No, you just need to lock down the config tight enough so that can't happen
And who do you think is going to lock down the config for you, the security fairies? No, an expensive team of hardworking IT staff who are going to take away your admin rights to stop you from screwing up their company network with the latest virus ridden screen saver. You can't even connect a new MS PC to the internet these days without being 0wned in the time it takes you to make a coffee. Do we get these problems with Mac OS X, not in the 2 years I've been running it. And I've not had to lock it down, the default settings are already secure.
Btw, your sig is very offensive. Python & Ruby are excellent programming languages.
The only valid point you made was "using your tv just to play vidio games", and how many people are going to buy an iMac for that when they can get a real TV a hell of a lot cheaper. As for DVDs, a basic iMac can already do that without a TV tuner, so that's irrelevant.
In my entire life I've only ever met one person who's brought a TV (actually a huge plasma screen) for watching DVD's and playing games. My mate Paul. He had a running battle with TV Licensing to prove he didn't need to pay it. In the end he had to physically walk them round the house and show them he didn't have an external aerial, a portable aerial, or a satellite dish capable of receiving transmissions before they would leave him alone.
I hardly think that Apple are going to bundle a TV tuner so that a one in a million consumer like Paul will be happy, at the expense of adding extra cost.
I agree. I've a PB with 512MB and there are times when even that isn't enough. Try running Activity Monitor and order your list on "real memory" usage. When Safari clocks in at 100+MB which it does frequently, having just 256MB in your system isn't going to cut the mustard.
I've been thinking of upgrading to 1GB, and that'll definitely be the starting point for any future purchases.
adding a TV tuner would be a disaster. If you didn't have one already, you'd be forced by Law to buy a TV license with your new iMac whether you wanted to use it as a TV or not. This would add an extra £121 ($216.90) to the cost of your computer.
Most people don't buy a computer to watch TV on, so why should we pay extra for functionality we don't need?
I find your polarized arguments to be very extreme, and not at all representative of real life. For instance, when do we ever give fuel, food and band-aids to enemy forces? We don't, we give them to the civilian victims of evil regimes, people who have been unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who's lives have been blighted by the turmoil in their own countries. Whether you're a christian or an atheist, we do this because it's the humanitarian thing; the right thing to do.
The world is not black & white, there are many shades of meaning, intent and understanding in between. Maybe you should meditate on that a bit and expand your world view a bit.
Blind prejudice... now there's something that really is Evil !!
Of cause they can all use GPL code too, so what. Does that make the BSD license evil? Not a bit, BSD code is also free, is also written by open source hackers. Tell me again why BSD code is evil, and this time back it up with reasoned well thought out arguments if you can. Or is it that you only recognise one style of freedom, automatically condemning anyone who doesn't share your world view?
Now, go read the Halloween document collection.
And how exactly are they supposed to support your accusation? BSD is attacked equally in two of those documents, and completely ignored in the rest. Have you actually bothered reading them yourself?
And because anyone can pickup this guys code and do what they like with it, he's also supporting GNU/Linux, Redhat, Mandrake, Novell, Government, The Red Cross, Misc Charities, your Grandma, and anyone else who can find a good honest use for his creativity and generosity.
You sir are a TWIT, and I hope your comment gets mod'd into the dirt.
Having billions in the bank goes not guarantee your future is insecure either. And comparing DEC to Sun as some kind of predictor of how things would have turned out is stupid. DEC had lots of other divisions besides servers, including shock-horror, Intel Servers, Workstations and Laptops. You also don't seem to get that low-volume doesn't always mean low-profit. But maybe that mindset is a reflection of the end of the industry you're in.
Paul Demone may not get paid to design CPU's but with the EV8 he did a a very thorough job of covering it over the 3 seperate articles he published on the subject. But then you wouldn't know that because you didn't read any of it did you:-)
2.5 GHz is about what AMD is running today. It's not some magically high frequency. It's what traditional process scaling would get you.
Thankyou, that's my point exactly. The Alpha chip was designed to be running at those speeds today, with the benefit of traditional process scaling, but that never happened because Compaq put the breaks on further development.
Multiple cores are something everybody is doing.
Not back then they weren't.
Intel brought SMT to the world before EV8 even would have taped out.
Bollocks, EV8 was supposed to go FCS in 2002, about the same time as Intel's pathetic attempt at delivering an excuse for SMT. Hardly been a raging success has it?
