With Apple's move into certain targeted markets looking like its working, I think that this will end up being a long term strategy for them. For most server solutions, Apple's actually a middle ground cost player because Windows CALs actually make their solution *more* expensive than Apple.
You might not be able to get it delivered today but you certainly can order it. It may ship in August but you can't really say it doesn't exist when they wheel it out onto the stage, it has a SKU number and they're taking orders for August delivery.
Out of the three 64 bit growth pathways Intel is most braindead, everybody says that AMD's solution is just a stopgap and only Apple/IBM/Motorola's PPC map makes perfect sense. With a near perfect ability to run 32 bit code on a 64 bit chip and a clear roadmap going ahead from the 970 (based on Power 4) to the 980 (based on Power 5) there's a lot of hardware reasons to go PPC. Now the most compelling PPC solution out there is the RS/6000 but if you have that kind of money, the most expensive mac is a minor expense.
Apple has a lot of neat hardware and they seem to not only put out good equipment but innovative equipment too. When did Mac users ever have to deal with IRQ conflicts? Wintel still won't let go of that braindead BIOS standard.
If you don't buy a 970 based Mac, 10.2 is much more likely to be a decent experience to tide you over to 10.4's release. Since I *do* plan on getting a G5, it's not a concern for me.
If Linux PPC was the more powerful solution than Linux x86, would you run it? I believe that in similar production runs, PPC has long been cheaper to produce than x86. Given that, and the impressive PPC 970 (and soon the 980 based on the Power 5) it could happen that Intel seriously loses the power war, even in Mhz terms (Itanium 2 caps out at 1Ghz, PPC 970 at 2Ghz).
I think that it's a fairly optimistic projection, but with IBM putting out PPC 970 blade servers, Apple may be able to make their 799 machines price attractive compared to the Compaq, IBM, and Dell machines they are directly competing with. They won't ever beat out white boxes but then again, nobody does.
When the G4s start hitting ebay at $600, you might want to experiment with it, just to see if you like the UI.
Linux is more likely to be a positive than a negative for Apple. Without Linux, would KDE be where it is today? Would KDE even exist? But without KDE, Apple wouldn't have been able to take KHTML and make Safari. But it's not one-sided as the KHTML group benefited by getting a great many feature and stability improvements to their library contributed back to their project from Apple.
Linux is for when you're young, poor, and in need of serious computing horsepower. OS X is for when you've got money in the bank and you don't want to have to deal with the Linux hassle.
Will Linux eventually get its usability act together and challenged OS X on its own turf? Maybe, but on its way there, Linux would much more quickly gut Windows dominance and that's a result I can live with.
Re:I think you're missing the point
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
OS X.0 had several updates as did OS X.1 and X.2, all of which were available free. If the.x are service packs, what are the.x.y updates?
The last time I was on the Apple site, I was pricing xServes for a client proposal. They do come with a 3 yr purchase plan.
As for free old OS versions, everything up to 7.6.1 is available with 8 and 9 not being released yet (except for the free updaters within 8 and 9).
If you can't afford the software, stay at your OS level. I'd still be at 10.1 if it wasn't for one particular program that annoyed me into 10.2. I'll likely stay here until I buy my next mac and get a family plan to upgrade all three.
You don't have to upgrade if what you have works for you. For a lot of people 10.1 is fine, for even more 10.2 will work just fine. When 10.4 rolls out in 2004/2005 some will make the jump while others will hold out for 10.5 in 2005/2006.
I don't understand why you *have* to upgrade from 10.2 when you aren't getting a new mac. What's so lacking with that?
Re:Your "duh" factor is fairly high
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Apple does sell a contract for 3 years worth of updates. The store's currently down but I think it's a considerable savings if you're going to upgrade to each new release.
One thing that Apple does that's kind of neat is that they eventually release old versions of their OS for free. If you have some ancient mac and need a copy of 7.5.3, you can just download it. Windows 95, otoh, isn't made available on those kinds of terms.
Re:Proof Apple is still not enterprise ready...
