Remember MySQL is released under the GPL Right, all of it including the client libaries are. What that means is is you want to use it in propietry apps you have to buy a license.
So what features, other than an expansion slot does a "standard" PC have that an iMac or Mac mini doesn't? An ordinary PC desktop: Either supports two monitors of my choice out of the box or can be fitted with a cheap and easy to fit card that allows it to do so. Monitors are usually a seperate item that can be bought from a different supplier to the PC if desired and saved from one PC to the next. Either has graphics suitable for moderate 3D gaming out of the box or can be fitted with a cheap and easy to fit card that allows it to do so. Can be fitted with extra hard drives on proper hard drive optimised interfaces mounted internally where they won't get unplugged by accident and run off the computers power supply so people won't forget to turn them on. Can have it's ram and hard drives upgraded/replaced with a single screwdriver. And yes can be fitted with expansion cards either immediately to meet specialist requirements or later to extend the machines usefull life.
The mini only supports one monitor (unless you want to get into really crappy USB to VGA adaptors) Monitors is seperate item that can be bought from a different supplier to the mac if desired and saved from one mac to the next. has space for only one internal hard drive which must be a laptop model (slow and/or small). requires two very thin putty knives to open and more dissasemby after that to get at the drives/ram, yes it's not as bad as some laptops but that doesn't make it good.. has no usable expansion slots (there is a mini PCIe or something with the wireless card in but you can't really get anything else for those slots and it has no external access).
The imac supports two monitors but one of them must be the built in one comes with a built in monitor that cannot be kept after the end of the macs usefull life. has space for only one internal hard drive though it is a proper desktop model. haven't researched getting inside this one in detail but the impression I get is that the ram is easy to get at but the hard drive requires a lot of dissasembly. does not have much in the way of expansion slots, the graphics card is replacable but only with special cards that are hard to obtain.
Apple has used phrases like "the power of unix" in marketing for OS-X before, then I think they had to stop for a while until they got certified after the open group made trademark threats.
not really, why apple decided to use a non standard boot process is unclear but they certainly produced a version of OS-X that booted using a standard PC bios but still required an apple TPM chip (it was used on the test machines that apple let developers have before the first intel mac was released). I strongly suspect the initial internal intel ports ran on completely standard PC hardware.
As you say apple doesn't participate in the very bottom of the market but that isn't what this is about. I don't object to paying a bit more for apple build quality, I do object to having to buy the top end (> £1000) models to get features that are standard on PCs.
To extend your car analogy imagine a car manufacturer that designed all but thier very top end models so it was impossible or at least extremely difficult to fit a towball or a better stereo system or a hands free kit for your carphone.
Save for the fact that a full release of OS X is only $130.00 retail. There is no OS-X release comparable to a full retail of windows, apples retail copies of OS-X are upgrades to install on your mac which by definition came with a copy of OS-X from the factory. Yes apple enforces the fact it is an upgrade differently to MS (hardware lock rather than asking for old media) but the principle is the same. On newegg vista ultimate upgrade is $249.99 and home premium upgrade is $144.99. Still more expensive but not by nearly as much as you make out.
You can try and teach conventional multithreading synchronization in C++, but you wind up lying to students, as the optimizers are typically built with single thread memory model assumptions. Surely thats why we have volatile to tell the compiler that something is touched by code outside the current thread (whether other threads or interrupts or whatever) and when I touch it the compiler had better do exactly as I say.
and still possible for languages that live "off in their own world" like Java and most Lisps. possible but much harder, this is one of the big differences between java and.net afaict. With java if you want to use an existing library written in C you have to write a peice of C code in a seperate file that uses rather unfriendly libraries to talk to the java code and then calls into the C library. Then you have to modify your build system to take account of compiling that code seperately. With.net afaict you can just use some form of unsafe block and immediately start writing native code.
A user downloading a single large file during peak times at high speeds is going to create more of a bandwidth problem than a user downloading multiple large files via BT staggered over a couple of days There are a couple of issues with this:
The first is that very few people download hundreds of megabytes per day from non P2P sources. Even if they do (for example a video on demand TV series) the content provider is likely to take steps to place the content close to the users (because it reduces thier costs as well as the users ISPs costs, see for example the BBC who peer with most if not all major UK ISPs) whereas with P2P bits of the files tend to come from all over the world.