Memory bandwidth is NOT a CPU design problem, it's a system design problem which is just solved with money - More pins and wires...duh! There is no innovation there. Hell NVIDIA sells a mass market 40GB/sec memory bandwidth solution which is almost 2x the bandwidth of this EV8 system.
Apples vs. Oranges, NVIDIA don't make general purpose cpus. And besides, if memory bandwidth is not a cpu design problem, as you're trying to suggest, then how come Intel are so crap at delivering half decent memory bandwith on Xeons. They control the designs of both the chip & the motherboard, and they still can't get it right.
Tell me again how DEC would have made billions?
DEC were already making billions on Alpha, it's called profit margin. Something you're probably not very familiar with in the Pee-Cee world.
Do you hear what you are saying? If all of these miraculous and EXPENSIVE events occurred...
Miraculous, hardly! Expensive yes, but DEC had a huge cash surplus with Billions in the bank at the time, and Alpha sales were generating a couple of Billion a year even then. This is one thing I never did understand. Alpha was hugely profitable, even after Compaq brought the farm. But Compaq couldn't get themselves out of their small box mass market mentality and just didn't know what to do with Alpha. In any case the real reason for Bob P jumping out of the manufacturing business popped out of the woodwork after the Compaq buy out. Seems he'd been talking to Compaq about buying the company for at least two years before it was actually agreed. Compaq weren't interested because DEC had their fingers in pies that Compaq didn't want. DEC's networking products were one of them... so Bob P sold that off, and the last hurdle was the FAB plants. Compaq did not want to be in the business of making processors. Basicly, Bob was shaping DEC ready for acquisition.
As he made his exit from the company during the 'merger' we can only assume that his motives were short term gain for the shareholders, a 'glowing' paragraph on his CV for overseeing the demise of DEC, and a big fat wad of cash in his back pocket.
... you'd have your SMT EV8 running "at the speed of today's Pentiums" So you'd have a super expensive chip running at the same speed as a cheap commodity chip?
When I said speed, I meant clock speed not performance. Take a look at the performance of the 1.5 GHz EV7 today, and use a little imagination to speculate the kind of performance a next generation chip would deliver at 2.5 GHz with multiple cores, and a memory bandwidth Intel can only dream about.
To close with I'd like to quote from the "conclusions" drawn from this extensive review of EV8s design & technology wins from Real World Technologies ( http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RW T011601000000 ):
The Alpha EV8 is an exciting new design for several reasons. It is by far the most aggressive speculative out-of-order execution superscalar RISC processor yet proposed. It will exploit SMT, arguably the most important new development in computer architecture in the last ten years, to double its sustained throughput to 8 to 10 billion instructions per second. When the EV8 first ships (2002?) it should drop easily into Compaq's then existing high performance computing platforms built around the EV7 and its on-chip dual 4 channel direct Rambus memory controllers and four 6.4 GB/s interprocessor communication link channels. It is hard to imagine what other architecture or platform could come close to challenging single or multiple processor EV8 systems in raw performance. But the onus is on Compaq to execute their high-end product strategy much more effectively then they have since acquiring DEC and Alpha in order for this technology to have the impact in the marketplace that it deserves
You're forgetting to factor in the additional costs of the extra Air Conditioning you're going to need for all those extra Xeons (installation and running costs). Boy do those things kick out some heat. Plus the electrical cost of running the Xeons, all that extra power they suck. Plus of the cost of extra sound insulation if your computer room is near any offices.
Think I'm joking on that last point? I helped install a 64 node Linux Xeon cluster last year in a room opposite a large office. One poor woman put up with the racket for about a week before moving her desk to the other end of the office... right opposite another computer room with 12 x Alpha ES45's (each with 4 cpus) . You couldn't hear a peep out of the Alpha room, but you could still hear the cluster of wailing Xeons from the other end of the corridor.
Oh, and BTW, a cluster of 20 Xeons is not necessarily more useful than 4 x 1.5 GHz Alphas in one box. It very much depend son the application you're using. Not to mention per cpu licensing costs on your layered products (I'm talking closed source here of cause).
Personally I'd rather have the Alphas.. they probably work out cheaper in the long run.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Itanium performance when the Alpha IP that Intel 'acquired' starts to kick in. Hopefully HP will get their finger out of their arse and finish the Tru64/TruCluster technology migration in a similar time frame, and we might actually have a class Unix product to go along with the hardware -- again. HP-UX today doesn't even come close.
