First you'd have to define the difference between desktop and OS.
While I consider OS X to best the best OS, I'm not so sure about the best desktop. The finder for example lacks more than one feature. Quicksilver IMHO is the main difference between Vista, Linux and OS X. Quicksilver is a killer app, that really changes the way to work with OS X.
The big plus of OS X is integration. One spellchecker, one dictionary, one search engine, one scripting language (Applescript), always there, always supported. But the KDE guys are getting there as well.
And a holy grail? No, there isn't one. Menu bars at the top of the app window or at the top the desktop? You may start a flame war here, but I don't think there's a provable "this is better than that and that's always true" solution. Different types of users, different types of desktops. One loves simplictiy, one loves features. One loves "there's always more than one way to do it", one loves GNOME.
IMHO KDE looked at Windows too often and looked at OS/2 and Mac OS X too seldom. There are a lot of good ideas in OS X and OS/2 as well.
Can you really change to a different store with your Apple TV? In iTunes I can only buy from the iTunes store. Of course I can buy stuff somewhere else and import it into iTunes (of DRM allows), but inside iTunes I can't.
I doubt that AppleTV allows shopping somewhere else. Of course I can transcode my DVDs to H264 and watch them with Apple TV, but this is a violation of the DMCA.
At least from my experience with my Mac mini. Even with Eclipse running and compiling things in the background, my power usage has never climbed above 60 watts.
SilentPCReview did some tests with iMacs as well. They loved them (no wonder IMHO). They did a 2xCPUBurn+ATI tool und XP to stress both cores and graphic card and never got more than 73 watts power usage even WITH the LCD on (link).
But you can get Athlon X2s these days that only draw 35 watts, compared to (IIRC) 65 watts for a Core 2 Duo.
Try to get them! Impossible. Even the single core EE SFF versions (35 watts) are difficult to get. The new 45 watt versions (but single core as well) are easier to get.
In any case, if the iPhone flops, Apple just take out the transmitter, drop the price and you're left with a pretty cute iPod Video DeLuxe - which wouldn't have been possible if they'd made a more "phone-y" phone. I'm 100% sure that Apple will do this under all circumstances. Even more probable if the iPhone is a hit.
Apple has invested a lot in this new light version of OS X and the multitouch GUI (IMHO the real gem in the iPhone). Surely not just for a single device.
Not an iMac, I don't need a second display. Not a Mini, upgradebility and serviceability is a mess (even worse than the iMac). And the MacPro is too powerful and too expensive.
A Mini Tower with a normal board, those MacPro drive bays with normal 3.5 inch drives, normal DDR2-RAMs (and not those notebook thingies) and expandability with 2 or 3 PCI-X slots would be a killer. Call it Mac. The best thing: 3.5 inch drives are cheaper than 2.5 inch drives and normal RAM is cheaper than S0-DIMMs. So these machines should not be pricier than the Minis.
Those people talking about putty knifes and serviceability in one sentence have not seen an Optiplex oder sth similiar from HP in their lifes before.
Btw. any sane system administrator will kill you, when you suggest dual booting or VMWare as good solutions to the problem of switching (liek the submitor of the article does). Come on, this guy has already too much to do supporting and securing one OS, never think of two OSes simultaniously... These are wonderful solutions for me, for developers or other technical guys. But not for widespread use in corporations.
I'm 100% sure that a site that is as important as Wikipedia could negotiate a deal with everyone. No matter if it's Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. You had a Wikipedia copy, you are not the Wikimedia Foundation, so your problems with AdSense do not mean that the "official" Wikipedia would have problems too.
Google sells advertising on MySpace for 3(?) years and paid 900 million for that. So if MySpace Content is good enough for Google, Wikipedia has to be too.
According to heise the new 45 watt versions are the followups to the old 65 watts EE version (not the 35 watts EE SFF versions). While the EE SFF were essentially unavailable, the "normal" EE versions were available. At least here in Germany.
But you can only sell out if the content producers know enough about advertising revenues. If they don't know anything about advertising revenue, they can't be influenced at all.
So let a third party do the advertising (e.g. Google) and let a fourth party do the verification of sales und page impressions (just to make sure that Google can not do evil...). This could be someone completly independet. I'd vote for something like PriceWaterhouseCoopers et.al.
With the right construction Wikipedia could profit from advertising, even profit big. They could buy licences and put stuff in the public domain and a lot of other very useful things.
So the situation is not that different from the US.
Subsidies have been cut by 36%, but they are still there.
