They DO make and sell their own computers. Anyone know what percentage of their profit comes from sales of Apple-branded hardware?
Yeah right now. The thing is, depending on how this OSX x86 thing plays out, I bet we'll see those number change quite a bit.
This could be a really good thing for them. As OSX gains popularity on x86 they'll sell a ton of copies of it. As people pirate it, they'll gain market dominance. As they gain market dominance, they'll sell more Apple Brand hardware, and the cycle continues.
In my opinion, this is the smartest move they could have made. I'm suprised they didn't do it sooner, but despite that, they picked a good time. The world at large is ready for OSX.
Hey hey that's going too far. I never said that it had nothing to do with hardware, just that the experience is all about the software.
Like you yourself said, you don't care what's in it, as long as it stays true to the Apple Experience.
We all know OSX x86 isn't going to run on just any hardware. And that's the way it should be. I stand by my original statement that Apple on the x86 will be a good thing.
In fact I'd go as far as to say it could usher in a whole new era of computing.
but it just isn't a sound business decision for Apple
Hahah. Right. Sorry, I know you really want to believe it's not going to happen, and that you didn't waste thousands of dollars on underperforming hardware. But it is going to happen. Jobs himself has said so.
No offense to you, but Jobs runs a multimillion dollar company. You are a nobody. I think I'll trust Steve.
Also, does it make more sense to sell that experience at 2k or 100 bucks? Well, if they want to make tons of money, I'd say 100 bucks is the way to go. Making money is not about selling the product with the highest price tag, it's about two things: volume, and profit per item.
I don't know if it compares to SMF (probably not), but Gentoo's init system is quite good. It supports parallel service launching, does automatic dependency checking (so if you restart one service that others depend on it restarts them all).
It also doesn't require you to add and remove symlinks in a bunch of rc.d directories which is really nice. If you want to add or remove a service there's a simple one command utility that does it for you.
You totally missed the point. But anyway Dell is obviously a hardware company. True they don't make their own stuff, but they're a hardware reseller first and foremost. That's the only thing they do.
Apple sells hardware yes, but they don't just sell hardware. They sell the Apple experience.
I'm with Steve on this one. The apple experience can most certainly translate to x86, and they will make tons of money from it.
If you don't think so, then just wait and be proven wrong.
Apple is no longer a hardware company. You're living in the past, like they have been for the last 5 years.
Think about it. They don't make their own processors, graphics cards, memory, hard drives, fans, cords, peripherals, etc.
They get companies to make this stuff for them, they package it up, and sell it for a decent profit.
Aside from using a different architecture (which doesn't change the end user experience that much), the only thing that really sets a mac apart from a pc, is the software.
Apple is ALL ABOUT software. They themselves are now just starting to realize this.
Hell even the iPod... what truly separates it from other players? Yeah the hardware is good, and it looks slick, but it's the interface. And iTunes.
I guarantee you with OSX x86 in place, Apple's hardware business could completely dissapear and they will make more money than they ever have in the history of Apple computers.
No I don't work in trade, but yes I do know that lots of measurements are in non-centigrade form. Hell even half the cookbooks and food items still use the inferior system.
Just because people still use it doesn't mean it can't change. Take a stand! I cook my damn pizza at 180 celcius even if I have to read the freakin' tiny ass print on my stove to do it.
I'm quite upset with you. No self respecting Canadian, or any member of any country other than the lagging-behind-the-times-USA uses non-metric measurements. Canada and fahrenheit should never be mentioned in the same sentence, unless it's one of the following:
"That Fahrenheight 911 show was pretty good eh?"
"Fahrenheight? It's too damn hot in here for your jibberish. Go fill up the $24 AC with ice so we can get the temperature to a respectable level of Centrigadey goodness."
Actually that's not necessarily true. It's definitely true right now though. Most developers haven't really been tought to think in terms of parallelism when designing software, but that's starting to change.