Unfortunately HP don't own the Alpha IP, they never did. Compaq sold (virtually gave it away) to Intel (along with the Alpha design team) before it sacrificed itself on HP's altar.
The fruits of that union haven't made it into the Itanium line yet, but it's coming, in a generation or two.
But, towards the turn of the millennium, something strange happened: the Pentium Pro architecture (happily renamed PII and PIII) inched towards the lead in integer operations. The P4 actually surpassed the Alpha chips. Intel had, by then, hired away some of the Alpha designers and began to adopt its performance enhancing strategies.
How could Intel catch up to the Alpha when Intel was burdened with an architecture as convoluted as x86?
Not by your interpretations of events, and certainly not because Intel hired a bunch of Alpha engineers (that came much later). Unfortunately it's so old now that I can't find a reference to it in google, but you seem to be blissfully unaware of the law suit that DEC brought against Intel over the theft of Alpha IP that mysteriously found its way into the Pentium architecture. I was working for DEC at the time as a Tru64/Alpha support engineer, so I do.
Some time prior to that there had been a quiet attempt at collaberation between DEC and Intel over the Alpha chip. I believe it was in a vain attempt to try and get Intel to adopt the Alpha architecture for future designs. Whatever the purpose, Intel were given extensive Alpha design docs to look at. Eventually they turned down the offer and went their own way. I remember eyebrows being raised inside DEC sometime after when the Pentium architecture started to make some very surprising, unexpected and unforecast performance leaps.
It took some time to gather the evidence, but eventually Bob Palmer launched a law suit against Intel for theft of Alpha IP. For a while DEC were threatening to halt all Pentium shipments and demand large unspecified damages. Bob P should have stuck to his guns and screwed Intel for all he could get, but instead (being the bean counter he was and not a technologist) he saw this as an opportunity to unburden DEC of the escalating costs of constantly refitting the FAB production plants. Work that was needed to meet the next chip shrink goals and keep Alpha ahead of the game.
In the end a deal was done. Intel brought all the Alpha fabrication and production plants off DEC, including StrongARM, and agreed to guarantee to produce Alphas for DEC for a number of years (I forget how many).
DEC still kept control of the Alpha design & development, and it wasn't until much later after the Compaq buy out, in one last act of Corporate infanticide from a cadre of incompetent senior managers that lntel finally got their hands on the full set of Alpha technologies.
But then that's what you get when Accountants run computer companies, not technologists and visionaries.
Make no mistake about it, if DEC management had believed in Alpha technology as much as the rest of the people in the company, and DEC had kept the FAB plants and invested in them as they had originally planned to do, and there had been no Comaq buy out, you would today be looking at SMT Alpha EV8 chips running somewhere around the speeds of todays Pentium chips.. and NOTHING Intel, IBM or anyone else could product would have even come close to touching it. It wasn't any technology shortcoming that killed Alpha, just bad management heaped on bad management heaped on even more bad management.
iCal and the Mozilla Calendar use the same file format, so events from one should show up without problem in the other. You can also subscribe to the list of events on Apple's website if you like.
This is great news, and should help to promote both applications.
I'm in the UK, and since getting a new Sony Ericsson K700i a month ago, my WAP use has really taken off. It's so much faster than the last time I tried using it. But half of that experience depends on the sites you go to. I'm with Orange, and their WAP sites really suck. Too many graphics on them make them slower than average to load and navigate.
The best site I've come across so far is bbc.co.uk/mobile. It's quick to load because it's very light on graphics, and the content is just everything I need when I'm away from my PowerBook. From the most recent news stories, to Traffic information. The latter is especially useful, as I can quickly search for accidents/road works on the Motorways (Freeways) I plan my use on my journey. And from time to time, when I unexpectedly find myself stuck in a traffic jam and I want to know what's happened ahead to cause it.
I even used WAP recently to check the horse racing result for a friend who wanted to know if she'd won on a bet she'd placed that morning. I found the site and had the results up in minutes. Oh, and she had won too.
It really is a hell of a lot more useful than it used to be.
That currently seems like the biggest problem we have with storage - Not the actual online storage, but the ability to keep up-to-date backups. I've worked for the past few weeks to backup my fileserver to DVD
... than the time taken to backup data, is the time it takes to restore it in the event of a disaster. I've come across a few clients over the years who's business would suffer a lot of financial damage if their systems were down for more than 2-3 days. And they just hadn't thought about this at all.
