Even if it were possible to turn this technology into a commercial venture, I don't think it would be allowed to see the light of day. The article tempts the reader to imagine the following products:
Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes (GB) of information.
Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies.
In reality, if someone brought a product like this to market in the next 10 years, it would turn the computing industry on its head, and not in a good way. The big players (IBM, HP, etc) would see billions slashed from their revenue and entire divisions would die out. Companies like EMC would collapse within a year. Millions would face unemployment as the storage market we know today evaporated and people in related industries took the hit.
Never mind the money lost, the social consequences to products like this would be devastating to a lot of people.
Why? It's got almost the same innards as a 15" but with more space and metal to dissipate the heat. If anything it should run cooler, or at least take longer to heat up.
This full screen mode + full screen (cube) switching seems to be a new feature included in their Beta 4 release, only out about a week. Have to say I'm dam impressed with this too. Native virtualisation is what I've been waiting for before upgrading my PowerBook. Now I'm just agonizing over whether to go for a 15" or a 17", and whether to risk getting something so new considering the teething problems the 15" had.
Still, it's nice to have the choice rather than no choice at all.
The 17" Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 starts at 7.1 lbs and gets heavier the more things you add to it. It's thicker too (and doesn't have as good a screen rez either).
Yes Digital invented clustering with OpenVMS. But since then the "clustering" brand has fragmented into HA (Highly Available) clusters and Compute Clusters like Beowulf (and variations on the theme). OpenVMS is a HA cluster, and still rules the HA roost because it does such an amazing job of combining shared storage with SSI (single system image) functionality. On the Unix front, only Tru64 has come close to OpenVMS, but sadly that's in decline and will very soon vanish.
There also seems to be zero interest out there in SSI. HP had the chance to re-model HP-UX using Tru64's SSI, bit gave up citing customer disinterest. Perhaps that's because the benefits of SSI have been under sold, I don't know. But you're unlikely to see it again in a commercial Unix setting any time soon. Once Tru64 finally dies.
The really sad thing is that in the commercial space, traditional HA clusters have become almost irrelevant. Most commercial clusters sit on top of Oracle.
Going back in time when I was working for Digital/Compaq in a unix support role I remember then I learned that some (twit) in Compaq had sold (or licensed) the DLM source code from Tru64 to Oracle. I was stunned. It was like selling the crown jewels, and it turns out I was right. Now Oracle 9i/10g RAC has ASM as an option. You don't need a cluster filesystem anymore as Oracle RAC has its own DLM and can manage just fine thank-you-very-much with shared raw storage feeding multiple database instances on multiple nodes. With each "cluster" node managing its own instance, you don't even need cluster services to start/stop Oracle across the cluster.
Why do you need Unix clusters in a commercial setting any more, or OpenVMS for that matter, when Oracle had got things so neatly tied up? And there is nothing in the Open Source database arena that can compete with RAC on functionality. Competing on price of cause is a different matter.
Secondly, MMOGs are not chemical addictions and should not be treated as such
I'm not so convinced about this. Let me quickly give you some background. I'm not really an action game player, never have been. I own a playstation I've had for 2-3 years and I think its been turned on about 10 times at the most. But I used to play DnD as a kid, and then again from about 30 (for several years) with a bunch of other guys from work. I also used to do MUDs a long way back before the graphical MMOGs came on the scene. Not being a Windows user I never had exposure to them either. It wasn't until I got my second Mac, one with enough clout to play WoW that I finally took the plunge, and I love it. Its huge fun. But I've noticed a very unexpected physical effect playing WoW can have on me. I perspire. Only a little, but that's never happened when I've been using a computer before.
This has got to be a side effect of increased levels of adrenaline in my bloodstream. I may not physically be in danger, but my brain is reacting to the danger on screen by triggering the fight or flight response in my body.
Adrenaline is not a drug, but a quick google search shows that adrenaline addiction can be very real.
So you're telling us that a "small business owner" doesn't know how to Google for an app and stumble onto VersionTracker (which he/she should suspect exists anyway as similar sites exist for Windows) but the same "small business owner" knows what a Terminal app is; knows how to drive a command line, and knows that he/she needs to use a command called "apt-get".
