Whats more of an important note, and I'm surprised not one poster above noted this, all of the companies using this tech today DID licence (or sub lisence) the technology from 3Com originally!
They're suing someone for LEGAL use of a patent? Are they assuming that license agreements between 3Com and others expired somehow and were not renewed, or that the sale of the license voided those agreements?
Also of note, the US government does have the power (I understand) to revoke patents found to be particularly important to the US infrastrucutre, the government can use anything patented without license fees paid (though they do have some paperwork and technically the do "license" the technology), and they can pass that power to any manufacturer who makes parts/systems for the government. If push came to shove, the government could either authorize Cisco, Intel, HP and others to continue to make parts in leiu of the patent in order to maintain the stability of the internet itself, including home and school connections and VoIP services deemed necessary for the public health/comminucation/education/etc, or they could simply revoke the patent outright.
he asked the differences, that's pretty much it aside from the "pretty" factors, and some behind the scenes code improvements that could have just as easily (and many are) backported into Vista.
Yea, there are about 100 other bullet point changes, but he asked what "mattered" to a user, why should one switch? The other changes really don;t impact users on perceivable levels and simply contribute to the whole feel of the OS being faster and stabler.
I do appreciate you noting that not all people providing supporting statements for 7 are shills, as personally I abhore the OS, and use it only as a required platform for some applications we can not yet abandon. Though I do not currently own a Mac (being remedied within weeks) i am a hardcore Apple fan (though I stay away from Fanboi status).
every "mersenne" prime, I should have clarified. Might not mean "every" prime.
We're already at 12M didgits, and yes I understand the processing power required to process numbers on that scale. However, the last 9 in a row primes found have all been mersenne, and we've increased the didgit count 3 fold over those 9. Between here and 1B didgits, maybe there's 10-15 more primes? (based on historical slide in primes per number of didgits as it increases, which is no way is a simple plotable line, just an estimation that it declines as it goes). We're finding about 3 more a year using less efficint techniques. Granted the power it takes to find each larger one grows, but we should be able to clean out all the mersenne primes inside 5 years tops.
The idea is, we know all the primes to use as "n" in the equasion, so finding each new one, including the ones that can be excluded through simpler mathematic formula, should not be difficult. (just time consuming).
Fact is, would that buy us any new intelligence? Would plotting 15 or 20 more points on a graph that has over 50M prime numbers on it already give us any new insight? no. That's why I feel this is pointless.
Of COURSE the people who make packet sniffing and filtering technology, backhaul switches, and high bandwidth components compatible with it are going to be against ANYTHING the prevents them from selling their rediculously expensive sniffing and filtering gear.
NATURALLY these companies are going to be ALL FOR letting firms be able to buy their kit and use it. If filtering was made illegal, then Cisco, Alcatel, Lucent, etc would have a hard time justifying their highly profitable expensive switches vs the competitors systems which are simpler, streamlined for high bandwidth, and cost a fraction to deploy, and for which their own similar switches still cost more to subsidize the development and sale of the big gear.
You're right, the anteanna is not the power draw, the chip and signal strength is. Either way, on my AP, i can dial back the gain and accordingly shorten the transmit range, and the device does draw less power doing so. Our business class HP/procurve APs can do this on the fly via centrally monitored systems in order to provide for signal crossover balancing, to limit chanel interference, and to also boost signal to extend range if another AP goes offline.
Having 2 anteanna and a dual radio device would simply allow both a high and low power signal concurrently (or to power off one when not in use). perhaps a single anteanna could also do that, I don't know, but the idea was lessening the power would work for short range devices. In the dedicated short range device (headset) only a lower power chip would be needed, and power draw should be on par or very near bluetooth draw. For USB wireless, the power can come from the port it;s connected to, and it could have significant dynamic range, possibly covering a whole house or more, or be dialed back to just a single room or PAN.
I also don't know how WiFi behaves when the iPhone is in standby. i know I can queue downloads, or turn on Pandora and put the device to sleep and the signal continues. I'm sure some other apps make occasional use of WiFi. If you have push enabled, and you are connected to a valid wifi base station, I also know it maintains it's activeSync connection over wifi and does not transmit on 3g, even when asleep, i just don;t know if it actively polls for approved networks when it's NOT connected to one when asleep. It;s less battery use to do that then to use 3G, so i would actually hope it is looking for pre-approved networks when asleep.
so, if we know all the primes between 3 and 43million, about 3.7 million prime numbers), and we have taken the time to define a category of prime number equal to 2^n-1, that means it took THIS DAMN LONG for someone to calculate a few million computations to come up with this new "milestone"???
It seems to me finding all the mersenne primes would have long since surpassed this mark seeing we defined this category of Euclidean "perfect numbers" back in the 1700s! Granted, the computational power to even determine is a 12M didgit number is in fact prime is fairly substantial, let alone calculating a factor of 2 to that length, but we're finding a new bigger one a few times a year now, with a few million additional didgits each time.
Finding all the primes between this one and 3 is a feat, until you considder the last 9 in a row bigger prime numbers discovered are ALL mersenne primes. If we simply focussed on running the existing primes through 2^n-1, we'd find every prine through a few billion didgits in a couple of years. And honestly, what have we learned by this new data since 2000? has it actually provided some pattern we didn't already know, or unlocked some secret about methematics we didn't know? Nope, it's just about who has the bigger CPU budget.
At full transmit power, yea, by a lot. Dial back the dB of the anteanna, and you can make WiFi would for very similar, and possibly less power draw.
If an intelligent WiFi driver is added, power use could by dytnamic, scaling up and down based on range and interference, for the direct connect devices. A multi radio device could potentially use 2 anteanna, one for short range and 1 for traditional AP connections, simultaneously, and might have a quite reasonable power draw compared to using both WiFi and bluetooth concurrently.
Since it has yet to be released in such a fashion, we don;t really have any good data on the energy draw.
A simple P2P only connection, without WiFi otherwise active, yea, bluetooth is probably going to use less power. How many of us have WiFi enabled devices where the WiFi is not left on 24x7 when the device is on regardless of the connectivity, so one could easily argue that WiFi P2P has 0 additional power draw, and simply turning bluetooth on would draw more power.
I can turn off WiFi on the iPhone, but it's a pain to have to do so all the time. It's worse on most other devices... With WiFi on 24x7, my phone outlasts my use needs each day. turning off bluetooth (which i did recently when I cruched a headset and had to wait a few weeks to get a new one) improved the battery life dramatically.
He asked a question, i answered. It's honestly better than XP, and few dissagree. Do I think it's a sell? No, but I'll take it over Vista if I'm forced to take a M$ OS.
Personally, I have a few PCs, mostly for beta testing, product training, and gaming, but I'm actually a Mac user... Have a nice new 15" macbook sitting in the shopping cart at Apple.com now, just waiting for new machines to come out in a week or two to see if the price changes.