Sure, Apple have the largest single share of the legal download market so far, but they're not the only legal download service in town, nor are they the only purveyor of portable music players. So who''s to say that they are a "monopoly"? They certainly aren't a monopoly in the Microsoft sense of the word, their market share isn't anywhere near as big. Consumers aren't forced to use iTMS and iPods to listen to their music. They can get perfectly usable alternatives elsewhere. Plus Apple's current market position doesn't make them immune to being knocked off their perch by their competitors in the future.
Frankly I don't see that Virgin have got a case here.
The world doesn't need yet another commercial linux distro. Unix is not Unix is not Unix. There are big differences between them, and God knows we've enough work on our plate having to learn at least a couple of commercial unix platforms as well as the two main Linux offerings to be marketable to employers today. One more would be a royal pain in the ass.
The only way is could work for IBM would be if they rolled out a version of Linux that shared the same sysadmin tools and philosophy as AIX. That way they could preserve customers investment in training as the skills would be interchangeable between their platforms.
At the end of the day though, they'd end up with a Linux platform which was no more functional than those from Redhat or SuSE, so would the extra engineering & expense really be worth it. Probably not.
Slashdot Mirror
That's supposed to be funny?!? How about we both go to ebay and I'll sell you mine.
No, you just need to lock down the config tight enough so that can't happen
And who do you think is going to lock down the config for you, the security fairies? No, an expensive team of hardworking IT staff who are going to take away your admin rights to stop you from screwing up their company network with the latest virus ridden screen saver. You can't even connect a new MS PC to the internet these days without being 0wned in the time it takes you to make a coffee. Do we get these problems with Mac OS X, not in the 2 years I've been running it. And I've not had to lock it down, the default settings are already secure.
Btw, your sig is very offensive. Python & Ruby are excellent programming languages.
I guess that depends when Long^H^H^H^HShorthorn finally ships ;-)
The only valid point you made was "using your tv just to play vidio games", and how many people are going to buy an iMac for that when they can get a real TV a hell of a lot cheaper. As for DVDs, a basic iMac can already do that without a TV tuner, so that's irrelevant.
In my entire life I've only ever met one person who's brought a TV (actually a huge plasma screen) for watching DVD's and playing games. My mate Paul. He had a running battle with TV Licensing to prove he didn't need to pay it. In the end he had to physically walk them round the house and show them he didn't have an external aerial, a portable aerial, or a satellite dish capable of receiving transmissions before they would leave him alone.
I hardly think that Apple are going to bundle a TV tuner so that a one in a million consumer like Paul will be happy, at the expense of adding extra cost.
I agree. I've a PB with 512MB and there are times when even that isn't enough. Try running Activity Monitor and order your list on "real memory" usage. When Safari clocks in at 100+MB which it does frequently, having just 256MB in your system isn't going to cut the mustard.
I've been thinking of upgrading to 1GB, and that'll definitely be the starting point for any future purchases.
How many people do you know who have more than 1GB of RAM in their home or office PCs? I could probably count them on one hand.
Your objection is noted, but pointless.
adding a TV tuner would be a disaster. If you didn't have one already, you'd be forced by Law to buy a TV license with your new iMac whether you wanted to use it as a TV or not. This would add an extra £121 ($216.90) to the cost of your computer.
Most people don't buy a computer to watch TV on, so why should we pay extra for functionality we don't need?
I find your polarized arguments to be very extreme, and not at all representative of real life. For instance, when do we ever give fuel, food and band-aids to enemy forces? We don't, we give them to the civilian victims of evil regimes, people who have been unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who's lives have been blighted by the turmoil in their own countries. Whether you're a christian or an atheist, we do this because it's the humanitarian thing; the right thing to do.
The world is not black & white, there are many shades of meaning, intent and understanding in between. Maybe you should meditate on that a bit and expand your world view a bit.
Blind prejudice
Of cause they can all use GPL code too, so what. Does that make the BSD license evil? Not a bit, BSD code is also free, is also written by open source hackers. Tell me again why BSD code is evil, and this time back it up with reasoned well thought out arguments if you can. Or is it that you only recognise one style of freedom, automatically condemning anyone who doesn't share your world view?
And how exactly are they supposed to support your accusation? BSD is attacked equally in two of those documents, and completely ignored in the rest. Have you actually bothered reading them yourself?
Fact: GPL is not evil
Fact: BSD is not evil
Get over it!
