Only explanation is it's MS Enterprise 5.7 and user preferences are the great new groundbreaking feature in MS Enterprise 6... expected any decade now.
Nah. MS Enterprise 5.7 would just deliver a sweaty English aristocrat holding a small plastic golf-ball stand.
I have seen with my own eyes, a government department that uses a company for all their IT needs, and that company needs to fill out a form every time you need to purchase a mouse, those forms and paper trail end up costing about 100$, for an 8$ mouse.....seriously, when no one is watching how you spend the money, anything goes, but tell these same people to pay 100$ for a mouse at home , they would freak!!!
Sounds like a good excuse to get that $100 ergonomic wireless darkfield laser mouse with the high inertia scroll wheel and adjustable weighting then...
Seriously, I'd guess $50-$100 is not atypical for the amount of money a large organisation spends processing any order. Partly to blame are the reams of tax, accounting and regulatory crap that firms have to deal with. On the other hand: while the adminisphere are quite happy to explain to you why, in these lean times, you can't have a $8 mouse and you'll just have to find another way, nobody ever seems to turn round to the adminisphere and explain to them why, in these lean times, they can't spend $100 on processing an $8 order and should find a better way.
(Like buying 500 $8 mice and only spending one $100 processing fee, and sticking them in a store cupboard somewhere).
The inevitable review and response to this scare story will produce a series of reforms which will increase these costs by introducing more "accountability" steps that increase the admin overhead. One of the main justifications for these single-supplier procurement deals is that they are necessary to comply with regulations on competitive tendering and other "lets fix everything" laws.
The only stuff that's worth over keeping and lovingly caring for over 30 years is the good stuff. The crap gets filtered out over time.
Ding!
Plus, how much did that decent HiFi system cost 30 years ago? Now allow for inflation*. I'm betting the answer is yikes!!!
Working the other way, your cd/MP3 micro system may not sound as good as your vintage HiFi but it sure sounds a hell of a lot better than the crappy portable radio/cassette that would have been its price/size/weight equivalent back in the day.
*Or maybe not. Electronics are dirt cheap today. In the case of computers, you've been able to get a computer for £300 and a fancy computer for £1500 since 1979 and I guess much the same applies to audio (except the effect of the number of transistors increasing by 10^6 isn't so noticeable in an audio product).
Books. Horrible things - they may be convenient to carry around but they'll never replace good old stone tablets. I want to be able to pass my stone tablets down to my grandkids and have them still readable in 4800 years time. By then they'll have released Books 2.0 and you'll have to buy everything again.
And don't talk to me about the scroll-hacking scandal.
As for the US market (I know that other locations outside Europe exist, so apologies if you're from one of those...) There were US versions of the BBC Micro and Archimedes but they were a flop.
One problem was, I suspect, that US computers were always expensive in the UK (reading a copy of Byte was a good way to cause apoplexy here in the UK when you saw that £700 Apple II cost $700 in the USA despite the exchange rate being around 2:1) - so here in the UK the technically more advanced BBC Micro was half the price of the Apple II. Of course, this mysterious £/$ parity only works one way, so by the time that BBC Micro had been exported to the US, its in the same price bracket as the Apple.
Problem 2 is the US's Never The Same Color 525 line apology for a TV system. So, while the UK BBC Micro could do 640x256 graphics on a 625-line PAL TV or monitor, the US NTSC version could only do 640x200. Consequence: lots of software (particularly games) breaks, so the US versions (already getting caned by the vast range of software for the now similarly-priced Apple) can't run lots of UK software.
Problem 3 is that the US FCC had this silly notion that people within 500' of a working computer should still be able to listen to a FM radio (sounds un-American to me, maybe it only applied to imports) whereas (in the happy days before European CE ratings) the likes of Sinclair and Acorn cheerfully stuck their electronics into unshielded plastic boxes. Consequence: all the cases needed re-designing for the US market making the product even more expensive.
Unfortunately, Acorn and Sinclair then decided to try and compete with each other. Pity, because Sinclair was really good at making insanely cheap computers for people who couldn't afford a computer, while Acorn were good at making serious bits of extremely versatile kit for people who could. The results of their competition - the Acorn Electron and the Sinclair QL - were a bit like one of those "In Hell..." jokes and didn't end well.
Well, I remember when I was a kid, the computer world was very fragmented. Apple was incompatible with Atari was incompatible with Commodore was incompatible with IBM.
