"This update seems to have come relatively soon after the O(1) scheduler (about a year?) which is relatively quick for changes to really important low-level parts of an operating system. Does this mean that the Linux community was relatively unhappy with the O(1) scheduler which was touted as a very good thing at the time"
The Linux O(1) scheduler has been around since 2002.
It's pretty good, but there are corner cases where you can fool it. For example, if a process classified as interactive goes CPU-bound, it can cause starvation for other processes.
I typically check my mail, touch base with the support guys, etc. Nagios would be lighting up my phone if it was something big, but it's good to be seen tackling the issue before everyone starts noticing.
Supporting SPF doesn't put an end to spam, but it's one of those best-practices things that can really make your life simpler down the road.
For outgoing mail service:
-It becomes immediately apparent when "surprise" mail servers pop up. This can be a web server that's sending outgoing mail directly, or someone sending mail through their ISP's mail servers when they should be connecting and authenticating to your servers, etc. Tracking down mail problems in these situations can be very frustrating.
-It helps prevent forged messages claiming to be from your domain. Not all recipients support this, but even after the fact it's helpful to be able to have an answer for what can be done about it that doesn't get any blame on you.
For incoming service:
-Even a moderately strict SPF policy can help prevent bounce-spam from being sent via your servers.
-It helps protect your users from scams.
It's not a perfect solution, but it puts your network in a better defined state. And that helps keep things running smoothly.
Certain major western Canadian cable ISPs who shall remain nameless have been known to silently trap SMTP connections, and then forward the messages on to the destination.
Now, that's all fine and good if you're willing to "include:" their SPF records... but unfortunately this steadfastly anonymous western Canadian cable ISP also happens to be one of the most prolific botnet havens in the world, so you're not really cutting down the number of people that can claim to be you by a useful amount.
Your best bet is to run a VPS mail server, choose a different port for your client to connect to, and use SSL. Alternatively, you can outsource your mail service to someone like Google (who provides SPF guidance).
The requirements to colonize other worlds are prohibitive for the time being, I don't think anyone denies that. But throwing out numbers as though they negate the possibility doesn't make sense.
We're doing things now that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago they could do the math and decide that, say, flying into orbit, or building an electronic computer might be possible, but the gap that remained to be filled was the expertise it took to do everything involved sufficiently well. Right now, we have the same proof of concept for possible propulsion technologies (eg Orion), or space elevator technologies (eg carbon nanotubes) that they had back then for manned flight, but we can't do them sufficiently well, on a sufficiently large scale for economic space travel.
That's fine. The relevant technologies will advance without the need for any specific focus on space travel. The technology of space travel will be the synthesis of many different technologies that are going to happen anyway. So, if it's too hard to do immediately, fine. That doesn't discredit the idea. It just means we can't do it now.
"I think the concern is that samples of silicon from different sources (consider, for example, 'depleted silicon' from the scrapyard of the Russian isotope-enrichment facility) might have different isotope distributions at the 10^-7 level"
That was precisely my concern. I know that some isotope ratios are unpredictable in nature (eg, carbon dating something that ate food from the ocean can be inaccurate), so a good standard would eliminate that from the outset. As apparently it does.
I also had one of the flawed G3 iBooks. The worst part was how many people recommended the machines, on the basis of how well built they were, even when they were getting theirs repaired just as regularly as mine.
If someone speaks highly of Apple's quality, but they do so whether or not the quality is good, then it doesn't really give me any information. Therefore, I tend to regard customer reviews with a fair amount of skepticism. If there's a pattern of downplaying problems, then even Consumer Reports and similar are suspect.
G3 iBooks are great... except the logic boards die on a regular basis. G4 iBooks are great... except the solder joints keep breaking. MacBooks are great... except that for that overheating under load thing.
I'd be fine with paying extra for quality. What I'm not fine with is paying extra for what Apple sells.
You are incorrect because the act of scheduling the next process to run requires constant time regardless of how many processes there are. The O(1) refers to this, correctly.
The reason this is important, and the reason they are worried about the act of scheduling the next process rather than time complexity over all N processes, is that if scheduling the next process were not constant time, the percentage of time spent scheduling the next process would grow larger as you added more processes. That's fine if you're on a desktop system and you go from 100 to 200, but as the number starts getting large on (say) big servers, you start running into a situation where all your CPUs are perpetually tied up trying to figure out what process to run next.
