The period of its orbit is less than a day, and it's not attached to the ground. It requires an aircraft to fly up to meet it.
Basically, it's much more massive than the cargo you're trying to lift, so its momentum can help boost the cargo as it's hauled up to a higher orbit. Momentum can be recovered with more efficient engines at a lower thrust level (nuclear or solar powered ion for example). The lower end of the cable is lower and slower than would be necessary for full orbit.
"But, I don't remember ever hearing that we actually have the technology to produce enough carbon nanotube material to actually build a prototype device of some sort let alone a cable spanning to LEO."
A space elevator must extend to geosynchronous orbit, 36000 km up.
"Um, no. As long as the center of mass for the space elevator system is at GEO, passengers/cargo could get off anywhere they want to (assuming there safe were provisions made for such departures)."
Provided your passengers are a crazy new breed of base jumper or don't mind falling to their doom, sure. They'd need the extra velocity in addition to the altitude to stay in orbit. Gravity at 300 km is pretty close to what it is on the surface, and you'd need about 7.7 km/s of extra velocity to stay in orbit. That's pretty close to what you need from sea level, and space elevators are unlikely to be accomodating to a few thousand tons of rocket.
"Great. Turn the allure of orbital travel into a 200km ride in a claustrophobic box with 17 people, sandwiched against some dude with balls-to-the-walls BO with a tinny rendition of "Girl from Ipanema" playing in the background. Where do I sign up?"
Hah! It's worse than you think. A space elevator to orbit doesn't go up 200 km. It has to go to an orbit with a period equal to that of a day otherwise it will fall out of the sky.
No, a space elevator ride to orbit has to go up 35,786 km.
"and in the market where they are the strongest (iPod) they do not show a tendency to prey on other manufacturers at the expense of the customer."
They prevent other companies from providing iTunes compatible hardware, and they prevent other companies from providing iPod compatible software. This is preying on other manufacturors at the expense of the customer. Note that I don't deny they have a right to do this, but they clearly do it.
As much as we hate paying for things, there's not a whole lot we can do to avoid paying for hardware. Apple doesn't make that much money on music, but their margins on iPods are quite good. iTunes isn't so good that Linux users want it just for the sake of the software, we want official support for the hardware.
Exxon recently announced that natural gas production in North America has peaked, and natural gas is necessary as a hydrogen source because the hydrocarbons from the tar sands are too big to be useful. It takes hydrogen to make smaller ones.
They're talking about building nuclear reactors to make the hydrogen instead...
Not necessarily. For example, they might recieve bug reports under NDA (not hard to imagine for security issues), and a source patch would violate that. They might also wish to license commercial code. Even if they don't want to do that, it makes people nervous when they have to rule out the ability to do that from the get-go.
"And I want a Ferrari... doesn't mean you have to give it to me, especially for free."
That doesn't make any sense. The maintainers give it away under the license they use voluntarily. They're not obligated to, they want to. Your analogy implies the companies that don't want the GPL involved are placing an extra burden on someone else when in fact they're just taking avantage of something a few security zealots are giving away.
"it seems like a bad idea for a package where the two main concerns are interoperability and security."
And yet, it turns out that most prefer to stick to the official OpenSSH as closely as possible, simply to avoid the cost of maintaining a ton of local customizations. They cut their customizations down to a minimum and try to track the official version (perhaps backporting security fixes).
"Except that BSD liscensing allows compaines like Microsoft the pervert a standard protocol, so that it is no longer interoperable, nor "ubiquitous"...perhaps not even secure."
I was aware of that argument before, but putting it in bold convinced me.
"The biggest difference is, of course, that they would have to publish any changes. To me, it seems obvious the you should WANT them publish any changes to SSH."
That's why these arguments never go anywhere. You don't just think I have different priorities, you believe I am irrational.
To replace telnet, they had to throw something out there that anyone could use and customize in any capacity (including extensions). Whether or not you agree, and whether or not they are right, some of the companies out there want the freedom to customize code without releasing the changes.
