and trapse through it in an hour's worth of work?
c'mon... that's just NOT ready for anyone but people who are dedicated to make it work on a daily basis. The LAST thing you want to do is coach your MOM through this... and it's something Windows and Mac machines have been able to do for TEN YEARS.
What's management going to be like on that homebrew system? Sure, BYO can be cheapest but allocationg/partitioning/whatever is going to take up substantially more of "someone's time," which even if they pay that person $40K/year the cost to a company is at least $80K/year all things considered.
No, you won't make more money in the short run. Americans are *enormously* price driven -- cheap nearly always wins here, without respect to longevity. We're awash with throw-away equipment; very few people (VERY few) will pay a 10% premium for a better part.
In Switzerland, sure, but here in the US; no. Hence Wal-mart, Target, etc., which sell to 90% of people, far far larger than the "boutique" shops with high-end stuff.
You've done "several bulb changes" when you have to replace the bulb "every 3000 hours or so?"
Let's see, 6 hours/day 7 days/week is 42 hours/week... roughly 2200 hours/year. So you watch a LOT of TV *and* you've had this thing for 8 years? Methinks your numbers don't add up. What's the real deal? Do the bulbs actually only last 1000 hours or really do you do nothing but watch TV? How do you have time to type this... TV going in the background?
You should check your facts, though -- iPods + iTMS are still not the majority of Apple's business -- the Mac business still the larger portion. It's like $6B for iPods, and $8B for Macs, software, etc.
So over the past 4 years iPods have gone from $0 to $6B and Macs have gone from $5.7B to $8B. Whether these lines will cross in the future I don't know... we'll see. But today, iPods are *not* the majority of Apple's business. And Apple has seen real market share gains (from 2% to 4%) in the last 24 months.
Well, Turrott has done a fairly large turnaround in the last 6 months, in general. He bought his wife an iMac I believe, and has spent most of the last 6 months mostly singing Apple's praises.
You can configure as many virtual desktops if you want -- the default is 4 (2x2) but you can add rows or colums as you see fit. I went to 16 (4x4) and that was fine... I don't know whether 36 or heck 81 would be manageable. I'm sure it would be RAM heavy;-)
The ability to bind applications to individual "spaces" is nice, as is the ability to dynamically drag windows between them. Clicking on an application icon automatically moves you to the appropriate space; this should mean much less (where is that damn window, it's buried!) that I still experience, even on my 30" Cinema Display. I thought this would be enough space for that to not happen anymore; all I have now is *huge* browser and mail windows.
Is it a quantum leap in virtual desktop managers? No. But switching between them is quick, efficient, and easy (you can use control-space # to go to it, or control-arrow key)... so it really just gives you a desktop space many times your actual space... that's what it feels like. None of the cube effects a la You! desktops, which is slow and mostly eye-candy-esque.
I worked for Persistence in 1996-1997. They had been around for 4+ years at that point, so their O/R mapping stuff dates back to 1993 or before. They had a number of patents on O/R mapping at the time, and later got more patents for their "caching" algorithms which seemed a bit more vague.
They were acquired by Progress Software in 2004 or 2005... I haven't seen any lawsuits from either of them.
But this is really curious, as things like O/R mapping have been around for a very long time... heck the EJB specification itself, which dates back to 1999 or so, includes O/R mapping as a part of it... entity beans must have persistence.
This infringement lawsuit then *must* hinge on some very specific technology pieces that have been violated. I mean, otherwise, as bad as the patent process is, if they missed the fact that the concept has been around with prior art for 10 years, and with specifications that mandate it for 5 years... talk about a joke.
It's just fibre attached storage, so you can use whatever servers you want as the head units. List is 7 TB for $13K... if you're going to scale up a lot you can certainly ask Apple for a discount.
Not *the* cheapest out there, but fast, reliable, and works well with Linux or whatever server heads you want.
I went to Stanford for graduate school (was there grade inflation there -- maybe -- for grad school the guideline to the faculty was 40% A, 50% B, 10% C -- but then again, the people WERE very qualified and they really DID know their stuff so when I was going for my masters in EE the competition was very stiff, given it wasn't my undergrad). Stanford has a fairly good reputation as an academic university -- more or less equivalent to the Ivy league colleges. Oh and there is TONS of research and grant money and Nobel prizes yadda yadda -- my EE professor had actually founded MIPS.
I spent 1.5 years at Santa Clara University (small, private, catholic college) and they had none of the "awards." What they did have was an interest in TEACHING -- which the Stanford professors and TAs didn't have so much.
I will say the Santa Clara education was FAR better from a "let's teach you" perspective, where Stanford was more like "I'm great, oh and you are keeping me from doing research for grant money but be happy you're in the room with me... my TAs will give you the test, hope you can learn the material, smart guys."