O(n) time over N processes is not a problem; you've either got the CPUs or you don't. If you don't, then your performance will suck for reasons that are your own fault. If you do have enough CPUs, then the time spent scheduling will remain in step with the time spent running the processes, and this is fine. However, if the time spent scheduling grew, every time a process was scheduled, across all CPUs, then your $50000 server would be worthless because it wouldn't be able to handle the workloads you intended for it. All those expensive CPUs would sit there figuring out what process to run rather than running it.
So, it is NOT a misnomer. It accurately describes the portion of the problem that the developers are concerned with. It's O(n) over n processes, and that's great because it means you can get to n without breaking down.
"Has Apple said "never, ever" to virtualization, or is it just that negotiating with Apple over how to do it legally is not on Parallels/VMWare's "TO DO" list (while they're busy racing to grab the lucrative windows-on-Mac market)?"
Both companies have made statements to the effect that they've explored the option, but can't do it commercially as long as Apple forbids it.
"Anway, if you don't like Apple's policy then it is incredibly easy to avoid buying a Mac because Apple do not have a 95%+ monopoly in the personal computer market - the only problem is which alternative you choose because Microsoft have a 95%+ monopoly in the PC market so even if you plump for Linux or BSD you'll find that lots of people take for granted that you can run Windows software."
a) OS X is not easier to avoid if you want a Mac, which seems to be the crowd making the most noise over this.
b) You can still dual boot quite easily.
"So, if a demand for virtualized Mac OSX does develop and Apple continue to block it then Apple will lose business."
The demand is already here, people are doing it illegally. It's enormously useful for anyone doing administration (testing patches before they're deployed) or developing software (testing against different OS revisions), on servers (where things are rapidly approaching the point where you can't be taken seriously without it). It does cost Apple business.
"P.S. did I mention that Microsoft have a 95%+ monopoly in the PC market"
I think you may have touched on it.
"which is why slashdot (plus the authoriities in every country that has any sort of monopoly/antitrust legislation) apply different standards to Microsoft and Apple."
Antitrust legislation makes shitty behavior legally actionable in the right circumstances, it doesn't make shitty behavior acceptable for everyone else.
Microsoft: You need to pay more to run Vista under virtualization. Slashdot's response: God I hate Microsoft!
Apple: You may never, under any circumstances, on any hardware, at any time, for any reason, ever run OS X under virtualization. Period. Slashdot's response: God I hate Microsoft!
Microsoft isn't specifically targeting Mac users, they're targeting everyone that does virtualization, which is a pretty sizable group these days. I don't support the practice, but apparently I must point out that Apple is specifically targeting Mac users, and their terms are much more onerous than Microsoft's in this case.
Besides, can't you run the entry level Vista Home with Boot Camp?
Yup. We do this at work (no link because I'm not spamming). We sell OpenBSD firewalls on minimal hardware (about the size of a broadband router, low power enough to be fanless), and then sell various services on top of that. You can do a surprising amount.
We use flash memory, and the space and rewrite cycle requirements for compiling on this are prohibitive.
They're going for 90% of all bodies 1 km across. They don't ignore smaller bodies (indeed, many have been found), it's just that a) smaller bodies are harder to see and b) there's way, way more of them. So for example, you might have 90% of 1 km bodies, 60% of all 900 m bodies, 30% of all 800 m bodies, and so on. Whatever the actual numbers are (I just made those up to illustrate the point), the goal is to locate the civilization-enders first, with progressively less threatening bodies being located later.
"Do we even know how a hunk of rock would react to the introduction of a bunch of alpha particles/gamma rays/x-rays/infrared radiation/etc? How would the the crystalline structure of the rock be affected? What models do we have that indicate the rock would shatter from an internal heat differential, rather than merely glowing very bright red for a while [assuming the rock even chose to absorb the heat energy in the first place, rather than just deflecting it off into the void of outer space]?"
Most of the heat would be dissipated by ablative cooling (eg, the surface would vaporize and disperse into space), and that's actually useful for the purposes of giving the body a nudge. The concern is that the shock would disrupt the asteroid, such that there would be more fragments.
Why is it bad for them to focus on a niche? It doesn't preclude them also making better looking or cheaper computers.