I think that sometimes making something ubiquitous is more important. I'm find with the Linux kernel being GPLed, but I'm also fine with other things being BSDLed.
Re:Why you shouldn't use OpenSSH
on
OpenSSH 4.2 released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've met Stallman and de Raadt and they're both assholes. But the world needs a few people that are willing to be assholes.
He gets results. For example, giving out contact information isn't the nicest way to get hardware docs and firmware, but it works.
Re:It's our pleasure, Mr. Gates.
on
OpenSSH 4.2 released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The BSD licensing has made it possible for commercial OSes to have an SSH implementation by default. That ubiquity is what killed telnet. By helping companies like Microsoft, Sun, and Apple, the OpenSSH project has helped everyone.
"Apple should probably consider selling a consumer tower for games and peeps like you when they switch to Intel. Not everyone needs a $2000 entry level workstation."
I think it's pretty unlikely. There's nothing preventing them from doing it now.
"They're estimating the energy cost alone to be 28% of the total energy extracted. Given all the other overhead involved, that's not going to turn into a gigantic profit margin. The most significant thing about this discovery is the potential to tap as much as a trillion barrels of oil from within the United States."
But consider the benefits.
Instead of contributing to a the trade deficit, it stimulates a huge amount of domestic economic activity.
"This poses the same fundamental problem that alternative energy supplies pose, the energy extracted vs the energy spent is MUCH lower then conventional oil drilledout of the ground, and even if such a system where today instantly implemented, where most of americas oil was from tar sands/oil shale, there would still be a MASSIVE jump in price, due to the expense of production."
Tar sands oil is economical at $15/bbl. Shale oil is supposedly economical at $30-$40/bbl. With prices higher than that and unlikely to drop in the future, companies doing it can recoup their investment and make money.
Also, while it might be expensive it creates a huge amount of domestic economic activity because it's a fairly intensive process, rather than simply contributing to the trade defficit.
"This is just me, but since Macs do come at a cost, I always buy the Apple Care. $300(Or it was $350) extra is a small price to pay"
I don't have a problem with occasional problems that Apple fixes under warranty, so Apple fixing occasional problems under warranty isn't enough to satisfy me. I have a problem with reliability so low that there's months of downtime involved whether or not it gets fixed. With availability that bad it hurts the computer's usefulness even when it's up and running, and it is an enormous inconvenience.
"But the big issue I have with Pentium Ms, and I'm hoping will be resolved when the Dual-Cores are released, is their lack of a SIMD."
This is simply wrong. Pentium Ms have SIMD support.
"When Altivec is in play, a G4 can easily beat out the best Pentium M currently available. OS X uses Altivec to help accelerate the GUI, and it provides a massive advantage for things like video encoding. Basically all multimedia is accelerated by it."
The Altivec implementation on G4s is considered to be pretty good and the SSE implementation on Pentium Ms is considered mediocre, but between their clock speed advantage and the fact that G4s are terrible at everything else they aren't at an advantage, even for things like encoding video.
"I didn't know they were making A64 notebooks"
They're sold under the "Turion" brand name.
"I don't mind a niche for hardware, when it means better quality, and things like true software and hardware integration. And fortunately now days, buying a niche machine doesn't mean a lack of software, as it did a few years back."
Well, you've pretty much defined yourself as falling within the niche, and I don't buy the claim of better quality. What about everyone else? Dell, for all their faults, doesn't disable the second display in firmware to get people to buy a $2000 computer.
"If this were Sony as an example, good luck on getting a replacement. I'm also one of their customers, or "was" I should say, because unlike Apple they don't fix the problems they create."
No one denies that there are crappy PC vendors. The advantage is that there's good ones as well.
"Now I've never heard of this. Both Titanium Powerbooks here have not had that problem and none of my friends with Powerbooks have encountered this either, and I know quite a few since I work with these types of peeps.."
