Why does it matter if they use Outlook/Exchange/Win2k3?
Macs can be bound to an Active Directory domain quite easily. Even better, macs can be MANAGED by a Windows domain via GPO's just like a PC if you install some extensions to AD.
MS Office for the mac comes with MS Entourage which is basically the mac version of Outlook and syncs just fine with an exchange server.
-2Ghz Core 2 Duo "Penryn" -1066MHz front-side bus -2GB DDR2 RAM -120GB SATA HDD -256MB (Shared) GeForce 9400M -SPDIF Audio In/Out -Firewire -13.3" 1280x800 LCD -802.11a/b/g/draft-n wireless, bluetooth 2.1 -8x DVD+-RW -4.5hr battery -5.0 lbs
A real computer geek also knows that USBserial adapters are dirt cheap and work with just about any remotely modern operating system including OSX and even support funky baud rates or port settings.
A PC-card slot would be nice but I can live without it. I wouldn't mind being able to put my old PCMCIA SCSI card to use and use CF->PCMCIA adapters instead of a USB card reader.
The shared-memory video isn't really an issue as the 9400M is actually quite capable and has 16 real stream processors. CoD4 runs well and Quake 4 runs REALLY well. It'll be supported by OpenCL in Snow Leopard as well.
The new Mini is expensive, and there's little justification for it at that spec level.
It's a pretty pricey little box but show me a cheaper PC in that SAME small form factor w/ the same Core 2 Duo CPU w/ 1066mhz FSB, DDR3 RAM, Firewire 400 and 800, gigabit ethernet, SPDIF Audio In AND Out (24-bit 96khz at that), displayport, an IR reciever for the remote, and a DVD burner.
Even if you found a mini-itx board with all of those goodies (you may but you most likely won't), by the time you got everything built, it would cost just as much if not more than the $600 mac mini. The new mini is not a wussified EEE desktop.
Now try to find an HP or Lenovo SFF desktop that has all of the same gear at a reasonable price.
BTW, it may be integrated video but the GF9400M is no slouch, I have no problem playing Call of Duty 4 @ 1280x800 on my low-end Macbook white.
To be fair when claiming "Apple is so expensive!" you really need to price a PC with the EXACT same specs. Same CPU, screen size, form factor, everything.
You'll find that Apple is either about the same price or cheaper.
The closest laptop I found to my new Macbook white is a Dell XPS series which has less features, is slightly slower and costs MORE. I looked at similar machines from Lenovo, Toshiba and Acer as well. The Dell does come with a little more RAM and a bigger HDD but those don't mean much. Those are cheap upgrades you can do yourself at some point.
Like someone said above, never buy RAM or HDD upgrades from Apple, buy the base machine and upgrade yourself.
The Magsafe power adapters are really slick as well, it's already saved my laptop from my kids twice. They were problematic at first but it looks like they fixed the issues.
My O1 died a few months ago. Just displays random garbage on the CRT with a constant whine coming from the speaker. I still have the carcass and full set of floppies.
Compare that to the life of newer laptops or portables. That thing was built in 81.
None of that matters. The only thing that does is the fastest x86 was ALWAYS faster than the fastest PPC CPU.
Wrong. The G5 mopped the floor with the Pentium IV's for a long time.
The G4 was faster than the early Pentium 3's that were around when it debuted. It lost its edge for a while but the newer DDR-based G4's are certainly no slouch.
The G3 kicked the Pentium II's ass.
Clock-for-clock performance benchmarks do matter. So does efficiency. Intel sucked until the Core series. And surprise.... my old 1.42Ghz G4 w/ DDR RAM is FASTER than the first intel 1.83GHz core solo-based mac mini. Even though the core solo is much newer.
It only "doesn't matter" to some punk kid who just wants to play games whose mommy and daddy are loaded and don't mind the sound of a jet engine in their living room.
Core and Core 2 are definitely huge improvements but that doesn't mean the Intel instruction set isn't awful.