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Quick releases are the proof of significant innovation. If everything runs on 10.1 or 10.2 there's no need to upgrade in an enterprise situation unless the next version provides more benefit than the cost to switch. And with net booting, upgrades are considerably easier than walking around with a CD to each system.
Re:Yesterday's technology at tomorrow's prices
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
Predictive, distributed compiling seems quite nice. Mac programmers will buy just for that. The folder labels is a bone to the OS 9 UI bigots. Apple's mixing in new features with bringing over old features from 9 that weren't ready before 10.0 shipped.
If it were medical boards that were just slack in punishing bad doctors then you wouldn't see the same litigation behaviors outside of the medical field. Medicine would be a unique problem. Instead you see it in every field with medicine being worse because it's easier to generate the sob story necessary to work the popular version of the scam. Of course, the RIAA variant on view in this story wouldn't be touched by your refom but would be managed by loser pays rules that are common in tort reform bills.
Now you think slack medical boards are the problem. Slack medical boards would tend to be slack across disciplines. Laziness doesn't pick and choose favorites. Instead, what you have are high risk disciplines creating a disproportionate share of the problem. You would think the sham docs would concentrate where it was easy but no! Those doctors, by your theory, are concentrating in hard disciplines where there's a lot of emotion, a lot of bad outcomes, exactly where they're at most risk of being scrutinized by grieving relatives. NOT! The phenomenon of certain specialties being lawsuit magnets really puts a wrench in your theory.
Insurance companies can track bad docs nationwide and they can price malpractice insurance out of reach of the bad doctors If they are the cause of unprofitability. They also could much more easily pressure state legislatures to tighten up on doctor licensing (most doctors are more than happy to rid themselves of the hacks and quacks in the field).
But that's not where insurance companies are putting their lobbying dollars. They're fully behind tort reform because they hear the shakedown stories every day and get to see the frivolous lawsuit racket happen all the time.
'Gimme a $20k settlement or I'll go to trial and give you a $50k legal bill by the time you get to dismissal' is how it often goes. Those $20k settlements add up. Bad results happen all the time in medicine. It doesn't mean that it's malpractice, just that professionally, doctors are trying to stave off death and everybody eventually loses in that attempt.
So you're left with a little reform fable that it must be the licensing board's fault when the lawsuit distribution of such an oversight failure would be completely different and those who would gain most in profitability (good doctors and insurance companies) are in complete agreement that lax state oversight is not the main issue.
Finally, I've been a jury foreman on a medical malpractice case. I saw the scam up close and personal. We had two jurors in my jury who were willing to convict and in a different random population distribution, we could have had all 12. Playing the jury's heartstrings is real and suing when you don't have a case is real, and Public citizen needs to get its head out of its butt because they're just not living in the real world. Whether or not that's on purpose is beyond my competence.
Loser pays means you aren't paying your lawyer if you win and most good lawyers are willing to take on such cases because Mr. Moneybags on the other end of the suit can pay their fee. The point of the intimidation racket is to play the percentages. You intimidate 9 out of 10 people, the 10th one sticks and you go to trial, lose but still bankrupt the guy, making him an object lesson.
Now in a loser pays system you're going to trial every time, you still bankrupt the 10th guy because of bribery, lucky jury pick, whatever. But the other 9 aren't settling, they're winning and making news about how you're a big mean bully. Ugly things are happening on the shareholders talk boards and there's a decided downward trend to the stock price because people don't want to be associated with such sleazy tactics (especially when they're expensive and ineffective).
End result, the 10th guy doesn't get bankrupt *because the racket no longer works*. The companies voluntarily stop intimidating people through the court system because it's inefficient and ineffective.
No, it would be like today's contingency lawsuits in that you don't pay at the beginning but the judge would pay the lawyer from the loser's pocket, in other words, lawyers get paid at the end a reasonable fee. I'm sure that jurisdictions could not pass this kind of reform but it would really kill off their local business community.