It's all about the algorithms. Once multi-core chips have been mainstream for a while, all the algorithms out there will start to get converted to take advantage of parallel processing. And there are already algorithms out there that do this... this page has a small repository of parallel implementations of common algorithms including QuickSort, hashing techniques (for super fast searching), string operations (which every application in existence uses), and more.
Now I know this isn't always possible, but in many cases it is. Almost every program out there uses search and sort algorithms. Your address book does it, your web browser does it. These algorithms can be implemented to take advantage of having multiple processors.
A lot of operations can actually be modified to take advantage of this stuff. See the pbzip2 project that achieves a near linear speed up per processor!
Almost every algorithm out there can be modified to take advantage of muliple cores. Things like video/audio decoding are prime candidates (a lot of research is currently happening in this area).
It may take a generation of programmers and then another generation or two of applications to start really taking advantage of parallelism, but mark my works: once this stuff is mainstream, you'll start to really see some performance like never before.
I have a couple of Debian machines, so I know a thing or two. Enough to know that the reason this botched so badly is probably because they didn't give users an updater, rather just expected everyone to read the release notes, and update their system like normal.
It's not such a bad thing to warn people that they need to perform some task prior to updating. But if 1/3 the users aren't following the intended procedure, also given that they experienced a number of problems prior to release... they should have taken more steps to ensure people's system wouldn't be dead.
If it was say on out of ever 100 users or maybe even one out of ten, I would agree that the users are at fault... but one third!?
C++ may be a poor excuse for a language, but changing C++ libraries are not one of the reasons. That fault lies with the gcc team, and even then it's not really a fault.
It would have been much more accurate to say that the g++ portion of the Gnu compiler collection is driven by people who are poor excuses for developers, but that's another story entirely.
And just so you know, some of the greatest languages ever designed suffer from similar (or greater) problems. Objective-C has terrible cross platform, cross-architecture, and cross-version compile and run time problems. Even the Gnu C library itself isn't necessarily compatible from version to version.
Most distributions have to keep a number of glibcs around just to satisfy dependencies.
All in all, the bottom line is that the problem is with the Debian team, not with the people who didn't read release notes, or with C++, or with anything else.
If all they had to do was upgrade, the installer / updater should have done that automatically... especially since the problem was known to be a problem prior to release!
Seriously, they wait how many years to release, and when they do a full one third of their install base is left with an unusable system?
Hey Jeff, thanks for the reply. I had heard otherwise, and feel bad for spreading misinfo. Anyway... see the replies to the other post if you're interested.
I'm sure they'll try, but imagine how quick that will be hacked. If it runs on x86 I guarantee you eventually someone will figure out a way to get it to work.
Hell we can already run OSX on x86 with PearPC. Now just imagine how much faster it would be if every instruction didn't have to be interpretted..
At any rate... I personally don't see why they don't just let people do it. I mean, if they're already going to the trouble of converting to x86. They could just have a short list of officially supported setups, even have things like 'OSX certified' stickers and what not.
Bill gates would be crying and shaking in his tiny little devil boots. There is exactly one thing that keeps me from running OSX and that's the cost of the hardware. I know a lot of people feel that way.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I read somewhere that it was most likely they would be using a non x86 chip, not unlike the intanium (which although was a flop in the pc market) could do really well for macs since they would be in a better position to take advantage of it. They already use PPC, the OS is under their complete control, etc.
I mean, it's great news if they're adopting x86. I for one would love to run OSX on my cheap ass PC, but something tells me Steve might not be so into that?
Anyway... if it's true, not only do I take back my stupid comment and say thanks for the correct knowledge, but I look forward to it!
Just so you know... that ad is not meant as a joke. That's the scary part.
As for Debian's lack of stable released being a good thing, I disagree, and so do many many former Debian users. The few of you remaining Deb'ers always tout about that, but the numbers say otherwise.