As for the PPC being a "cleaner" architecture, that is only your opinion. I prefer x86/x64.
x64 cleans some things up but straight x86 is awful. Not a matter of opinion. A matter of cold hard facts. If you did much ASM and had to deal with Intel CPU's pretty close to the metal, you would realize how bad it is. Especially if you ever dealt with other architectures like m68k.
SPARC and PowerPC are much cleaner architectures than x86 will ever be.
Apple loves to put in meaningless benchmarks with no real-world meaning to hype their products.
For example, the "3 times faster than a Pentium II" claims back in some of the older PowerPC days - this was true for a single Photoshop operation that at that point had Altivec optimizations on PPC but was running straight scalar code (no MMX) on a P2.
If your going to spout blind FUD, do your homework. Altivec didn't even exist on PowerPC's back when the Pentium II was around. The current PowerPC CPUs were the PowerPC 604 and the newcomer was the G3.
Altivec didn't arrive until the G4 and by then the Pentium III was out and selling.
At the same clock rate, the PowerPC really was quite a bit faster. Not by rediculous "3x" margins but it really was quite a bit faster. The PowerPC is also a much cleaner and well-thought-out architecture. Anybody that still does any ASM can definitely vouch for this.
Just because IBM/Moto/Apple didn't have the R&D dollars to polish a turd until it hit 4GHz doesn't mean the PowerPC sucked. It was and still is an awesome architecture.
For nearly all other applications, the P2 was equal to or faster than the PPC.
No, it wasn't. I ran several real-world benchmarks as I owned an Apple B&W G3 tower and a Pentium II at the time.
Are they as fast as Apple claimed? Hell no. Were they genuinely faster? Yes.
For nearly all users, the network is the bottleneck.
Now that is very accurate. For what most people use a computer for, a single-board 1.6Ghz atom machine with a GMA950 is more than they'll ever need for web browsing, e-mail, playing youtube videos and running Word. A faster machine doesn't make you type faster or make web pages load faster.
Safari's improvements though are very welcome as they free CPU cycles for more useful things. A more efficient app is always a welcome change.
So get an AUI twisted pair transceiver and plug the machine into just about any hub or switch. It plugs into your AUI port, has some blinkenlights and an RJ-45 jack. They can be had for cheap on eBay. I have a few in my closet. Works great for my old VAXstation 3100.
AUI ports don't have to be used with ThickNet. I don't think I've seen a functional 10Base5 installation in a LONG time.
I don't know, we've successfully migrated to OpenOffice in a lot of cases. It's really not bad. The only thing that's annoying is the lack of support for InfoPath forms because corporate decided to get stupid and do all student enrollment forms and such in InfoPath.
Our users would MUCH rather use OpenOffice than Office 2007. Office 2003 wasn't too bad and was a bit quicker than OpenOffice but being locked in with proprietary formats that are a constant moving target certainly has disadvantages.
I've used OpenOffice since before it was opened up. StarOffice 5 was a decent replacement for Office 2000 and we used it extensively throughout a group of about 5 radio stations. Worked well.
OpenOffice has rough edges but sucks isn't necessarily the word I'd use. I'll take OpenOffice over running Office via WINE any day of the week.
Office is not a magic bullet, people try to use it for things it was never intended to do and just plain sucks at. These are the documents OpenOffice tends to choke on.
On my machines I use both the mac version of Office, which I actually like more than the PC version, and I use OpenOffice on everything else. Other than some very minor conversion issues I've never had a problem. I consider the occasional glitch "the cost of doing business".
Saying something else sucks because it can't digest every detail of a poorly documented moving target is silly. Calling it useless because of that is even sillier.
Quit whining, that means there were be guaranteed work for a bunch of coders in 2038 that would probably otherwise be unemployed or going nuts in retirement.
Then a bunch of whiny MS fanboys will all be saying OMG we fixed that back in 2000, Linux iz teh suXX0rz.
Though I'm hoping that by 2038 MS would have already received the flaming death it deserves, Bill Gates will have died from some horrible disease he picked up while exploiting third world children, Linux will have dwindled down to 3 or 4 fairly unified distros, BSD finally gets the attention it deserved, the second armed US revolution will have happened with the citizens being the victors and the space program finally received more funding than some BS foreign war.....