The old geopolitical game that all the great powers played (yes, including the US) was to not let a hegemon hold Iraq and Iran because that would allow the resulting entity to sweep down and take Saudi Arabia without blinking and there goes our economy.
The mullahs are busy hiring international thugs to beat up their own people lately. Even if the old calculus didn't hold, Iran's just incapable until they get a new government. Hopefully that'll be this year.
Tinkering around the margins with cosmetic reforms isn't going to get rid of the problem. You can argue for different reforms but all the blockers say the same thing, admit some things need to be fixed and never come up with anything constructive, just that whatever reform is proposed is no good.
Tech people getting legally hammered by drive by lawsuits are only a small part of the problem. People are not getting better and even dying because medical specialists are being priced out of wide jurisidictions (West Virginia seems to be worst). When you have to go to a different state to deliver your baby, that's just wrong. So what's going to take care of that problem except tort reform?
Oh that's taken care of already as the trial lawyers collectively have decided to back the Democrat party (and have become their #1 money source). With all the blockers in one party, if your #1 problem is the judicial criminals who inimidate through litigation then all you have to do is vote out the Dems.
I'm not you're son, in fact, I probably have a few years on you. Respect your elders, would ya boy?
The current system of torts is absolutely devastating our medical profession (which tends to get hit worse than tech though tech's catching up). They have to airlift patients out of areas with bad legal frameworks because all the specialists have either retired or moved away. Look at West Virginia for a very good example.
Does anybody here want to airlift out all those tech jobs that are litigation risky to nations with loser pays? It's remarkably easy with technology jobs.
You're assuming that this student actually did something wrong. From the 'dentist' comment, it's pretty obvious that he didn't and that this was pure judicial harrassment. Loser pays speeds up settlements for the guilty (they don't want to have to pay any more of their opponent's fees than necessary) and it makes the unjustly accused stick to their guns. That's a two-fer win that works to everybody's advantage but the legal criminals who use the current system to intimidate and unjustly profit from the current rules.
They have a plan to take care of that. It's called damage caps and loser pays tort reform. Essentially, it takes away the incentive to make frivolous lawsuits. The guy wouldn't need a defense fund, and wouldn't need to settle because he'd simply go through the process and get his lawyer fees back when he wins.
Oh, no, N. Korea's an entirely different situation. Who are the Iraqi version of the S. Koreans? you know, the guys with more population, a hugely bigger economy, and right on the border with this lunatic nation of their co-ethnics?
S. Korea, Japan, and the PRC could take apart N. Korea by themselves if they wanted to. But who was able to do it in Iraq's neighborhood and clean up the local bully? Iran? Please. They sacrificed a generation of their children to Iraqi gas and minefields. Saudia Arabia? ROFL! Kuwait? you're kidding, right? Turkey's really the only candidate and they just aren't interested, as taking responsibility for Iraq would set back their ambitions of joining the EU for decades. They've got enough trouble with Cyprus.
But fear not, there are interesting moves afoot in N. Korea and Rumsfeld's likely to soon announce some force structure changes that have already been leaked to the press that remake the old status quo. He's pulling forces back off of the DMZ and it's driving the N. Koreans nuts. How can they justify their repressive measures (which in reality are there to stop revolt) when the great boogie man is pulling his troops off their borders. It also scares the piss out of S. Korea because they have to come up with the replacements for those troops at the DMZ. The extra cost should focus their minds pretty well on the cost of playing friendly with a psychotic regime.
And isn't this the entire point of the exercise? The RIAA (and MPAA for that matter) aren't looking for legal remedies for a particular instance of lawbreaking, they're looking to create a mass of cowed serfs who take their hats off and bow when their lords and masters pass by them.
Using the legal process as an intimidation tool is just how the lawyers like it. We need tort reform now!
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With Apple's move into certain targeted markets looking like its working, I think that this will end up being a long term strategy for them. For most server solutions, Apple's actually a middle ground cost player because Windows CALs actually make their solution *more* expensive than Apple.