And because anyone can pickup this guys code and do what they like with it, he's also supporting GNU/Linux, Redhat, Mandrake, Novell, Government, The Red Cross, Misc Charities, your Grandma, and anyone else who can find a good honest use for his creativity and generosity.
You sir are a TWIT, and I hope your comment gets mod'd into the dirt.
Having billions in the bank goes not guarantee your future is insecure either. And comparing DEC to Sun as some kind of predictor of how things would have turned out is stupid. DEC had lots of other divisions besides servers, including shock-horror, Intel Servers, Workstations and Laptops. You also don't seem to get that low-volume doesn't always mean low-profit. But maybe that mindset is a reflection of the end of the industry you're in.
Paul Demone may not get paid to design CPU's but with the EV8 he did a a very thorough job of covering it over the 3 seperate articles he published on the subject. But then you wouldn't know that because you didn't read any of it did you
Thankyou, that's my point exactly. The Alpha chip was designed to be running at those speeds today, with the benefit of traditional process scaling, but that never happened because Compaq put the breaks on further development.
Not back then they weren't.
Bollocks, EV8 was supposed to go FCS in 2002, about the same time as Intel's pathetic attempt at delivering an excuse for SMT. Hardly been a raging success has it?
Apples vs. Oranges, NVIDIA don't make general purpose cpus. And besides, if memory bandwidth is not a cpu design problem, as you're trying to suggest, then how come Intel are so crap at delivering half decent memory bandwith on Xeons. They control the designs of both the chip & the motherboard, and they still can't get it right.
DEC were already making billions on Alpha, it's called profit margin. Something you're probably not very familiar with in the Pee-Cee world.
Miraculous, hardly! Expensive yes, but DEC had a huge cash surplus with Billions in the bank at the time, and Alpha sales were generating a couple of Billion a year even then. This is one thing I never did understand. Alpha was hugely profitable, even after Compaq brought the farm. But Compaq couldn't get themselves out of their small box mass market mentality and just didn't know what to do with Alpha. In any case the real reason for Bob P jumping out of the manufacturing business popped out of the woodwork after the Compaq buy out. Seems he'd been talking to Compaq about buying the company for at least two years before it was actually agreed. Compaq weren't interested because DEC had their fingers in pies that Compaq didn't want. DEC's networking products were one of them
As he made his exit from the company during the 'merger' we can only assume that his motives were short term gain for the shareholders, a 'glowing' paragraph on his CV for overseeing the demise of DEC, and a big fat wad of cash in his back pocket.
When I said speed, I meant clock speed not performance. Take a look at the performance of the 1.5 GHz EV7 today, and use a little imagination to speculate the kind of performance a next generation chip would deliver at 2.5 GHz with multiple cores, and a memory bandwidth Intel can only dream about.
To close with I'd like to quote from the "conclusions" drawn from this extensive review of EV8s design & technology wins from Real World Technologies ( http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=R
Good day.
You're forgetting to factor in the additional costs of the extra Air Conditioning you're going to need for all those extra Xeons (installation and running costs). Boy do those things kick out some heat. Plus the electrical cost of running the Xeons, all that extra power they suck. Plus of the cost of extra sound insulation if your computer room is near any offices.
Think I'm joking on that last point? I helped install a 64 node Linux Xeon cluster last year in a room opposite a large office. One poor woman put up with the racket for about a week before moving her desk to the other end of the office
Oh, and BTW, a cluster of 20 Xeons is not necessarily more useful than 4 x 1.5 GHz Alphas in one box. It very much depend son the application you're using. Not to mention per cpu licensing costs on your layered products (I'm talking closed source here of cause).
Personally I'd rather have the Alphas
Macka
You hit the nail on the head there mate.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Itanium performance when the Alpha IP that Intel 'acquired' starts to kick in. Hopefully HP will get their finger out of their arse and finish the Tru64/TruCluster technology migration in a similar time frame, and we might actually have a class Unix product to go along with the hardware -- again. HP-UX today doesn't even come close.
Unfortunately HP don't own the Alpha IP, they never did. Compaq sold (virtually gave it away) to Intel (along with the Alpha design team) before it sacrificed itself on HP's altar.
The fruits of that union haven't made it into the Itanium line yet, but it's coming, in a generation or two.