Holy crap, I was a kid in those days but I watched my dad do it on a couple old Sun boxes at work.
You're really showing your age. You've officially earned the right to tell kids to get off your lawn. How'd that hip replacement go? LOL
I still have a copy of the first edition of O'Reilly's Essential Systems Administration where that was officially talked about in print. I learned BSD reading that book.
I bought a used NEC 1x SCSI CD-ROM for my Slackware install around the same time period. Cost me $12 at a local HAMfest.
I had to find a book with Slackware on CD in it. I couldn't stomach the download time over dialup for slackware via my NetCom shell account. I really wanted to learn how to manage UNIX boxes, not just use them. I couldn't talk anyone out of a copy of SCO UNIX or Novell UNIXware so I started looking at MINIX and Linux.
I had downloaded MINIX 1.7 and installed it from floppies to play with while I waited to get the big Linux book. I was about 14 at the time I think.
MINIX ran GREAT on my 386DX/40 w/ 16MB RAM. Linux got installed on the 486. The mac was running a pirated copy of A/UX then eventually NetBSD/mac68k 1.2.
Like Ubuntu has never had a problematic release... please. I've seen at least one piss poor release from every distro.
I finally got sick of all of the inconsistencies present between all of the Linux distros and switched to FreeBSD and NetBSD (on non-x86 hardware) back in 1997. Though I had run NetBSD/mac68k on a IIci since about 1995. I also knew BSD well from my experience on a VAX and SunOS 4 boxes.
A couple of my machines run OSX as well these days because A.) I like the interface. B.) I like to run a few commercial apps. C.) Running them in WINE doesn't count.
Much happier now. The only things I have running Linux are a Linksys WRT54G, a Linksys NSLU2 and an iPaq 3850. Those would run NetBSD as well if there were solid drivers for everything and someone ported OPIE to NetBSD.
Pretty much. More than it takes to screw over most places though.
Hell, before I got here all you needed was a machine connected to the network that someone left logged in. The previous "SysAdmin" before me didn't understand the difference between share permissions and filesystem permissions and pretty much everyone had at least read access to everything.
Very scary.... especially the Financial Aid dept shares. Fortunately he wasn't here long.
But in reality you are just a fringe group who (I am not trying to insult you) really doesn't matter that much.
Fringe group?! Gee, most Internet sites are powered by open source software AND operating systems. Most consumer grade wireless routers are powered by open source software. An insane amount of embedded hardware is based on open source. Last I checked, at least 1 in 5 web browsers are powered by open source software.
The protocols used on the global internet that makes the entire world go round these days are OPEN standards and most TCP/IP implementations are based on open source implementations and incorporate some of that code. Especially from early versions of BSD UNIX.
Most smartphones that are actually in people's hands were developed with or utilize code from open source projects to some degree (non-Blackberry or WinCE), such as the iPhone, T-Mobile G-1 and Sidekick (the new one is based on NetBSD).
Open source is HARDLY a fringe group. The world literally revolves around it, you just don't see it smacking you in the face. Get a clue. The patent system no longer protects the little guy, it's used as a warchest for large companies to crush whomever they feel like. Especially the little guy.
Patents directly stifle innovation and directly get in the way of creativity because you can never be sure you aren't infringing one and the second you are successful with any product, chances are you infringed on some frivolous very obvious patent and won't be able to afford the legal onslaught.
It would make a great Macbook Nano or low cost edu box for Apple to fill the niche the old Mac LC series and eMacs filled.
I could see a Mac Nano being built. Maybe, just maybe, Apple could build a usable decent little box to compete with $350 Walmart crap PC's that would not be a total POS with crap HW quality. I would pay $400 to get a genuine Apple branded Atom-based machine that I could run OS X on without disgusting patches and hacks.
The Atom is fast enough to not be a complete toy and with the Ion platform it really would be awesome for a low cost mac. Because it makes sense and would get broad everyday consumer's attention, Apple would never do it.
Raster rendering used to be extremely slow as well before much R&D money was pumped into making cheap hardware with enough oompf to do it well on affordable computers.