Ethanol from Corn or sugar beets doesn't make sense for the US or Europe. This may be different for e.g. Brazil. Diesel from rape or soybeans makes much more sense (or even algae in the long run).
When the community picked the old, dormant Postgres source code up (no problem due to the BSD licensing), the first that was added (after some debates) was the SQL syntax, hence the name change to PostgreSQL.
Not sure where Apple starts supporting it: in the server or the desktop version of Mac OS X. But the signs for ZFS support are clear.
ZFS is vastly superior to ReiserFS 3/4, to ext2/3/4, to xfs, etc. It's fast, journalled, expandable on the fly, supports snapshots, checksums, redundancy,... Among the few things that miss is builtin encryption, quotas (can be solved by "personal" filesystems) and online raid expansion. But in essence it's very cool. Most of the things that make TimeMachine look cool are built into ZFS. With the feature set of ZFS TimeMachine is not much more than a fancy GUI.
German magazine Video tested LCD vs. Plasma under real world conditions (OK, Sin City and Ice Age in a loop). The result: Plasma consume a bit more energy, but not much more.
While LCDs use nearly the same amount of energy regardless of the picture, the plasmas energy uses climbs with the brightness of the content. LCD uses background lighting and the LC filter out light/colours. 200 watts if the picture is white, 200 watts if the picture is black. Plasmas "create" light and a plasma uses much more energy when the picture is white (all plasma cells on full power) than with a black picture. And most content isn't pure white.
This is very dependent on the model of your TV. Modern Panasonic plasmas seem to fair rather well.
There's an article on German magazin Spiegel (of course in German), but the table of energy usage on the last page is pretty self explanatory I think.
I'm kind of astonished that the urban myth of much higher energy usage of plasmas is still alive.
Most of the Macs have one internal drive and cannot be updated. An external drive is not a problem as you said yourself. So your problem is only valid to Mac Pro owners with two optical drives. I'm not sure, but I guesstimate, that this may be even less than 1 percent of all Mac owners.
So you have two choices: Give 99% of all users an option they will never use. Or require "special training", which btw. is the use of the option key in addition to the eject key (in effect I find this more consistent and even a bit more intuitive than fiddling with the holes the older drives had).
But nevertheless it could be even more intuitive: Mac OSX knows how many internal drives it has. If you have one, eject it. If you have two, present a dialogue that explains eject and option+eject. Give an option to never show this dialogue again.
I'm not an Apple zealot and you definitly make a good point asking, why Apple doesn't simply put an eject button on every drive. This is the most intuitive solution.
Even worse. According to their blog, it contains a headphone socket too.
All those naysayers really p*** me off. After years of longing finally an nearly 100% opensource phone, with a proven build-system (openembedded) and backed by a development team which has some of the brightest hackers in the mobile linux world including Mr. GPL (Harald Welte, from gpl violations). And what do we get? A bunch of postings from naysayers, who didn't read the article, didn't do two seconds of their own research (like checking who is in this team) and distribute plain wrong facts.
As soon as this thing is available, my Motorola A780 (which is Linux, but badly badly crippled) will be for sale on ebay.
What is the patent stuff worth when it only applies to Novell employees? What about the gazillion other committers outside Novell? For example Codeweavers? What about ReactOS? What about OpenOffice and ODF (they mention ODF, but most of the committers to OO are from Sun, not from Novell)?
This is very very puzzling. I have a lot of questions and not a single answer (OK, one answer: This is good for Mono).
This is thin film technology (which btw is the correct translation) as well.
Btw, the time in years is not what really matters. Much more interesting is the simple ratio of energy you need to produce to the amount of energy you can "harvest". Even oil needs oil to produce, to refine, to transport, etc. I don't have numbers, but I guestimate that you lose 20-30% of the energy until the gas is gobbled by your car.
Good for the employees of Namesys. Good for SuSE. And perhaps without Reiser himself there even a chance that the disputes with the kernel team can be solved.
I don't see any other solution. Else ReiserFS will fade into obscurity. It may well be that it's already too late to save ReiserFS.
2 harddrives, 1 PCI-X slots for a graphic card, 2 PCI slots (TV, etc), 4 normal RAM Slots (no SO-DIMMs). And put this into a case, that has a better serviceability than the minis and the iMacs (that's currently a KO criteria against the minis and the iMacs for many businesses).
These things could be rather cheap even with a good case, cause most of the components are standardized. Sell them for the price of an iMac minus half the price of the monitor (17" is 300 USD, so minus 150 USD; 20" is 500 USD, so minus 250 USD, 24" is 1000 USD, so minus 500 USD).