...but for serious business computing, long before MS-DOS, there was CP/M, which ran on hardware from many different manufacturers. As a kid, you didn't want one (a) because you couldn't afford it and (b) the cheaper, fragmented systems had cool things like sound and colour graphics. It was, however, sufficiently important that you could even buy Z80-based second processors for 6502 systems like the Apple and BBC Micro to run CP/M. By that time, device-independent graphics libraries for CP/M were cropping up (GDI if I remember correctly. I used the Z80/CPM second processor for the BBC Micro for a while, which included GDI - it cropped up later in the GEM windowing system).
Then, as 16/32 bit processors started to appear, Unix could have been a contender, were it not for the DOS dominance. I suppose it was a contender: of the 3 modern platforms you mention one is officially Unix (Mac OS X) one would be Unix if it could afford the club membership (Linux) and one is Posix-compliant on alternate Thursdays (Windows).
The other thing is that, now, we have the luxury of oodles of CPU power, RAM and storage space. This means we can write major apps, games even, in high-level languages and have hardware abstraction layers that bury the technical details of graphics hardware, sound and other peripherals. We can even have virtual machines running with reasonable performance - Apple have been able to switch from 68K to PPC to Intel and completely change OS while still providing backward compatibility. Back in the good old 8-bit days, that sort of thing would have been a pipedream - you needed bare-metal access and assembly code to get a decent performance. "Compatibility" then meant compatible hardware whereas today it is more about compatible APIs. Too much emphasis on compatibility then would have stunted development (Exhibit A: the IBM PC).
let's dump more garbage into our oceans. Its not like they're struggling to survive against the onslaught of man already!
Get with the program: it's called "creating an artificial reef to encourage wildlife":-)
Actually, we mammals did pretty well the last time something big dropped out of the sky and wiped out the dominant species.
Sadly, the ISS is just too tiny to make a sufficiently large bang to pass on the favor to the next up and coming class of lifeforms (although the news media will probably act like it is).
Playing nice with windows is what Linux has been trying for 10+ years and look where it's gotten us.
Probably a lot further than Linux would have gotten otherwise.
Plus, Linux's appeal is at the server end, not on the desktop. Apple's appeal is vice versa - they have an attractive desktop product, with native versions of several key industry-standard applications.
However sad, unfair or misguided this is, however much the actual products suck, Linux's stumbling block has always been the lack of MS Office, Adobe CS etc. This might actually change post-tablet - the iPad has gone some way to convince people that they can live without Word.
Yeah, Steve Jobs personally came round with a MiB neuralizer and wiped my memory. Now all I can remember before the iPad is a few rather expensive stylus-driven Windows machines that never really caught on and were nothing like the sort of tablet that TFA is referring to.
Because it's percentage-based and can therefore fluctuate based on total size, market share is not as important a figure as it's often made out to be.
Well, that's one problem. The other problem is that the tablet market was created out of nowhere by Apple less than 18 months ago, and its only in the last 6 months or so that there has been anything significant in the way of non-vaporware alternatives. So the fact that Android has increased its market share now that there are a number of viable iPad alternatives is definitely one for the department of urso-sylvanian scatology or the journal of papal denominational studies.
The decision to release OS10.7, or Lion, for download only is hardly going to endear Apple to IT managers who need to conserve network resources.
They've already announced a volume licensing scheme which only requires one download and everybody should know by now that the "updater" app that you download can be copied to physical media and re-used, and if you dig it contains a disc image of a good-old-fangled bootable DVD which you can use for bare metal installs. Most big IT setups will do an install on one machine of each type and then image it, anyway.
The main annoyance is not for IT departments, but for microbusinesses and people running small groups of renegade Mac users in PC centric environments, where the minimum order of 20 licenses might be a problem (although if you phrase that as "$600 for up to 20 users" it sounds more reasonable).
Most of all, IT departments would want to see the Mac OS offering full support for virtualization, on the desktop and on the server.
Ain't gonna happen. First, Occam's razor suggests that the reason they dropped XServe was that they couldn't even sell it to themselves: who's going to buy a XServe when the makers have just built a big shiny data center full of Dells?. Second, they've passed on the realistic solution, which was to license Snow Leopard Server for non-Apple hardware: at $500 a pop (or sign a volume license) it would hardly allow Dell to produce a $500 MacPro-killing minitower, but would be competetive with other server-grade software. Now that Server is a $50 add-on, that is out of the window.
Thing is, Apple has to make the Mac play nice with Windows servers if they want any business penetration. With that as a given, there's not much of a case for using OS X in your general purpose server farm when you can use Windows or Linux instead: OSX's USP is its combination of UNIX with nice GUI and the availability of MS and Adobe applications, which counts for little on a server.