The other issue is assuming a network that treats all packets equally a group of TCP connections competing for the line should end up with about equal bandwidth. So if you use a protocol that uses n TCP connections (I think bittorrent tends to use about 5 though it depends on configuration) at once to download a file you will end up with 5 times the bandwidth share as someone who is downloading using a conventional protocol that is based on a single TCP connection.
If your neighbor's network is going slower because you're downloading a huge file, that's not a sign of you being a 'bandwidth hog' - it's a sign of improper QoS policies in place. One soloution is certainly a QOS system that limits bandwidth hogs to thier fair share while allowing normal users to have a normal bursty pattern. I think the main downside to that system is you really need to implement it at every level of the network as you can't be sure at what level of the network the pinch point will be.
In my opinion, it's just an excuse to try to maintain the old business models of cable TV (for cable companies) and cellphone/landline (for phone companies) when better alternatives (digital distribution/VoIP) exist. With voip I agree with you but that isn't what this article is about. I would also agree with you if they tried to attack sanely implemented legitimate digital distribution of TV series but that isn't what this article is about either.
Distribution using tools like bittorrent is a network admins nightmare. There is little to no attempt made to keep traffic on cheap local links rather than expensive international ones. Multiple TCP connections are used for a single download making the protocol more agressive in it's use of bandwidth (see above) and the ISP dare not try and do anything to cache/optimise it because they know that the bulk of the traffic is illegal.
there's no reason to think they won't federate eventually. Depends, companies whose main buisness model is dying tend to be a little unpredicatable, one step towards openness won't nessacerally be followed by others.
It means that theverylastaoluser@aol.com (seriously, who uses it anymore?) can now IM to smartpeople@gmail.com, and vice versa. My understanding is you can't do that yet. Implementing XMPP as a client protocol is pretty seperate from implementing XMPP "federation".
Why? I mean... isn't that all you need? Or do people do things with IM that I don't do? It works kind of but it still has major issues:
* groupchats are only possible if all buddies are on the same network * features beyond basic IM are rarely supported well if at all * you have to manage multiple identities. Rather than one line of IM address contact information you end up with 5 or so.
However all they have to do is throw the switch so to speak. If you are running a pure jabber server using a standard jabber server codebase it is that simple. OTOH if you are running what is probablly just a form of gateway server into your existing closed system then it is going to be much much harder.
I think the problem here is, the typical user would consider the mini a "reasonably specced system". The typical user who doesn't game, doesn't edit videos doesn't want a couple of monitors probablly would yes.
To accommodate the people who want something in between the mini and the Pro, well, they're all going to want slightly different things Every other major manufacturer manages to produce a cheap machine with expansion slots that can be used either for those more esoteric requirements or to extend the usefull life of the machine. Every other major manufacturer manages to produce a midrange machine for which you can choose your monitor(s).
and that breaks away from the "small number of standardized systems" philosophy at Apple. Apple already offers build to order options on almost every machine in thier range.
All my co-workers use iMacs. Do you think that given the choice of the integrated iMac or a similarlly priced and specced combination of seperate mac and monitor they would have gone for the iMac or the seperate units?
Every other maker that has produced all in ones and small form factor machines has had them remain a niche product. This suggests to me that the reason the imac and mini sell so well is because they are the only reasonablly priced and legit way to get OS-X, not because customers want all in one.
Most people probably want a new monitor when they get a new computer There was a time when practically every PC came with a monitor. Then manufacturers realised that not everyone wants to replace thier monitor as often as thier PC and they started making them optional. Now in my experiance it is unusual to find a PC where the monitor isn't optional.
The imacs do now support an external monitor as an extra screen (from what I can gather in the powerpc days they didn't without hacks) but you still end up with a pair of monitors that don't match and when the imac reaches the end of it's usefull life I have to get rid of the lovely monitor that came with it too. No thanks.
to assert that "Vista Not Included" actually bothers anyone beside Steve Ballmer. I agree it shouldn't be included but not having windows as a build time option is a major pain for those who wan't to be absoloutely sure of being legit. Using system builder packs on your own systems is something of a grey area, full retail windows is damn expensive and afaict most volume licenses are upgrade/downgrade only.
