Comment Re:Bold claim... (Score 1, Insightful) 557
And profit? Doesn't seem so bad to me.
And profit? Doesn't seem so bad to me.
Yea, but HD, Video card, and Ram are all cheap. Xeons, on the other hand, are not. People constantly fail to realize that the Mac Pro is not comparable to a normal Core 2 or Core i7 desktop. No Mac is. Apple doesn't use any of Intel's desktop chips. The Macbooks, iMacs, and Minis all use mobile chips, and the Mac Pros and Xserves use Xeons.
You can certainly argue that Apple is missing an entire market segment, but I'd say they pretty much specialize in that.
Techies eh? I know this is all anecdotal crap that is utterly useless, but I'm a programmer and a sys-admin and I have been for 15 years now, and after spending the first 12 years working on and administering everything *but* macs, I finally tried one, and loved it. Last December I started migrating some of the Linux and Solaris boxes of my current employer to Xserves and it's been great. We still have a bunch of Windows build servers because our build targets for most of our projects require it, but apart from a few in-house-built high performance NAS systems, all of our Unix boxes now run OS X.
Also, you can keep your Visual Studio. I use it all day at work cranking out C++ code, but I always go home to Xcode these days. I have a lot of machines at home, mostly running Solaris or Gentoo at this point, and one Windows XP x64 desktop I had before I ever considered a Mac. I might as well sell most of them, because I spend 99% of my time on my Macbook Pro now.
And just for anecdotal completeness (cause that makes sense...) most of the best coders I know have switched to macs in the past 3 years, and I know *a lot* of really good coders.
I'd say "trust me," but this is Slashdot.....that would be horrible advice.
Personally I own PCs as well because I already had them before I switched to Mac. When they die or become too slow to be useful, they will not be replaced. Honestly I haven't booted my "main" PC in about 3 months, and that was just to grab some files. So, I "own" PCs, but I don't "use" them anymore. My ancient Sun E4500 sees more use than any of my PCs these days, and at this point that thing is just a power-hungry toy.
Losing one developers 'couple of days' work usually isn't a big concern. It's common for svn users to also have several days worth of work uncommitted.
I don't know where you work, but at my company losing half a day of one developer's work would be a huge deal. We're required to check in all of our work *at least* every couple hours. If it's not done, we need to check in a patch. There is no legitimate reason here for a developer to lose more than 2 hours of work. You'd be reprimanded for doing that once, and fired if you did it again.
Great opinion. Unfortunately it ignores the reality that humans are involved... As far as the vast majority of (at least Americans, after all, this is NASA we're talking about) are concerned, there might as well not be a space program at all at this point. Most people have *no* idea what NASA is up to these days, and don't really care. If people don't care, their representatives don't care, and if their reps don't care, well then, "why are we funding NASA again?" If NASA doesn't do something to inspire the public, they're going to continue seeing what they've seen for decades: Budget cuts. *That* is why they need to send people. It's *all* about the "chest-thumping nonsense" because chest-thumping nonsense is what holds the attention of the vast majority of people. It really doesn't matter how much it ends up costing. People will beg, borrow, and steal to get things they want. But they're not going to lift a finger to get something they could care less about. I think the current budget for NASA (something like 0.6% of the total budget) probably accurately represents the percentage of Americans interested in space exploration at this point. Honestly, the best way to fund a Mars mission is probably to make some kind of reality TV show about it... Maybe send a dysfunctional family or an aging rock band instead of scientists.
We have a couple of the 4TB ReadyNAS 1100's... 80MB/sec?!?!?!?!? How? What magic did you work to get that? The most we've been able to squeeze out of the things is ~30MB/s, which is in line with what most reviews have found. We've ended up just using them as on-line backups because they're too slow for active use. We've got them mounted via NFS to a linux box with 4TB of really fast RAID5 storage internally, and we just use rdiff-backup to sync the internal RAID daily. In terms of a speed comparison, the linux box (via an Intel PCIe quad gigE board) has no trouble pumping 350-400MB/s.
Crap! You're right. Man, this just isn't my day...
What is algebra, exactly? Is it one of those three-cornered things? -- J.M. Barrie