Um, native 2008 server integration, stronger security model, boots faster than XP, faster file copy than XP, compatible with modern 64 bit software and upcoming releases that will not be coded for XP, faster than a fully patched XP system on the same hardware (inclusive of AV, latest browser, java, etc; a "typically" configured XP system, not an out of the box pre-SP1 config that would be unusable on the net), More secure, will actually continue to get patches going forward, will run IE9 when it comes out, DX 10 and 11 support, improved sleep/hibernate system, better battery life on modern notebooks (supports advanced power management features), You can uninstall IE completely (or at least "disable" it completely), better media center system, don't need a floppy to install non-IDE boot devices, far improved memory management systems, snadboxed memory allocation and dynamically assigned system memory space, much improved taskbar, simpler home networking, better handling of multiple audio devices, vastly improved search, oh, and with Pro or higher you can still run XP...
Yes, Windows 7 should be radically reduced in price, for upgrades from Viata. Full price for an upgrade from XP (say $189) is still reasonable, and a retail price of $279 for Pro and $329 for Ultimate is reasonable. Home should simply be dropped, it's pointless. If it's not connected to a domain, don't enable the business-only features. Apple figured that out, 1 version for all... On low performance machines, detect the limitations and don't enable the snazzy features (or just demand higher minimum specs).
For existing Vista users, upgrade from any version to Pro should have been $49 max, and $89 to ultimate, unless you already HAD ultimate in which case it should have been free. 7 is not a ground up requite of Vista, it;s an overhaul. Not really different from the 10.5 - 10.6 transition Apple just did. A few new features though limited in scope, some new graphics, faster stabler code, and more secure, that's all 7 really amounts to, and that's all they should charge for it.
Most peopole with XP won't upgrade to 7 though, since their machines are likely far underpoewred to run it, and will at least need RAM updates, if not GPUs as well. Upgrading from xp to 7, aside from the enthusiasts who insisted on XP on newer machines, is not a tearget audience for Microsot. Charging them more for skipping vista, a price about $20 more than upgrading to vista originally would have cost, is fair. Some who would upgrade might hesitate at that price, and instead simply buy new hardware to make the leap.
I'm OK with the vendors (M$ in this case) dinging us every 3-4 years for a major upgrade at or about $200. (or $300+ for a full version for a new PC without an existing license). If you bought vista, 7 is the appology upgrade you should get cheap (like the old "Plus" packs for 95/98). If you skipped Vista, and have not given M$ a verion upgrade since 2002-2004, then you're due, cough it up... Its the nature of the industry.
If you don;t like the additional costs associated with the upgrade (office, AV, roxio, other core apps, possibly some new devices, etc), then the price gap for switching platforms becomes an option, and maybe moving to Mac might actually be cheaper (when looking at comperable performance and feature, not bottom end machines that do not compare), or maybe it's time to abandon microsof tand join the linux bandwagon. That's your choice based on your business needs and price range. You should allways be buying based on #1 what meets your needs and 2# the best system you can get that meets those needs in your budget (and most times, if a lower system price meets your needs, spending more on a higher class system will often mean lower TCO if you look at 4+ year lifespans, so if a better system is still under your budget cap, buy it!)
Well, they did take out about half of new england, including large portions of canada several years ago. However, that was not a grid issue, but a computer communication issue, and that's been fixed and made far more redundant. It was an accident of coincidence that allowed improperly timed alarms to cascade through a communication network that shut the grid down because it thought it was fighting off electric backpressure and trying top prevent a feedback that would have blown transformers and possibly generators, and then the other system that tried to account for the lack in sudden power availability also alarmed and could not cope, and went down.
That communication issue was identified (as well as a few other case scenarios they realized were also possible) and the systems were reprogrammed and upgraded.
The chance of such a mass grid failure is rediculously low now. the bigger the interconencted grid is, especially including HVDC superconducting long range lines, the less of a chance of faiure there is as localized issues can be readily handled by power stations hundreds of miles away. The big deal was the next power station down the line could not handle a wide area outage, and then itself went down. If we're not relying on the poewr station down the street, but can draw from across the nation, that's a non-issue.
yup, and they fixed that. and systems like this are part of the fix, not a complication requiring additional resources.
plus, explain how to take out a buried, 0.3 meter thick, hunk of earthquake re-enforced metal line? Short of digging a massive hole, planting a half ton or more of good high order explosive, probably a shaped charge, while not getting cooked by the 5GW charge, and without tripping buried sensors along the cable run (other wires buried a few feet shallower than the main lines, which help detect when some dumbass is digging in the wrong place or without a permit to prevent accidental damage to the lines), and the fact that its not one line but several (typically at least 3, a dozen or so meters apart each). It may be possible to take out 1 line, but not the minimum of at least 4 it would take to knock this out. The interchange systems would be well protected by security and likely monitoerd 24x7 by sattelite. Also, the land around this area is not exacly highly populated, and easy to patrol...
A few hack terrorists with a half assed plan are only going to get caught. Nothing better than good bait sometimes...
The current cynicism that any improvement in infrastructure is a) only for the money b) going to ruin the planet c) a target for terrorists d) too late
is getting really old.
The proposal allows for better distribution of power generation across the continent. Even if it was a target for terrorism so what. If you want to curl up in a little ball because the terrorists might get you knock yourself out.
BTW, knocking this section out doesn't take all 3 grids down.
Exactly.
Money issues? This will provide thousands of jobs, the ability for power systems in remote ares to be built to poewr distant cities, and increase the profitability of the power companies. It solves issues of where to put power generation systems and could reduce construction (and legal battle) costs by 2/3rds or more. For every dollar they'll save, you'll be lucky to see $0.50 come off your bill, meaning it;s a LOT more money for them. THEY WANT THIS and so do we, is that not proof?
Planetary issues? This allows us to deploy mass wind, water, and solar systems where we could not due to transmission distances and disconnected grid infrastructure. now we can access cheap clean energy and give it to anyone instead of building less efficint power plants where the power is needed. This will be the beginning of the elimination of coal and gas power across most of the land.
Terrorism? First it's a proof of concept, and only facilitates a transfer system between other currently completely self sufficient (soft of) systems. This is a beginning, not a complete system. Even a terorist strike on this new triangle (which is self redundant btw, requiring 2 seperate coordinated strikes at a minimum, against underground buried cables in what's likely to be a secure area) would not cause more than a few second brownout as the grid rebalanced. Besides, these cables, do you have ANY idea of their construction??? significant bombardment would have trouble causing radical damage to the cable itself, and you're not getting a bomb inside the secured areas where the interconnect will be.
Further, being a POC, these cables will be deployed everywhere from this central spoke, creating more nodes in the future, and is the begining of a replacement redundant grid system. When deployed there will be fewer points of failure than in today's grid, and few if any single points that could take out more than small towns.