By 2038, no major consumer cpu manufacturer will be producing anything but 64 bit chips. If by consumer cpu manufacturer you mean those who made desktop PC orientated chips you are right but they are only a tiny fraction of the overall processors sold. Also I don't see 32 bit compatibility support in PC processors going away in the forseeable future (current PC processors can still run 16 bit code!)
but even if your system has been moved to a 64 bit platform and is compiled natively rather than using a 32 bit compatibility mode there are still two big problems. * for efficiancy many 64 bit platforms define int as being 32 bit (the integer types that matches the size of a pointer isn't nessacerally the fastest integer type). Through laziness or ignorance many programmers use int when they should use time_t. * many file formats, network protocols and databases almost certainly have 32 bit unix style timestamps designed in. Databases are fairly simple (a simple alter table or similar) but conversion may require quite some downtime. File formats and network protocols may be much harder.
until you want to back it up or email it to a friend or whatever, at which point you have to either get your head arround the concept of dumping and importing or copy files that are in system directories and probablly owned by root. You also have to make sure you don't cause any conflicts with data already on the machine when reimporting the file someone sent you.
All this is much more complex for the user than just having thier database self contained in a single file that they can treat like any other file and open immediately without having to do any importing crap.
I would love to see a single-user desktop database program with modest relational capabilities, intuitive query and report functions, and decent ability to import and export data. In what way does access not meet theese requirements?
3. Somebody has the same phone number of 10 years. Not at all surprising, other than the addition of an extra 1 to the area code (this happened to every geographic area code in the UK) my parents phone number has not changed since before I was born.
I can well belive the MSDN support would be good, keeping developers happy is relatively cheap for the ammount of benifit it brings your platform and MSDN subscribers are 1: paying quite a substantial subscription and 2: likely to actually know what they are talking about.
With second level tech support I guess it's just a case of you get what you pay for;)
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Remember MySQL is released under the GPL
Right, all of it including the client libaries are. What that means is is you want to use it in propietry apps you have to buy a license.
That page does not seem to mention anything about what volatile means just that some compilers generate slow code when using it.
So what features, other than an expansion slot does a "standard" PC have that an iMac or Mac mini doesn't?
An ordinary PC desktop:
Either supports two monitors of my choice out of the box or can be fitted with a cheap and easy to fit card that allows it to do so.
Monitors are usually a seperate item that can be bought from a different supplier to the PC if desired and saved from one PC to the next.
Either has graphics suitable for moderate 3D gaming out of the box or can be fitted with a cheap and easy to fit card that allows it to do so.
Can be fitted with extra hard drives on proper hard drive optimised interfaces mounted internally where they won't get unplugged by accident and run off the computers power supply so people won't forget to turn them on.
Can have it's ram and hard drives upgraded/replaced with a single screwdriver.
And yes can be fitted with expansion cards either immediately to meet specialist requirements or later to extend the machines usefull life.
The mini
only supports one monitor (unless you want to get into really crappy USB to VGA adaptors)
Monitors is seperate item that can be bought from a different supplier to the mac if desired and saved from one mac to the next.
has space for only one internal hard drive which must be a laptop model (slow and/or small).
requires two very thin putty knives to open and more dissasemby after that to get at the drives/ram, yes it's not as bad as some laptops but that doesn't make it good..
has no usable expansion slots (there is a mini PCIe or something with the wireless card in but you can't really get anything else for those slots and it has no external access).
The imac
supports two monitors but one of them must be the built in one
comes with a built in monitor that cannot be kept after the end of the macs usefull life.
has space for only one internal hard drive though it is a proper desktop model.
haven't researched getting inside this one in detail but the impression I get is that the ram is easy to get at but the hard drive requires a lot of dissasembly.
does not have much in the way of expansion slots, the graphics card is replacable but only with special cards that are hard to obtain.
Apple has used phrases like "the power of unix" in marketing for OS-X before, then I think they had to stop for a while until they got certified after the open group made trademark threats.
not really, why apple decided to use a non standard boot process is unclear but they certainly produced a version of OS-X that booted using a standard PC bios but still required an apple TPM chip (it was used on the test machines that apple let developers have before the first intel mac was released). I strongly suspect the initial internal intel ports ran on completely standard PC hardware.
