If Intel had waited for a low-power chipset to be ready, then we wouldn't have the Atom at all in the meantime, and you'd be getting a 3 hour battery life. It's coming, but Intel has said it's just not ready yet.
Or Linux - just try using a lot of the standard Gnome control panels with less than 800 vertical pixels. Login Properties and Compiz Config, I'm looking squarely at you.
Yes, models for $300 - with 2GB of storage, a 7-inch 800x480 screen, and an underclocked chip running at 630Mhz. $500 is perfectly reasonable as Eee 900 and HP 2133 sales have shown.
Please stop with the stupid and uninformed comparisons to the Eee 2G Surf...
For a small number of fields like that, why re-invent the wheel? Grab OpenOffice and just create a spreadsheet. Easily searchable, sortable, extendable, and all with zero maintenance on your part.
I recently moved my collection of serial numbers out of a defunct proprietary program and into a spreadsheet - couldn't be happier.
This is largely true, until you want to install something not in the repository. Then life is painful again.
Admittedly, the open nature of Linux makes this much, much less likely to happen. Another possible solution for Windows/OS X is to publish API's for their software update systems so that it can check third parties and list their updates as well (although separately from system updates).
> Gentoo, or Linux From Scratch. You should use it.
Two things wrong here: 1) It's pretty likely being as "curmudgeonly" as he is, he's on pretty underpowered hardware. Gentoo in particular can be extremely punishing when you want to update, and it you put it off too long, portage-rot builds up. 2) Did you just try to recommend something to a sub-1000-UID poster as if he hasn't heard of it?
In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that the UK now applies the short scale interpretation exclusively in mass media and official usage.
Completely missed the point. SSD's are not about extremely fast sequential access, they're designed for near-instantaneous random access. No seeking means faster random access, which also means MUCH improved performance when multiple processes are hitting the disk at once.
Just think back to when you moved to a dual-core CPU how much more responsive it was. Now take that same jump to I/O, which is always the performance bottleneck. We're leaving the age of simple increases in horsepower - Mhz, RPM, and throughput; now we're attacking the problems of resource contention. Multicore CPU's, solid state disks, more memory, better CPU-memory interconnects - all of this is making resource contention and "churn" a thing of the past.
And, clearly, you know better how to run a bank's systems than they do, despite having run them this way for, what, 30 years? 40?
Having seen bank systems (and credit card companies, and pharma, etc), yes, I can damn well confidently say I do. The handle money for a living. I design networks and datacenters for a living.
You do NOT want to know the things I've seen - you'll never use a credit card or fill a prescription again. I could write TheDailyWTF for a month based on one specific credit card provider alone.
People using Linux on BigIron(tm) bank on 24/7/365/25years uptime. When a single server costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars you can't afford a spare sitting idle.
Active-Active clustering or load balancing. Sure, it can be a bitch to get working with all of the data synchronization required (especially for things like databases, which are traditionally active-passive), but if you want real reliability and the efficiency of using both boxes, it's what you do.
The very fact that there is load balancing means that every server is likely to have active connections going through it. If you currently have connections going through a specific server, you don't want to drop those connections in order to reboot that particular machine.
So you take it out of rotation on the load balancer and give it a few minutes to complete all its active connections. Patch/reboot whatever. Bring it back into rotation, and repeat with the other box.
What, the 256MB/512MB discrete cards in the iMac and MacBook Pro can't game? Hell, the Intel GMA X3100 in the MacBook, MacBook Air, and Mac Mini will suffice for World of Warcraft.
Macs generally don't *need* as many upgrades, because everything (802.11n, Bluetooth, Gigabit ethernet, firewire, decent graphics, etc) is built-in. And before you start, it pisses me off that there's no gigabit ethernet and firewire on the Air as well.
Once they do that for ALL failure scenarios (kernel upgrade, grub/lilo errors, xconf, hardware upgrades, PCI card movement, etc), then yes. Until then, no. Right now I can kill my Linux install by moving PCI cards from slot to slot in my tower. No hardware changes - things just moved. If it can autodetect it properly on setup, it should be able to do the same on boot if something is wrong. If it can't do it in setup, it needs to be improved.