I had a PowerVR2-based card back in 1996 and it struggled with Quake 2 at 512x384 in a K6 233. Software rendering almost as fast. The 3DFX Voodoo1 was less than impressive as well.
Give it time, raytracing hardware will become viable eventually.
Dude, My kids aren't 6 months old. They're several years old. I had them when I made over $50k. They were planned.
I could afford them at that point you little condescending little prick and who are you to tell me a god damn thing about family planning you sack of shit? I'm not some welfare case and I've payed just as much into the system as you.
Having children IS my right as a human being.
Having children isn't the sole right of the upper middle class. Who the fuck do you think you are?
I hope sincerely your job gets cut at some point and you find yourself clinging to life. Just so I can walk by and piss on you. There's no such thing as having a "job for life" anymore in IT.
That's what I meant by NMS. Network Monitoring System or Network Management Station depending on the context.
Nagios is "ok". I've always preferred Zabbix to Nagios however. Zabbix is pretty f**kin cool, worth a look if you haven't seen it yet. It's FOSS as well.
HP OpenVue is awesome if you've got budget to burn. I really don't here though.
I rarely have the option of "filling up" when it comes to lunch. Just getting something in my stomach makes me happy when I'm getting close to running out of cash.
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Gee, using your argument, the Core 2 Duo is a worse CPU than the Pentium IV or Pentium D 940 when in reality it's MUCH faster.
Yeah, so far I'm real happy with the machine. Would have liked the DDR3 RAM in the aluminum version but I don't "need" it.
If you grab a cheesy USB serial port off the shelf at Walmart for $12, then yeah, they suck.
I have one that's reliable and has no problems talking to just about anything but I had to spend $35 or so.
Why does it matter if they use Outlook/Exchange/Win2k3?
Macs can be bound to an Active Directory domain quite easily. Even better, macs can be MANAGED by a Windows domain via GPO's just like a PC if you install some extensions to AD.
MS Office for the mac comes with MS Entourage which is basically the mac version of Outlook and syncs just fine with an exchange server.
I call. My new Macbook White 2009, $999
-2Ghz Core 2 Duo "Penryn"
-1066MHz front-side bus
-2GB DDR2 RAM
-120GB SATA HDD
-256MB (Shared) GeForce 9400M
-SPDIF Audio In/Out
-Firewire
-13.3" 1280x800 LCD
-802.11a/b/g/draft-n wireless, bluetooth 2.1
-8x DVD+-RW
-4.5hr battery
-5.0 lbs
A real computer geek also knows that USBserial adapters are dirt cheap and work with just about any remotely modern operating system including OSX and even support funky baud rates or port settings.
A PC-card slot would be nice but I can live without it. I wouldn't mind being able to put my old PCMCIA SCSI card to use and use CF->PCMCIA adapters instead of a USB card reader.
The shared-memory video isn't really an issue as the 9400M is actually quite capable and has 16 real stream processors. CoD4 runs well and Quake 4 runs REALLY well. It'll be supported by OpenCL in Snow Leopard as well.
The new Mini is expensive, and there's little justification for it at that spec level.
It's a pretty pricey little box but show me a cheaper PC in that SAME small form factor w/ the same Core 2 Duo CPU w/ 1066mhz FSB, DDR3 RAM, Firewire 400 and 800, gigabit ethernet, SPDIF Audio In AND Out (24-bit 96khz at that), displayport, an IR reciever for the remote, and a DVD burner.
Even if you found a mini-itx board with all of those goodies (you may but you most likely won't), by the time you got everything built, it would cost just as much if not more than the $600 mac mini. The new mini is not a wussified EEE desktop.
Now try to find an HP or Lenovo SFF desktop that has all of the same gear at a reasonable price.
BTW, it may be integrated video but the GF9400M is no slouch, I have no problem playing Call of Duty 4 @ 1280x800 on my low-end Macbook white.
Don't believe me? Prove me wrong.
To be fair when claiming "Apple is so expensive!" you really need to price a PC with the EXACT same specs. Same CPU, screen size, form factor, everything.
You'll find that Apple is either about the same price or cheaper.