Well it's been a very long time since I last read anything from the bible. But I was brought up in a Christian family, and I'm pretty sure I remember that the resurrection meant exactly that. I'm pretty sure I remember that there are accounts in the bible of christ having conversations with people afterwards. There really isn't any other way to interpret what the bible is saying there. It says he came back from the dead, and that's literally what it means.
In fact that's the whole premise of the christian faith. Anyone who claims to be a christian and doesn't actually believe that christ rose from the dead, frankly, isn't one.
That's assuming you believe any of it anyway, which I don't. But that's another matter entirely.
Use sudo to grant root to a single user
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 1
Another derivative of that is when sudo is used to temporarily grant access to root privs. As a consultant who travels around between different customer sites a lot, I sometimes visit customers who set me up my own permanent user account, then turn on sudo access when I get there, and turn it off when I leave. Works very well for all concerned. Much less work for them and less waiting around for me.
I'm currently setting up Windows 2000 on Q, but it seems to be very slow
You're going to have to wait for the QEMU Accelerator Module to be ported to Mac OS X. This thread is an interesting read and a useful source of user's experiences and information on the subject.
I don't understand why you expect a KDE app, firefox, and a gnome app to all be consistant button-order-wise when KDE and gnome have fundementally different button order philosophies.
Doh! That's the whole point of his post. Gnome and KDE are already collaborating on many fronts via freedesktop.org and he's basically appealing to both camps to get their act together on button order consistency.
My 1.67Ghz PowerBook G4 gets like that too after 10 mins of playing World of Warcraft. The cpu monitor shows it's going flat out, the fan is working constantly and the underside is too hot to sit directly on my knee. It doesn't surprise me that the extra horsepower of the Core Duo does the same.
Having said that, I'm hoping the Core Duo can handle WoW a bit better than my G4. It's fine most of the time, but seems to run out of gas when I'm in the proximity of lots of other players. In some of the busier parts of Stormwind with about 30+ other players on my screen, the frame rate drops off and play can get a little jerky.
Companies like people who believe in them whatever it is. They drop money to them at any given time, company keeps going.
If I was that person I'd have brought a MacBook Pro already. But I haven't have I. Like I said in my first post, I will be in the near future. I haven't yet because I'm waiting for the whole package to meet my needs which are:
A native VM environment
hopefully a 160GB SATA drive (their current max is 120GB)
Universal Binary versions of a few packages I use.
Speak for yourself, I want to have a choice as to what hardware I play my music on.
Ah but that's the crux of it isn't it. You see these days when you exchange money for a song, or for that matter a DVD or even a piece of software; you're not actually buying that item, you're only buying the right to use it. You don't own the music/movie/software sitting in your house, they do! You only own your usage rights. That's the way these industries have turned. So you see, what hardware that music/movie/software can play on isn't actually your choice to make!
Welcome to the 21st century, where the only things you truly own are inside your own skin. For the moment anyway.
The same incentive as always, to make money. Removing DRM doesn't change that.
You're missing Yaz's point. Apple have had to establish country specific agreements with all the record labels that supply iTunes with songs. Those agreements were only allowed on condition that Apple packaged the music with DRM technology that the record labels were happy with. If the French government forced Apple or any other music reseller to remove their DRM, the labels (Sony BMG for example) would declare breach of contract and the music source would dry up. They see no value in pushing digital music onto the internet where it can be easily copied from customer to customer to customer, without any encumbrance, and without their chance to grab a handful of cash from each.
Again though, we need to see a more accurate transcript of what's really going in. This is the second shite news report I've read about this today, and neither of them really say what's going on. Does this just target the music formats iTunes can play, or does it also target the players too? We don't know at the moment.
If Apple were forced to provide a way for music from iTunes to run on competitors players, they might be able to get round this by licensing WMA + DRM from Microsoft, building that into iTunes and then having a "convert" button. The customer would end up with two versions of the same song in their iTunes library, one for the iPod and one for the other WMA players. Could be a quick way out of the legal snare for Apple.
They could also provide a "convert" button to translate the music in the other direction, converting WMA into AAC. But if their competitors are also legally bound to provide both formats too, then Apple would still be forced to license Fairplay to their competition in France. Either Apple could run with this as an experiment and see what effect this really does have on their iPod sales; or they could just figure the destruction of their vertical market model just isn't worth it and close up shop and go home.
The latter would create a shit storm amongst customers in France, and could rebound on their government quite badly. After all, your average member of the public wouldn't give a rats ass about why they can't get music for their iPod any more, they just want it. Period!