And you argue that now it's just a core server distro, but that's not how it started. It may be that way now because you could never reasonably use it as a workstation machine, that is true yes. There used be tons of people using Deb as their main computer, now every single one that I knew has reluctantly (or otherwise) moved on to something else.
Look, you can keep living in your fantasy dream world where remaining stagnant is a good thing, but that's up to you. For the rest of us we have a thing called reality.
You're forgetting that you can't just compare raw numbers like that.
Apache runs a lot more web servers than IIS. Despite BSD being way more secure than Linux it is also used much less frequently.
Statistics like these are probably the most useless in determining security in terms of safety. I can't say for certain, but more than anything they probably say more about the commonality of the respective programs and operating systems.
Especially when looking at most of these "hacks" they are really just web site defacements, most of which don't count against specific operating systems or web servers.
A lot of attacks like those are done by taking advantage of holes in web software, ie SQL injections, or exploiting other flaws in script logic.
I think it comes a close second to Gentoo. In terms of thoughtful design anyway... silly ricer ethics aside.
But despite this... your question of "why are so many distros based on Debian?" Well Debian is certainly well designed, and this is definitely part of the reason, but it's not the whole of it.
The reason why there are so many based on Debian is because the Debian project leaders suck huge. RH may have sold its soul to the devil, but Debian is like the really promising super smart kid who found the joys of weed, and spent the rest of his life in a basement smoking dope, watching tripped out screensavers, and eating brownies.
Debian was great. Now it's just an old decrepid remnant of its former self. Many others have picked up in its wake though, so it's all good. Nothing lost, and all to gain!
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. The punishment for computer crime is significantly harsher than that of its non-technical counterpart.
You could walk into a bank and rob it at gun point, all the while threatening to kill people, and there's a good chance you'd only be jail for about 7 years.
On the other hand, rob the same bank, of the same amount of money, without a gun, and without threatening anyone, but do it with a computer, and you could be looking at 20 years!
In Canada, a simple DOS attack will get you 10 years in prison.
Also, under the Youth Offenders Act, youngsters who commit computer crimes are always punished to the maximum extent (3 years). In comparison, some children convicted of murder have been let go in one year.
Computer crimes carry a harsh penalty.
Despite this, cybercrime is still attractive? Precisely because it's easy, and non-confrontal. I don't think it has as much to do with the risk/reward ratio as you may think... because those who are actually considering committing these crimes are very aware of not only how easy it is to get caught, but how strict the penalities are.
It's not like the good 'ol days when you could hack a Gibson across state lines. Now days if you do something big enough, people will notice, and unless you have a huge crime syndicate protecting you, you're going to get caught.
Having said that... I think I'm going to go walk into a bank with an axe. To me, the risk/reward ratio on that one seems really good! Way better than this computer crime crap. Why waste time learning all those damn c0dez when I can just walk down the street in a crazed fit!
Dmix necessary for most sound cards? I don't think so, unless by "most sound cards" you mean "really freakin' old sound cards." Almost every modern card, including the on board sound on every single motherboard I've used in the past 2 or so years, my 5 year old Sound Blaster Live, etc, do not need dmix to mix multiple streams automatically, and hardware accelerated.
But, having said that, you're right, there are some cards that need software stream multiplexing. And in that case, check here. I've used this guide to set up dmix on a really old card I had laying around. The guide is very easy to follow, and took me maybe 5 to 10 minutes including the time it took me to google for the appropriate info, and play a couple songs (simultaneously) afterwards to test it out.
One thing I realize though... if a soundcard is so crappy as to not support hardware mixing, this is generally a good indication that its sound quality may be... less than desirable.
Slashdot Mirror
I never said it was going to run on commodity hardware. What Phil Schiller says there is exactly what I was talking about.
They DO make and sell their own computers. Anyone know what percentage of their profit comes from sales of Apple-branded hardware?
Yeah right now. The thing is, depending on how this OSX x86 thing plays out, I bet we'll see those number change quite a bit.