The closest laptop I found to my new Macbook white is a Dell XPS series which has less features, is slightly slower and costs MORE. I looked at similar machines from Lenovo, Toshiba and Acer as well. The Dell does come with a little more RAM and a bigger HDD but those don't mean much. Those are cheap upgrades you can do yourself at some point.
Like someone said above, never buy RAM or HDD upgrades from Apple, buy the base machine and upgrade yourself.
The Magsafe power adapters are really slick as well, it's already saved my laptop from my kids twice. They were problematic at first but it looks like they fixed the issues.
I second that. I would be happy with just a single PCIe x16 slot.
It's REALLY annoying when you know you have the CPU power to run something but the onboard video is holding you back.
I really liked the G4 midtower desktops simply because I COULD swap out the video card.
Not EVERYONE needs to stick a SCSI or eSATA card in their mac but lots of people would like to upgrade their video card.
And if I did want to slap a nice eSATA card in there, I shouldn't have to buy a $2500 machine with a Quad-Core Xeon to do it.
As far as enterprise customers go, I have a hard time believing that they take all-in-one machines seriously, even if they are really cool machines.
Don't get me wrong, the iMac is no piece of shit but they are genuinely missing out by not having a standard desktop offering for less than $2500.
My O1 died a few months ago. Just displays random garbage on the CRT with a constant whine coming from the speaker. I still have the carcass and full set of floppies.
Compare that to the life of newer laptops or portables. That thing was built in 81.
None of that matters. The only thing that does is the fastest x86 was ALWAYS faster than the fastest PPC CPU.
Wrong. The G5 mopped the floor with the Pentium IV's for a long time.
The G4 was faster than the early Pentium 3's that were around when it debuted. It lost its edge for a while but the newer DDR-based G4's are certainly no slouch.
The G3 kicked the Pentium II's ass.
Clock-for-clock performance benchmarks do matter. So does efficiency. Intel sucked until the Core series. And surprise.... my old 1.42Ghz G4 w/ DDR RAM is FASTER than the first intel 1.83GHz core solo-based mac mini. Even though the core solo is much newer.
It only "doesn't matter" to some punk kid who just wants to play games whose mommy and daddy are loaded and don't mind the sound of a jet engine in their living room.
Core and Core 2 are definitely huge improvements but that doesn't mean the Intel instruction set isn't awful.
As for the PPC being a "cleaner" architecture, that is only your opinion. I prefer x86/x64.
x64 cleans some things up but straight x86 is awful. Not a matter of opinion. A matter of cold hard facts. If you did much ASM and had to deal with Intel CPU's pretty close to the metal, you would realize how bad it is. Especially if you ever dealt with other architectures like m68k.
SPARC and PowerPC are much cleaner architectures than x86 will ever be.
Apple loves to put in meaningless benchmarks with no real-world meaning to hype their products.
For example, the "3 times faster than a Pentium II" claims back in some of the older PowerPC days - this was true for a single Photoshop operation that at that point had Altivec optimizations on PPC but was running straight scalar code (no MMX) on a P2.
If your going to spout blind FUD, do your homework. Altivec didn't even exist on PowerPC's back when the Pentium II was around. The current PowerPC CPUs were the PowerPC 604 and the newcomer was the G3.
Altivec didn't arrive until the G4 and by then the Pentium III was out and selling.
At the same clock rate, the PowerPC really was quite a bit faster. Not by rediculous "3x" margins but it really was quite a bit faster. The PowerPC is also a much cleaner and well-thought-out architecture. Anybody that still does any ASM can definitely vouch for this.
Just because IBM/Moto/Apple didn't have the R&D dollars to polish a turd until it hit 4GHz doesn't mean the PowerPC sucked. It was and still is an awesome architecture.
For nearly all other applications, the P2 was equal to or faster than the PPC.
No, it wasn't. I ran several real-world benchmarks as I owned an Apple B&W G3 tower and a Pentium II at the time.
Are they as fast as Apple claimed? Hell no. Were they genuinely faster? Yes.
For nearly all users, the network is the bottleneck.