While the Mac Mini and Mac Pro servers are not a replacement for proper rack-mounted server hardware, they are fine for Mac workgroups. The advantages of "proper" server hardware only cuts in when you've got a hundred of the things and the overall MTBF starts to go down.
As for this whole Apple hates business thing: so much of the business sector is a MS or Linux closed shop than any investment Apple makes is a long shot. Its main "inroad" to business in the past was its present in the DTP, Pro graphics and video arenas which was established at a time when Apple and Adobe had a head-and-shoulders lead in those markets and the PC of the day wasn't technically up to competing. That is now going to be a war of attrition. Apple main weapon now is its ability to rapidly innovate and move on to new things: that goes down a storm in the consumer arena but is not so good to businesses who like nice stable platforms, roadmaps and 5 years warning before a product is discontinued.
There are rumors that Apple will, itself, run a virtualized version of Mac OS under VMware as part of its iCloud product.
Well, OS X is Unix and Apple own it so they can install it where the hell they like. Bet its stripped down to hell, though. Chances are though, it would be just as practical to run iCloud on Linux, OpenBSD or any other Unix-a-like - just a bit of an embarrassment if your name was Apple.
Because it is overkill for keyboards and mice, more expensive and power hungry than proprietary radios, so people don't buy bluetooth keyboards and mice so the drivers don't get debugged etc... The only real attraction for mice/keyboards is if you have a laptop with built in BT, but now that the proprietary wireless dongles tend to be those low profile jobs that you can leave in a laptop USB port without getting snapped off, that's less of a consideration.
There is a reason why HID Bluetooth devices are blocked. Apple sells an overpriced "iPad Keyboard Dock". Mr. Jobs says buy that and make him more money.
Nice theory - except my clunky old Belkin Bluetooth keyboard pairs with my iPad in a jiffy, and my cheap'n'nasty Packard Bell USB mini-keyboard works via the USB adaptor that comes with the $30 iPad camera connection kit (you get a "USB device not supported" message, but it still works).
Back under the bridge and wait for the next billygoat, mate.
The GP's problem is probably that he forgot to hold his nose and hum the star spangled banner while standing on one leg and holding the power button on the keyboard while counting to 3 (to 2 thou shalt not count, except that thou then proceedest to 3: 5 is right out!) to put it in pairing mode. Bluetooth devices can be a faff like that.
My question is why did they give up on the 30" 2560x1600 monitor and go back down to 27"?
They dropped the 24" display at the same time as the 30". The average of 24 and 30 is 27. Simples!:-) Seriously, this probably was a happy medium between the two sizes/price points.
They also switched from 16:10 ratio to TV-style 16:9, so the panel size would change anyhow. Not sure there is such a thing as a 30" 16:9 panel - 30" monitors all seem to be 16:10 and quite a bit more expensive.
All in all, it sounds pretty sweet. I had no idea thunderbolt could do all that. Color me impressed.
I think Apple should have pulled out some stops and announced this display back when they launched Thunderbolt Macs, rather than burying it amid all the Lion hooha. This is exactly the sort of thing that distinguishes Thunderbolt from USB3.
However, before you rush out and order your kick-ass dual-core turbo graphics card, remember that ThunderBolt is only two lanes of PCIe so it might not be optimal for that. The applications suggested in the ad are more sensible.
I think the GP meant that they give employees two computers so that they can have a portable system and a dual display (with better than 17" screens).
Personally, I find a laptop on an elevator stand, external keyboard, a large "main" screen and the laptop display as a dumping ground for palettes and reference tools does the job... although a triple-screen setup would be nice. I'm hoping that the TB-out on the new display will take a MDP-to-DVI adapter (Don't see why not): two Apple displays would be an... extravagance.
and here's another display that looks fabulous, but will only work with the latest Macs (unless someone comes up with a DVI/DisplayPort to Thunderbolt converter so we can at least use the display).
Well, its a watershed product for Thunderbolt - Firewire 800, GB Ethernet and a daisychain for other TB peripherals or a second monitor, on top of the sound/usb/webcam functionality of the previous display, all over a single connection to the laptop.
If you want to use old Macs, you probably don't want this, and if you want to plug in PCs, BluRay players etc. you don't want an Apple display at all. Last I looked, the original MiniDisplayPort Cinema display is still available, and there's plenty of third party alternatives (including monitors with Displayport).
But yes, its a pity they couldn't make it fall back to DisplayPort (my home machine is TB but my work machine is DisplayPort so that is a bit of a bummer).