Moreover, if they become a solid Linux vendor, they'll be able to pick up a lot of high-margin sales pretty easily. There's plenty of professionals using Linux on some pretty pricey hardware. It doesn't take much volume to make up for the effort if it's high-end workstations you're talking about, and getting the hardware certified with major Linux distros would allow them to keep a lot of the OS-related costs that currently go to Microsoft.
It's not going to save the company, but it does have the potential to be a profitable niche.
Yes, but if a rogue comet the size of Pluto hit the earth we'd all be killed and nothing would be enough.
It's about risk mitigation -- how much you need, how much you can afford. Anyone that sees enough of the industry will eventually witness remarkably improbable data loss, but RAID or other similar strategies aren't about making you invulnerable (since a file that gets overwritten with an old version or something is just as gone on a RAID array), they're about being able to operationally tolerate the failure of individual drives. You still need proper backups, and that's completely beyond the scope of avoiding mechanical failure.
It didn't conclude RAID 5 doesn't help, it concludes RAID 5 doesn't help as much as people think, because people think the probability of another failure before the rebuild is complete is negligible and they're wrong.
It helps, and distributing the data more helps more. Someone concerned about multi-drive failures can, for example, use a 3-way RAID 1 array, or a RAID 6 array (which can tolerate the loss of any 2 drives).
The problem is not that everyone is willing to accept a solution that sucks, the problem is that the current solution of integrated package management rocks.
All I need to do is search for something in the package manager GUI, click the its checkbox, click "apply", and I'm done. It's even easier than downloading a dmg, because you've got to go out and find that dmg on the publisher's website, or versiontracker or whatever. I simply express a desire for that program to be available, and then downloads, installations, updates, etc are all handled by the package manager. This even works for proprietary software (eg I have Nvidia's binary drivers, Adobe's Flash and PDF reader, VMWare Player, etc installed through my distro's package manager).
The best solution is for the vendor to supply whatever they're going to supply in a tarball, and then let the maintainers figure out what the dependencies and so forth are.
a) Virtualization support for hardware like the graphics card is coming, and it'll arrive faster if there's a killer app like MacOS virtualization driving it.
b) It's extremely useful for developers, eg testing stuff that can crash the system, or testing stuff against various different OS revisions. Even if it's a bit slower, it's still faster than rebooting the whole machine.
c) This doesn't matter at all on the server, where MacOS is the only OS of consequence that can't run as a guest in a VM. There is a large portion of the IT industry where this eliminates you from consideration completely.
"How is it flamebait if someone even mentions God?...the statement was made in a very tasteful way and it is simply the poster's opinion. I know *most* everyone on Slashdot doesn't believe in God in the traditional sense but Intelligent Design is as good a theory as any...If you were really thinking scientifically you would take all theories into account and not dismiss others because of how ridiculous it is solely based on the majority of the scientific community. The majority of the scientific community used to believe the Earth was flat, you couldn't split an atom, among so many other things. Science is not infallible"
Intelligent design is not a scientific theory because it's not falsifiable. That doesn't mean it must be wrong (because it might be historically true), but the reason it's important for things to be falsifiable is because this gives us a mechanism to gain confidence in things we discover.
Science is also not infallible, which is why the justification for belief is important. There needs to be a reason something is held to be true, "You haven't got a better idea." isn't enough. And there needs to be a willingness to abandon things that are shown to be wrong, something various religious organizations haven't been terribly willing to do (eg Galileo got locked up for claiming that heavenly bodies could orbit something other than the Sun).
You shouldn't take my word for it that the Earth is round, you should agree that it is a reasonable conclusion from the fact that different parts of the world can simultaneously experience night and day, or that something casts a longer shadow as you go further north/south, or that you can go up into space and look at it and take pictures. It's not "zOMG SCIENCE SAID SO", it's a mechanism that allows good reasons for thinking things to be evaluated and filtered out from the bad reasons.
Intelligent design might indeed be historically accurate, but there aren't any good reasons to assume that it is. The Bible gives one account, but Hindus will give you another. In the absence of any good way to pick one over the rest, the only reasonable action is to keep looking for reasons. That's what led us to evolution, and parts of evolution that didn't hold up to the evidence (eg Darwin thought all change must be slow and gradual) get shot down just as surely as the claim that the Earth was created in its current form 6k years ago.
It's not a he said/she said thing, it's the fact that intelligent design brings nothing useful to the discussion. Without being able to test it, it doesn't give knowledge more weight, and accepting it implicitly means accepting that we don't need to bother expanding our knowledge. That's simply not a reasonable thing to expect.