Too late? Well, late, I'll agree, we should have started deployment 20 years ago when we had the technology. Oh, wait... We did, 22 years ago! Now it;s proven, and being deployed, and will take 30-40 years to completely roll out, at a cost of nearly 10 trillion. but, it;s not too late... Too late implies even if we built it, there would be no benefit as we'll have already collapsed. Yes it;s too late to deploy it in the most cost effective method, and we have a stressed grid, and may need to build a few temporary power plants not necessary if we put a few trillion behind this a while back, but in the end the extra research actually saved us a lot of money, and allowed better long term planning. This is a 50 year process to replace a grid, not a 3-4 year build out...
I do propose we back off the electric car bandwagon a bit and spend the money instead on some additional superlines like this, and some more wind farms, and some dotyenergy RFTS fuel manufacturing plants (www.dotyenergy.com) to halt our oil expansion and curb import demand, and give our grid time to grow to actually be able to power those cars, and battery technology time to mature so we'll want to both drive them and pay for them. People do blow the super grid technology out of proportion. Most of those people are fed by propoganda and FUD from employees of local power monopolies who will no longer be able to overcharge for power, but i could give a fuck about the greedy minority.
Well, as Apple made public knowledge when they switched to Intel, (not an exact quote) "we develop, compile, and test OS X on multiple hardware platfors, always have since the very first day of development, include new processor platforms as they come available, and can change to an alternate platform at any time."
IBM appears to be working on a low power P6/P7 architecture, AMD has some nice new stuff, They have their own fab now for low power CPUs, I'm sure they're compiling against Atom and likely even Cell...
Honetly, as long as GPUs remain seperate from CPUs, it's long past time when the north/southbridge became integrated into the core CPU silcon. They already added the memory controller and other mainboard resources, now the base systems bus and other common components could all be included. nVidia really is doing the right thing moving into alternate markets, this one IS dying, this may actually be good for both nVidia and intel as it gives intel an advantage in being able to seperate and move away from current trends easier, and gives nVidia a more consolodated and focussed research effoer for GPU/CPU acceleration - generic core processing technology.
nVidia will still reap a LOT of profit from the existing systems for years, and makes a killing in GPUs and AMD chipsets. Saving this reaserch money, shutting down the facilities, and in the end almost certainly winning a case against intel for a few hundred million in cash down the road, this is a great opportunity for them, and I commend their decision.
1st, Just called my Aunt, had her send me an e-mail from her iMac 300MHz (blue tray load CRT iMac). It has 128MB of RAM and is running OS 9.1 quite nicely with netscape as her browser and e-mail client.
I can also state that the iMac 17" (lamp) G4, running with a "max capable" 768MB of RAM (came with 256) shipped wityh OS 10.2 and ran great on OS 10.4. It booted in about 15 seconds 9including McAfee's boot scan), and played video files better and cleaner than an XP machine with 1GB of RAM and an x600 ATI GPU.
Each Mac OS in the OS X line has shown faster processing performance on the same hardware each release. This is not for dispute, this is fack backed up by nermerous independent reviews. Yes, some older hardware that did not meet the minimum specs of the new OS would fall into that category,
I did not say the mac required less CPU or RAM than Windows, I said Windows runs like ASS on it;s defined minimum requirement, and OS X runs fine on it's own, seperate, minimum requirement. Further, the mac DOES outperform Windows on the same intel CPU with 1GB of RAM in virtually all 3rd party tests of the same software (photoshop, MP3 ripping, DVD decoding, etc).
This is not for arguement, it's clearly covered facts through hundreds of tests and publiches available information.
OS X was ahead of it's time, no doubt, and the 10.0 and 10.1 editions were overburdened and slow, but that same machine that came with 10.0 and ran slow ran 10.2 great, without the RAM upgrade. Vista sucked, and still sucks. XP initially ran fine on 128MB, but today I've got 2GB in a machine with 10 times the CPU horesepower and it takes several minutes to convert fairly simple Viseo diagrams into PDF... XP has gotten worse withage, OS X has imporved, that's all I'm saying.
for the uninitiated, and to further clarify; if packetized voice is voice over IP, then so are your landline analog calls, for the last 10 years or longer.... By the logic people are using, your landline is VOIP.
Just because the voice traffic is at some point sent across digital trunk lines does not make it an IP protocol. VoIP/SIP includes endpoint to endpoint (or at least endpoint to analog handover) communication to a SIP device that is addressed not by a phone number, but by a dotted quad. A True VOIP call can happen IP to IP without any telco involvement other than the VOIP Provider. Google voice is ENTIRELY dependent on traditional ISP telecommunications systems and traditional call routing (though it's a hybrid that does include SIP sipport for Gizmo), it is NOT VOIP.
Google Voice may handle incoming and outgoing VOIP calls centrally, but that's no differnt than having PRI, T1, and IP connections into the same VRU chassis at the same time. The technology is not the medium through which the call is processed, it is simply a device that ROUTES the call through other call handling systems. You can not ansewr a google phone call unless you have a traditional call system. There is no IP device or software addressible directly by Google's systems, therefor it is not a VOIP system.
It handles hunt groups, caller ID data manipulation, DTMF code transforms, voice response, and DTMF tone response. It's a glorified call router (actually, its a higly SIMPLIFIED call router, barely using a fraction of the functions of a true VRU), but by itself it is NOT a VoIP service.
Yes, it CAN route a call to and from an existing VoIP service, like Gizmo, but it does not place calls via SIP itself directly, it only initiates and received calls from other existing SIP extensions and numbers, and can not be substituted in place of Gizmo. It uses your Gizmo number and requires a gizmo client.
The Google Voice App is simply an IP based system for communicating to the VRU to cause it to initiate calls, and to manage voicemail, account settings, and contacts. That's it.
it was the file sharing feature we needed... and the ability to support DOS and Mac floppies. That's why we went to 7 initially.
That, and it actually was a much nicer OS experience, if you had the RAM (2MB or more) and a SCSI HDD. Oh, and also freely distributable! (Yes, Apple actually ENCOURAGED people to pirate copies and share with friends. The software was sold for the cost of the floppy disks (or CD, as it was the first OS also available in that format).
We had some accounting package (great Plains?) that required it... also, 6.x disks gave up the ghost and could not find new copies after that many years! It wasn't exactly the internet age yet... (though the classic was the first machine we got online. The LCII ran AOL 1.x at some point, had been running compuserve for a while previous, and both had accessed the "true" internet as well via a server we had set up at a local high school).
Or, like me and everyone i know, you sign up with microsoft as a Registered Partner, take a few free online classes, and then pay $300 a year for an action pack subscription, and put up to 10 copies of Windows Pro into VMs and 1 copy of Windows Ultimate into Production, get free upgrades to all the new releases, run a couple of home servers on the outdated PC hardware, and get 10 copies of Office Ultimate to spread around.
Several of us split action pack subscription costs for our "company" (which is a legitimate consulting firm, including business registration and all the proper state and federal forms, we're even members of the Chanber of Commerce, but it generates $0 in revenue anually and exists pretty much solely for training and vendor software access).
My share is $75 a year, and i get the Pro/Ultimate versions of Windows and Office for less than your OEM copy of Home edition from New Egg, let alone the $400-600 throw away intel hardware you suggest to get the licnese that I can't legall use on another machine.