Code signing - this conflicts with GPLv3's "anti-Tivoization" clause. As others posted, both sides will see this as a feature, not a bug.
It's not "free". This is true; much as you cannot download the Tivo source code and have it compile and work on your Tivo, you cannot just download available source code and run it on your iPhone. This goes back to the signing issues above.
NDA provisions. I'm willing to bet this is purely during the beta period. All of Apple's other tools, documentation, etc are freely available, and I expect this will continue once it is released. After all, signing up for this program gives access to beta software (the iPhone firmware 2.0), and Apple similarly restricts access to OS X and other beta software. Once it's final, these restrictions are lifted.
Ultimately, this all boils down to code signing and what you think of it. The problems presented by this are fairly specific to GPLv3; anyone is free to distribute their code under (for example) the MIT/BSD license, or even GPLv2.
As for GPLv3 it's far from widespread, and with prominent projects such as the Linux kernel avoiding it, I'm not sure how much traction it will gain over GPLv2. Much like Windows Vista has to compete with XP, GPLv3 has to compete with GPLv2.
Profit margins are about 25% depending on the product line. This is according to actual financial figures. You know, profit reports and such. Things that have to be correct and accurate for legal purposes or they're in trouble with the SEC for misleading stockholders. Real data, instead of you pulling shit out of your ass.
Macs are not more expensive; they're just less flexible. True, you can't get a Mac with slots for less than a Mac Pro. You can't get a Mac laptop with a 7-inch screen and ultra low processor/memory/drive for $400. But for what they do sell - Mac Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro - they're similar, generally only varying by a few bucks here and there (except Apple's memory is damn expensive for some reason). This little dance has been done a billion times, and will be done a billion times again.
If they're truly breaking things, this means your network is so poorly designed that they are even capable of it. Get off your BOFH horse and do a decent job before yelling at people who are just trying to do their job reasonably.
My mother's laptop takes over 5 minutes to boot because of all of the scripts and login items the company forces her to run. This is not an uncommon occurrence because the various shit also prevents it from waking from sleep about 50% of the time. It's so locked down she can't install anything - not even a driver so she can plug in her company-supplied Sprint EVDO card for remote access. Nope, she has to drive into the office (about an hour away) just so they can pop in the card. Need to change an IP setting for the home wifi network? No-can-do (truly, the firewall and VPN cannot be trusted against the awesome power of the home LAN...). Maybe use something secure like Firefox instead of IE 5.5 (yes, 5.5!). Nope, can't install it. Use a USB memory stick to copy a file? Nope.
"Enterprise IT" policies are almost always to make IT's life easier at the expense of the end user. Now who was supposed to be supporting whom?
No problems here. However, if you install the betas of Ubuntu or Redhat they will only partially work due to incompatibilities between the current Linux kernel and VMWare Tools.
So where do we go to provide input on the batshit-insanely-ugly toolbar changes they've made, especially on XP/Vista? Those icons are some of the worst I've seen (including IE) and will do quite a bit of harm to Firefox's branding. Right now whenever you see Firefox in screenshots, ads, etc, you recognize it immediately based on the toolbar icons (minor changes from 1.5 to 2.0 aside). This toolbar... you'll wonder what unpaid intern in an ad graphics department cooked it up thinking it looked "kewl"...
You'll actually find most scientists to be religious or agnostic. It's quite hard to be atheist when you study some of these deeply complex topics - cosmology, neurology, etc.
As much as I like the MacBook Air, you neglect what happens when you get to the meeting:
* You need to get something off a CD or DVD
* You need to plug in ethernet as well as a USB flash drive
* The resolution of the X300 is much, much better
If I had my way, my next laptop upgrade at work would be an X300 (I have a T60 now), and an additional personal laptop would be an Air (I have a MacBook Pro now). Toss in the high-res screen from the X300, and the Air could easily *be* my next laptop.
Re:I couldn't help but post this amazing quote.
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Um, the 1000 runs Linux, and on a 40GB SSD too. If anything, their commitment to SSD is waning, evidenced by the 1000(H) with an 80GB hard drive.
> Still one thing missing... That is for Asus to sell the Eee without an OS so we can avoid the Microsoft tax.
And the Linux version isn't doing EXACTLY THAT?