I've seen it on sites like Macslash and Ars Technica, with plenty of people posting to say they've experienced it. That's not a large study, but it's common enough for relatively small sites like that to get people chiming in.
"The bugs that peeps described are odd, and if they were "major bugs," I would have encountered them on at least one of my Macs."
If only all bugs were easy to reproduce.
"A major bug for me, would be a complete system crash every-time I tried to run one of my Apps."
I would consider a "major bug" to be one that prevents me from doing what I need to do. If the guy had to use a Linux machine to finish the post, it prevented him from doing what he needed to do.
"Now if only there were a company that truly had "proper testing." Now be honest, can you name any major update for any system that has been bug free? The answer is no of course."
That's true. But Debian-stable will do many times better than OS X.
"The iMac wasn't designed for your needs. Apple did have a single configuration of the G5, but as the cost dropped on the proc, they simply offered a dual configuration in the same price bracket. G5 Towers are also workstations, so they cost more."
The PowerMacs are priced within reason for a dual machine, but the single-CPU machines weren't. They were double the cost of an equivilant PC. It's an upsell. Every premium feature is rolled into a single computer that costs a lot of money. Because these features are usually only required individually, being unable to aquire them individually is a big disadvantage. And now that x86 dual-core processors are available, you don't even have to do without the performance advantage.
"The G4 is slow in relation to what is out there now, but still has more power than other chips when configured at the same speed."
That's not true. Pentium Ms and Athlon64s are faster by a factor of 2 at integer performance at the same clock speed, and their FP performance advantage is also substantial.
"BTW, my Powerbook used to get about 5 hours before the battery started showing its age, which was way better than any PC notebook available at that time."
PC laptops now have battery lives in excess of 7 hours thanks to Pentium M, and they get better performance on top of that.
"For 2 years now, Apple has held the top customer satisfaction rating"
Given the tendency of Apple users to express satisfaction with performance that would cause dissatisfaction with others, I don't consider a voluntary survey to be a reliable indicator. For example, the Macintouch reliability survey had people trying to inflate Apple's good results.
I think there's plenty of PC users that would have bought crappy machines and not taken care of windows, and it's not hard to imagine them being happier with a Mac, but for more demanding situations I've found Apple's offerings wanting. I know a lot of people that were burned by the iBook problems that have switched back. These things put people off permanently, and they have to be addressed.
A niche player can afford to offer a few specialized machines. As long as Apple refuses to diversify, they will never be more than a niche player.
"Unfortuantely you bought when Apple had just switched to Asus for their iBook's logic boards. Their first revs were complete crap."
The flawed computers were sold for more than two years, so I can conclude that Apple either did it knowingly or they don't pay much attention to failure rates. Either is cause for concern, IMO.
"It's a bummer that you ended up with a lemon, if you would've spent a bit more for a Powerbook(They do not use Asus boards.), or bought later on when the G4 iBook were released, chances are that you would've bought a machine that is truly reliable."
"Apple will replace all iBook logic boards free of charge."
I don't mind the occasional failure, but when the quality is so low that it leads to significant downtime you can bet I have a problem. That 10% I mentioned was over the course of 2 years, so that's a pretty big chunk of time.
Apple has been much better in the past, so I interpret these to be evidence of a declining commitment to quality and I am unwilling to risk another Apple purchase.
I'm also unwilling to even consider them because of the poor specs. minis are too slow, iMacs can't do dual displays and can't be substantially upgraded, and PowerMacs would be great if they had a single-CPU version that cost half as much. If I ignore the reliability problems and the slow CPU in the laptops, there's still the crapper screens (resolution, contrast ratio, etc), the slower hard drives (4200 with 5400 rpm for premium instead of 5400 and 7200 rpm), the shorter battery life, etc. These crappy specs have nothing to do with the CPU so I don't hold out much hope for an improvement post-Intel switch.
I've used OS X, and IMO it's just not worth the associated crap you have to put up with. I'm not basing this solely on my experience, I see ample evidence that I am not alone and that the quality is declining. Unless Apple improves, they're going to lose these switchers just like they lost me.