Sure, you could run it in a linux image using VPC
B)
Now imagine a mac fast enough to make that make sense.
B)B)B)
You might not be able to get it delivered today but you certainly can order it. It may ship in August but you can't really say it doesn't exist when they wheel it out onto the stage, it has a SKU number and they're taking orders for August delivery.
Out of the three 64 bit growth pathways Intel is most braindead, everybody says that AMD's solution is just a stopgap and only Apple/IBM/Motorola's PPC map makes perfect sense. With a near perfect ability to run 32 bit code on a 64 bit chip and a clear roadmap going ahead from the 970 (based on Power 4) to the 980 (based on Power 5) there's a lot of hardware reasons to go PPC. Now the most compelling PPC solution out there is the RS/6000 but if you have that kind of money, the most expensive mac is a minor expense.
Apple has a lot of neat hardware and they seem to not only put out good equipment but innovative equipment too. When did Mac users ever have to deal with IRQ conflicts? Wintel still won't let go of that braindead BIOS standard.
If you don't buy a 970 based Mac, 10.2 is much more likely to be a decent experience to tide you over to 10.4's release. Since I *do* plan on getting a G5, it's not a concern for me.
If Linux PPC was the more powerful solution than Linux x86, would you run it? I believe that in similar production runs, PPC has long been cheaper to produce than x86. Given that, and the impressive PPC 970 (and soon the 980 based on the Power 5) it could happen that Intel seriously loses the power war, even in Mhz terms (Itanium 2 caps out at 1Ghz, PPC 970 at 2Ghz).
I think that it's a fairly optimistic projection, but with IBM putting out PPC 970 blade servers, Apple may be able to make their 799 machines price attractive compared to the Compaq, IBM, and Dell machines they are directly competing with. They won't ever beat out white boxes but then again, nobody does.
When the G4s start hitting ebay at $600, you might want to experiment with it, just to see if you like the UI.
Linux is more likely to be a positive than a negative for Apple. Without Linux, would KDE be where it is today? Would KDE even exist? But without KDE, Apple wouldn't have been able to take KHTML and make Safari. But it's not one-sided as the KHTML group benefited by getting a great many feature and stability improvements to their library contributed back to their project from Apple.
Linux is for when you're young, poor, and in need of serious computing horsepower. OS X is for when you've got money in the bank and you don't want to have to deal with the Linux hassle.
Will Linux eventually get its usability act together and challenged OS X on its own turf? Maybe, but on its way there, Linux would much more quickly gut Windows dominance and that's a result I can live with.
OS X.0 had several updates as did OS X.1 and X.2, all of which were available free. If the .x are service packs, what are the .x.y updates?
The last time I was on the Apple site, I was pricing xServes for a client proposal. They do come with a 3 yr purchase plan.
As for free old OS versions, everything up to 7.6.1 is available with 8 and 9 not being released yet (except for the free updaters within 8 and 9).
If you can't afford the software, stay at your OS level. I'd still be at 10.1 if it wasn't for one particular program that annoyed me into 10.2. I'll likely stay here until I buy my next mac and get a family plan to upgrade all three.
You don't have to upgrade if what you have works for you. For a lot of people 10.1 is fine, for even more 10.2 will work just fine. When 10.4 rolls out in 2004/2005 some will make the jump while others will hold out for 10.5 in 2005/2006.
I don't understand why you *have* to upgrade from 10.2 when you aren't getting a new mac. What's so lacking with that?
Apple does sell a contract for 3 years worth of updates. The store's currently down but I think it's a considerable savings if you're going to upgrade to each new release.
One thing that Apple does that's kind of neat is that they eventually release old versions of their OS for free. If you have some ancient mac and need a copy of 7.5.3, you can just download it. Windows 95, otoh, isn't made available on those kinds of terms.
Quick releases are the proof of significant innovation. If everything runs on 10.1 or 10.2 there's no need to upgrade in an enterprise situation unless the next version provides more benefit than the cost to switch. And with net booting, upgrades are considerably easier than walking around with a CD to each system.