... why isn't this thing walking on two legs, wearing glasses and solving quadratic equations ?
Spot on. But there's light in the tunnel !
on
No EFI Support for Vista
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've got a PowerBook at the moment, and will definitely be upgrading to a Macbook Pro in the near future. Being able to run MS Windows on it at (near) native speed would be a huge bonus for me, but I've got zero interest in dual booting to get that. I don't give a rats ass about running games under windows; I hardly have enough free time in my life to play WoW on my PowerBook more than a few times a week (without getting into trouble with my other half).
What I really need it for is those work occasions where I run into equipment that needs a dedicated Windows app to manage it, and dual-booting to deal with that is just stupid. I need a good native virtual environment I can just fire up in a minute, do my work and then close it down. VPC on PowerPC just doesn't cut it. It's way too slow.
The things I'm keeping an eye on...... QEMU + Accelerator seems to be the only choice for Intel OSX right now. VMware are apparently showing interest (but nothing solid yet) and another outfit called iEmulator.com are supposed to have an Intel port of their existing Mac OSX product in the pipeline.
If Xen worked I'd be delighted, but there seem to be problems that are going to take some time to work out. 1) there is no Intel VT support in the current Intel Mac's, and 2) Moshe Bar has said that "OS X has its own virtualization technology that interferes with Xen". Apparently he's been able to get FreeBSD and Debian working, but Apple's protectiveness of its hardware specs has so far prevented Bar from getting the graphics, sound or Wi-Fi to work.
I understand that there are different philosophies and ways of doing things, but my problem with the way SuSE chooses to implement system management with YaST is that it gave me back that Microsoft feeling. You know, that one where you don't quite trust your system because you don't know what its doing behind your back and you don't feel in control. For example I discovered that I couldn't even do something as simple as a quick manual edit of/etc/hosts. Because the next time I ran YaST it overwrote my change with its own copy. Now I've played around with several flavors of Unix over the past 16 years and I've never come across one that behaves like that. I just don't like it, period!
Fortunately, Linux being what it is, I'm not locked into one vendor for my needs and I can choose another distribution that does things the way I want. Redhat is good, and I've played around with Ubuntu a little too and like what I see there as well.
I find that its YaST is too slow and looks ancient, not to mention the fact that it will run through all those config scripts even when no configuration is changed at all!
It's not still doing that is it? I stopped using SuSE years ago and that was one of my main beefs. If I wanted to set something up by hand I'd have to go way out of my way to find out where all the proprietary-SuSE-only config files / scripts were stashed or risk having YaST obliterate my changes the next time I wanted to do something as mundane as change a user config. I hated YaST with a passion for that very reason. I always recommend Redhat to customers now.
For the most part anyway. I've been a full time Mac user for 3-4 years now and at no point have I ever given a rats ass that my G4 wasn't an x86 box. I just wanted it to perform well enough to do what I needed it to do. Which for the most part it does.
The Intel move is a good thing for me because I sometimes deal with bits of kit that have specialist Windows/x86 apps for managing them. When I run into this I have to fire up VPC and frankly its dog slow and painful to use. Now that the Qemu Accelerator executes x86 code natively on an Intel Mac, its just a matter of time before I make the switch. Frankly I'm only holding out for Apple to start offering the new 160GB SATA drives for the MacBook Pro ( I really do need the space ) plus a couple of Apps I use to get their Universal binary versions.
Now if I had a choice between getting a MacBook Pro with an Intel chip or an AMD chip, that would be a different kettle of fish. Providing they both offered similar performance per watt I would have the luxury of being able to look at the ethical arguments and factor that into my purchasing decision. Its a moot point though because I don't have that choice. Not if I want to use OSX and enjoy the Apple apps and integration experience anyway, and that's the big issue for me. I love using OSX, end of story!
The Itanium on the other hand was obsolete on it's launch. Even HP dumped it after killing their own better performing 64 bit processor for it and spending billions of dollars and ten years building it.
HP most certainly have not dumped it. If anything they're pushing harder than ever. All I hear from HP these days is Itanium, Itanium, Itanium.... and I've been to a few HP pre-sales events in the last couple of months where they've been pushing it very hard. In a few months they'll be revising their Integrity line and introducing systems that are Montecito ready. Right now HP are saying that for Integrity, they will not be beaten on price. And if you're in the market for an Itanium server you can expect to get some pretty hefty discounts!