It costs $999, which, based on a quick Google price check, is actually toward the low end for this size.
True, the Dell 27" monitors are a similar price and don't include webcams, sound, mic etc. - but OTOH they have a plethora of video inputs (DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Composite, Component) whereas the Apple only has a single, captive cable Mini Displayport (now Thunderbolt) input.
Hence my comment that it only makes sense as a MacBook Pro companion, in which case the onboard sound, webcam and USB, and the built in MacBook charger offset the lack of input flexibility. As such, its good value, but still expensive.
Its also in the doldrums between home/office monitors (<<$1000) and graphics pro monitors (from $1000 to infinity and beyond) - so its value kinda depends on whether you think glossy screens are the spawn of Satan and unfit for serious use. That seems to be a common view amongst pro users. Personally, I think that's hogwash - my visual cortex is very good at ignoring discernible reflections but if the light from the screen is swamped by scattered light from the whole room there's nothing you can do. Plus, you can always stick a 3rd party anti-glare filter in front of a glossy screen, but you can't make a matte screen glossy.
I use an Apple Cinema Display at work, where it only ever gets plugged into a MBP, and its a thing of beauty. At home, I use a HP 26" that is not nearly as good, but ain't bad and was half the price. If I was going to drop a grand on a monitor then, previously, I'd have gone for the Dell because of the input flexibility. However, the idea of Ethernet and FW built in and the possibility of daisychaining a third monitor makes my credit card itch. If they'd added an eSATA port I'd be sold.
(A) For the people moaning about no physical media, they have also announced that there will be a physical version available on a USB thumb drive next month (gives them time for the first patches!) albeit for a considerable premium ($70 vs. $30 for download).
(B) Also interesting is the new 27" Thunderbolt Display which includes webcam, microphone, a sound system, gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800 and a thunderbolt daisy-chain port for additional peripherals and monitors - all via a single thunderbolt connection to a Mac (plus a magsafe power output to charge your laptop).
Its still "reassuringly expensive", and only really makes sense as a "if you need to ask the price..." Macbook Pro companion, but it could represent the first example of the sort of things that Thunderbolt can do that USB3 can't.
(Yeah, the USB ports are still only USB2, but Mac users are more likely to have an investment in FW800 while they wait for reasonably-priced Thunderbolt drives).
...who, like the inventor, regularly has to do screen real-estate-intensive work "on the road"...for example, on-location video editing, where two screens are particularly useful. If there are enough people in that category, good luck to the product.
However, for anybody who spends more time working at their desk than on the road, 2 x 17" is a bit small (...and they look like 1080p monitors to me) - I'd fancy something rather bigger for my main screen, and for the price premium of a dual screen laptop you could probably equip both home and office with a 26" display. I quite like the combination of a 13" laptop (for true portability) and a 28" display.
What's particularly annoying, though, is the MS Office "ribbon" concept infecting new software - particularly c.f. the previous version of Mac Office which used a floating palette. Pin a load of clutter to the top of the window just when everybody is being pushed to 16:9 displays? Brilliant.
Well, yes, but there is such a thing as applying definitions realistically. Non-destructible bedrock at the lower boundary of the map is hardly in the same league as the sort of fudges in other games claiming "fully destructible" environments, and even in meatspace, whacking fog with a pickaxe is pretty ineffective.
Even Minecraft doesn't have a fully destructible environment - some blocks can't be moved or changed, and there are depth and height limits, not to mention width wrap-arounds through the use on fixed-length int's on map indexes.
You seem to be confusing "fully destructible" with "infinite". AFAIK the only non-destructible blocks are bedrock and clouds. The "borderlands" where the int pointers break down and the everything goes crazy are further away than you'd get in normal gameplay.
But you're right - just because its good for Minecraft doesn't mean its good for every game. Part of the fun of Minecraft is the whacked-out physics, and the retro graphics nicely mirror the block-based theme.
It is like saying that since Up! was such a succesfull movie, every movie must now be 3D rendered. Or indeed that since Terry Pratchett made a hit by not using chapters, books no longer should have chapters.
You forget the Zeroth Amendment of the US Constitution: If some is good, more is better.
What Minecraft could really teach the industry is "don't get so big that every game has development costs the size of the national debt of a small country: then you can afford to take risks instead of playing safe and re-creating the last game with better graphics".
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Only explanation is it's MS Enterprise 5.7 and user preferences are the great new groundbreaking feature in MS Enterprise 6... expected any decade now.
Nah. MS Enterprise 5.7 would just deliver a sweaty English aristocrat holding a small plastic golf-ball stand.