LCDs are not that much more energy efficient as most people think. Heise has done a comparison and with real world pictures the difference is small. Reason: LCDs only emit part of the light from the backlight. So yes, when the picture consists of pure white the plasma uses much more energy the the LCD. But when the picture is only green, the plasma gets more efficient, cause it only has to lighten up the green pixels, whereas the LCD backlight still uses the same amount of energy it uses when displaying a white picture.
The short life span of plasmas may well be an urban myth too. Plasmas degrade. But what degrades is the same thing that degrades in your old CRT. And don't get me wrong, but I haven't heard of millions of CRTs thrown away after 5 years cause their brightness has faded too much. Plasmas will last at least as long as your old CRT. For me: no problem with that. Same goes with image burn in. Theoretically a problem with your old CRT too. But *I* haven't had a problem with that neither.
Your point with glares is no point. You can buy an LCD that acts as a mirror as well as a plasma. You can buy a plasma with good anti-reflection coating too.
And you left out the biggest con of LCDs: Their color reproduction. Skin (faces) still look waxy. LED backlights will fix that (at least the manufacturers promise that). But these things are very new and very expensive.
And never forget that you bought one of the best LCDs available. So you can say the your Aquos is wonderful. That may well be. But not all LCDs are that good. Most 32" LCDs under 1000 Dollars are awful. I'd like to know what you have payed. I wouldn't be suprised if a 42" Panasonic plasma would have costed you nearly the same amount of money.
For me the decision is easy: Due to the lack of missing HD content I stay with my tube. And stand at the side line while both technologies get better and cheaper every day...
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First you'd have to define the difference between desktop and OS.
While I consider OS X to best the best OS, I'm not so sure about the best desktop. The finder for example lacks more than one feature. Quicksilver IMHO is the main difference between Vista, Linux and OS X. Quicksilver is a killer app, that really changes the way to work with OS X.
The big plus of OS X is integration. One spellchecker, one dictionary, one search engine, one scripting language (Applescript), always there, always supported. But the KDE guys are getting there as well.
And a holy grail? No, there isn't one. Menu bars at the top of the app window or at the top the desktop? You may start a flame war here, but I don't think there's a provable "this is better than that and that's always true" solution. Different types of users, different types of desktops. One loves simplictiy, one loves features. One loves "there's always more than one way to do it", one loves GNOME.
IMHO KDE looked at Windows too often and looked at OS/2 and Mac OS X too seldom. There are a lot of good ideas in OS X and OS/2 as well.
Bye egghat.
Can you really change to a different store with your Apple TV? In iTunes I can only buy from the iTunes store. Of course I can buy stuff somewhere else and import it into iTunes (of DRM allows), but inside iTunes I can't.
I doubt that AppleTV allows shopping somewhere else. Of course I can transcode my DVDs to H264 and watch them with Apple TV, but this is a violation of the DMCA.
Did Apple really open their DRM for AppleTV?
Bye egghat
At least from my experience with my Mac mini. Even with Eclipse running and compiling things in the background, my power usage has never climbed above 60 watts.
SilentPCReview did some tests with iMacs as well. They loved them (no wonder IMHO). They did a 2xCPUBurn+ATI tool und XP to stress both cores and graphic card and never got more than 73 watts power usage even WITH the LCD on (link).
The iMac 24" used a maximum of 138 watts (link).
Bye egghat.
Try to get them! Impossible. Even the single core EE SFF versions (35 watts) are difficult to get. The new 45 watt versions (but single core as well) are easier to get.
By egghat.
Apple has invested a lot in this new light version of OS X and the multitouch GUI (IMHO the real gem in the iPhone). Surely not just for a single device.
Bye egghat.
Not an iMac, I don't need a second display. Not a Mini, upgradebility and serviceability is a mess (even worse than the iMac). And the MacPro is too powerful and too expensive.
... These are wonderful solutions for me, for developers or other technical guys. But not for widespread use in corporations.
A Mini Tower with a normal board, those MacPro drive bays with normal 3.5 inch drives, normal DDR2-RAMs (and not those notebook thingies) and expandability with 2 or 3 PCI-X slots would be a killer. Call it Mac. The best thing: 3.5 inch drives are cheaper than 2.5 inch drives and normal RAM is cheaper than S0-DIMMs. So these machines should not be pricier than the Minis.