Oh, yea, that OEM license, since you did not get an install CD (only a restore CD) how do you get it into the VM?...and as I mentioned, doing so violates the license agreement).
XP 512? it started at 64MB! and even SP3 still lists 64 as required, 128 reccomended... Granted, it runs like ASS with less than 1GB installed. I also find it odd that IE 7 is installed by default with SP3 patch rollup, and it's system requirements are higher than XP's...
OS 10.0 128MB ram, OS 10.1 128 (unoficially 64) OS 10.2 128 (256 reccomended) OS 10.3 128 (512 recomended) OS 10.4 256 (512 reccomended) OS 10.5 512 (1GB reccomended) OS 10.6 1GB (1GB reccomended) the key (I misspoke my statement, sorry) is that each new version runs with improved performance on the same hardware. no it was not possible to go from 10.0 to 10.6 on the same hardware (though it is possible to go from 10.0 to 10.5, which covers 2001 - 2009 with improving performance for each release, and assuming you had a G4 processor and added a bit of RAM along the way) Also, Windows runs like ASS with it's minimum recomendation (it is barely usable at 4 times that setting). OS X runs like a champ with little stutter, and 100% of OS features work with the minimum supported settings. the "minimum" is simply Apple's choice to suggest what it SHOULD run on in order to get suitable performance, where microsoft chooses to list the absolute hardware minimum.
I can attest that I have had OS 10.4 running on a machine with 128MB of installed RAM, and it did in fact run (and booted faster than an XP box with 1GB).
Vista "premium ready" (aka, can actually run the whole OS) required 1GB of RAM to do the same thing OS 10.4 did at the time with 256MB.
Windows 7 requires 2GB MINIMUM for the 64 bit edition. OS X 10.6 only requires 1GB.
Linux can only survive in server mode (no GUI) on 64MB. Base OS requires 256MB running Gnome or KDE Windows Manager (and it runs like ass with less than 512).
Family Mac History:
- original Lisa bought in 1984, stopped using in 1989, sold to a museum in 1998 still working.
- 512Ke bought in 1985, stopped using in 1993, donated to a school in 1996 still working running OS 6.
- Mac IIcx bought in 1989, donated to a school in 1997
- Mac Classic bought in 1991, stopped using in 1997, was still working running OS 7 in 2002?
- LC II bought in 1992, used as a gaming and VM platform (even ran Windows NT on it) until 1997, donated to an elderly family member who used it until 2003 when they passed. Was still working when sold at the garrage sale for $350.
- Quadra 630 bought in 1995, donated to a church in 2000, was still in use as of 2004 last i heard. May still be functional today.
- iMac Blue 300mhz model bought in 1999, ran up through OS 9.x, still in use today by my Aunt.
- PowerComputing powerdesk, bought in 1996, sold to a business to replace their own matching model (killed by lightnig strike) in 2002, was still in use in 2005 last i heard. i got $650 for that 6 year old machine...
- G3 desktop, bought 1999, killed by stormwater damage in 2003.
- Mac Cube, bought 2001, killed by stormwater damage 2003.
- G4 desktop, bought 2003, still in use in a local school we donated it to.
- iBook 14" bought in 2003, killed in a car accident 2005.
- iMac G4 17"/768/1GHz, bought in 2003, upgraded through OS 10.3, sold in 2007 for $750 on ebay.
- mini bought in 2005, i still use it today as my media server.
- iMac 20" core 2 bought in 2005, still in use as my Father's primary machine, bumped to 2GB RAM and 10.6 recently. never once in my father's life has he used a Windows based machine more than to borrow web access for a few minutes, or to check e-mail.
- MBP 15" bought Christmas 2006, still in use as mom's primary machine. Runs XM in a VM, but only for go-to-my-pc for her work.
We also had an iBook G4 for about 6 months that I bought at a tag sale for $50 which sold on ebay for $350; a quadra 9600 I acquired used in 2002 - cleaned up and doneted to a church a few months later; and I've also had an SE30, MacIIsi, LCIII, and an XServeSL for short periods of time (none bought new).
Average lifespan of Macs in our family (includng those destroyed by storm or car crash, and those still in use) is over 6.5 years. Excluding those destoyed by storm or crash it's 7.3 years, and excluding those still in use is 8.5 years.
Of all thos emachines, only the iMac 17", 20", 1st MBP, and the Mini have even had hardware upgrades, and those only RAM, and the LCII I added an ethernet adapter to later in it's life. (the PowerComputing Machine I'm not counting, as it was basically a lab system that I rebuilt about a dozen times and was constantly upgraded with differing components and various drives, and had not less than 10 differnt OS run on it). The iMac Blue 300 and the iMac 17" were the only 2 machines ever requiring a hardware repair. (the CD drive in the Blue sucked ass, and it did blow a mainboard in it's 5th year due to power surge, the 17" iMac lost a HDD in its 4th year).
Quite the longevity in hardware. What's equally impressive is the resale value. I can litterally buy a Mac, and in 4-5 years I can sell it, and the TCO of that machine will be less than that of some cheap Dell machine that has nowhere near the capabilities.
I have no software i use that requires Windows. I have some games I choose to play in Windows (which can easily be done from Boot Camp, not on a seperate machine, or now with the latest release of fusion, even inside a VM). At the office, we have a few network management clients that only run from Windows boxes, but those who use Linus simply VNC to a machine with it installed and use it remotely. Apps themselves can be virtualized as well now, no longer requiring the underlying OS to funtion. I can easily shed Windows completely at any time, and I'm an IT analyst! 90% of people out there do not use a computer for more than simple very common games, edit basic documents, work with photos and maybe video, use Web2.0, and use messaging. That's it... only LEGACY software, and some highly specialized applications is an issue preventing full fledged migration away from Windows. All of that can be run in a VM, and no second "machine" is required.
in other words, Apple could be the sole hardware provider (including mainframe class grid systems own down), Windows would be needed on maybe 30% of machines, and everyone else would be out of business or niche providers...
1) less than 10% of PC owners play games, let alone have PCs that are capable of gaming (excluding the included OS games (solitaire) and web based games, which run on both.
2) Bad place to say linux can not completely replace a PC, i might run were I you... of the 2200 employees in our comainy in IS (of 15,00+ employees with a user account) all the ones who use Linux for more than a casual hobby (those who have made it their primary daily OS) do not have a windows machine at home anymore unless work has ISSUED them one.
3) If you have a Mac, you run Windows in a VM or bootcamp. A second machine is not required to maintain compatability. People that have both Macs and PCs often do because they already owned a PC at the time, and do not care to simply dispose of it (it still has some value to them, and street value on a used PC is so bad they're not worth selling, and most schools only take donations now of NEW PCs due to the depreciation problems, as well as support issues for a random farm of used machines...)
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Whats more of an important note, and I'm surprised not one poster above noted this, all of the companies using this tech today DID licence (or sub lisence) the technology from 3Com originally!