Yes Itanium has failed to grab anything like the market share it was meant to. But that has nothing to do with its architecture. There's an arstechnia review from last year (I think) which talked about the Itanium architecture, and they were very up beat and complementary about it. The summary of that article was that as fabrication tech improves and die shrinks follow, and it becomes possible to cram more cores and larger and larger caches on to a chip, the Itanium architecture has more scope to grow and perform than any of its current competition. EPIC loves large caches.
There is only one real reason why Itanium has been such a flop so far, and that's x86-64. Intel had no intention of bolting 64 bit tech onto the x86 architecture. If you wanted 64 bit computing you were meant to go Itanium. End of story. That was the way Itanium was going to get its market share, and large volumes were going to drive the costs down. Intel either didn't see AMD coming, or didn't see what they were doing as a threat until it was too late. The x86-64 bomb shell, when it hit, threw Intel into complete disarray. Not only was x86-64 way cheaper than Itanium, but it out performed it and it offered seamless backward compatibility. The Itanium volume market plan was doomed from that moment on. As a consequence Intel had to scrap their x86 road map and re-draw it with their own 64 bit implementation, i.e. EM64T. They've been playing catch up ever since.
A side effect of the Intel's change in direction and focus has been a change in where they've put their resources. Itanium got starved of the resources it was originally planned to have and as a consequence Montecito is way late and isn't quite the kick ass design it was meant to be. Intel's partners like HP have suffered as a consequence.
Never the less Itanium is not going away, and even though Montecito is late, the current crop of Itanium chips are no slouch. When Montecito arrives it's going to give a much needed boost to HP Itanium sales. That's what they hope for anyway.
I'm right with you. I disabled the "Open Safe Files" way back when I first discovered it was automatically opening dmg's I'd downloaded. I remember being quite shocked that that was the default behavior.
Apple have made a classic security gaffe here... there is no such thing as a "safe file". And assuming its so is just setting the stage for a disaster waiting to happen.
After all the historical problems the Windows world has had with auto executing this and that, you'd have thought that someone at Apple would have swallowed a clue pill and had the common sense to take that option out!
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it were possible to turn this technology into a commercial venture, I don't think it would be allowed to see the light of day. The article tempts the reader to imagine the following products:In reality, if someone brought a product like this to market in the next 10 years, it would turn the computing industry on its head, and not in a good way. The big players (IBM, HP, etc) would see billions slashed from their revenue and entire divisions would die out. Companies like EMC would collapse within a year. Millions would face unemployment as the storage market we know today evaporated and people in related industries took the hit.
Never mind the money lost, the social consequences to products like this would be devastating to a lot of people.
Why? It's got almost the same innards as a 15" but with more space and metal to dissipate the heat. If anything it should run cooler, or at least take longer to heat up.
This full screen mode + full screen (cube) switching seems to be a new feature included in their Beta 4 release, only out about a week. Have to say I'm dam impressed with this too. Native virtualisation is what I've been waiting for before upgrading my PowerBook. Now I'm just agonizing over whether to go for a 15" or a 17", and whether to risk getting something so new considering the teething problems the 15" had.
Still, it's nice to have the choice rather than no choice at all.
The 17" Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 starts at 7.1 lbs and gets heavier the more things you add to it. It's thicker too (and doesn't have as good a screen rez either).
Yes Digital invented clustering with OpenVMS. But since then the "clustering" brand has fragmented into HA (Highly Available) clusters and Compute Clusters like Beowulf (and variations on the theme). OpenVMS is a HA cluster, and still rules the HA roost because it does such an amazing job of combining shared storage with SSI (single system image) functionality. On the Unix front, only Tru64 has come close to OpenVMS, but sadly that's in decline and will very soon vanish.
There also seems to be zero interest out there in SSI. HP had the chance to re-model HP-UX using Tru64's SSI, bit gave up citing customer disinterest. Perhaps that's because the benefits of SSI have been under sold, I don't know. But you're unlikely to see it again in a commercial Unix setting any time soon. Once Tru64 finally dies.
The really sad thing is that in the commercial space, traditional HA clusters have become almost irrelevant. Most commercial clusters sit on top of Oracle.