Those people talking about putty knifes and serviceability in one sentence have not seen an Optiplex oder sth similiar from HP in their lifes before.
Btw. any sane system administrator will kill you, when you suggest dual booting or VMWare as good solutions to the problem of switching (liek the submitor of the article does). Come on, this guy has already too much to do supporting and securing one OS, never think of two OSes simultaniously
Bye egghat.
I'm 100% sure that a site that is as important as Wikipedia could negotiate a deal with everyone. No matter if it's Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. You had a Wikipedia copy, you are not the Wikimedia Foundation, so your problems with AdSense do not mean that the "official" Wikipedia would have problems too.
Google sells advertising on MySpace for 3(?) years and paid 900 million for that. So if MySpace Content is good enough for Google, Wikipedia has to be too.
Bye egghat.
According to heise the new 45 watt versions are the followups to the old 65 watts EE version (not the 35 watts EE SFF versions). While the EE SFF were essentially unavailable, the "normal" EE versions were available. At least here in Germany.
Bye egghat.
Everybody talks about selling out.
...). This could be someone completly independet. I'd vote for something like PriceWaterhouseCoopers et.al.
But you can only sell out if the content producers know enough about advertising revenues. If they don't know anything about advertising revenue, they can't be influenced at all.
So let a third party do the advertising (e.g. Google) and let a fourth party do the verification of sales und page impressions (just to make sure that Google can not do evil
With the right construction Wikipedia could profit from advertising, even profit big. They could buy licences and put stuff in the public domain and a lot of other very useful things.
Bye egghat
Zimbra: 6 million Paid Mailboxes.
I guess most of them are not private mailboxes.
So there's definitly are market for this.
Bye egghat.
So the situation is not that different from the US.
Subsidies have been cut by 36%, but they are still there.
Ethanol from Corn or sugar beets doesn't make sense for the US or Europe. This may be different for e.g. Brazil. Diesel from rape or soybeans makes much more sense (or even algae in the long run).
Bye egghat
Btw. Postgres was a project from Stonebreaker meant to deal with the limitiations of SQL (POST inGRES).
See the history of PostgreSQL.
When the community picked the old, dormant Postgres source code up (no problem due to the BSD licensing), the first that was added (after some debates) was the SQL syntax, hence the name change to PostgreSQL.
Bye egghat.
Not sure where Apple starts supporting it: in the server or the desktop version of Mac OS X. But the signs for ZFS support are clear.
... Among the few things that miss is builtin encryption, quotas (can be solved by "personal" filesystems) and online raid expansion. But in essence it's very cool. Most of the things that make TimeMachine look cool are built into ZFS. With the feature set of ZFS TimeMachine is not much more than a fancy GUI.
ZFS is vastly superior to ReiserFS 3/4, to ext2/3/4, to xfs, etc. It's fast, journalled, expandable on the fly, supports snapshots, checksums, redundancy,
Read more at wikipedia or here (How cool is that).
Bye egghat
German magazine Video tested LCD vs. Plasma under real world conditions (OK, Sin City and Ice Age in a loop). The result: Plasma consume a bit more energy, but not much more.
While LCDs use nearly the same amount of energy regardless of the picture, the plasmas energy uses climbs with the brightness of the content. LCD uses background lighting and the LC filter out light/colours. 200 watts if the picture is white, 200 watts if the picture is black. Plasmas "create" light and a plasma uses much more energy when the picture is white (all plasma cells on full power) than with a black picture. And most content isn't pure white.
This is very dependent on the model of your TV. Modern Panasonic plasmas seem to fair rather well.
There's an article on German magazin Spiegel (of course in German), but the table of energy usage on the last page is pretty self explanatory I think.
I'm kind of astonished that the urban myth of much higher energy usage of plasmas is still alive.
Bye egghat
Not many, I guess.
Most of the Macs have one internal drive and cannot be updated. An external drive is not a problem as you said yourself. So your problem is only valid to Mac Pro owners with two optical drives. I'm not sure, but I guesstimate, that this may be even less than 1 percent of all Mac owners.
So you have two choices: Give 99% of all users an option they will never use. Or require "special training", which btw. is the use of the option key in addition to the eject key (in effect I find this more consistent and even a bit more intuitive than fiddling with the holes the older drives had).
But nevertheless it could be even more intuitive: Mac OSX knows how many internal drives it has. If you have one, eject it. If you have two, present a dialogue that explains eject and option+eject. Give an option to never show this dialogue again.