They're suing someone for LEGAL use of a patent? Are they assuming that license agreements between 3Com and others expired somehow and were not renewed, or that the sale of the license voided those agreements?
Also of note, the US government does have the power (I understand) to revoke patents found to be particularly important to the US infrastrucutre, the government can use anything patented without license fees paid (though they do have some paperwork and technically the do "license" the technology), and they can pass that power to any manufacturer who makes parts/systems for the government. If push came to shove, the government could either authorize Cisco, Intel, HP and others to continue to make parts in leiu of the patent in order to maintain the stability of the internet itself, including home and school connections and VoIP services deemed necessary for the public health/comminucation/education/etc, or they could simply revoke the patent outright.
he asked the differences, that's pretty much it aside from the "pretty" factors, and some behind the scenes code improvements that could have just as easily (and many are) backported into Vista.
Yea, there are about 100 other bullet point changes, but he asked what "mattered" to a user, why should one switch? The other changes really don;t impact users on perceivable levels and simply contribute to the whole feel of the OS being faster and stabler.
I do appreciate you noting that not all people providing supporting statements for 7 are shills, as personally I abhore the OS, and use it only as a required platform for some applications we can not yet abandon. Though I do not currently own a Mac (being remedied within weeks) i am a hardcore Apple fan (though I stay away from Fanboi status).
every "mersenne" prime, I should have clarified. Might not mean "every" prime.
We're already at 12M didgits, and yes I understand the processing power required to process numbers on that scale. However, the last 9 in a row primes found have all been mersenne, and we've increased the didgit count 3 fold over those 9. Between here and 1B didgits, maybe there's 10-15 more primes? (based on historical slide in primes per number of didgits as it increases, which is no way is a simple plotable line, just an estimation that it declines as it goes). We're finding about 3 more a year using less efficint techniques. Granted the power it takes to find each larger one grows, but we should be able to clean out all the mersenne primes inside 5 years tops.
The idea is, we know all the primes to use as "n" in the equasion, so finding each new one, including the ones that can be excluded through simpler mathematic formula, should not be difficult. (just time consuming).
Fact is, would that buy us any new intelligence? Would plotting 15 or 20 more points on a graph that has over 50M prime numbers on it already give us any new insight? no. That's why I feel this is pointless.
Of COURSE the people who make packet sniffing and filtering technology, backhaul switches, and high bandwidth components compatible with it are going to be against ANYTHING the prevents them from selling their rediculously expensive sniffing and filtering gear.
NATURALLY these companies are going to be ALL FOR letting firms be able to buy their kit and use it. If filtering was made illegal, then Cisco, Alcatel, Lucent, etc would have a hard time justifying their highly profitable expensive switches vs the competitors systems which are simpler, streamlined for high bandwidth, and cost a fraction to deploy, and for which their own similar switches still cost more to subsidize the development and sale of the big gear.
You're right, the anteanna is not the power draw, the chip and signal strength is. Either way, on my AP, i can dial back the gain and accordingly shorten the transmit range, and the device does draw less power doing so. Our business class HP/procurve APs can do this on the fly via centrally monitored systems in order to provide for signal crossover balancing, to limit chanel interference, and to also boost signal to extend range if another AP goes offline.
Having 2 anteanna and a dual radio device would simply allow both a high and low power signal concurrently (or to power off one when not in use). perhaps a single anteanna could also do that, I don't know, but the idea was lessening the power would work for short range devices. In the dedicated short range device (headset) only a lower power chip would be needed, and power draw should be on par or very near bluetooth draw. For USB wireless, the power can come from the port it;s connected to, and it could have significant dynamic range, possibly covering a whole house or more, or be dialed back to just a single room or PAN.
I also don't know how WiFi behaves when the iPhone is in standby. i know I can queue downloads, or turn on Pandora and put the device to sleep and the signal continues. I'm sure some other apps make occasional use of WiFi. If you have push enabled, and you are connected to a valid wifi base station, I also know it maintains it's activeSync connection over wifi and does not transmit on 3g, even when asleep, i just don;t know if it actively polls for approved networks when it's NOT connected to one when asleep. It;s less battery use to do that then to use 3G, so i would actually hope it is looking for pre-approved networks when asleep.
so, if we know all the primes between 3 and 43million, about 3.7 million prime numbers), and we have taken the time to define a category of prime number equal to 2^n-1, that means it took THIS DAMN LONG for someone to calculate a few million computations to come up with this new "milestone"???
It seems to me finding all the mersenne primes would have long since surpassed this mark seeing we defined this category of Euclidean "perfect numbers" back in the 1700s! Granted, the computational power to even determine is a 12M didgit number is in fact prime is fairly substantial, let alone calculating a factor of 2 to that length, but we're finding a new bigger one a few times a year now, with a few million additional didgits each time.
Finding all the primes between this one and 3 is a feat, until you considder the last 9 in a row bigger prime numbers discovered are ALL mersenne primes. If we simply focussed on running the existing primes through 2^n-1, we'd find every prine through a few billion didgits in a couple of years. And honestly, what have we learned by this new data since 2000? has it actually provided some pattern we didn't already know, or unlocked some secret about methematics we didn't know? Nope, it's just about who has the bigger CPU budget.
"Bluetooth uses less power" Well, yes and no.
At full transmit power, yea, by a lot. Dial back the dB of the anteanna, and you can make WiFi would for very similar, and possibly less power draw.
If an intelligent WiFi driver is added, power use could by dytnamic, scaling up and down based on range and interference, for the direct connect devices. A multi radio device could potentially use 2 anteanna, one for short range and 1 for traditional AP connections, simultaneously, and might have a quite reasonable power draw compared to using both WiFi and bluetooth concurrently.
Since it has yet to be released in such a fashion, we don;t really have any good data on the energy draw.
A simple P2P only connection, without WiFi otherwise active, yea, bluetooth is probably going to use less power. How many of us have WiFi enabled devices where the WiFi is not left on 24x7 when the device is on regardless of the connectivity, so one could easily argue that WiFi P2P has 0 additional power draw, and simply turning bluetooth on would draw more power.
I can turn off WiFi on the iPhone, but it's a pain to have to do so all the time. It's worse on most other devices... With WiFi on 24x7, my phone outlasts my use needs each day. turning off bluetooth (which i did recently when I cruched a headset and had to wait a few weeks to get a new one) improved the battery life dramatically.
He asked a question, i answered. It's honestly better than XP, and few dissagree. Do I think it's a sell? No, but I'll take it over Vista if I'm forced to take a M$ OS.
Personally, I have a few PCs, mostly for beta testing, product training, and gaming, but I'm actually a Mac user... Have a nice new 15" macbook sitting in the shopping cart at Apple.com now, just waiting for new machines to come out in a week or two to see if the price changes.