Oracle has a couple initiatives going on... RAC and ASM. Here's about how it works (these are BROAD numbers, mind you).
6 years ago, before the.com crash, your average back-end IT infrastructure had a few main pieces:
Cisco networking gear. Sun servers. EMC disks. Oracle database.
So you paid a few mil for the network. A few mil for the servers. A few mil for the EMC disks. And a mil or two for Oracle at $10K/cpu (list)
NOW, Oracle says "we have 10g RAC, use us to replicate across CPUs. Don't pay $3M + $1M/year for Sun support... buy a rack of Linux servers (or blades) and hardware costs $250K versus $3M... support is nearly free because if a machine fails, just pull it from the rack, throw it in the trash, and swap a new one in there.'
And lo, they promoted "Linux is unbreakable" and charged an extra $10K/cpu for this service. Total end cost to customer is LESS than the old solution, and it's way FASTER.
Then, they have another initiative... use ASM and the low-cost storage initiative... use the database to span multiple disks, and handle all the replication/redundancy. Don't pay EMC $3M + $1M/year for Symmetrix support. Put it on lower cost gear (Clariion, Nexsan ATAboy, or *gasp* Apple Xserve RAID even). Spindle speeds are slower, so you buy 2x as many spindles and get the same IOPS. Hey, you save a couple million and pay more per CPU (say $40K/cpu list) for the whole shootin' match.
$2M Cisco + $500K Dell + $500K Dell or Apple + $4M Oracle = $7M + maintenance
You save $3M a year! Of course Oracle gets a bigger cut. But it's "win-win."
Of course, there is the one subtlety here -- you are now using Oracle's RAC and ASM so you can use cheap hardware and storage. This stuff is totally proprietary, so if Oracle comes back come renewal time and doubles your per-CPU cost for the software, it's a helluva lot harder to rip it out than just porting stored-procedure code.
Slashdot Mirror
You're using the wrong products. The Mac Pro is the desktop system with the dual Woodcrest processors.
The MacBook Pro (laptop) isn't cheaper than a Dell notebook. Though the new ones are closer -- and they come with sufficient RAM (2 GB), hallelujah!
This isn't what the patent is about, though. It's trivial to put your home on removable media. The trick (and I hope the devil's in the details, because the concept isn't all that interesting) is to have the login info and credentials on the external media as well, and have the OS hook into it so you can walk up to a machine with your iPod (or firewire HD), plug it in, and log into the machine. Obviously there are some security implications yadda yadda, and without knowing what the final solution looks like I have no idea how that would be handled.
;-)
There's obviously prior art here; it seems Apple is citing a lot of it. I'm interested in what (if anything) new is brought to the table. No doubt it will be called the largest thing ever in a keynote
*shrug*
;-)
Don't know *why* it requires this. But it is a known issue, and enabling IPv6 is the solution
Hmmm... doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
;-)
And oh, my bad, that's special relativity, not general relativity
Why?
Because with Parallels you need to pay for Parallels, and you need to pay for a Windows license. This is substantially more than the "$0" you pay to Microsoft for a Windows license with Crossover. Big difference, if all you need is one or two applications.
No, I understand why IT would dictate it. There are many reasons -- some good, some not so good.
It doesn't change the fact, though, that it really depends on IT's defined role in the organization. Are they there to support their users (and whatever their users see as necessary to be efficient), or to make IT's life of supporting the users easy? This is a balancing act -- and if supporting multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, whatever...) is important, then in many cases it will be necessary to add IT staff to perform this. This has a cost, of course -- one the company must be prepared to pay.
Seriously?
.NUT client-side proprietary extensions)
;-)
;-)
What do you mean? Lots of people use Macs for business, or *want* to use Macs for business. Usually (this is assuming an IT department who is reasonable, and more and more actually are), it boils down to one or two business critical applications that are Windows only. Some of the most common ones are:
* Microsoft Outlook (because Entourage is 98% of the way there... and that's not 100%)
* Microsoft Project
* Microsoft Visio
* Microsoft Access (and custom databases that have become "business critical"
* Internet Explorer 6 (with all its bastardized VBScript and
* CAD tools (Pro/E, SolidWorks, etc).
VM solutions like Parallels (and upcoming VMWare workstation) can do this, as can Boot Camp. But Crossover is lighter weight and works well also. Crossover is a very interesting and exciting option.