This could be a really good thing for them. As OSX gains popularity on x86 they'll sell a ton of copies of it. As people pirate it, they'll gain market dominance. As they gain market dominance, they'll sell more Apple Brand hardware, and the cycle continues.
In my opinion, this is the smartest move they could have made. I'm suprised they didn't do it sooner, but despite that, they picked a good time. The world at large is ready for OSX.
Hey hey that's going too far. I never said that it had nothing to do with hardware, just that the experience is all about the software.
Like you yourself said, you don't care what's in it, as long as it stays true to the Apple Experience.
We all know OSX x86 isn't going to run on just any hardware. And that's the way it should be. I stand by my original statement that Apple on the x86 will be a good thing.
In fact I'd go as far as to say it could usher in a whole new era of computing.
but it just isn't a sound business decision for Apple
Hahah. Right. Sorry, I know you really want to believe it's not going to happen, and that you didn't waste thousands of dollars on underperforming hardware. But it is going to happen. Jobs himself has said so.
No offense to you, but Jobs runs a multimillion dollar company. You are a nobody. I think I'll trust Steve.
Also, does it make more sense to sell that experience at 2k or 100 bucks? Well, if they want to make tons of money, I'd say 100 bucks is the way to go. Making money is not about selling the product with the highest price tag, it's about two things: volume, and profit per item.
Which has more, hardware, or software? Exactly.
I don't know if it compares to SMF (probably not), but Gentoo's init system is quite good. It supports parallel service launching, does automatic dependency checking (so if you restart one service that others depend on it restarts them all).
It also doesn't require you to add and remove symlinks in a bunch of rc.d directories which is really nice. If you want to add or remove a service there's a simple one command utility that does it for you.
exactly.
You totally missed the point. But anyway Dell is obviously a hardware company. True they don't make their own stuff, but they're a hardware reseller first and foremost. That's the only thing they do.
Apple sells hardware yes, but they don't just sell hardware. They sell the Apple experience.
I'm with Steve on this one. The apple experience can most certainly translate to x86, and they will make tons of money from it.
If you don't think so, then just wait and be proven wrong.
Apple is no longer a hardware company. You're living in the past, like they have been for the last 5 years.
Think about it. They don't make their own processors, graphics cards, memory, hard drives, fans, cords, peripherals, etc.
They get companies to make this stuff for them, they package it up, and sell it for a decent profit.
Aside from using a different architecture (which doesn't change the end user experience that much), the only thing that really sets a mac apart from a pc, is the software.
Apple is ALL ABOUT software. They themselves are now just starting to realize this.
Hell even the iPod... what truly separates it from other players? Yeah the hardware is good, and it looks slick, but it's the interface. And iTunes.
I guarantee you with OSX x86 in place, Apple's hardware business could completely dissapear and they will make more money than they ever have in the history of Apple computers.
I take it you don't work in a trade, then?
No I don't work in trade, but yes I do know that lots of measurements are in non-centigrade form. Hell even half the cookbooks and food items still use the inferior system.
Just because people still use it doesn't mean it can't change. Take a stand! I cook my damn pizza at 180 celcius even if I have to read the freakin' tiny ass print on my stove to do it.
"That Fahrenheight 911 show was pretty good eh?"
"Fahrenheight? It's too damn hot in here for your jibberish. Go fill up the $24 AC with ice so we can get the temperature to a respectable level of Centrigadey goodness."
Actually that's not necessarily true. It's definitely true right now though. Most developers haven't really been tought to think in terms of parallelism when designing software, but that's starting to change.
It's all about the algorithms. Once multi-core chips have been mainstream for a while, all the algorithms out there will start to get converted to take advantage of parallel processing. And there are already algorithms out there that do this... this page has a small repository of parallel implementations of common algorithms including QuickSort, hashing techniques (for super fast searching), string operations (which every application in existence uses), and more.