"And geeks are *still* switching to Macs in droves."
Some are switching back.
I switched and then switched back not because Linux is technically better but because of the reliability problems, hardware and software. The performance and lower prices are a bonus.
For example, my G3 iBook had about 10% downtime from all the bad logic boards and a few other things (eg they were out of replacement power bricks). I've also had problems with bugs and updates that break things. Some Linux distros are bad about this as well (eg Gentoo), but others are much better than OS X (eg Debian).
Some PC OEMs make better support than Applecare available. For example, Dell offers next-business-day or even same-day onsite support. In the alternative, a user can take responsibility for themselves and get instant service every time.
Ultimatley, I found that Apple simply didn't make a machine I could rely on.
"Apple has always been about features at the cost of some speed."
Actually they're all about speed sometimes, but only when they have it.
"I wouldn't be too surprised if "Leopard" could run win and linux apps each in their own window, thus the need to keep the app threads separate from the kernel threads."
er... what? That doesn't make sense.
As the article says, each application thread is also a kernel entity in OS X. Also, the number of windows has nothing to do with the number of threads. It doesn't really have anything to do with anything. A single-threaded application can have multiple windows and a multi-threaded app can have one window.
"By the report the G5 processors are just as fast as the fastest x86."
Slower on integer performance, memory latency, etc. About the same on floating point. Faster on vector. This isn't much of a shock. It depends on what you need to do, but I will note that the Opteron 250 did pretty well and that's not the fastest chip AMD makes.
"If you take a look at Apple's developer tools - specifically, XCode 2.1 and above, you'll find that building binaries for both platforms is fairly easy."
If you don't feel the need to do testing on both binaries...
Slashdot Mirror
The period of its orbit is less than a day, and it's not attached to the ground. It requires an aircraft to fly up to meet it.
Basically, it's much more massive than the cargo you're trying to lift, so its momentum can help boost the cargo as it's hauled up to a higher orbit. Momentum can be recovered with more efficient engines at a lower thrust level (nuclear or solar powered ion for example). The lower end of the cable is lower and slower than would be necessary for full orbit.
"But, I don't remember ever hearing that we actually have the technology to produce enough carbon nanotube material to actually build a prototype device of some sort let alone a cable spanning to LEO."
A space elevator must extend to geosynchronous orbit, 36000 km up.
"Um, no. As long as the center of mass for the space elevator system is at GEO, passengers/cargo could get off anywhere they want to (assuming there safe were provisions made for such departures)."
Provided your passengers are a crazy new breed of base jumper or don't mind falling to their doom, sure. They'd need the extra velocity in addition to the altitude to stay in orbit. Gravity at 300 km is pretty close to what it is on the surface, and you'd need about 7.7 km/s of extra velocity to stay in orbit. That's pretty close to what you need from sea level, and space elevators are unlikely to be accomodating to a few thousand tons of rocket.
"Great. Turn the allure of orbital travel into a 200km ride in a claustrophobic box with 17 people, sandwiched against some dude with balls-to-the-walls BO with a tinny rendition of "Girl from Ipanema" playing in the background. Where do I sign up?"
Hah! It's worse than you think. A space elevator to orbit doesn't go up 200 km. It has to go to an orbit with a period equal to that of a day otherwise it will fall out of the sky.
No, a space elevator ride to orbit has to go up 35,786 km.
"and no one can deny the build quality and attention to detail that goes into Apple hardware"
Logic boards 1 through 4 for my iBook disagree.
"Apple is a small company"
Apple is a huge company.
"and in the market where they are the strongest (iPod) they do not show a tendency to prey on other manufacturers at the expense of the customer."
They prevent other companies from providing iTunes compatible hardware, and they prevent other companies from providing iPod compatible software. This is preying on other manufacturors at the expense of the customer. Note that I don't deny they have a right to do this, but they clearly do it.
You're missing the point.