Um, native 2008 server integration, stronger security model, boots faster than XP, faster file copy than XP, compatible with modern 64 bit software and upcoming releases that will not be coded for XP, faster than a fully patched XP system on the same hardware (inclusive of AV, latest browser, java, etc; a "typically" configured XP system, not an out of the box pre-SP1 config that would be unusable on the net), More secure, will actually continue to get patches going forward, will run IE9 when it comes out, DX 10 and 11 support, improved sleep/hibernate system, better battery life on modern notebooks (supports advanced power management features), You can uninstall IE completely (or at least "disable" it completely), better media center system, don't need a floppy to install non-IDE boot devices, far improved memory management systems, snadboxed memory allocation and dynamically assigned system memory space, much improved taskbar, simpler home networking, better handling of multiple audio devices, vastly improved search, oh, and with Pro or higher you can still run XP...
a few points to add.
Yes, Windows 7 should be radically reduced in price, for upgrades from Viata. Full price for an upgrade from XP (say $189) is still reasonable, and a retail price of $279 for Pro and $329 for Ultimate is reasonable. Home should simply be dropped, it's pointless. If it's not connected to a domain, don't enable the business-only features. Apple figured that out, 1 version for all... On low performance machines, detect the limitations and don't enable the snazzy features (or just demand higher minimum specs).
For existing Vista users, upgrade from any version to Pro should have been $49 max, and $89 to ultimate, unless you already HAD ultimate in which case it should have been free. 7 is not a ground up requite of Vista, it;s an overhaul. Not really different from the 10.5 - 10.6 transition Apple just did. A few new features though limited in scope, some new graphics, faster stabler code, and more secure, that's all 7 really amounts to, and that's all they should charge for it.
Most peopole with XP won't upgrade to 7 though, since their machines are likely far underpoewred to run it, and will at least need RAM updates, if not GPUs as well. Upgrading from xp to 7, aside from the enthusiasts who insisted on XP on newer machines, is not a tearget audience for Microsot. Charging them more for skipping vista, a price about $20 more than upgrading to vista originally would have cost, is fair. Some who would upgrade might hesitate at that price, and instead simply buy new hardware to make the leap.
I'm OK with the vendors (M$ in this case) dinging us every 3-4 years for a major upgrade at or about $200. (or $300+ for a full version for a new PC without an existing license). If you bought vista, 7 is the appology upgrade you should get cheap (like the old "Plus" packs for 95/98). If you skipped Vista, and have not given M$ a verion upgrade since 2002-2004, then you're due, cough it up... Its the nature of the industry.
If you don;t like the additional costs associated with the upgrade (office, AV, roxio, other core apps, possibly some new devices, etc), then the price gap for switching platforms becomes an option, and maybe moving to Mac might actually be cheaper (when looking at comperable performance and feature, not bottom end machines that do not compare), or maybe it's time to abandon microsof tand join the linux bandwagon. That's your choice based on your business needs and price range. You should allways be buying based on #1 what meets your needs and 2# the best system you can get that meets those needs in your budget (and most times, if a lower system price meets your needs, spending more on a higher class system will often mean lower TCO if you look at 4+ year lifespans, so if a better system is still under your budget cap, buy it!)
Well, they did take out about half of new england, including large portions of canada several years ago. However, that was not a grid issue, but a computer communication issue, and that's been fixed and made far more redundant. It was an accident of coincidence that allowed improperly timed alarms to cascade through a communication network that shut the grid down because it thought it was fighting off electric backpressure and trying top prevent a feedback that would have blown transformers and possibly generators, and then the other system that tried to account for the lack in sudden power availability also alarmed and could not cope, and went down.
That communication issue was identified (as well as a few other case scenarios they realized were also possible) and the systems were reprogrammed and upgraded.
The chance of such a mass grid failure is rediculously low now. the bigger the interconencted grid is, especially including HVDC superconducting long range lines, the less of a chance of faiure there is as localized issues can be readily handled by power stations hundreds of miles away. The big deal was the next power station down the line could not handle a wide area outage, and then itself went down. If we're not relying on the poewr station down the street, but can draw from across the nation, that's a non-issue.
yup, and they fixed that. and systems like this are part of the fix, not a complication requiring additional resources.
plus, explain how to take out a buried, 0.3 meter thick, hunk of earthquake re-enforced metal line? Short of digging a massive hole, planting a half ton or more of good high order explosive, probably a shaped charge, while not getting cooked by the 5GW charge, and without tripping buried sensors along the cable run (other wires buried a few feet shallower than the main lines, which help detect when some dumbass is digging in the wrong place or without a permit to prevent accidental damage to the lines), and the fact that its not one line but several (typically at least 3, a dozen or so meters apart each). It may be possible to take out 1 line, but not the minimum of at least 4 it would take to knock this out. The interchange systems would be well protected by security and likely monitoerd 24x7 by sattelite. Also, the land around this area is not exacly highly populated, and easy to patrol...
A few hack terrorists with a half assed plan are only going to get caught. Nothing better than good bait sometimes...
Meh, why is that getting flagged as insightful.
The current cynicism that any improvement in infrastructure is
a) only for the money
b) going to ruin the planet
c) a target for terrorists
d) too late
is getting really old.
The proposal allows for better distribution of power generation across the continent. Even if it was a target for terrorism so what. If you want to curl up in a little ball because the terrorists might get you knock yourself out.
BTW, knocking this section out doesn't take all 3 grids down.
Exactly.
Money issues? This will provide thousands of jobs, the ability for power systems in remote ares to be built to poewr distant cities, and increase the profitability of the power companies. It solves issues of where to put power generation systems and could reduce construction (and legal battle) costs by 2/3rds or more. For every dollar they'll save, you'll be lucky to see $0.50 come off your bill, meaning it;s a LOT more money for them. THEY WANT THIS and so do we, is that not proof?
Planetary issues? This allows us to deploy mass wind, water, and solar systems where we could not due to transmission distances and disconnected grid infrastructure. now we can access cheap clean energy and give it to anyone instead of building less efficint power plants where the power is needed. This will be the beginning of the elimination of coal and gas power across most of the land.
Terrorism? First it's a proof of concept, and only facilitates a transfer system between other currently completely self sufficient (soft of) systems. This is a beginning, not a complete system. Even a terorist strike on this new triangle (which is self redundant btw, requiring 2 seperate coordinated strikes at a minimum, against underground buried cables in what's likely to be a secure area) would not cause more than a few second brownout as the grid rebalanced. Besides, these cables, do you have ANY idea of their construction??? significant bombardment would have trouble causing radical damage to the cable itself, and you're not getting a bomb inside the secured areas where the interconnect will be.
Further, being a POC, these cables will be deployed everywhere from this central spoke, creating more nodes in the future, and is the begining of a replacement redundant grid system. When deployed there will be fewer points of failure than in today's grid, and few if any single points that could take out more than small towns.