If Intel had waited for a low-power chipset to be ready, then we wouldn't have the Atom at all in the meantime, and you'd be getting a 3 hour battery life. It's coming, but Intel has said it's just not ready yet.
Or Linux - just try using a lot of the standard Gnome control panels with less than 800 vertical pixels. Login Properties and Compiz Config, I'm looking squarely at you.
Yes, models for $300 - with 2GB of storage, a 7-inch 800x480 screen, and an underclocked chip running at 630Mhz. $500 is perfectly reasonable as Eee 900 and HP 2133 sales have shown.
Please stop with the stupid and uninformed comparisons to the Eee 2G Surf...
For a small number of fields like that, why re-invent the wheel? Grab OpenOffice and just create a spreadsheet. Easily searchable, sortable, extendable, and all with zero maintenance on your part.
I recently moved my collection of serial numbers out of a defunct proprietary program and into a spreadsheet - couldn't be happier.
This is largely true, until you want to install something not in the repository. Then life is painful again.
Admittedly, the open nature of Linux makes this much, much less likely to happen. Another possible solution for Windows/OS X is to publish API's for their software update systems so that it can check third parties and list their updates as well (although separately from system updates).
> Gentoo, or Linux From Scratch. You should use it.
Two things wrong here:
1) It's pretty likely being as "curmudgeonly" as he is, he's on pretty underpowered hardware. Gentoo in particular can be extremely punishing when you want to update, and it you put it off too long, portage-rot builds up.
2) Did you just try to recommend something to a sub-1000-UID poster as if he hasn't heard of it?
o.O
In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that the UK now applies the short scale interpretation exclusively in mass media and official usage.
Completely missed the point. SSD's are not about extremely fast sequential access, they're designed for near-instantaneous random access. No seeking means faster random access, which also means MUCH improved performance when multiple processes are hitting the disk at once.
Just think back to when you moved to a dual-core CPU how much more responsive it was. Now take that same jump to I/O, which is always the performance bottleneck. We're leaving the age of simple increases in horsepower - Mhz, RPM, and throughput; now we're attacking the problems of resource contention. Multicore CPU's, solid state disks, more memory, better CPU-memory interconnects - all of this is making resource contention and "churn" a thing of the past.
And, clearly, you know better how to run a bank's systems than they do, despite having run them this way for, what, 30 years? 40?
Having seen bank systems (and credit card companies, and pharma, etc), yes, I can damn well confidently say I do. The handle money for a living. I design networks and datacenters for a living.
You do NOT want to know the things I've seen - you'll never use a credit card or fill a prescription again. I could write TheDailyWTF for a month based on one specific credit card provider alone.
People using Linux on BigIron(tm) bank on 24/7/365/25years uptime. When a single server costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars you can't afford a spare sitting idle.
Active-Active clustering or load balancing. Sure, it can be a bitch to get working with all of the data synchronization required (especially for things like databases, which are traditionally active-passive), but if you want real reliability and the efficiency of using both boxes, it's what you do.
Anything less is asking for trouble.
The very fact that there is load balancing means that every server is likely to have active connections going through it. If you currently have connections going through a specific server, you don't want to drop those connections in order to reboot that particular machine.
So you take it out of rotation on the load balancer and give it a few minutes to complete all its active connections. Patch/reboot whatever. Bring it back into rotation, and repeat with the other box.
What, the 256MB/512MB discrete cards in the iMac and MacBook Pro can't game? Hell, the Intel GMA X3100 in the MacBook, MacBook Air, and Mac Mini will suffice for World of Warcraft.
Macs generally don't *need* as many upgrades, because everything (802.11n, Bluetooth, Gigabit ethernet, firewire, decent graphics, etc) is built-in. And before you start, it pisses me off that there's no gigabit ethernet and firewire on the Air as well.
Once they do that for ALL failure scenarios (kernel upgrade, grub/lilo errors, xconf, hardware upgrades, PCI card movement, etc), then yes. Until then, no. Right now I can kill my Linux install by moving PCI cards from slot to slot in my tower. No hardware changes - things just moved. If it can autodetect it properly on setup, it should be able to do the same on boot if something is wrong. If it can't do it in setup, it needs to be improved.