Predictive, distributed compiling seems quite nice. Mac programmers will buy just for that. The folder labels is a bone to the OS 9 UI bigots. Apple's mixing in new features with bringing over old features from 9 that weren't ready before 10.0 shipped.
If it were medical boards that were just slack in punishing bad doctors then you wouldn't see the same litigation behaviors outside of the medical field. Medicine would be a unique problem. Instead you see it in every field with medicine being worse because it's easier to generate the sob story necessary to work the popular version of the scam. Of course, the RIAA variant on view in this story wouldn't be touched by your refom but would be managed by loser pays rules that are common in tort reform bills.
Now you think slack medical boards are the problem. Slack medical boards would tend to be slack across disciplines. Laziness doesn't pick and choose favorites. Instead, what you have are high risk disciplines creating a disproportionate share of the problem. You would think the sham docs would concentrate where it was easy but no! Those doctors, by your theory, are concentrating in hard disciplines where there's a lot of emotion, a lot of bad outcomes, exactly where they're at most risk of being scrutinized by grieving relatives. NOT! The phenomenon of certain specialties being lawsuit magnets really puts a wrench in your theory.
Insurance companies can track bad docs nationwide and they can price malpractice insurance out of reach of the bad doctors If they are the cause of unprofitability. They also could much more easily pressure state legislatures to tighten up on doctor licensing (most doctors are more than happy to rid themselves of the hacks and quacks in the field).
But that's not where insurance companies are putting their lobbying dollars. They're fully behind tort reform because they hear the shakedown stories every day and get to see the frivolous lawsuit racket happen all the time.
'Gimme a $20k settlement or I'll go to trial and give you a $50k legal bill by the time you get to dismissal' is how it often goes. Those $20k settlements add up. Bad results happen all the time in medicine. It doesn't mean that it's malpractice, just that professionally, doctors are trying to stave off death and everybody eventually loses in that attempt.
So you're left with a little reform fable that it must be the licensing board's fault when the lawsuit distribution of such an oversight failure would be completely different and those who would gain most in profitability (good doctors and insurance companies) are in complete agreement that lax state oversight is not the main issue.
Finally, I've been a jury foreman on a medical malpractice case. I saw the scam up close and personal. We had two jurors in my jury who were willing to convict and in a different random population distribution, we could have had all 12. Playing the jury's heartstrings is real and suing when you don't have a case is real, and Public citizen needs to get its head out of its butt because they're just not living in the real world. Whether or not that's on purpose is beyond my competence.
Sorry, try again.
Loser pays means you aren't paying your lawyer if you win and most good lawyers are willing to take on such cases because Mr. Moneybags on the other end of the suit can pay their fee. The point of the intimidation racket is to play the percentages. You intimidate 9 out of 10 people, the 10th one sticks and you go to trial, lose but still bankrupt the guy, making him an object lesson.
Now in a loser pays system you're going to trial every time, you still bankrupt the 10th guy because of bribery, lucky jury pick, whatever. But the other 9 aren't settling, they're winning and making news about how you're a big mean bully. Ugly things are happening on the shareholders talk boards and there's a decided downward trend to the stock price because people don't want to be associated with such sleazy tactics (especially when they're expensive and ineffective).
End result, the 10th guy doesn't get bankrupt *because the racket no longer works*. The companies voluntarily stop intimidating people through the court system because it's inefficient and ineffective.
This would depend on the legislation which is not passed yet. Write your congressman if that's not the system you want.
No, it would be like today's contingency lawsuits in that you don't pay at the beginning but the judge would pay the lawyer from the loser's pocket, in other words, lawyers get paid at the end a reasonable fee. I'm sure that jurisdictions could not pass this kind of reform but it would really kill off their local business community.
According to this article they're currently dna testing remains. We'll know in the next few days.
I'm sure Syria has been made aware of its options. I don't think money is involved, except maybe offering sweetners to the Assad exile package.