Too late? Well, late, I'll agree, we should have started deployment 20 years ago when we had the technology. Oh, wait... We did, 22 years ago! Now it;s proven, and being deployed, and will take 30-40 years to completely roll out, at a cost of nearly 10 trillion. but, it;s not too late... Too late implies even if we built it, there would be no benefit as we'll have already collapsed. Yes it;s too late to deploy it in the most cost effective method, and we have a stressed grid, and may need to build a few temporary power plants not necessary if we put a few trillion behind this a while back, but in the end the extra research actually saved us a lot of money, and allowed better long term planning. This is a 50 year process to replace a grid, not a 3-4 year build out...
I do propose we back off the electric car bandwagon a bit and spend the money instead on some additional superlines like this, and some more wind farms, and some dotyenergy RFTS fuel manufacturing plants (www.dotyenergy.com) to halt our oil expansion and curb import demand, and give our grid time to grow to actually be able to power those cars, and battery technology time to mature so we'll want to both drive them and pay for them. People do blow the super grid technology out of proportion. Most of those people are fed by propoganda and FUD from employees of local power monopolies who will no longer be able to overcharge for power, but i could give a fuck about the greedy minority.
Well, as Apple made public knowledge when they switched to Intel, (not an exact quote) "we develop, compile, and test OS X on multiple hardware platfors, always have since the very first day of development, include new processor platforms as they come available, and can change to an alternate platform at any time."
IBM appears to be working on a low power P6/P7 architecture, AMD has some nice new stuff, They have their own fab now for low power CPUs, I'm sure they're compiling against Atom and likely even Cell...
Honetly, as long as GPUs remain seperate from CPUs, it's long past time when the north/southbridge became integrated into the core CPU silcon. They already added the memory controller and other mainboard resources, now the base systems bus and other common components could all be included. nVidia really is doing the right thing moving into alternate markets, this one IS dying, this may actually be good for both nVidia and intel as it gives intel an advantage in being able to seperate and move away from current trends easier, and gives nVidia a more consolodated and focussed research effoer for GPU/CPU acceleration - generic core processing technology.
nVidia will still reap a LOT of profit from the existing systems for years, and makes a killing in GPUs and AMD chipsets. Saving this reaserch money, shutting down the facilities, and in the end almost certainly winning a case against intel for a few hundred million in cash down the road, this is a great opportunity for them, and I commend their decision.
ONLY for the new i5/i7 architecture and beyond...
OK,
1st, Just called my Aunt, had her send me an e-mail from her iMac 300MHz (blue tray load CRT iMac). It has 128MB of RAM and is running OS 9.1 quite nicely with netscape as her browser and e-mail client.
I can also state that the iMac 17" (lamp) G4, running with a "max capable" 768MB of RAM (came with 256) shipped wityh OS 10.2 and ran great on OS 10.4. It booted in about 15 seconds 9including McAfee's boot scan), and played video files better and cleaner than an XP machine with 1GB of RAM and an x600 ATI GPU.
Each Mac OS in the OS X line has shown faster processing performance on the same hardware each release. This is not for dispute, this is fack backed up by nermerous independent reviews. Yes, some older hardware that did not meet the minimum specs of the new OS would fall into that category,
I did not say the mac required less CPU or RAM than Windows, I said Windows runs like ASS on it;s defined minimum requirement, and OS X runs fine on it's own, seperate, minimum requirement. Further, the mac DOES outperform Windows on the same intel CPU with 1GB of RAM in virtually all 3rd party tests of the same software (photoshop, MP3 ripping, DVD decoding, etc).
This is not for arguement, it's clearly covered facts through hundreds of tests and publiches available information.
OS X was ahead of it's time, no doubt, and the 10.0 and 10.1 editions were overburdened and slow, but that same machine that came with 10.0 and ran slow ran 10.2 great, without the RAM upgrade. Vista sucked, and still sucks. XP initially ran fine on 128MB, but today I've got 2GB in a machine with 10 times the CPU horesepower and it takes several minutes to convert fairly simple Viseo diagrams into PDF... XP has gotten worse withage, OS X has imporved, that's all I'm saying.
for the uninitiated, and to further clarify; if packetized voice is voice over IP, then so are your landline analog calls, for the last 10 years or longer.... By the logic people are using, your landline is VOIP.
Just because the voice traffic is at some point sent across digital trunk lines does not make it an IP protocol. VoIP/SIP includes endpoint to endpoint (or at least endpoint to analog handover) communication to a SIP device that is addressed not by a phone number, but by a dotted quad. A True VOIP call can happen IP to IP without any telco involvement other than the VOIP Provider. Google voice is ENTIRELY dependent on traditional ISP telecommunications systems and traditional call routing (though it's a hybrid that does include SIP sipport for Gizmo), it is NOT VOIP.
Google Voice may handle incoming and outgoing VOIP calls centrally, but that's no differnt than having PRI, T1, and IP connections into the same VRU chassis at the same time. The technology is not the medium through which the call is processed, it is simply a device that ROUTES the call through other call handling systems. You can not ansewr a google phone call unless you have a traditional call system. There is no IP device or software addressible directly by Google's systems, therefor it is not a VOIP system.
Google voice is not VoIP, it is a VRU.
It handles hunt groups, caller ID data manipulation, DTMF code transforms, voice response, and DTMF tone response. It's a glorified call router (actually, its a higly SIMPLIFIED call router, barely using a fraction of the functions of a true VRU), but by itself it is NOT a VoIP service.
Yes, it CAN route a call to and from an existing VoIP service, like Gizmo, but it does not place calls via SIP itself directly, it only initiates and received calls from other existing SIP extensions and numbers, and can not be substituted in place of Gizmo. It uses your Gizmo number and requires a gizmo client.
The Google Voice App is simply an IP based system for communicating to the VRU to cause it to initiate calls, and to manage voicemail, account settings, and contacts. That's it.
it was the file sharing feature we needed... and the ability to support DOS and Mac floppies. That's why we went to 7 initially.
That, and it actually was a much nicer OS experience, if you had the RAM (2MB or more) and a SCSI HDD. Oh, and also freely distributable! (Yes, Apple actually ENCOURAGED people to pirate copies and share with friends. The software was sold for the cost of the floppy disks (or CD, as it was the first OS also available in that format).
We had some accounting package (great Plains?) that required it... also, 6.x disks gave up the ghost and could not find new copies after that many years! It wasn't exactly the internet age yet... (though the classic was the first machine we got online. The LCII ran AOL 1.x at some point, had been running compuserve for a while previous, and both had accessed the "true" internet as well via a server we had set up at a local high school).
Or, like me and everyone i know, you sign up with microsoft as a Registered Partner, take a few free online classes, and then pay $300 a year for an action pack subscription, and put up to 10 copies of Windows Pro into VMs and 1 copy of Windows Ultimate into Production, get free upgrades to all the new releases, run a couple of home servers on the outdated PC hardware, and get 10 copies of Office Ultimate to spread around.
Several of us split action pack subscription costs for our "company" (which is a legitimate consulting firm, including business registration and all the proper state and federal forms, we're even members of the Chanber of Commerce, but it generates $0 in revenue anually and exists pretty much solely for training and vendor software access).