Funny how Apple supporters dismiss this reason when it's applied to Windows security, but when it supports Job's reasons for keeping FairPlay closed it's accepted.
"So yes, even with the Intel Macs, you can get machines cheaper than what Apple well sell them for. However, it's no surprise you can get a cheaper machine with lesser hardware! However, if you try to match the basic specs, and a couple of the accessories (ie: no consumer machine today should ship without wifi!) you're not going to save a lot of money over the Mac."
The opposite is also true. The various accessories might cost a lot to add, but you save a lot if you don't add them because don't need them. Having something like firewire or a camera bundled only justifies the cost if you're willing to pay for that stuff, if it'll give you some benefit. It's not reasonable to simply point at all the stuff an iMac has, and point at how much it costs to match that with a PC, if you'd never get a PC like that. It's a comparison without meaningful context.
I was in this position when I got my current machine. Mac Pros are priced pretty reasonably as dual-Xeon machines go, but having all that CPU power was never my goal. I wanted RAID for data integrity, and PCI-E to allow for upgrades in the future, and nothing about that requires dual-Xeons. For my needs, a Mac Pro is stupidly expensive.
Similarly, if you don't need a remote, or firewire, or a webcam, or a fancy graphics card, then you're paying a lot for an machine that is well equipped in ways that don't benefit you. Conversely, if you want more than an iMac offers, you're SOL. If you'd prefer to substitute firewire for an interface that's fast enough to handle current hard drives like eSATA, or want something better than an underclocked 7600GT, or want 4 gb of memory, then there's just no way to do it with an iMac.
They may be sufficiently well equipped to justify the cost, but that does not imply one's needs justify the expense.
Slashdot Mirror
"This update seems to have come relatively soon after the O(1) scheduler (about a year?) which is relatively quick for changes to really important low-level parts of an operating system. Does this mean that the Linux community was relatively unhappy with the O(1) scheduler which was touted as a very good thing at the time"
The Linux O(1) scheduler has been around since 2002.
It's pretty good, but there are corner cases where you can fool it. For example, if a process classified as interactive goes CPU-bound, it can cause starvation for other processes.
I typically check my mail, touch base with the support guys, etc. Nagios would be lighting up my phone if it was something big, but it's good to be seen tackling the issue before everyone starts noticing.
My dealings with Dell on the server side have been pretty satisfactory, even running Slackware or OpenBSD.
My only complaint is the satisfaction survey they send you after the issue is resolved (not kidding).
Supporting SPF doesn't put an end to spam, but it's one of those best-practices things that can really make your life simpler down the road.
For outgoing mail service:
-It becomes immediately apparent when "surprise" mail servers pop up. This can be a web server that's sending outgoing mail directly, or someone sending mail through their ISP's mail servers when they should be connecting and authenticating to your servers, etc. Tracking down mail problems in these situations can be very frustrating.
-It helps prevent forged messages claiming to be from your domain. Not all recipients support this, but even after the fact it's helpful to be able to have an answer for what can be done about it that doesn't get any blame on you.
For incoming service:
-Even a moderately strict SPF policy can help prevent bounce-spam from being sent via your servers.
-It helps protect your users from scams.
It's not a perfect solution, but it puts your network in a better defined state. And that helps keep things running smoothly.
Certain major western Canadian cable ISPs who shall remain nameless have been known to silently trap SMTP connections, and then forward the messages on to the destination.
Now, that's all fine and good if you're willing to "include:" their SPF records... but unfortunately this steadfastly anonymous western Canadian cable ISP also happens to be one of the most prolific botnet havens in the world, so you're not really cutting down the number of people that can claim to be you by a useful amount.
Your best bet is to run a VPS mail server, choose a different port for your client to connect to, and use SSL. Alternatively, you can outsource your mail service to someone like Google (who provides SPF guidance).
The requirements to colonize other worlds are prohibitive for the time being, I don't think anyone denies that. But throwing out numbers as though they negate the possibility doesn't make sense.
We're doing things now that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago they could do the math and decide that, say, flying into orbit, or building an electronic computer might be possible, but the gap that remained to be filled was the expertise it took to do everything involved sufficiently well. Right now, we have the same proof of concept for possible propulsion technologies (eg Orion), or space elevator technologies (eg carbon nanotubes) that they had back then for manned flight, but we can't do them sufficiently well, on a sufficiently large scale for economic space travel.