As you say apple doesn't participate in the very bottom of the market but that isn't what this is about. I don't object to paying a bit more for apple build quality, I do object to having to buy the top end (> £1000) models to get features that are standard on PCs.
To extend your car analogy imagine a car manufacturer that designed all but thier very top end models so it was impossible or at least extremely difficult to fit a towball or a better stereo system or a hands free kit for your carphone.
Save for the fact that a full release of OS X is only $130.00 retail.
There is no OS-X release comparable to a full retail of windows, apples retail copies of OS-X are upgrades to install on your mac which by definition came with a copy of OS-X from the factory. Yes apple enforces the fact it is an upgrade differently to MS (hardware lock rather than asking for old media) but the principle is the same. On newegg vista ultimate upgrade is $249.99 and home premium upgrade is $144.99. Still more expensive but not by nearly as much as you make out.
You can try and teach conventional multithreading synchronization in C++, but you wind up lying to students, as the optimizers are typically built with single thread memory model assumptions.
Surely thats why we have volatile to tell the compiler that something is touched by code outside the current thread (whether other threads or interrupts or whatever) and when I touch it the compiler had better do exactly as I say.
and still possible for languages that live "off in their own world" like Java and most Lisps. .net afaict. With java if you want to use an existing library written in C you have to write a peice of C code in a seperate file that uses rather unfriendly libraries to talk to the java code and then calls into the C library. Then you have to modify your build system to take account of compiling that code seperately. With .net afaict you can just use some form of unsafe block and immediately start writing native code.
possible but much harder, this is one of the big differences between java and
A user downloading a single large file during peak times at high speeds is going to create more of a bandwidth problem than a user downloading multiple large files via BT staggered over a couple of days
There are a couple of issues with this:
The first is that very few people download hundreds of megabytes per day from non P2P sources. Even if they do (for example a video on demand TV series) the content provider is likely to take steps to place the content close to the users (because it reduces thier costs as well as the users ISPs costs, see for example the BBC who peer with most if not all major UK ISPs) whereas with P2P bits of the files tend to come from all over the world.
The other issue is assuming a network that treats all packets equally a group of TCP connections competing for the line should end up with about equal bandwidth. So if you use a protocol that uses n TCP connections (I think bittorrent tends to use about 5 though it depends on configuration) at once to download a file you will end up with 5 times the bandwidth share as someone who is downloading using a conventional protocol that is based on a single TCP connection.
If your neighbor's network is going slower because you're downloading a huge file, that's not a sign of you being a 'bandwidth hog' - it's a sign of improper QoS policies in place.
One soloution is certainly a QOS system that limits bandwidth hogs to thier fair share while allowing normal users to have a normal bursty pattern. I think the main downside to that system is you really need to implement it at every level of the network as you can't be sure at what level of the network the pinch point will be.
In my opinion, it's just an excuse to try to maintain the old business models of cable TV (for cable companies) and cellphone/landline (for phone companies) when better alternatives (digital distribution/VoIP) exist.
With voip I agree with you but that isn't what this article is about. I would also agree with you if they tried to attack sanely implemented legitimate digital distribution of TV series but that isn't what this article is about either.
Distribution using tools like bittorrent is a network admins nightmare. There is little to no attempt made to keep traffic on cheap local links rather than expensive international ones. Multiple TCP connections are used for a single download making the protocol more agressive in it's use of bandwidth (see above) and the ISP dare not try and do anything to cache/optimise it because they know that the bulk of the traffic is illegal.
there's no reason to think they won't federate eventually.
Depends, companies whose main buisness model is dying tend to be a little unpredicatable, one step towards openness won't nessacerally be followed by others.
It means that theverylastaoluser@aol.com (seriously, who uses it anymore?) can now IM to smartpeople@gmail.com, and vice versa.
My understanding is you can't do that yet. Implementing XMPP as a client protocol is pretty seperate from implementing XMPP "federation".
Why? I mean ... isn't that all you need? Or do people do things with IM that I don't do?
It works kind of but it still has major issues:
* groupchats are only possible if all buddies are on the same network
* features beyond basic IM are rarely supported well if at all
* you have to manage multiple identities. Rather than one line of IM address contact information you end up with 5 or so.