Going back in time when I was working for Digital/Compaq in a unix support role I remember then I learned that some (twit) in Compaq had sold (or licensed) the DLM source code from Tru64 to Oracle. I was stunned. It was like selling the crown jewels, and it turns out I was right. Now Oracle 9i/10g RAC has ASM as an option. You don't need a cluster filesystem anymore as Oracle RAC has its own DLM and can manage just fine thank-you-very-much with shared raw storage feeding multiple database instances on multiple nodes. With each "cluster" node managing its own instance, you don't even need cluster services to start/stop Oracle across the cluster.
Why do you need Unix clusters in a commercial setting any more, or OpenVMS for that matter, when Oracle had got things so neatly tied up? And there is nothing in the Open Source database arena that can compete with RAC on functionality. Competing on price of cause is a different matter.
It's a hormone.
This has got to be a side effect of increased levels of adrenaline in my bloodstream. I may not physically be in danger, but my brain is reacting to the danger on screen by triggering the fight or flight response in my body.
Adrenaline is not a drug, but a quick google search shows that adrenaline addiction can be very real.
I don't believe you!
Well it's been a very long time since I last read anything from the bible. But I was brought up in a Christian family, and I'm pretty sure I remember that the resurrection meant exactly that. I'm pretty sure I remember that there are accounts in the bible of christ having conversations with people afterwards. There really isn't any other way to interpret what the bible is saying there. It says he came back from the dead, and that's literally what it means.
In fact that's the whole premise of the christian faith. Anyone who claims to be a christian and doesn't actually believe that christ rose from the dead, frankly, isn't one.
That's assuming you believe any of it anyway, which I don't. But that's another matter entirely.
Another derivative of that is when sudo is used to temporarily grant access to root privs. As a consultant who travels around between different customer sites a lot, I sometimes visit customers who set me up my own permanent user account, then turn on sudo access when I get there, and turn it off when I leave. Works very well for all concerned. Much less work for them and less waiting around for me.
My 1.67Ghz PowerBook G4 gets like that too after 10 mins of playing World of Warcraft. The cpu monitor shows it's going flat out, the fan is working constantly and the underside is too hot to sit directly on my knee. It doesn't surprise me that the extra horsepower of the Core Duo does the same.
Having said that, I'm hoping the Core Duo can handle WoW a bit better than my G4. It's fine most of the time, but seems to run out of gas when I'm in the proximity of lots of other players. In some of the busier parts of Stormwind with about 30+ other players on my screen, the frame rate drops off and play can get a little jerky.
Happy now?
Welcome to the 21st century, where the only things you truly own are inside your own skin. For the moment anyway.
Again though, we need to see a more accurate transcript of what's really going in. This is the second shite news report I've read about this today, and neither of them really say what's going on. Does this just target the music formats iTunes can play, or does it also target the players too? We don't know at the moment.
If Apple were forced to provide a way for music from iTunes to run on competitors players, they might be able to get round this by licensing WMA + DRM from Microsoft, building that into iTunes and then having a "convert" button. The customer would end up with two versions of the same song in their iTunes library, one for the iPod and one for the other WMA players. Could be a quick way out of the legal snare for Apple.
They could also provide a "convert" button to translate the music in the other direction, converting WMA into AAC. But if their competitors are also legally bound to provide both formats too, then Apple would still be forced to license Fairplay to their competition in France. Either Apple could run with this as an experiment and see what effect this really does have on their iPod sales; or they could just figure the destruction of their vertical market model just isn't worth it and close up shop and go home.
The latter would create a shit storm amongst customers in France, and could rebound on their government quite badly. After all, your average member of the public wouldn't give a rats ass about why they can't get music for their iPod any more, they just want it. Period!
And your point is ???
I've got a PowerBook at the moment, and will definitely be upgrading to a Macbook Pro in the near future. Being able to run MS Windows on it at (near) native speed would be a huge bonus for me, but I've got zero interest in dual booting to get that. I don't give a rats ass about running games under windows; I hardly have enough free time in my life to play WoW on my PowerBook more than a few times a week (without getting into trouble with my other half).
...... QEMU + Accelerator seems to be the only choice for Intel OSX right now. VMware are apparently showing interest (but nothing solid yet) and another outfit called iEmulator.com are supposed to have an Intel port of their existing Mac OSX product in the pipeline.