That's fine. The relevant technologies will advance without the need for any specific focus on space travel. The technology of space travel will be the synthesis of many different technologies that are going to happen anyway. So, if it's too hard to do immediately, fine. That doesn't discredit the idea. It just means we can't do it now.
Thanks for the informative reply.
"I think the concern is that samples of silicon from different sources (consider, for example, 'depleted silicon' from the scrapyard of the Russian isotope-enrichment facility) might have different isotope distributions at the 10^-7 level"
That was precisely my concern. I know that some isotope ratios are unpredictable in nature (eg, carbon dating something that ate food from the ocean can be inaccurate), so a good standard would eliminate that from the outset. As apparently it does.
How do they account for different isotopes? Or do they just get a sphere that weighs the same as N many atoms of pure silicon 28 would weigh?
"More likely for them all to end up in a star/black hole than a planet, or a huge gas giant than a nice habitable planet with water oceans."
I'd think even more likely than that would be drifting out into intergalactic space and floating around until the eventual heat death of the universe.
I also had one of the flawed G3 iBooks. The worst part was how many people recommended the machines, on the basis of how well built they were, even when they were getting theirs repaired just as regularly as mine.
If someone speaks highly of Apple's quality, but they do so whether or not the quality is good, then it doesn't really give me any information. Therefore, I tend to regard customer reviews with a fair amount of skepticism. If there's a pattern of downplaying problems, then even Consumer Reports and similar are suspect.
G3 iBooks are great... except the logic boards die on a regular basis.
G4 iBooks are great... except the solder joints keep breaking.
MacBooks are great... except that for that overheating under load thing.
I'd be fine with paying extra for quality. What I'm not fine with is paying extra for what Apple sells.
You are incorrect because the act of scheduling the next process to run requires constant time regardless of how many processes there are. The O(1) refers to this, correctly.
The reason this is important, and the reason they are worried about the act of scheduling the next process rather than time complexity over all N processes, is that if scheduling the next process were not constant time, the percentage of time spent scheduling the next process would grow larger as you added more processes. That's fine if you're on a desktop system and you go from 100 to 200, but as the number starts getting large on (say) big servers, you start running into a situation where all your CPUs are perpetually tied up trying to figure out what process to run next.
O(n) time over N processes is not a problem; you've either got the CPUs or you don't. If you don't, then your performance will suck for reasons that are your own fault. If you do have enough CPUs, then the time spent scheduling will remain in step with the time spent running the processes, and this is fine. However, if the time spent scheduling grew, every time a process was scheduled, across all CPUs, then your $50000 server would be worthless because it wouldn't be able to handle the workloads you intended for it. All those expensive CPUs would sit there figuring out what process to run rather than running it.
So, it is NOT a misnomer. It accurately describes the portion of the problem that the developers are concerned with. It's O(n) over n processes, and that's great because it means you can get to n without breaking down.
"Has Apple said "never, ever" to virtualization, or is it just that negotiating with Apple over how to do it legally is not on Parallels/VMWare's "TO DO" list (while they're busy racing to grab the lucrative windows-on-Mac market)?"
Both companies have made statements to the effect that they've explored the option, but can't do it commercially as long as Apple forbids it.
"Anway, if you don't like Apple's policy then it is incredibly easy to avoid buying a Mac because Apple do not have a 95%+ monopoly in the personal computer market - the only problem is which alternative you choose because Microsoft have a 95%+ monopoly in the PC market so even if you plump for Linux or BSD you'll find that lots of people take for granted that you can run Windows software."
a) OS X is not easier to avoid if you want a Mac, which seems to be the crowd making the most noise over this.
b) You can still dual boot quite easily.
"So, if a demand for virtualized Mac OSX does develop and Apple continue to block it then Apple will lose business."
The demand is already here, people are doing it illegally. It's enormously useful for anyone doing administration (testing patches before they're deployed) or developing software (testing against different OS revisions), on servers (where things are rapidly approaching the point where you can't be taken seriously without it). It does cost Apple business.
"P.S. did I mention that Microsoft have a 95%+ monopoly in the PC market"
I think you may have touched on it.
"which is why slashdot (plus the authoriities in every country that has any sort of monopoly/antitrust legislation) apply different standards to Microsoft and Apple."
Antitrust legislation makes shitty behavior legally actionable in the right circumstances, it doesn't make shitty behavior acceptable for everyone else.