Again, this is predicated on whether IT permits it. I find IT departments are mostly divided into a couple groups:
* IT feels their job is to dictate technology -- they choose what's most convenient for them to control and manage, and put IT's needs in front of the users needs (i.e. users who want to run Linux or OS X on the desktop must fight and scratch and are sometimes locked out of the network altogether). CrossOver is no use here, nor is Parallels -- you offend the director of IT because he'll fall out of his l337 company with his Microsoft sales rep, and will also offend his staff of 43 MSCEs that are necessary to manage one Exchange instance
* IT who feels IT's job is to serve the needs of the business... basically they are willing to deploy and support solutions that have business value (I even heard one CIO say he let users use Macs because it was a competitive differentator when hiring... if a user could run a Mac all day at work he got more productivity out of them... this company ships tens of millions of DVDs to people in the mail every year... they're progressive
Crossover is perfect for the second case.
Businesses *still* have a problem with Linux on the desktop, because they're impossible to manage currently. Corporations have all their user info in Active Directory today. So you need Linux with a few things:
;-)
1) Ability to authenticate and authorize with AD. This means LDAP *and* Kerberos. Unfortunately, most Linux + LDAP currently stores passwords as crypt in LDAP. That won't fly.
2) Ability to do package management, handle closed-source packages and binaries, and lock users from fiddling with stuff. This is still largely "the wild west" on Linux today. The more freedom you give the individual user, the more effort it tends to be on IT.
OS X can handle both of these well today. Linux... generally doesn't yet, or else it costs too much for managed versions that *do* this. I regularly hear from people who have to pay hundreds of dollars per year for Linux versions that support this -- costs that are actually far in excess of Windows and OS X. Sure, you can get the free versions, but then you're back to "hard to manage.'
Linux works very well today in server environments. Desktop Linux is still very challenging for IT... and laptop Linux "just sucks" right now, due to poor support for wireless and sleep/resume. I'd find the 4 page article on enabling sleep/resume on a Linux + Thinkpad combo, if I wanted a good laugh
I don't know. I was playing with an install of Suse Enterprise Linux in a Parallels VM last week. The display resolution was wrong (it was 1024x768 on a MacBook Pro; I wanted to get it to the native 1400x850 in full screen mode). There was no control panel for this, that I could find.
That is, there is STILL no GUI-based way to change the resolution. Am I SERIOUSLY expected to drop to a shell, run Xconfigurator (or equivalent), kill my X session (forget how to do that), and then fire it back up and pray that it works? Oh and if it doesn't, I have to find another machine, go surfing Google to find out which file to modify, and trapse through it in an hour's worth of work?
c'mon... that's just NOT ready for anyone but people who are dedicated to make it work on a daily basis. The LAST thing you want to do is coach your MOM through this... and it's something Windows and Mac machines have been able to do for TEN YEARS.
Are you saying war is beginning?
Oh noes! Who set us up the bomb?
WE HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE OUR TIME.
What's management going to be like on that homebrew system? Sure, BYO can be cheapest but allocationg/partitioning/whatever is going to take up substantially more of "someone's time," which even if they pay that person $40K/year the cost to a company is at least $80K/year all things considered.
No, you won't make more money in the short run. Americans are *enormously* price driven -- cheap nearly always wins here, without respect to longevity. We're awash with throw-away equipment; very few people (VERY few) will pay a 10% premium for a better part.
In Switzerland, sure, but here in the US; no. Hence Wal-mart, Target, etc., which sell to 90% of people, far far larger than the "boutique" shops with high-end stuff.
You've done "several bulb changes" when you have to replace the bulb "every 3000 hours or so?"
Let's see, 6 hours/day 7 days/week is 42 hours/week... roughly 2200 hours/year. So you watch a LOT of TV *and* you've had this thing for 8 years? Methinks your numbers don't add up. What's the real deal? Do the bulbs actually only last 1000 hours or really do you do nothing but watch TV? How do you have time to type this... TV going in the background?
You should check your facts, though -- iPods + iTMS are still not the majority of Apple's business -- the Mac business still the larger portion. It's like $6B for iPods, and $8B for Macs, software, etc.
So over the past 4 years iPods have gone from $0 to $6B and Macs have gone from $5.7B to $8B. Whether these lines will cross in the future I don't know... we'll see. But today, iPods are *not* the majority of Apple's business. And Apple has seen real market share gains (from 2% to 4%) in the last 24 months.
Well, Turrott has done a fairly large turnaround in the last 6 months, in general. He bought his wife an iMac I believe, and has spent most of the last 6 months mostly singing Apple's praises.
I've played with Spaces briefly; it's nice.
;-)
You can configure as many virtual desktops if you want -- the default is 4 (2x2) but you can add rows or colums as you see fit. I went to 16 (4x4) and that was fine... I don't know whether 36 or heck 81 would be manageable. I'm sure it would be RAM heavy
The ability to bind applications to individual "spaces" is nice, as is the ability to dynamically drag windows between them. Clicking on an application icon automatically moves you to the appropriate space; this should mean much less (where is that damn window, it's buried!) that I still experience, even on my 30" Cinema Display. I thought this would be enough space for that to not happen anymore; all I have now is *huge* browser and mail windows.