Now I know this isn't always possible, but in many cases it is. Almost every program out there uses search and sort algorithms. Your address book does it, your web browser does it. These algorithms can be implemented to take advantage of having multiple processors.
A lot of operations can actually be modified to take advantage of this stuff. See the pbzip2 project that achieves a near linear speed up per processor!
Almost every algorithm out there can be modified to take advantage of muliple cores. Things like video/audio decoding are prime candidates (a lot of research is currently happening in this area).
It may take a generation of programmers and then another generation or two of applications to start really taking advantage of parallelism, but mark my works: once this stuff is mainstream, you'll start to really see some performance like never before.
Well I have to admit I feel kind of stupid. I don't know what made me trust the journalistic integrity of anything posted on slashdot.
No kidding, where the hell did get get that number?
Anyway you're right, it would be a good thing for apt-get to update itself. I know that the gentoo's portage system does this automatically.
I have a couple of Debian machines, so I know a thing or two. Enough to know that the reason this botched so badly is probably because they didn't give users an updater, rather just expected everyone to read the release notes, and update their system like normal.
It's not such a bad thing to warn people that they need to perform some task prior to updating. But if 1/3 the users aren't following the intended procedure, also given that they experienced a number of problems prior to release... they should have taken more steps to ensure people's system wouldn't be dead.
If it was say on out of ever 100 users or maybe even one out of ten, I would agree that the users are at fault... but one third!?
That was a good post, until you decided to troll.
C++ may be a poor excuse for a language, but changing C++ libraries are not one of the reasons. That fault lies with the gcc team, and even then it's not really a fault.
It would have been much more accurate to say that the g++ portion of the Gnu compiler collection is driven by people who are poor excuses for developers, but that's another story entirely.
And just so you know, some of the greatest languages ever designed suffer from similar (or greater) problems. Objective-C has terrible cross platform, cross-architecture, and cross-version compile and run time problems. Even the Gnu C library itself isn't necessarily compatible from version to version.
Most distributions have to keep a number of glibcs around just to satisfy dependencies.
All in all, the bottom line is that the problem is with the Debian team, not with the people who didn't read release notes, or with C++, or with anything else.
If all they had to do was upgrade, the installer / updater should have done that automatically... especially since the problem was known to be a problem prior to release!
Seriously, they wait how many years to release, and when they do a full one third of their install base is left with an unusable system?
Very very bad.
What the hell were you thinking when you wrote that? Seriously, I'd like to know.
Hey Jeff, thanks for the reply. I had heard otherwise, and feel bad for spreading misinfo. Anyway... see the replies to the other post if you're interested.
I'm sure they'll try, but imagine how quick that will be hacked. If it runs on x86 I guarantee you eventually someone will figure out a way to get it to work.
Hell we can already run OSX on x86 with PearPC. Now just imagine how much faster it would be if every instruction didn't have to be interpretted..
At any rate... I personally don't see why they don't just let people do it. I mean, if they're already going to the trouble of converting to x86. They could just have a short list of officially supported setups, even have things like 'OSX certified' stickers and what not.
Bill gates would be crying and shaking in his tiny little devil boots. There is exactly one thing that keeps me from running OSX and that's the cost of the hardware. I know a lot of people feel that way.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I read somewhere that it was most likely they would be using a non x86 chip, not unlike the intanium (which although was a flop in the pc market) could do really well for macs since they would be in a better position to take advantage of it. They already use PPC, the OS is under their complete control, etc.
I mean, it's great news if they're adopting x86. I for one would love to run OSX on my cheap ass PC, but something tells me Steve might not be so into that?
Anyway... if it's true, not only do I take back my stupid comment and say thanks for the correct knowledge, but I look forward to it!
You realize of course that Apple is NOT moving to x86. Just because they're moving to intel doesn't mean they're adopting x86.
Just so you know... that ad is not meant as a joke. That's the scary part.