Microsoft: You need to pay more to run Vista under virtualization.
Slashdot's response: God I hate Microsoft!
Apple: You may never, under any circumstances, on any hardware, at any time, for any reason, ever run OS X under virtualization. Period.
Slashdot's response: God I hate Microsoft!
Microsoft isn't specifically targeting Mac users, they're targeting everyone that does virtualization, which is a pretty sizable group these days. I don't support the practice, but apparently I must point out that Apple is specifically targeting Mac users, and their terms are much more onerous than Microsoft's in this case.
Besides, can't you run the entry level Vista Home with Boot Camp?
Yup. We do this at work (no link because I'm not spamming). We sell OpenBSD firewalls on minimal hardware (about the size of a broadband router, low power enough to be fanless), and then sell various services on top of that. You can do a surprising amount.
We use flash memory, and the space and rewrite cycle requirements for compiling on this are prohibitive.
They're going for 90% of all bodies 1 km across. They don't ignore smaller bodies (indeed, many have been found), it's just that a) smaller bodies are harder to see and b) there's way, way more of them. So for example, you might have 90% of 1 km bodies, 60% of all 900 m bodies, 30% of all 800 m bodies, and so on. Whatever the actual numbers are (I just made those up to illustrate the point), the goal is to locate the civilization-enders first, with progressively less threatening bodies being located later.
"Do we even know how a hunk of rock would react to the introduction of a bunch of alpha particles/gamma rays/x-rays/infrared radiation/etc? How would the the crystalline structure of the rock be affected? What models do we have that indicate the rock would shatter from an internal heat differential, rather than merely glowing very bright red for a while [assuming the rock even chose to absorb the heat energy in the first place, rather than just deflecting it off into the void of outer space]?"
Most of the heat would be dissipated by ablative cooling (eg, the surface would vaporize and disperse into space), and that's actually useful for the purposes of giving the body a nudge. The concern is that the shock would disrupt the asteroid, such that there would be more fragments.
"Seriously? We launch a gajillion dollar probe, chance it in a sling around the largest planet in our solar system to only save 3 years"
a) slightshots are a pretty well tested maneuver
b) it provides additional observations that are valuable in themselves, eg features on Io that have changed since Galileo last observed them.
c) 3 years gives us a chance to study Pluto's atmosphere before it freezes out as Pluto moves away from the sun.
Why is it bad for them to focus on a niche? It doesn't preclude them also making better looking or cheaper computers.
Moreover, if they become a solid Linux vendor, they'll be able to pick up a lot of high-margin sales pretty easily. There's plenty of professionals using Linux on some pretty pricey hardware. It doesn't take much volume to make up for the effort if it's high-end workstations you're talking about, and getting the hardware certified with major Linux distros would allow them to keep a lot of the OS-related costs that currently go to Microsoft.
It's not going to save the company, but it does have the potential to be a profitable niche.
"Even RAID6 isn't always enough"
Yes, but if a rogue comet the size of Pluto hit the earth we'd all be killed and nothing would be enough.
It's about risk mitigation -- how much you need, how much you can afford. Anyone that sees enough of the industry will eventually witness remarkably improbable data loss, but RAID or other similar strategies aren't about making you invulnerable (since a file that gets overwritten with an old version or something is just as gone on a RAID array), they're about being able to operationally tolerate the failure of individual drives. You still need proper backups, and that's completely beyond the scope of avoiding mechanical failure.
It didn't conclude RAID 5 doesn't help, it concludes RAID 5 doesn't help as much as people think, because people think the probability of another failure before the rebuild is complete is negligible and they're wrong.
It helps, and distributing the data more helps more. Someone concerned about multi-drive failures can, for example, use a 3-way RAID 1 array, or a RAID 6 array (which can tolerate the loss of any 2 drives).
The problem is not that everyone is willing to accept a solution that sucks, the problem is that the current solution of integrated package management rocks.
All I need to do is search for something in the package manager GUI, click the its checkbox, click "apply", and I'm done. It's even easier than downloading a dmg, because you've got to go out and find that dmg on the publisher's website, or versiontracker or whatever. I simply express a desire for that program to be available, and then downloads, installations, updates, etc are all handled by the package manager. This even works for proprietary software (eg I have Nvidia's binary drivers, Adobe's Flash and PDF reader, VMWare Player, etc installed through my distro's package manager).