Now that is very accurate. For what most people use a computer for, a single-board 1.6Ghz atom machine with a GMA950 is more than they'll ever need for web browsing, e-mail, playing youtube videos and running Word. A faster machine doesn't make you type faster or make web pages load faster.
Safari's improvements though are very welcome as they free CPU cycles for more useful things. A more efficient app is always a welcome change.
So get an AUI twisted pair transceiver and plug the machine into just about any hub or switch. It plugs into your AUI port, has some blinkenlights and an RJ-45 jack. They can be had for cheap on eBay. I have a few in my closet. Works great for my old VAXstation 3100.
AUI ports don't have to be used with ThickNet. I don't think I've seen a functional 10Base5 installation in a LONG time.
I don't know, we've successfully migrated to OpenOffice in a lot of cases. It's really not bad. The only thing that's annoying is the lack of support for InfoPath forms because corporate decided to get stupid and do all student enrollment forms and such in InfoPath.
Our users would MUCH rather use OpenOffice than Office 2007. Office 2003 wasn't too bad and was a bit quicker than OpenOffice but being locked in with proprietary formats that are a constant moving target certainly has disadvantages.
I've used OpenOffice since before it was opened up. StarOffice 5 was a decent replacement for Office 2000 and we used it extensively throughout a group of about 5 radio stations. Worked well.
OpenOffice has rough edges but sucks isn't necessarily the word I'd use. I'll take OpenOffice over running Office via WINE any day of the week.
Office is not a magic bullet, people try to use it for things it was never intended to do and just plain sucks at. These are the documents OpenOffice tends to choke on.
On my machines I use both the mac version of Office, which I actually like more than the PC version, and I use OpenOffice on everything else. Other than some very minor conversion issues I've never had a problem. I consider the occasional glitch "the cost of doing business".
Saying something else sucks because it can't digest every detail of a poorly documented moving target is silly. Calling it useless because of that is even sillier.
Quit whining, that means there were be guaranteed work for a bunch of coders in 2038 that would probably otherwise be unemployed or going nuts in retirement.
Then a bunch of whiny MS fanboys will all be saying OMG we fixed that back in 2000, Linux iz teh suXX0rz.
Though I'm hoping that by 2038 MS would have already received the flaming death it deserves, Bill Gates will have died from some horrible disease he picked up while exploiting third world children, Linux will have dwindled down to 3 or 4 fairly unified distros, BSD finally gets the attention it deserved, the second armed US revolution will have happened with the citizens being the victors and the space program finally received more funding than some BS foreign war.....
one can dream can't he?
Holy crap, I was a kid in those days but I watched my dad do it on a couple old Sun boxes at work.
You're really showing your age. You've officially earned the right to tell kids to get off your lawn. How'd that hip replacement go? LOL
I still have a copy of the first edition of O'Reilly's Essential Systems Administration where that was officially talked about in print. I learned BSD reading that book.
I bought a used NEC 1x SCSI CD-ROM for my Slackware install around the same time period. Cost me $12 at a local HAMfest.
I had to find a book with Slackware on CD in it. I couldn't stomach the download time over dialup for slackware via my NetCom shell account. I really wanted to learn how to manage UNIX boxes, not just use them. I couldn't talk anyone out of a copy of SCO UNIX or Novell UNIXware so I started looking at MINIX and Linux.
I had downloaded MINIX 1.7 and installed it from floppies to play with while I waited to get the big Linux book. I was about 14 at the time I think.
MINIX ran GREAT on my 386DX/40 w/ 16MB RAM. Linux got installed on the 486. The mac was running a pirated copy of A/UX then eventually NetBSD/mac68k 1.2.
Ah, the good ol' days.
Like Ubuntu has never had a problematic release... please. I've seen at least one piss poor release from every distro.
I finally got sick of all of the inconsistencies present between all of the Linux distros and switched to FreeBSD and NetBSD (on non-x86 hardware) back in 1997. Though I had run NetBSD/mac68k on a IIci since about 1995. I also knew BSD well from my experience on a VAX and SunOS 4 boxes.