:-)
What I really need it for is those work occasions where I run into equipment that needs a dedicated Windows app to manage it, and dual-booting to deal with that is just stupid. I need a good native virtual environment I can just fire up in a minute, do my work and then close it down. VPC on PowerPC just doesn't cut it. It's way too slow.
The things I'm keeping an eye on
If Xen worked I'd be delighted, but there seem to be problems that are going to take some time to work out. 1) there is no Intel VT support in the current Intel Mac's, and 2) Moshe Bar has said that "OS X has its own virtualization technology that interferes with Xen". Apparently he's been able to get FreeBSD and Debian working, but Apple's protectiveness of its hardware specs has so far prevented Bar from getting the graphics, sound or Wi-Fi to work.
So it's really only a matter of time
I understand that there are different philosophies and ways of doing things, but my problem with the way SuSE chooses to implement system management with YaST is that it gave me back that Microsoft feeling. You know, that one where you don't quite trust your system because you don't know what its doing behind your back and you don't feel in control. For example I discovered that I couldn't even do something as simple as a quick manual edit of
Fortunately, Linux being what it is, I'm not locked into one vendor for my needs and I can choose another distribution that does things the way I want. Redhat is good, and I've played around with Ubuntu a little too and like what I see there as well.
Thanks. I'll watch out for that one in future and make sure I get it right next time.
For the most part anyway. I've been a full time Mac user for 3-4 years now and at no point have I ever given a rats ass that my G4 wasn't an x86 box. I just wanted it to perform well enough to do what I needed it to do. Which for the most part it does.
The Intel move is a good thing for me because I sometimes deal with bits of kit that have specialist Windows/x86 apps for managing them. When I run into this I have to fire up VPC and frankly its dog slow and painful to use. Now that the Qemu Accelerator executes x86 code natively on an Intel Mac, its just a matter of time before I make the switch. Frankly I'm only holding out for Apple to start offering the new 160GB SATA drives for the MacBook Pro ( I really do need the space ) plus a couple of Apps I use to get their Universal binary versions.
Now if I had a choice between getting a MacBook Pro with an Intel chip or an AMD chip, that would be a different kettle of fish. Providing they both offered similar performance per watt I would have the luxury of being able to look at the ethical arguments and factor that into my purchasing decision. Its a moot point though because I don't have that choice. Not if I want to use OSX and enjoy the Apple apps and integration experience anyway, and that's the big issue for me. I love using OSX, end of story!
Yes Itanium has failed to grab anything like the market share it was meant to. But that has nothing to do with its architecture. There's an arstechnia review from last year (I think) which talked about the Itanium architecture, and they were very up beat and complementary about it. The summary of that article was that as fabrication tech improves and die shrinks follow, and it becomes possible to cram more cores and larger and larger caches on to a chip, the Itanium architecture has more scope to grow and perform than any of its current competition. EPIC loves large caches.
There is only one real reason why Itanium has been such a flop so far, and that's x86-64. Intel had no intention of bolting 64 bit tech onto the x86 architecture. If you wanted 64 bit computing you were meant to go Itanium. End of story. That was the way Itanium was going to get its market share, and large volumes were going to drive the costs down. Intel either didn't see AMD coming, or didn't see what they were doing as a threat until it was too late. The x86-64 bomb shell, when it hit, threw Intel into complete disarray. Not only was x86-64 way cheaper than Itanium, but it out performed it and it offered seamless backward compatibility. The Itanium volume market plan was doomed from that moment on. As a consequence Intel had to scrap their x86 road map and re-draw it with their own 64 bit implementation, i.e. EM64T. They've been playing catch up ever since.
A side effect of the Intel's change in direction and focus has been a change in where they've put their resources. Itanium got starved of the resources it was originally planned to have and as a consequence Montecito is way late and isn't quite the kick ass design it was meant to be. Intel's partners like HP have suffered as a consequence.
Never the less Itanium is not going away, and even though Montecito is late, the current crop of Itanium chips are no slouch. When Montecito arrives it's going to give a much needed boost to HP Itanium sales. That's what they hope for anyway.
I'm right with you. I disabled the "Open Safe Files" way back when I first discovered it was automatically opening dmg's I'd downloaded. I remember being quite shocked that that was the default behavior.
Apple have made a classic security gaffe here
After all the historical problems the Windows world has had with auto executing this and that, you'd have thought that someone at Apple would have swallowed a clue pill and had the common sense to take that option out!