I have seen with my own eyes, a government department that uses a company for all their IT needs, and that company needs to fill out a form every time you need to purchase a mouse, those forms and paper trail end up costing about 100$, for an 8$ mouse.....seriously, when no one is watching how you spend the money, anything goes, but tell these same people to pay 100$ for a mouse at home , they would freak!!!
Sounds like a good excuse to get that $100 ergonomic wireless darkfield laser mouse with the high inertia scroll wheel and adjustable weighting then...
Seriously, I'd guess $50-$100 is not atypical for the amount of money a large organisation spends processing any order. Partly to blame are the reams of tax, accounting and regulatory crap that firms have to deal with. On the other hand: while the adminisphere are quite happy to explain to you why, in these lean times, you can't have a $8 mouse and you'll just have to find another way, nobody ever seems to turn round to the adminisphere and explain to them why, in these lean times, they can't spend $100 on processing an $8 order and should find a better way.
(Like buying 500 $8 mice and only spending one $100 processing fee, and sticking them in a store cupboard somewhere).
The inevitable review and response to this scare story will produce a series of reforms which will increase these costs by introducing more "accountability" steps that increase the admin overhead. One of the main justifications for these single-supplier procurement deals is that they are necessary to comply with regulations on competitive tendering and other "lets fix everything" laws.
The only stuff that's worth over keeping and lovingly caring for over 30 years is the good stuff. The crap gets filtered out over time.
Ding!
Plus, how much did that decent HiFi system cost 30 years ago? Now allow for inflation*. I'm betting the answer is yikes!!!
Working the other way, your cd/MP3 micro system may not sound as good as your vintage HiFi but it sure sounds a hell of a lot better than the crappy portable radio/cassette that would have been its price/size/weight equivalent back in the day.
*Or maybe not. Electronics are dirt cheap today. In the case of computers, you've been able to get a computer for £300 and a fancy computer for £1500 since 1979 and I guess much the same applies to audio (except the effect of the number of transistors increasing by 10^6 isn't so noticeable in an audio product).
every man wants to write a book,
Books. Horrible things - they may be convenient to carry around but they'll never replace good old stone tablets. I want to be able to pass my stone tablets down to my grandkids and have them still readable in 4800 years time. By then they'll have released Books 2.0 and you'll have to buy everything again.
And don't talk to me about the scroll-hacking scandal.
Were the Acorns and Sinclairs released in the EU exclusively?
You mentioned the Timex/Sinclair computers. some of which were sold elswhere.
As for the US market (I know that other locations outside Europe exist, so apologies if you're from one of those...) There were US versions of the BBC Micro and Archimedes but they were a flop.
One problem was, I suspect, that US computers were always expensive in the UK (reading a copy of Byte was a good way to cause apoplexy here in the UK when you saw that £700 Apple II cost $700 in the USA despite the exchange rate being around 2:1) - so here in the UK the technically more advanced BBC Micro was half the price of the Apple II. Of course, this mysterious £/$ parity only works one way, so by the time that BBC Micro had been exported to the US, its in the same price bracket as the Apple.
Problem 2 is the US's Never The Same Color 525 line apology for a TV system. So, while the UK BBC Micro could do 640x256 graphics on a 625-line PAL TV or monitor, the US NTSC version could only do 640x200. Consequence: lots of software (particularly games) breaks, so the US versions (already getting caned by the vast range of software for the now similarly-priced Apple) can't run lots of UK software.
Problem 3 is that the US FCC had this silly notion that people within 500' of a working computer should still be able to listen to a FM radio (sounds un-American to me, maybe it only applied to imports) whereas (in the happy days before European CE ratings) the likes of Sinclair and Acorn cheerfully stuck their electronics into unshielded plastic boxes. Consequence: all the cases needed re-designing for the US market making the product even more expensive.
Unfortunately, Acorn and Sinclair then decided to try and compete with each other. Pity, because Sinclair was really good at making insanely cheap computers for people who couldn't afford a computer, while Acorn were good at making serious bits of extremely versatile kit for people who could. The results of their competition - the Acorn Electron and the Sinclair QL - were a bit like one of those "In Hell..." jokes and didn't end well.
The BBC have even dramatized the story for television.
but later on the Acorn Archimedes looked pretty cool
So was the little ol' processor that Acorn threw together to run it. I believe you can now buy those outside of Europe ;-).
Well, I remember when I was a kid, the computer world was very fragmented. Apple was incompatible with Atari was incompatible with Commodore was incompatible with IBM.