- Code signing - this conflicts with GPLv3's "anti-Tivoization" clause. As others posted, both sides will see this as a feature, not a bug.
- It's not "free". This is true; much as you cannot download the Tivo source code and have it compile and work on your Tivo, you cannot just download available source code and run it on your iPhone. This goes back to the signing issues above.
- NDA provisions. I'm willing to bet this is purely during the beta period. All of Apple's other tools, documentation, etc are freely available, and I expect this will continue once it is released. After all, signing up for this program gives access to beta software (the iPhone firmware 2.0), and Apple similarly restricts access to OS X and other beta software. Once it's final, these restrictions are lifted.
Ultimately, this all boils down to code signing and what you think of it. The problems presented by this are fairly specific to GPLv3; anyone is free to distribute their code under (for example) the MIT/BSD license, or even GPLv2.As for GPLv3 it's far from widespread, and with prominent projects such as the Linux kernel avoiding it, I'm not sure how much traction it will gain over GPLv2. Much like Windows Vista has to compete with XP, GPLv3 has to compete with GPLv2.
Profit margins are about 25% depending on the product line. This is according to actual financial figures. You know, profit reports and such. Things that have to be correct and accurate for legal purposes or they're in trouble with the SEC for misleading stockholders. Real data, instead of you pulling shit out of your ass.
Macs are not more expensive; they're just less flexible. True, you can't get a Mac with slots for less than a Mac Pro. You can't get a Mac laptop with a 7-inch screen and ultra low processor/memory/drive for $400. But for what they do sell - Mac Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro - they're similar, generally only varying by a few bucks here and there (except Apple's memory is damn expensive for some reason). This little dance has been done a billion times, and will be done a billion times again.
If they're truly breaking things, this means your network is so poorly designed that they are even capable of it. Get off your BOFH horse and do a decent job before yelling at people who are just trying to do their job reasonably.
My mother's laptop takes over 5 minutes to boot because of all of the scripts and login items the company forces her to run. This is not an uncommon occurrence because the various shit also prevents it from waking from sleep about 50% of the time. It's so locked down she can't install anything - not even a driver so she can plug in her company-supplied Sprint EVDO card for remote access. Nope, she has to drive into the office (about an hour away) just so they can pop in the card. Need to change an IP setting for the home wifi network? No-can-do (truly, the firewall and VPN cannot be trusted against the awesome power of the home LAN...). Maybe use something secure like Firefox instead of IE 5.5 (yes, 5.5!). Nope, can't install it. Use a USB memory stick to copy a file? Nope.
"Enterprise IT" policies are almost always to make IT's life easier at the expense of the end user. Now who was supposed to be supporting whom?
No problems here. However, if you install the betas of Ubuntu or Redhat they will only partially work due to incompatibilities between the current Linux kernel and VMWare Tools.
I hereby donate my sig-line to you. You are one high motherfucker.
In case I should change it:
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
So where do we go to provide input on the batshit-insanely-ugly toolbar changes they've made, especially on XP/Vista? Those icons are some of the worst I've seen (including IE) and will do quite a bit of harm to Firefox's branding. Right now whenever you see Firefox in screenshots, ads, etc, you recognize it immediately based on the toolbar icons (minor changes from 1.5 to 2.0 aside). This toolbar... you'll wonder what unpaid intern in an ad graphics department cooked it up thinking it looked "kewl"...
Except that Scientists don't want to accept that
You'll actually find most scientists to be religious or agnostic. It's quite hard to be atheist when you study some of these deeply complex topics - cosmology, neurology, etc.
So which of Earth's many religions is the correct one with respect to the creation of the universe?
Yours is, to you. And that's all that really matters.
As much as I like the MacBook Air, you neglect what happens when you get to the meeting:
* You need to get something off a CD or DVD
* You need to plug in ethernet as well as a USB flash drive
* The resolution of the X300 is much, much better
If I had my way, my next laptop upgrade at work would be an X300 (I have a T60 now), and an additional personal laptop would be an Air (I have a MacBook Pro now). Toss in the high-res screen from the X300, and the Air could easily *be* my next laptop.
"Get over it loser. The system worked properly."
Which is what scares me more...