The best solution is for the vendor to supply whatever they're going to supply in a tarball, and then let the maintainers figure out what the dependencies and so forth are.
a) Virtualization support for hardware like the graphics card is coming, and it'll arrive faster if there's a killer app like MacOS virtualization driving it.
b) It's extremely useful for developers, eg testing stuff that can crash the system, or testing stuff against various different OS revisions. Even if it's a bit slower, it's still faster than rebooting the whole machine.
c) This doesn't matter at all on the server, where MacOS is the only OS of consequence that can't run as a guest in a VM. There is a large portion of the IT industry where this eliminates you from consideration completely.
"How is it flamebait if someone even mentions God?...the statement was made in a very tasteful way and it is simply the poster's opinion. I know *most* everyone on Slashdot doesn't believe in God in the traditional sense but Intelligent Design is as good a theory as any...If you were really thinking scientifically you would take all theories into account and not dismiss others because of how ridiculous it is solely based on the majority of the scientific community. The majority of the scientific community used to believe the Earth was flat, you couldn't split an atom, among so many other things. Science is not infallible"
Intelligent design is not a scientific theory because it's not falsifiable. That doesn't mean it must be wrong (because it might be historically true), but the reason it's important for things to be falsifiable is because this gives us a mechanism to gain confidence in things we discover.
Science is also not infallible, which is why the justification for belief is important. There needs to be a reason something is held to be true, "You haven't got a better idea." isn't enough. And there needs to be a willingness to abandon things that are shown to be wrong, something various religious organizations haven't been terribly willing to do (eg Galileo got locked up for claiming that heavenly bodies could orbit something other than the Sun).
You shouldn't take my word for it that the Earth is round, you should agree that it is a reasonable conclusion from the fact that different parts of the world can simultaneously experience night and day, or that something casts a longer shadow as you go further north/south, or that you can go up into space and look at it and take pictures. It's not "zOMG SCIENCE SAID SO", it's a mechanism that allows good reasons for thinking things to be evaluated and filtered out from the bad reasons.
Intelligent design might indeed be historically accurate, but there aren't any good reasons to assume that it is. The Bible gives one account, but Hindus will give you another. In the absence of any good way to pick one over the rest, the only reasonable action is to keep looking for reasons. That's what led us to evolution, and parts of evolution that didn't hold up to the evidence (eg Darwin thought all change must be slow and gradual) get shot down just as surely as the claim that the Earth was created in its current form 6k years ago.
It's not a he said/she said thing, it's the fact that intelligent design brings nothing useful to the discussion. Without being able to test it, it doesn't give knowledge more weight, and accepting it implicitly means accepting that we don't need to bother expanding our knowledge. That's simply not a reasonable thing to expect.
Funny how Apple supporters dismiss this reason when it's applied to Windows security, but when it supports Job's reasons for keeping FairPlay closed it's accepted.
"So yes, even with the Intel Macs, you can get machines cheaper than what Apple well sell them for. However, it's no surprise you can get a cheaper machine with lesser hardware! However, if you try to match the basic specs, and a couple of the accessories (ie: no consumer machine today should ship without wifi!) you're not going to save a lot of money over the Mac."
The opposite is also true. The various accessories might cost a lot to add, but you save a lot if you don't add them because don't need them. Having something like firewire or a camera bundled only justifies the cost if you're willing to pay for that stuff, if it'll give you some benefit. It's not reasonable to simply point at all the stuff an iMac has, and point at how much it costs to match that with a PC, if you'd never get a PC like that. It's a comparison without meaningful context.
I was in this position when I got my current machine. Mac Pros are priced pretty reasonably as dual-Xeon machines go, but having all that CPU power was never my goal. I wanted RAID for data integrity, and PCI-E to allow for upgrades in the future, and nothing about that requires dual-Xeons. For my needs, a Mac Pro is stupidly expensive.
Similarly, if you don't need a remote, or firewire, or a webcam, or a fancy graphics card, then you're paying a lot for an machine that is well equipped in ways that don't benefit you. Conversely, if you want more than an iMac offers, you're SOL. If you'd prefer to substitute firewire for an interface that's fast enough to handle current hard drives like eSATA, or want something better than an underclocked 7600GT, or want 4 gb of memory, then there's just no way to do it with an iMac.
They may be sufficiently well equipped to justify the cost, but that does not imply one's needs justify the expense.