Not by your interpretations of events, and certainly not because Intel hired a bunch of Alpha engineers (that came much later). Unfortunately it's so old now that I can't find a reference to it in google, but you seem to be blissfully unaware of the law suit that DEC brought against Intel over the theft of Alpha IP that mysteriously found its way into the Pentium architecture. I was working for DEC at the time as a Tru64/Alpha support engineer, so I do.
Some time prior to that there had been a quiet attempt at collaberation between DEC and Intel over the Alpha chip. I believe it was in a vain attempt to try and get Intel to adopt the Alpha architecture for future designs. Whatever the purpose, Intel were given extensive Alpha design docs to look at. Eventually they turned down the offer and went their own way.
I remember eyebrows being raised inside DEC sometime after when the Pentium architecture started to make some very surprising, unexpected and unforecast performance leaps.
It took some time to gather the evidence, but eventually Bob Palmer launched a law suit against Intel for theft of Alpha IP. For a while DEC were threatening to halt all Pentium shipments and demand large unspecified damages. Bob P should have stuck to his guns and screwed Intel for all he could get, but instead (being the bean counter he was and not a technologist) he saw this as an opportunity to unburden DEC of the escalating costs of constantly refitting the FAB production plants. Work that was needed to meet the next chip shrink goals and keep Alpha ahead of the game.
In the end a deal was done. Intel brought all the Alpha fabrication and production plants off DEC, including StrongARM, and agreed to guarantee to produce Alphas for DEC for a number of years (I forget how many).
DEC still kept control of the Alpha design & development, and it wasn't until much later after the Compaq buy out, in one last act of Corporate infanticide from a cadre of incompetent senior managers that lntel finally got their hands on the full set of Alpha technologies.
But then that's what you get when Accountants run computer companies, not technologists and visionaries.
Make no mistake about it, if DEC management had believed in Alpha technology as much as the rest of the people in the company, and DEC had kept the FAB plants and invested in them as they had originally planned to do, and there had been no Comaq buy out, you would today be looking at SMT Alpha EV8 chips running somewhere around the speeds of todays Pentium chips
Macka
From their web site:
This is great news, and should help to promote both applications.
The point I was trying to make is that it's an example of a real world use, and the sort of thing that people will want to do more of in the future.
I'm in the UK, and since getting a new Sony Ericsson K700i a month ago, my WAP use has really taken off. It's so much faster than the last time I tried using it. But half of that experience depends on the sites you go to. I'm with Orange, and their WAP sites really suck. Too many graphics on them make them slower than average to load and navigate.
The best site I've come across so far is bbc.co.uk/mobile. It's quick to load because it's very light on graphics, and the content is just everything I need when I'm away from my PowerBook. From the most recent news stories, to Traffic information. The latter is especially useful, as I can quickly search for accidents/road works on the Motorways (Freeways) I plan my use on my journey. And from time to time, when I unexpectedly find myself stuck in a traffic jam and I want to know what's happened ahead to cause it.
I even used WAP recently to check the horse racing result for a friend who wanted to know if she'd won on a bet she'd placed that morning. I found the site and had the results up in minutes. Oh, and she had won too.
It really is a hell of a lot more useful than it used to be.
there: a location other than here; that place; "you can take it from there"
their: of or relating to them or themselves especially as possessors, agents, or objects of an action
Sure, Apple have the largest single share of the legal download market so far, but they're not the only legal download service in town, nor are they the only purveyor of portable music players. So who''s to say that they are a "monopoly"? They certainly aren't a monopoly in the Microsoft sense of the word, their market share isn't anywhere near as big. Consumers aren't forced to use iTMS and iPods to listen to their music. They can get perfectly usable alternatives elsewhere. Plus Apple's current market position doesn't make them immune to being knocked off their perch by their competitors in the future.
Frankly I don't see that Virgin have got a case here.
The world doesn't need yet another commercial linux distro. Unix is not Unix is not Unix. There are big differences between them, and God knows we've enough work on our plate having to learn at least a couple of commercial unix platforms as well as the two main Linux offerings to be marketable to employers today. One more would be a royal pain in the ass.
The only way is could work for IBM would be if they rolled out a version of Linux that shared the same sysadmin tools and philosophy as AIX. That way they could preserve customers investment in training as the skills would be interchangeable between their platforms.
At the end of the day though, they'd end up with a Linux platform which was no more functional than those from Redhat or SuSE, so would the extra engineering & expense really be worth it. Probably not.
Where are my moderator points when I need them. Would love to have given you a 'funny' for that one.
It's nice to see yet more contributions from Apple to the OSS community.