Comment Re:red v blue (Score 1) 285
That the more government/less government axis is not a particularly useful way to define the red/blue divide.
No, we should be encouraging nuclear first, then solar / wind / geothermal, because nuclear is actually scalable and doesnt chew up gobs of land.
That's true right up until it generates a huge wasteland, and starts to poison the seas. Nuclear should only be used as a transitional source. I guess, in theory, a reactor could be made safe, but I doubt it could in practice.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is." - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
For most digital work these days, you really just need a logic analyzer.
Unless your logic analyzer can show you ringing or capacitance / inductance problems on the digital signal lines, this is not really true. "Digital" signals on a circuit board are analog after all, and are subject to a lot of the same gremlins that plague an all analog circuit. This sort of thing doesn't always matter in a digital circuit, but you need a good scope to find them when they cause problems.
You just missed out on the previous generation workstation that experienced the coolant leak debacle, where your Powermac G5 would suddenly leak the coolant they were using down over the motherboard and power supply and then out the bottom of the chassis.
I have one of those liquid cooled G5s. It's been an audio recording workhorse. It's going to be retired soon, but it's still going strong. I look for leaks every so often, but I've never found evidence of one.
I hear that there are faster machines available these days
BSD, on the other hand, was built with embedded systems in mind.
BSD was built before there was any thought about building embedded system with Unix. iOS, and OS X before it, have been pretty battery-conscious, but BSD, not so much.
Show me where Apple have crossed the ethical lines ?
- using what practically amounts to slave labor at Foxconn
You mean just like every other major manufacturer? The Foxconn jobs are highly desired, anyway.
- dodging taxes by claiming residence in ireland
Don't most major US companies hold a lot of assets in overseas subsidies?
- suing everyone and their moms with bullshit claims and patents
You mean just like every other major manufacturer? If you're arguing that the patent system should be reformed, I totally agree with that. Until that time, shouldn't they play the game?
- false advertising (it should be named the Idiot Bar, not the Genius Bar)
If you say so.
- overpricing all their stuff
Well then their sales will suffer, right? Oh... wait...
- suing everyone making compatible hardware into bankruptcy
What is "compatible hardware" in this case? Are you talking about the 1990s clones?
- putting in a clause into OSX's license prohibiting using it on anything but official Apple hardware
This is a moot point now, as there is no distribution of the OS other than the Apple store. It's been an "upgrade" market for the OS rather than a "purchase" market for a long time.
I'd love to know who is still buying Apple devices when Android gizmos do pretty much the same thing for a fraction of the cost.
The devil's in the details, in this case, the definition of "pretty much."
By any traditional definition of "workstation" it is not one. It is no more a workstation than the Mini is. Both need additional products to make them functional as such.
I don't think that this change is different, in spirit, from some of the changes that Apple has pushed in the past. Apple tends to jettison things that it thinks are no longer relevant to the future, e.g. SCSI, ADB, Serial ports, etc. When Apple went USB-only on the original iMac, it was a controversial move, because there wasn't much in the way of a USB device market at that point in time. Fast forward a year or so, and there were more USB devices than you could shake a mouse at. I see the Mac Pro "sneak peek" as a warning shot across the bow of the peripheral manufacturers. If manufacturers get on board with Thunderbolt, it's a pretty interesting future, I think.
My workflow already uses a combination of a fast boot/swap drive, FW800 and NAS for storage, so that won't change much with a new Mac Pro, other than needing a TB->FW adaptor somewhere (at a cost of $29 from Apple.) I'm a firm believer in the concept of storage living outside of my "compute core." I've changed computers with barely a hitch because my data lived somewhere else.
Many PCIe cards will already work in an expansion chassis. Many will not. I believe this is mostly a driver issue, other than the rare card that needs more bandwidth than Thunderbolt provides. If you are someone who needs that third (or fifth) high speed graphics card, the new Mac Pro is not for you. But realistically, what percentage of the potential market for this sort of machine is in that segment? I imagine that most PCIe cards will be made to work in an expansion chassis, or a Thunderbolt alternative will appear.
That said, I'm stuck waiting for MOTU to come up with a Thunderbolt solution for their PCI line (e.g. 2408mk3, HD192). Their adaptor card, the PCIe-424, does NOT work in an expansion chassis. If MOTU doesn't come up with a solution for using their PCI line, the ripple effect of me moving to a new Mac Pro would involve replacing audio interfaces, and my digital mixer. The follow-on costs would probably end up being more than the MacPro. I'm optimistic that MOTU, like most manufacturers will get its act together regarding Thunderbolt.
Summing up, if Apple & Intel are successful in their gamble to push the world towards Thunderbolt, in a year or so, we'll think that compute cores like the Mac Pro are the natural order. We'll wonder what all the fuss was about. Isn't this the way computers have always been?
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