I'm not an Apple zealot and you definitly make a good point asking, why Apple doesn't simply put an eject button on every drive. This is the most intuitive solution.
Bye egghat.
Even worse. According to their blog, it contains a headphone socket too.
All those naysayers really p*** me off. After years of longing finally an nearly 100% opensource phone, with a proven build-system (openembedded) and backed by a development team which has some of the brightest hackers in the mobile linux world including Mr. GPL (Harald Welte, from gpl violations). And what do we get? A bunch of postings from naysayers, who didn't read the article, didn't do two seconds of their own research (like checking who is in this team) and distribute plain wrong facts.
As soon as this thing is available, my Motorola A780 (which is Linux, but badly badly crippled) will be for sale on ebay.
Bye egghat.
What is the patent stuff worth when it only applies to Novell employees? What about the gazillion other committers outside Novell? For example Codeweavers? What about ReactOS? What about OpenOffice and ODF (they mention ODF, but most of the committers to OO are from Sun, not from Novell)?
This is very very puzzling. I have a lot of questions and not a single answer (OK, one answer: This is good for Mono).
Bye egghat.
From an older posting:
. "
"One manufacturer of solar cells even claims 0.85 years with their "Dünnfilmtechnologie" (is flat film a suitable translation?), see on page 3 here (Energierückzahldauer = amount of time for energy payback)
This is thin film technology (which btw is the correct translation) as well.
Btw, the time in years is not what really matters. Much more interesting is the simple ratio of energy you need to produce to the amount of energy you can "harvest". Even oil needs oil to produce, to refine, to transport, etc. I don't have numbers, but I guestimate that you lose 20-30% of the energy until the gas is gobbled by your car.
Bye egghat.
Good for the employees of Namesys. Good for SuSE. And perhaps without Reiser himself there even a chance that the disputes with the kernel team can be solved.
I don't see any other solution. Else ReiserFS will fade into obscurity. It may well be that it's already too late to save ReiserFS.
Bye egghat.
and now try to argue with him about the quality of his website ;-)
Bye egghat
Atleast Perl has a rather useful
use strict;
Bye egghat.
This is a *good* PR move.
Which is not the norm when you're talking abount Sun microsoystems.
Bye egghat.
2 harddrives, 1 PCI-X slots for a graphic card, 2 PCI slots (TV, etc), 4 normal RAM Slots (no SO-DIMMs). And put this into a case, that has a better serviceability than the minis and the iMacs (that's currently a KO criteria against the minis and the iMacs for many businesses).
These things could be rather cheap even with a good case, cause most of the components are standardized. Sell them for the price of an iMac minus half the price of the monitor (17" is 300 USD, so minus 150 USD; 20" is 500 USD, so minus 250 USD, 24" is 1000 USD, so minus 500 USD).
IMHO this would be a winner.
Bye egghat.
Full Ack!
Electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem.
Bye egghat.
Some things from your posts are urban myths ...
...
LCDs are not that much more energy efficient as most people think. Heise has done a comparison and with real world pictures the difference is small. Reason: LCDs only emit part of the light from the backlight. So yes, when the picture consists of pure white the plasma uses much more energy the the LCD. But when the picture is only green, the plasma gets more efficient, cause it only has to lighten up the green pixels, whereas the LCD backlight still uses the same amount of energy it uses when displaying a white picture.
The short life span of plasmas may well be an urban myth too. Plasmas degrade. But what degrades is the same thing that degrades in your old CRT. And don't get me wrong, but I haven't heard of millions of CRTs thrown away after 5 years cause their brightness has faded too much. Plasmas will last at least as long as your old CRT. For me: no problem with that. Same goes with image burn in. Theoretically a problem with your old CRT too. But *I* haven't had a problem with that neither.
Your point with glares is no point. You can buy an LCD that acts as a mirror as well as a plasma. You can buy a plasma with good anti-reflection coating too.
And you left out the biggest con of LCDs: Their color reproduction. Skin (faces) still look waxy. LED backlights will fix that (at least the manufacturers promise that). But these things are very new and very expensive.
And never forget that you bought one of the best LCDs available. So you can say the your Aquos is wonderful. That may well be. But not all LCDs are that good. Most 32" LCDs under 1000 Dollars are awful. I'd like to know what you have payed. I wouldn't be suprised if a 42" Panasonic plasma would have costed you nearly the same amount of money.
For me the decision is easy: Due to the lack of missing HD content I stay with my tube. And stand at the side line while both technologies get better and cheaper every day
Bye egghat.