My share is $75 a year, and i get the Pro/Ultimate versions of Windows and Office for less than your OEM copy of Home edition from New Egg, let alone the $400-600 throw away intel hardware you suggest to get the licnese that I can't legall use on another machine.
Oh, yea, that OEM license, since you did not get an install CD (only a restore CD) how do you get it into the VM? ...and as I mentioned, doing so violates the license agreement).
XP 512? it started at 64MB! and even SP3 still lists 64 as required, 128 reccomended... Granted, it runs like ASS with less than 1GB installed. I also find it odd that IE 7 is installed by default with SP3 patch rollup, and it's system requirements are higher than XP's...
OS 10.0 128MB ram,
OS 10.1 128 (unoficially 64)
OS 10.2 128 (256 reccomended)
OS 10.3 128 (512 recomended)
OS 10.4 256 (512 reccomended)
OS 10.5 512 (1GB reccomended)
OS 10.6 1GB (1GB reccomended)
the key (I misspoke my statement, sorry) is that each new version runs with improved performance on the same hardware. no it was not possible to go from 10.0 to 10.6 on the same hardware (though it is possible to go from 10.0 to 10.5, which covers 2001 - 2009 with improving performance for each release, and assuming you had a G4 processor and added a bit of RAM along the way)
Also, Windows runs like ASS with it's minimum recomendation (it is barely usable at 4 times that setting). OS X runs like a champ with little stutter, and 100% of OS features work with the minimum supported settings. the "minimum" is simply Apple's choice to suggest what it SHOULD run on in order to get suitable performance, where microsoft chooses to list the absolute hardware minimum.
I can attest that I have had OS 10.4 running on a machine with 128MB of installed RAM, and it did in fact run (and booted faster than an XP box with 1GB).
Vista "premium ready" (aka, can actually run the whole OS) required 1GB of RAM to do the same thing OS 10.4 did at the time with 256MB.
Windows 7 requires 2GB MINIMUM for the 64 bit edition. OS X 10.6 only requires 1GB.
Linux can only survive in server mode (no GUI) on 64MB. Base OS requires 256MB running Gnome or KDE Windows Manager (and it runs like ass with less than 512).
Family Mac History:
- original Lisa bought in 1984, stopped using in 1989, sold to a museum in 1998 still working.
- 512Ke bought in 1985, stopped using in 1993, donated to a school in 1996 still working running OS 6.
- Mac IIcx bought in 1989, donated to a school in 1997
- Mac Classic bought in 1991, stopped using in 1997, was still working running OS 7 in 2002?
- LC II bought in 1992, used as a gaming and VM platform (even ran Windows NT on it) until 1997, donated to an elderly family member who used it until 2003 when they passed. Was still working when sold at the garrage sale for $350.
- Quadra 630 bought in 1995, donated to a church in 2000, was still in use as of 2004 last i heard. May still be functional today.
- iMac Blue 300mhz model bought in 1999, ran up through OS 9.x, still in use today by my Aunt.
- PowerComputing powerdesk, bought in 1996, sold to a business to replace their own matching model (killed by lightnig strike) in 2002, was still in use in 2005 last i heard. i got $650 for that 6 year old machine...
- G3 desktop, bought 1999, killed by stormwater damage in 2003.
- Mac Cube, bought 2001, killed by stormwater damage 2003.
- G4 desktop, bought 2003, still in use in a local school we donated it to.
- iBook 14" bought in 2003, killed in a car accident 2005.
- iMac G4 17"/768/1GHz, bought in 2003, upgraded through OS 10.3, sold in 2007 for $750 on ebay.
- mini bought in 2005, i still use it today as my media server.
- iMac 20" core 2 bought in 2005, still in use as my Father's primary machine, bumped to 2GB RAM and 10.6 recently. never once in my father's life has he used a Windows based machine more than to borrow web access for a few minutes, or to check e-mail.
- MBP 15" bought Christmas 2006, still in use as mom's primary machine. Runs XM in a VM, but only for go-to-my-pc for her work.
We also had an iBook G4 for about 6 months that I bought at a tag sale for $50 which sold on ebay for $350; a quadra 9600 I acquired used in 2002 - cleaned up and doneted to a church a few months later; and I've also had an SE30, MacIIsi, LCIII, and an XServeSL for short periods of time (none bought new).
Average lifespan of Macs in our family (includng those destroyed by storm or car crash, and those still in use) is over 6.5 years. Excluding those destoyed by storm or crash it's 7.3 years, and excluding those still in use is 8.5 years.
Of all thos emachines, only the iMac 17", 20", 1st MBP, and the Mini have even had hardware upgrades, and those only RAM, and the LCII I added an ethernet adapter to later in it's life. (the PowerComputing Machine I'm not counting, as it was basically a lab system that I rebuilt about a dozen times and was constantly upgraded with differing components and various drives, and had not less than 10 differnt OS run on it). The iMac Blue 300 and the iMac 17" were the only 2 machines ever requiring a hardware repair. (the CD drive in the Blue sucked ass, and it did blow a mainboard in it's 5th year due to power surge, the 17" iMac lost a HDD in its 4th year).
Quite the longevity in hardware. What's equally impressive is the resale value. I can litterally buy a Mac, and in 4-5 years I can sell it, and the TCO of that machine will be less than that of some cheap Dell machine that has nowhere near the capabilities.
I have no software i use that requires Windows. I have some games I choose to play in Windows (which can easily be done from Boot Camp, not on a seperate machine, or now with the latest release of fusion, even inside a VM). At the office, we have a few network management clients that only run from Windows boxes, but those who use Linus simply VNC to a machine with it installed and use it remotely. Apps themselves can be virtualized as well now, no longer requiring the underlying OS to funtion. I can easily shed Windows completely at any time, and I'm an IT analyst! 90% of people out there do not use a computer for more than simple very common games, edit basic documents, work with photos and maybe video, use Web2.0, and use messaging. That's it... only LEGACY software, and some highly specialized applications is an issue preventing full fledged migration away from Windows. All of that can be run in a VM, and no second "machine" is required.
in other words, Apple could be the sole hardware provider (including mainframe class grid systems own down), Windows would be needed on maybe 30% of machines, and everyone else would be out of business or niche providers...
1) less than 10% of PC owners play games, let alone have PCs that are capable of gaming (excluding the included OS games (solitaire) and web based games, which run on both.
2) Bad place to say linux can not completely replace a PC, i might run were I you... of the 2200 employees in our comainy in IS (of 15,00+ employees with a user account) all the ones who use Linux for more than a casual hobby (those who have made it their primary daily OS) do not have a windows machine at home anymore unless work has ISSUED them one.
3) If you have a Mac, you run Windows in a VM or bootcamp. A second machine is not required to maintain compatability. People that have both Macs and PCs often do because they already owned a PC at the time, and do not care to simply dispose of it (it still has some value to them, and street value on a used PC is so bad they're not worth selling, and most schools only take donations now of NEW PCs due to the depreciation problems, as well as support issues for a random farm of used machines...)