You couldn't hide a Mac Pro behind a counter, they're enormous. I guess you could if you really cared to, but come on - it's pretty obvious the GP looked into an Apple Store, saw a bunch of iMacs, and came away with the wrong impression...

What, you saw a bunch of iMacs? Those are the computers - that slab of aluminum is all there is. There's nothing hidden under the counter.

The only computer Apple makes that they could conceivably hide is the Mac Mini, and there's no reason to - it's about the size of four CD jewel cases. It's small enough that you might be excused for not noticing it - but no Apple Stores hide them.

"Sage has similar capabilities to Mathematica including the separation of client and server for example."

Yeah, forget all that math shit, the client-server separation is the hardest and most important part to get right.

Why is this getting so much press? The maker of an expensive, cheesy robot dinosaur toy files for bankruptcy. What a shocker. This should be a 1-paragraph blurb tucked in some back corner of the Wall Street Journal, but instead I've been seeing it on every website I check for nearly a week.

On another note - who in their right mind would pay $300 for this thing? Who in their right mind would think someone would pay $300 for this thing?

They made him watch a TV show that makes fun of him. It's a little childish, but I really don't see what's so reprehensible about that.

What else should Apple care about besides my money?

I'm glad they care about getting my money, because it means they will continue to try to build products that I want to pay for.

Sorry, but you're quite wrong here. Most filesystems can be configured at mount-time to behave in the manner you describe, but by default, they may defer writes to the disk for upwards of several seconds.

This improves performance tremendously, and the resulting unreliability is simply a tradeoff that is required to deal with what are fundamentally very slow devices.

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~enightin/syncio.ps

You do not want the filesystem to striving to dump all data to disk as fast as possible, all the time - for instance, it doesn't really matter if you lose some items from your browser cache during a crash. So, the filesystem can defer writing new files in your cache until the disk is idle in between some more important operations, and the only effect you'll notice is vastly improved performance.

No, it's really distance traveled per unit of money that matters.

Or, per unit of CO2, if you're one of those people.

That's not a problem, that's a feature. What, you want a window manager or something? Most people don't want to worry about process management on their freaking phone.

If a developer wants to build an application that remembers where the user was when it last closed and returns to that spot when it launches again, that's certainly doable on the iPhone.

What an idiot - doesn't he realize how wonderful it is that technology makes it possible for us to avoid paying the authors we like as much money as we used to?

A Mac is a genuine Unix workstation that is much easier to administer, and has much better software and hardware support than Linux.

I can run basically every Linux/Unix application on my Mac, both command-line and GUI, while not having to worry about wireless networking drivers, printer support, power management / sleep support on my laptop, getting accelerated 3D drivers working, or any of the other minor hassles that are involved with setting up and maintaining a Linux install.

If you walk into the computer science department at MIT, basically all the faculty have a Mac, and fully half the students do. These people are not buying Macs because they saw a cool ad on the bus - they're buying them because a Mac is the best tool available.

The argument that Macs are just expensive, "designer" PCs that look pretty and sell well because Apple has marketed them well doesn't hold water. Yes, they have nice hardware, and a clean, polished, slick UI, and that does make them more pleasant to work with than some blob of Dell plastic running Vista - but they have the functionality to back up their appearance, as well.

Yeah, they're more expensive. If you value your time at all, you should realize that spending an extra $100 on a Mac is well worth it if it improves your productivity. Hell, if you ever spend two hours fighting with some weird issue on your Linux box, it's no longer saved you any money. You know how long I've spent fighting with the OS to get my wireless working, or hibernate working, or whatever, in Mac OS X, in the five years I've been using a Mac? Zero. I'm not exaggerating. It lives up to the hype. It "just works". It gets out of my way and lets me get things done.