...but for serious business computing, long before MS-DOS, there was CP/M, which ran on hardware from many different manufacturers. As a kid, you didn't want one (a) because you couldn't afford it and (b) the cheaper, fragmented systems had cool things like sound and colour graphics. It was, however, sufficiently important that you could even buy Z80-based second processors for 6502 systems like the Apple and BBC Micro to run CP/M. By that time, device-independent graphics libraries for CP/M were cropping up (GDI if I remember correctly. I used the Z80/CPM second processor for the BBC Micro for a while, which included GDI - it cropped up later in the GEM windowing system).
Then, as 16/32 bit processors started to appear, Unix could have been a contender, were it not for the DOS dominance. I suppose it was a contender: of the 3 modern platforms you mention one is officially Unix (Mac OS X) one would be Unix if it could afford the club membership (Linux) and one is Posix-compliant on alternate Thursdays (Windows).
The other thing is that, now, we have the luxury of oodles of CPU power, RAM and storage space. This means we can write major apps, games even, in high-level languages and have hardware abstraction layers that bury the technical details of graphics hardware, sound and other peripherals. We can even have virtual machines running with reasonable performance - Apple have been able to switch from 68K to PPC to Intel and completely change OS while still providing backward compatibility. Back in the good old 8-bit days, that sort of thing would have been a pipedream - you needed bare-metal access and assembly code to get a decent performance. "Compatibility" then meant compatible hardware whereas today it is more about compatible APIs. Too much emphasis on compatibility then would have stunted development (Exhibit A: the IBM PC).
let's dump more garbage into our oceans. Its not like they're struggling to survive against the onslaught of man already!
Get with the program: it's called "creating an artificial reef to encourage wildlife" :-)
Actually, we mammals did pretty well the last time something big dropped out of the sky and wiped out the dominant species.
Sadly, the ISS is just too tiny to make a sufficiently large bang to pass on the favor to the next up and coming class of lifeforms (although the news media will probably act like it is).
I don't think that's true.
Playing nice with windows is what Linux has been trying for 10+ years and look where it's gotten us.
Probably a lot further than Linux would have gotten otherwise.
Plus, Linux's appeal is at the server end, not on the desktop. Apple's appeal is vice versa - they have an attractive desktop product, with native versions of several key industry-standard applications.
However sad, unfair or misguided this is, however much the actual products suck, Linux's stumbling block has always been the lack of MS Office, Adobe CS etc. This might actually change post-tablet - the iPad has gone some way to convince people that they can live without Word.
Yeah, Steve Jobs personally came round with a MiB neuralizer and wiped my memory. Now all I can remember before the iPad is a few rather expensive stylus-driven Windows machines that never really caught on and were nothing like the sort of tablet that TFA is referring to.
Because it's percentage-based and can therefore fluctuate based on total size, market share is not as important a figure as it's often made out to be.
Well, that's one problem. The other problem is that the tablet market was created out of nowhere by Apple less than 18 months ago, and its only in the last 6 months or so that there has been anything significant in the way of non-vaporware alternatives. So the fact that Android has increased its market share now that there are a number of viable iPad alternatives is definitely one for the department of urso-sylvanian scatology or the journal of papal denominational studies.
The decision to release OS10.7, or Lion, for download only is hardly going to endear Apple to IT managers who need to conserve network resources.
They've already announced a volume licensing scheme which only requires one download and everybody should know by now that the "updater" app that you download can be copied to physical media and re-used, and if you dig it contains a disc image of a good-old-fangled bootable DVD which you can use for bare metal installs. Most big IT setups will do an install on one machine of each type and then image it, anyway.
The main annoyance is not for IT departments, but for microbusinesses and people running small groups of renegade Mac users in PC centric environments, where the minimum order of 20 licenses might be a problem (although if you phrase that as "$600 for up to 20 users" it sounds more reasonable).
Most of all, IT departments would want to see the Mac OS offering full support for virtualization, on the desktop and on the server.
Ain't gonna happen. First, Occam's razor suggests that the reason they dropped XServe was that they couldn't even sell it to themselves: who's going to buy a XServe when the makers have just built a big shiny data center full of Dells?. Second, they've passed on the realistic solution, which was to license Snow Leopard Server for non-Apple hardware: at $500 a pop (or sign a volume license) it would hardly allow Dell to produce a $500 MacPro-killing minitower, but would be competetive with other server-grade software. Now that Server is a $50 add-on, that is out of the window.
Thing is, Apple has to make the Mac play nice with Windows servers if they want any business penetration. With that as a given, there's not much of a case for using OS X in your general purpose server farm when you can use Windows or Linux instead: OSX's USP is its combination of UNIX with nice GUI and the availability of MS and Adobe applications, which counts for little on a server.