They now seem to be at least as open as Google about it all.
IIRC they still don't participate in the gloabl jabber network like google do.
However all they have to do is throw the switch so to speak.
If you are running a pure jabber server using a standard jabber server codebase it is that simple. OTOH if you are running what is probablly just a form of gateway server into your existing closed system then it is going to be much much harder.
I think the problem here is, the typical user would consider the mini a "reasonably specced system".
The typical user who doesn't game, doesn't edit videos doesn't want a couple of monitors probablly would yes.
To accommodate the people who want something in between the mini and the Pro, well, they're all going to want slightly different things
Every other major manufacturer manages to produce a cheap machine with expansion slots that can be used either for those more esoteric requirements or to extend the usefull life of the machine. Every other major manufacturer manages to produce a midrange machine for which you can choose your monitor(s).
and that breaks away from the "small number of standardized systems" philosophy at Apple.
Apple already offers build to order options on almost every machine in thier range.
All my co-workers use iMacs.
Do you think that given the choice of the integrated iMac or a similarlly priced and specced combination of seperate mac and monitor they would have gone for the iMac or the seperate units?
Every other maker that has produced all in ones and small form factor machines has had them remain a niche product. This suggests to me that the reason the imac and mini sell so well is because they are the only reasonablly priced and legit way to get OS-X, not because customers want all in one.
Most people probably want a new monitor when they get a new computer
There was a time when practically every PC came with a monitor. Then manufacturers realised that not everyone wants to replace thier monitor as often as thier PC and they started making them optional. Now in my experiance it is unusual to find a PC where the monitor isn't optional.
The imacs do now support an external monitor as an extra screen (from what I can gather in the powerpc days they didn't without hacks) but you still end up with a pair of monitors that don't match and when the imac reaches the end of it's usefull life I have to get rid of the lovely monitor that came with it too. No thanks.
to assert that "Vista Not Included" actually bothers anyone beside Steve Ballmer.
I agree it shouldn't be included but not having windows as a build time option is a major pain for those who wan't to be absoloutely sure of being legit. Using system builder packs on your own systems is something of a grey area, full retail windows is damn expensive and afaict most volume licenses are upgrade/downgrade only.
Well in enterprise they certainly had pad to site and site to pad, i'm not sure when site to site transport came in.
afaict most slot loaders can't handle them. The wii can but I bet the mechanism had to be made considerablly more complex to support it.
By 2038, no major consumer cpu manufacturer will be producing anything but 64 bit chips.
If by consumer cpu manufacturer you mean those who made desktop PC orientated chips you are right but they are only a tiny fraction of the overall processors sold. Also I don't see 32 bit compatibility support in PC processors going away in the forseeable future (current PC processors can still run 16 bit code!)
but even if your system has been moved to a 64 bit platform and is compiled natively rather than using a 32 bit compatibility mode there are still two big problems.
* for efficiancy many 64 bit platforms define int as being 32 bit (the integer types that matches the size of a pointer isn't nessacerally the fastest integer type). Through laziness or ignorance many programmers use int when they should use time_t.
* many file formats, network protocols and databases almost certainly have 32 bit unix style timestamps designed in. Databases are fairly simple (a simple alter table or similar) but conversion may require quite some downtime. File formats and network protocols may be much harder.
until you want to back it up or email it to a friend or whatever, at which point you have to either get your head arround the concept of dumping and importing or copy files that are in system directories and probablly owned by root. You also have to make sure you don't cause any conflicts with data already on the machine when reimporting the file someone sent you.
All this is much more complex for the user than just having thier database self contained in a single file that they can treat like any other file and open immediately without having to do any importing crap.
I would love to see a single-user desktop database program with modest relational capabilities, intuitive query and report functions, and decent ability to import and export data.
In what way does access not meet theese requirements?
3. Somebody has the same phone number of 10 years.
Not at all surprising, other than the addition of an extra 1 to the area code (this happened to every geographic area code in the UK) my parents phone number has not changed since before I was born.
I can well belive the MSDN support would be good, keeping developers happy is relatively cheap for the ammount of benifit it brings your platform and MSDN subscribers are 1: paying quite a substantial subscription and 2: likely to actually know what they are talking about.
;)
With second level tech support I guess it's just a case of you get what you pay for