A couple of my machines run OSX as well these days because A.) I like the interface. B.) I like to run a few commercial apps. C.) Running them in WINE doesn't count.
Much happier now. The only things I have running Linux are a Linksys WRT54G, a Linksys NSLU2 and an iPaq 3850. Those would run NetBSD as well if there were solid drivers for everything and someone ported OPIE to NetBSD.
Pretty much. More than it takes to screw over most places though.
Hell, before I got here all you needed was a machine connected to the network that someone left logged in. The previous "SysAdmin" before me didn't understand the difference between share permissions and filesystem permissions and pretty much everyone had at least read access to everything.
Very scary.... especially the Financial Aid dept shares. Fortunately he wasn't here long.
Well, I wouldn't want to do that on an internet facing DNS server. Certainly wouldn't want to put passwords in there even on an internal DNS.
Just some general info like "Big ugly AlphaServer w/ 4 network interfaces in the server closet upstairs, see Binder #12 for more info"
But in reality you are just a fringe group who (I am not trying to insult you) really doesn't matter that much.
Fringe group?! Gee, most Internet sites are powered by open source software AND operating systems. Most consumer grade wireless routers are powered by open source software. An insane amount of embedded hardware is based on open source. Last I checked, at least 1 in 5 web browsers are powered by open source software.
The protocols used on the global internet that makes the entire world go round these days are OPEN standards and most TCP/IP implementations are based on open source implementations and incorporate some of that code. Especially from early versions of BSD UNIX.
Most smartphones that are actually in people's hands were developed with or utilize code from open source projects to some degree (non-Blackberry or WinCE), such as the iPhone, T-Mobile G-1 and Sidekick (the new one is based on NetBSD).
Open source is HARDLY a fringe group. The world literally revolves around it, you just don't see it smacking you in the face. Get a clue. The patent system no longer protects the little guy, it's used as a warchest for large companies to crush whomever they feel like. Especially the little guy.
Patents directly stifle innovation and directly get in the way of creativity because you can never be sure you aren't infringing one and the second you are successful with any product, chances are you infringed on some frivolous very obvious patent and won't be able to afford the legal onslaught.
It would make a great Macbook Nano or low cost edu box for Apple to fill the niche the old Mac LC series and eMacs filled.
I could see a Mac Nano being built. Maybe, just maybe, Apple could build a usable decent little box to compete with $350 Walmart crap PC's that would not be a total POS with crap HW quality. I would pay $400 to get a genuine Apple branded Atom-based machine that I could run OS X on without disgusting patches and hacks.
The Atom is fast enough to not be a complete toy and with the Ion platform it really would be awesome for a low cost mac. Because it makes sense and would get broad everyday consumer's attention, Apple would never do it.
Raster rendering used to be extremely slow as well before much R&D money was pumped into making cheap hardware with enough oompf to do it well on affordable computers.
I had a PowerVR2-based card back in 1996 and it struggled with Quake 2 at 512x384 in a K6 233. Software rendering almost as fast. The 3DFX Voodoo1 was less than impressive as well.
Give it time, raytracing hardware will become viable eventually.
LOL I really wouldn't be surprised.
Dude, My kids aren't 6 months old. They're several years old. I had them when I made over $50k. They were planned.
I could afford them at that point you little condescending little prick and who are you to tell me a god damn thing about family planning you sack of shit? I'm not some welfare case and I've payed just as much into the system as you.
Having children IS my right as a human being.
Having children isn't the sole right of the upper middle class. Who the fuck do you think you are?
I hope sincerely your job gets cut at some point and you find yourself clinging to life. Just so I can walk by and piss on you. There's no such thing as having a "job for life" anymore in IT.
That's what I meant by NMS. Network Monitoring System or Network Management Station depending on the context.
Nagios is "ok". I've always preferred Zabbix to Nagios however. Zabbix is pretty f**kin cool, worth a look if you haven't seen it yet. It's FOSS as well.
HP OpenVue is awesome if you've got budget to burn. I really don't here though.
I rarely have the option of "filling up" when it comes to lunch. Just getting something in my stomach makes me happy when I'm getting close to running out of cash.