While the Mac Mini and Mac Pro servers are not a replacement for proper rack-mounted server hardware, they are fine for Mac workgroups. The advantages of "proper" server hardware only cuts in when you've got a hundred of the things and the overall MTBF starts to go down.
As for this whole Apple hates business thing: so much of the business sector is a MS or Linux closed shop than any investment Apple makes is a long shot. Its main "inroad" to business in the past was its present in the DTP, Pro graphics and video arenas which was established at a time when Apple and Adobe had a head-and-shoulders lead in those markets and the PC of the day wasn't technically up to competing. That is now going to be a war of attrition. Apple main weapon now is its ability to rapidly innovate and move on to new things: that goes down a storm in the consumer arena but is not so good to businesses who like nice stable platforms, roadmaps and 5 years warning before a product is discontinued.
There are rumors that Apple will, itself, run a virtualized version of Mac OS under VMware as part of its iCloud product.
Well, OS X is Unix and Apple own it so they can install it where the hell they like. Bet its stripped down to hell, though. Chances are though, it would be just as practical to run iCloud on Linux, OpenBSD or any other Unix-a-like - just a bit of an embarrassment if your name was Apple.
Does anyone know why Bluetooth sucks so bad
Because it is overkill for keyboards and mice, more expensive and power hungry than proprietary radios, so people don't buy bluetooth keyboards and mice so the drivers don't get debugged etc... The only real attraction for mice/keyboards is if you have a laptop with built in BT, but now that the proprietary wireless dongles tend to be those low profile jobs that you can leave in a laptop USB port without getting snapped off, that's less of a consideration.
There is a reason why HID Bluetooth devices are blocked. Apple sells an overpriced "iPad Keyboard Dock". Mr. Jobs says buy that and make him more money.
Nice theory - except my clunky old Belkin Bluetooth keyboard pairs with my iPad in a jiffy, and my cheap'n'nasty Packard Bell USB mini-keyboard works via the USB adaptor that comes with the $30 iPad camera connection kit (you get a "USB device not supported" message, but it still works).
Back under the bridge and wait for the next billygoat, mate.
The GP's problem is probably that he forgot to hold his nose and hum the star spangled banner while standing on one leg and holding the power button on the keyboard while counting to 3 (to 2 thou shalt not count, except that thou then proceedest to 3: 5 is right out!) to put it in pairing mode. Bluetooth devices can be a faff like that.
My question is why did they give up on the 30" 2560x1600 monitor and go back down to 27"?
They dropped the 24" display at the same time as the 30". The average of 24 and 30 is 27. Simples! :-) Seriously, this probably was a happy medium between the two sizes/price points.
They also switched from 16:10 ratio to TV-style 16:9, so the panel size would change anyhow. Not sure there is such a thing as a 30" 16:9 panel - 30" monitors all seem to be 16:10 and quite a bit more expensive.
Almost?
All in all, it sounds pretty sweet. I had no idea thunderbolt could do all that. Color me impressed.
I think Apple should have pulled out some stops and announced this display back when they launched Thunderbolt Macs, rather than burying it amid all the Lion hooha. This is exactly the sort of thing that distinguishes Thunderbolt from USB3.
Chances are a Thunderbolt adapter to a box with PCIe slots will eventually appear on the market.
Something like this you mean?
However, before you rush out and order your kick-ass dual-core turbo graphics card, remember that ThunderBolt is only two lanes of PCIe so it might not be optimal for that. The applications suggested in the ad are more sensible.
I think the GP meant that they give employees two computers so that they can have a portable system and a dual display (with better than 17" screens).
Personally, I find a laptop on an elevator stand, external keyboard, a large "main" screen and the laptop display as a dumping ground for palettes and reference tools does the job... although a triple-screen setup would be nice. I'm hoping that the TB-out on the new display will take a MDP-to-DVI adapter (Don't see why not): two Apple displays would be an... extravagance.
and here's another display that looks fabulous, but will only work with the latest Macs (unless someone comes up with a DVI/DisplayPort to Thunderbolt converter so we can at least use the display).
Well, its a watershed product for Thunderbolt - Firewire 800, GB Ethernet and a daisychain for other TB peripherals or a second monitor, on top of the sound/usb/webcam functionality of the previous display, all over a single connection to the laptop.
If you want to use old Macs, you probably don't want this, and if you want to plug in PCs, BluRay players etc. you don't want an Apple display at all. Last I looked, the original MiniDisplayPort Cinema display is still available, and there's plenty of third party alternatives (including monitors with Displayport).