As for Debian's lack of stable released being a good thing, I disagree, and so do many many former Debian users. The few of you remaining Deb'ers always tout about that, but the numbers say otherwise.
And you argue that now it's just a core server distro, but that's not how it started. It may be that way now because you could never reasonably use it as a workstation machine, that is true yes. There used be tons of people using Deb as their main computer, now every single one that I knew has reluctantly (or otherwise) moved on to something else.
Look, you can keep living in your fantasy dream world where remaining stagnant is a good thing, but that's up to you. For the rest of us we have a thing called reality.
You're forgetting that you can't just compare raw numbers like that.
Apache runs a lot more web servers than IIS. Despite BSD being way more secure than Linux it is also used much less frequently.
Statistics like these are probably the most useless in determining security in terms of safety. I can't say for certain, but more than anything they probably say more about the commonality of the respective programs and operating systems.
Especially when looking at most of these "hacks" they are really just web site defacements, most of which don't count against specific operating systems or web servers.
A lot of attacks like those are done by taking advantage of holes in web software, ie SQL injections, or exploiting other flaws in script logic.
Oh well... I'm wasting my time.
I think it comes a close second to Gentoo. In terms of thoughtful design anyway... silly ricer ethics aside.
But despite this... your question of "why are so many distros based on Debian?" Well Debian is certainly well designed, and this is definitely part of the reason, but it's not the whole of it.
The reason why there are so many based on Debian is because the Debian project leaders suck huge. RH may have sold its soul to the devil, but Debian is like the really promising super smart kid who found the joys of weed, and spent the rest of his life in a basement smoking dope, watching tripped out screensavers, and eating brownies.
Debian was great. Now it's just an old decrepid remnant of its former self. Many others have picked up in its wake though, so it's all good. Nothing lost, and all to gain!
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. The punishment for computer crime is significantly harsher than that of its non-technical counterpart.
You could walk into a bank and rob it at gun point, all the while threatening to kill people, and there's a good chance you'd only be jail for about 7 years.
On the other hand, rob the same bank, of the same amount of money, without a gun, and without threatening anyone, but do it with a computer, and you could be looking at 20 years!
In Canada, a simple DOS attack will get you 10 years in prison.
Also, under the Youth Offenders Act, youngsters who commit computer crimes are always punished to the maximum extent (3 years). In comparison, some children convicted of murder have been let go in one year.
Computer crimes carry a harsh penalty.
Despite this, cybercrime is still attractive? Precisely because it's easy, and non-confrontal. I don't think it has as much to do with the risk/reward ratio as you may think... because those who are actually considering committing these crimes are very aware of not only how easy it is to get caught, but how strict the penalities are.
It's not like the good 'ol days when you could hack a Gibson across state lines. Now days if you do something big enough, people will notice, and unless you have a huge crime syndicate protecting you, you're going to get caught.
Having said that... I think I'm going to go walk into a bank with an axe. To me, the risk/reward ratio on that one seems really good! Way better than this computer crime crap. Why waste time learning all those damn c0dez when I can just walk down the street in a crazed fit!
Dmix necessary for most sound cards? I don't think so, unless by "most sound cards" you mean "really freakin' old sound cards." Almost every modern card, including the on board sound on every single motherboard I've used in the past 2 or so years, my 5 year old Sound Blaster Live, etc, do not need dmix to mix multiple streams automatically, and hardware accelerated.
But, having said that, you're right, there are some cards that need software stream multiplexing. And in that case, check here. I've used this guide to set up dmix on a really old card I had laying around. The guide is very easy to follow, and took me maybe 5 to 10 minutes including the time it took me to google for the appropriate info, and play a couple songs (simultaneously) afterwards to test it out.
One thing I realize though... if a soundcard is so crappy as to not support hardware mixing, this is generally a good indication that its sound quality may be... less than desirable.
It's been available for 2.6 yes, but that does not mean it's been included in the main distribution package... which it hasn't been.