Is it a quantum leap in virtual desktop managers? No. But switching between them is quick, efficient, and easy (you can use control-space # to go to it, or control-arrow key)... so it really just gives you a desktop space many times your actual space... that's what it feels like. None of the cube effects a la You! desktops, which is slow and mostly eye-candy-esque.
rofl. right.
I worked for Persistence in 1996-1997. They had been around for 4+ years at that point, so their O/R mapping stuff dates back to 1993 or before. They had a number of patents on O/R mapping at the time, and later got more patents for their "caching" algorithms which seemed a bit more vague.
They were acquired by Progress Software in 2004 or 2005... I haven't seen any lawsuits from either of them.
But this is really curious, as things like O/R mapping have been around for a very long time... heck the EJB specification itself, which dates back to 1999 or so, includes O/R mapping as a part of it... entity beans must have persistence.
This infringement lawsuit then *must* hinge on some very specific technology pieces that have been violated. I mean, otherwise, as bad as the patent process is, if they missed the fact that the concept has been around with prior art for 10 years, and with specifications that mandate it for 5 years... talk about a joke.
It's just fibre attached storage, so you can use whatever servers you want as the head units. List is 7 TB for $13K... if you're going to scale up a lot you can certainly ask Apple for a discount.
Not *the* cheapest out there, but fast, reliable, and works well with Linux or whatever server heads you want.
That's a lot of ink. Do they sell anything else any more?
Excellent point.
I went to Stanford for graduate school (was there grade inflation there -- maybe -- for grad school the guideline to the faculty was 40% A, 50% B, 10% C -- but then again, the people WERE very qualified and they really DID know their stuff so when I was going for my masters in EE the competition was very stiff, given it wasn't my undergrad). Stanford has a fairly good reputation as an academic university -- more or less equivalent to the Ivy league colleges. Oh and there is TONS of research and grant money and Nobel prizes yadda yadda -- my EE professor had actually founded MIPS.
I spent 1.5 years at Santa Clara University (small, private, catholic college) and they had none of the "awards." What they did have was an interest in TEACHING -- which the Stanford professors and TAs didn't have so much.
I will say the Santa Clara education was FAR better from a "let's teach you" perspective, where Stanford was more like "I'm great, oh and you are keeping me from doing research for grant money but be happy you're in the room with me... my TAs will give you the test, hope you can learn the material, smart guys."
Also, Apple is a hardware company. If hardware sales went down 50%, but software sales of OS X went up 10x, what would happen to total revenues?
As the wording next to the Vanilla Latte in the Stanford Coho says... "Do the math."
Just go get Senuti or iPod.iTunes or PodWorks. Ranging from free to $8, and you're covered.
Particularly pesky in this pugilannimous period, practically prone practices such as parliament should be permanently purged.
Oracle has a couple initiatives going on... RAC and ASM. Here's about how it works (these are BROAD numbers, mind you).
.com crash, your average back-end IT infrastructure had a few main pieces:
6 years ago, before the
Cisco networking gear. Sun servers. EMC disks. Oracle database.
So you paid a few mil for the network. A few mil for the servers. A few mil for the EMC disks. And a mil or two for Oracle at $10K/cpu (list)
NOW, Oracle says "we have 10g RAC, use us to replicate across CPUs. Don't pay $3M + $1M/year for Sun support... buy a rack of Linux servers (or blades) and hardware costs $250K versus $3M... support is nearly free because if a machine fails, just pull it from the rack, throw it in the trash, and swap a new one in there.'
And lo, they promoted "Linux is unbreakable" and charged an extra $10K/cpu for this service. Total end cost to customer is LESS than the old solution, and it's way FASTER.
Then, they have another initiative... use ASM and the low-cost storage initiative... use the database to span multiple disks, and handle all the replication/redundancy. Don't pay EMC $3M + $1M/year for Symmetrix support. Put it on lower cost gear (Clariion, Nexsan ATAboy, or *gasp* Apple Xserve RAID even). Spindle speeds are slower, so you buy 2x as many spindles and get the same IOPS. Hey, you save a couple million and pay more per CPU (say $40K/cpu list) for the whole shootin' match.
So your cost goes from (again, broad numbers)
$2M Cisco + $3M Sun + $3M EMC + $2M Oracle = $10M + maintenance
to:
$2M Cisco + $500K Dell + $500K Dell or Apple + $4M Oracle = $7M + maintenance
You save $3M a year! Of course Oracle gets a bigger cut. But it's "win-win."
Of course, there is the one subtlety here -- you are now using Oracle's RAC and ASM so you can use cheap hardware and storage. This stuff is totally proprietary, so if Oracle comes back come renewal time and doubles your per-CPU cost for the software, it's a helluva lot harder to rip it out than just porting stored-procedure code.