But yes, its a pity they couldn't make it fall back to DisplayPort (my home machine is TB but my work machine is DisplayPort so that is a bit of a bummer).
It costs $999, which, based on a quick Google price check, is actually toward the low end for this size.
True, the Dell 27" monitors are a similar price and don't include webcams, sound, mic etc. - but OTOH they have a plethora of video inputs (DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Composite, Component) whereas the Apple only has a single, captive cable Mini Displayport (now Thunderbolt) input.
Hence my comment that it only makes sense as a MacBook Pro companion, in which case the onboard sound, webcam and USB, and the built in MacBook charger offset the lack of input flexibility. As such, its good value, but still expensive.
Its also in the doldrums between home/office monitors (<<$1000) and graphics pro monitors (from $1000 to infinity and beyond) - so its value kinda depends on whether you think glossy screens are the spawn of Satan and unfit for serious use. That seems to be a common view amongst pro users. Personally, I think that's hogwash - my visual cortex is very good at ignoring discernible reflections but if the light from the screen is swamped by scattered light from the whole room there's nothing you can do. Plus, you can always stick a 3rd party anti-glare filter in front of a glossy screen, but you can't make a matte screen glossy.
I use an Apple Cinema Display at work, where it only ever gets plugged into a MBP, and its a thing of beauty. At home, I use a HP 26" that is not nearly as good, but ain't bad and was half the price. If I was going to drop a grand on a monitor then, previously, I'd have gone for the Dell because of the input flexibility. However, the idea of Ethernet and FW built in and the possibility of daisychaining a third monitor makes my credit card itch. If they'd added an eSATA port I'd be sold.
(A) For the people moaning about no physical media, they have also announced that there will be a physical version available on a USB thumb drive next month (gives them time for the first patches!) albeit for a considerable premium ($70 vs. $30 for download).
(B) Also interesting is the new 27" Thunderbolt Display which includes webcam, microphone, a sound system, gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800 and a thunderbolt daisy-chain port for additional peripherals and monitors - all via a single thunderbolt connection to a Mac (plus a magsafe power output to charge your laptop).
Its still "reassuringly expensive", and only really makes sense as a "if you need to ask the price..." Macbook Pro companion, but it could represent the first example of the sort of things that Thunderbolt can do that USB3 can't.
(Yeah, the USB ports are still only USB2, but Mac users are more likely to have an investment in FW800 while they wait for reasonably-priced Thunderbolt drives).
...who, like the inventor, regularly has to do screen real-estate-intensive work "on the road" ...for example, on-location video editing, where two screens are particularly useful. If there are enough people in that category, good luck to the product.
However, for anybody who spends more time working at their desk than on the road, 2 x 17" is a bit small (...and they look like 1080p monitors to me) - I'd fancy something rather bigger for my main screen, and for the price premium of a dual screen laptop you could probably equip both home and office with a 26" display. I quite like the combination of a 13" laptop (for true portability) and a 28" display.
What's particularly annoying, though, is the MS Office "ribbon" concept infecting new software - particularly c.f. the previous version of Mac Office which used a floating palette. Pin a load of clutter to the top of the window just when everybody is being pushed to 16:9 displays? Brilliant.
Well, yes, but there is such a thing as applying definitions realistically. Non-destructible bedrock at the lower boundary of the map is hardly in the same league as the sort of fudges in other games claiming "fully destructible" environments, and even in meatspace, whacking fog with a pickaxe is pretty ineffective.
Even Minecraft doesn't have a fully destructible environment - some blocks can't be moved or changed, and there are depth and height limits, not to mention width wrap-arounds through the use on fixed-length int's on map indexes.
You seem to be confusing "fully destructible" with "infinite". AFAIK the only non-destructible blocks are bedrock and clouds. The "borderlands" where the int pointers break down and the everything goes crazy are further away than you'd get in normal gameplay.
But you're right - just because its good for Minecraft doesn't mean its good for every game. Part of the fun of Minecraft is the whacked-out physics, and the retro graphics nicely mirror the block-based theme.
It is like saying that since Up! was such a succesfull movie, every movie must now be 3D rendered. Or indeed that since Terry Pratchett made a hit by not using chapters, books no longer should have chapters.
You forget the Zeroth Amendment of the US Constitution: If some is good, more is better.
What Minecraft could really teach the industry is "don't get so big that every game has development costs the size of the national debt of a small country: then you can afford to take risks instead of playing safe and re-creating the last game with better graphics".