The old geopolitical game that all the great powers played (yes, including the US) was to not let a hegemon hold Iraq and Iran because that would allow the resulting entity to sweep down and take Saudi Arabia without blinking and there goes our economy.
The mullahs are busy hiring international thugs to beat up their own people lately. Even if the old calculus didn't hold, Iran's just incapable until they get a new government. Hopefully that'll be this year.
Tinkering around the margins with cosmetic reforms isn't going to get rid of the problem. You can argue for different reforms but all the blockers say the same thing, admit some things need to be fixed and never come up with anything constructive, just that whatever reform is proposed is no good.
Tech people getting legally hammered by drive by lawsuits are only a small part of the problem. People are not getting better and even dying because medical specialists are being priced out of wide jurisidictions (West Virginia seems to be worst). When you have to go to a different state to deliver your baby, that's just wrong. So what's going to take care of that problem except tort reform?
Oh that's taken care of already as the trial lawyers collectively have decided to back the Democrat party (and have become their #1 money source). With all the blockers in one party, if your #1 problem is the judicial criminals who inimidate through litigation then all you have to do is vote out the Dems.
All I can say is they had better not launch this in Chicago. The real casualty count of all this would be too sad for words.
I'm not you're son, in fact, I probably have a few years on you. Respect your elders, would ya boy?
The current system of torts is absolutely devastating our medical profession (which tends to get hit worse than tech though tech's catching up). They have to airlift patients out of areas with bad legal frameworks because all the specialists have either retired or moved away. Look at West Virginia for a very good example.
Does anybody here want to airlift out all those tech jobs that are litigation risky to nations with loser pays? It's remarkably easy with technology jobs.
You're assuming that this student actually did something wrong. From the 'dentist' comment, it's pretty obvious that he didn't and that this was pure judicial harrassment. Loser pays speeds up settlements for the guilty (they don't want to have to pay any more of their opponent's fees than necessary) and it makes the unjustly accused stick to their guns. That's a two-fer win that works to everybody's advantage but the legal criminals who use the current system to intimidate and unjustly profit from the current rules.
I can live with those gomers being upset.
They have a plan to take care of that. It's called damage caps and loser pays tort reform. Essentially, it takes away the incentive to make frivolous lawsuits. The guy wouldn't need a defense fund, and wouldn't need to settle because he'd simply go through the process and get his lawyer fees back when he wins.
Or he's that Nazi war criminal dentist who kept asking Dustin Hoffman "is it safe"?
Yeah, the RIAA represented by an international war criminal out to get blood money. I like the imagery.
Oh, no, N. Korea's an entirely different situation. Who are the Iraqi version of the S. Koreans? you know, the guys with more population, a hugely bigger economy, and right on the border with this lunatic nation of their co-ethnics?
S. Korea, Japan, and the PRC could take apart N. Korea by themselves if they wanted to. But who was able to do it in Iraq's neighborhood and clean up the local bully? Iran? Please. They sacrificed a generation of their children to Iraqi gas and minefields. Saudia Arabia? ROFL! Kuwait? you're kidding, right? Turkey's really the only candidate and they just aren't interested, as taking responsibility for Iraq would set back their ambitions of joining the EU for decades. They've got enough trouble with Cyprus.
But fear not, there are interesting moves afoot in N. Korea and Rumsfeld's likely to soon announce some force structure changes that have already been leaked to the press that remake the old status quo. He's pulling forces back off of the DMZ and it's driving the N. Koreans nuts. How can they justify their repressive measures (which in reality are there to stop revolt) when the great boogie man is pulling his troops off their borders. It also scares the piss out of S. Korea because they have to come up with the replacements for those troops at the DMZ. The extra cost should focus their minds pretty well on the cost of playing friendly with a psychotic regime.
And isn't this the entire point of the exercise? The RIAA (and MPAA for that matter) aren't looking for legal remedies for a particular instance of lawbreaking, they're looking to create a mass of cowed serfs who take their hats off and bow when their lords and masters pass by them.
Using the legal process as an intimidation tool is just how the lawyers like it. We need tort reform now!