As much as we hate paying for things, there's not a whole lot we can do to avoid paying for hardware. Apple doesn't make that much money on music, but their margins on iPods are quite good. iTunes isn't so good that Linux users want it just for the sake of the software, we want official support for the hardware.
Refining will very quickly become the problem.
Exxon recently announced that natural gas production in North America has peaked, and natural gas is necessary as a hydrogen source because the hydrocarbons from the tar sands are too big to be useful. It takes hydrogen to make smaller ones.
They're talking about building nuclear reactors to make the hydrogen instead...
"GPL allows all of the above :)"
Not necessarily. For example, they might recieve bug reports under NDA (not hard to imagine for security issues), and a source patch would violate that. They might also wish to license commercial code. Even if they don't want to do that, it makes people nervous when they have to rule out the ability to do that from the get-go.
"And I want a Ferrari... doesn't mean you have to give it to me, especially for free."
That doesn't make any sense. The maintainers give it away under the license they use voluntarily. They're not obligated to, they want to. Your analogy implies the companies that don't want the GPL involved are placing an extra burden on someone else when in fact they're just taking avantage of something a few security zealots are giving away.
"it seems like a bad idea for a package where the two main concerns are interoperability and security."
And yet, it turns out that most prefer to stick to the official OpenSSH as closely as possible, simply to avoid the cost of maintaining a ton of local customizations. They cut their customizations down to a minimum and try to track the official version (perhaps backporting security fixes).
" Except that BSD liscensing allows compaines like Microsoft the pervert a standard protocol, so that it is no longer interoperable, nor "ubiquitous" ...perhaps not even secure. "
I was aware of that argument before, but putting it in bold convinced me.
"The biggest difference is, of course, that they would have to publish any changes. To me, it seems obvious the you should WANT them publish any changes to SSH."
That's why these arguments never go anywhere. You don't just think I have different priorities, you believe I am irrational.
To replace telnet, they had to throw something out there that anyone could use and customize in any capacity (including extensions). Whether or not you agree, and whether or not they are right, some of the companies out there want the freedom to customize code without releasing the changes.
I think that sometimes making something ubiquitous is more important. I'm find with the Linux kernel being GPLed, but I'm also fine with other things being BSDLed.
Don't they ship OpenSSH with SFU?
I've met Stallman and de Raadt and they're both assholes. But the world needs a few people that are willing to be assholes.
He gets results. For example, giving out contact information isn't the nicest way to get hardware docs and firmware, but it works.
The BSD licensing has made it possible for commercial OSes to have an SSH implementation by default. That ubiquity is what killed telnet. By helping companies like Microsoft, Sun, and Apple, the OpenSSH project has helped everyone.
"Apple should probably consider selling a consumer tower for games and peeps like you when they switch to Intel. Not everyone needs a $2000 entry level workstation."
I think it's pretty unlikely. There's nothing preventing them from doing it now.
It'll be required because new DVDs will require a new encryption key.
"They're estimating the energy cost alone to be 28% of the total energy extracted. Given all the other overhead involved, that's not going to turn into a gigantic profit margin. The most significant thing about this discovery is the potential to tap as much as a trillion barrels of oil from within the United States."
But consider the benefits.
Instead of contributing to a the trade deficit, it stimulates a huge amount of domestic economic activity.
"This poses the same fundamental problem that alternative energy supplies pose, the energy extracted vs the energy spent is MUCH lower then conventional oil drilledout of the ground, and even if such a system where today instantly implemented, where most of americas oil was from tar sands/oil shale, there would still be a MASSIVE jump in price, due to the expense of production."
Tar sands oil is economical at $15/bbl. Shale oil is supposedly economical at $30-$40/bbl. With prices higher than that and unlikely to drop in the future, companies doing it can recoup their investment and make money.
Also, while it might be expensive it creates a huge amount of domestic economic activity because it's a fairly intensive process, rather than simply contributing to the trade defficit.
"This is just me, but since Macs do come at a cost, I always buy the Apple Care. $300(Or it was $350) extra is a small price to pay"
I don't have a problem with occasional problems that Apple fixes under warranty, so Apple fixing occasional problems under warranty isn't enough to satisfy me. I have a problem with reliability so low that there's months of downtime involved whether or not it gets fixed. With availability that bad it hurts the computer's usefulness even when it's up and running, and it is an enormous inconvenience.
"But the big issue I have with Pentium Ms, and I'm hoping will be resolved when the Dual-Cores are released, is their lack of a SIMD."
This is simply wrong. Pentium Ms have SIMD support.
"When Altivec is in play, a G4 can easily beat out the best Pentium M currently available. OS X uses Altivec to help accelerate the GUI, and it provides a massive advantage for things like video encoding. Basically all multimedia is accelerated by it."
The Altivec implementation on G4s is considered to be pretty good and the SSE implementation on Pentium Ms is considered mediocre, but between their clock speed advantage and the fact that G4s are terrible at everything else they aren't at an advantage, even for things like encoding video.
"I didn't know they were making A64 notebooks"
They're sold under the "Turion" brand name.
"I don't mind a niche for hardware, when it means better quality, and things like true software and hardware integration. And fortunately now days, buying a niche machine doesn't mean a lack of software, as it did a few years back."
Well, you've pretty much defined yourself as falling within the niche, and I don't buy the claim of better quality. What about everyone else? Dell, for all their faults, doesn't disable the second display in firmware to get people to buy a $2000 computer.
"If this were Sony as an example, good luck on getting a replacement. I'm also one of their customers, or "was" I should say, because unlike Apple they don't fix the problems they create."
No one denies that there are crappy PC vendors. The advantage is that there's good ones as well.
"Now I've never heard of this. Both Titanium Powerbooks here have not had that problem and none of my friends with Powerbooks have encountered this either, and I know quite a few since I work with these types of peeps.."
I've seen it on sites like Macslash and Ars Technica, with plenty of people posting to say they've experienced it. That's not a large study, but it's common enough for relatively small sites like that to get people chiming in.
"The bugs that peeps described are odd, and if they were "major bugs," I would have encountered them on at least one of my Macs."
If only all bugs were easy to reproduce.
"A major bug for me, would be a complete system crash every-time I tried to run one of my Apps."
I would consider a "major bug" to be one that prevents me from doing what I need to do. If the guy had to use a Linux machine to finish the post, it prevented him from doing what he needed to do.
"Now if only there were a company that truly had "proper testing." Now be honest, can you name any major update for any system that has been bug free? The answer is no of course."
That's true. But Debian-stable will do many times better than OS X.
"The iMac wasn't designed for your needs. Apple did have a single configuration of the G5, but as the cost dropped on the proc, they simply offered a dual configuration in the same price bracket. G5 Towers are also workstations, so they cost more."
The PowerMacs are priced within reason for a dual machine, but the single-CPU machines weren't. They were double the cost of an equivilant PC. It's an upsell. Every premium feature is rolled into a single computer that costs a lot of money. Because these features are usually only required individually, being unable to aquire them individually is a big disadvantage. And now that x86 dual-core processors are available, you don't even have to do without the performance advantage.
"The G4 is slow in relation to what is out there now, but still has more power than other chips when configured at the same speed."
That's not true. Pentium Ms and Athlon64s are faster by a factor of 2 at integer performance at the same clock speed, and their FP performance advantage is also substantial.
"BTW, my Powerbook used to get about 5 hours before the battery started showing its age, which was way better than any PC notebook available at that time."
PC laptops now have battery lives in excess of 7 hours thanks to Pentium M, and they get better performance on top of that.
"For 2 years now, Apple has held the top customer satisfaction rating"
Given the tendency of Apple users to express satisfaction with performance that would cause dissatisfaction with others, I don't consider a voluntary survey to be a reliable indicator. For example, the Macintouch reliability survey had people trying to inflate Apple's good results.
I think there's plenty of PC users that would have bought crappy machines and not taken care of windows, and it's not hard to imagine them being happier with a Mac, but for more demanding situations I've found Apple's offerings wanting. I know a lot of people that were burned by the iBook problems that have switched back. These things put people off permanently, and they have to be addressed.
A niche player can afford to offer a few specialized machines. As long as Apple refuses to diversify, they will never be more than a niche player.
"When did /. get a sense of humor?"
It didn't, they just did their usual amount of fact checking.
"Unfortuantely you bought when Apple had just switched to Asus for their iBook's logic boards. Their first revs were complete crap."
The flawed computers were sold for more than two years, so I can conclude that Apple either did it knowingly or they don't pay much attention to failure rates. Either is cause for concern, IMO.
"It's a bummer that you ended up with a lemon, if you would've spent a bit more for a Powerbook(They do not use Asus boards.), or bought later on when the G4 iBook were released, chances are that you would've bought a machine that is truly reliable."
Other Apple computers have had problems recently, including the PowerBook you propose.
"Apple will replace all iBook logic boards free of charge."
I don't mind the occasional failure, but when the quality is so low that it leads to significant downtime you can bet I have a problem. That 10% I mentioned was over the course of 2 years, so that's a pretty big chunk of time.
There are also major bugs and issues with updates that proper testing would have caught.
Apple has been much better in the past, so I interpret these to be evidence of a declining commitment to quality and I am unwilling to risk another Apple purchase.
I'm also unwilling to even consider them because of the poor specs. minis are too slow, iMacs can't do dual displays and can't be substantially upgraded, and PowerMacs would be great if they had a single-CPU version that cost half as much. If I ignore the reliability problems and the slow CPU in the laptops, there's still the crapper screens (resolution, contrast ratio, etc), the slower hard drives (4200 with 5400 rpm for premium instead of 5400 and 7200 rpm), the shorter battery life, etc. These crappy specs have nothing to do with the CPU so I don't hold out much hope for an improvement post-Intel switch.
I've used OS X, and IMO it's just not worth the associated crap you have to put up with. I'm not basing this solely on my experience, I see ample evidence that I am not alone and that the quality is declining. Unless Apple improves, they're going to lose these switchers just like they lost me.
"And geeks are *still* switching to Macs in droves."
Some are switching back.
I switched and then switched back not because Linux is technically better but because of the reliability problems, hardware and software. The performance and lower prices are a bonus.
For example, my G3 iBook had about 10% downtime from all the bad logic boards and a few other things (eg they were out of replacement power bricks). I've also had problems with bugs and updates that break things. Some Linux distros are bad about this as well (eg Gentoo), but others are much better than OS X (eg Debian).
Some PC OEMs make better support than Applecare available. For example, Dell offers next-business-day or even same-day onsite support. In the alternative, a user can take responsibility for themselves and get instant service every time.
Ultimatley, I found that Apple simply didn't make a machine I could rely on.
"Apple has always been about features at the cost of some speed."
Actually they're all about speed sometimes, but only when they have it.
"I wouldn't be too surprised if "Leopard" could run win and linux apps each in their own window, thus the need to keep the app threads separate from the kernel threads."
er... what? That doesn't make sense.
As the article says, each application thread is also a kernel entity in OS X. Also, the number of windows has nothing to do with the number of threads. It doesn't really have anything to do with anything. A single-threaded application can have multiple windows and a multi-threaded app can have one window.
"By the report the G5 processors are just as fast as the fastest x86."
Slower on integer performance, memory latency, etc. About the same on floating point. Faster on vector. This isn't much of a shock. It depends on what you need to do, but I will note that the Opteron 250 did pretty well and that's not the fastest chip AMD makes.
I made this for work, but it's useful all over the place.
"If you take a look at Apple's developer tools - specifically, XCode 2.1 and above, you'll find that building binaries for both platforms is fairly easy."
If you don't feel the need to do testing on both binaries...