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

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.

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 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.

You mean just like every other major manufacturer? The Foxconn jobs are highly desired, anyway.

Don't most major US companies hold a lot of assets in overseas subsidies?

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?

If you say so.

Well then their sales will suffer, right? Oh... wait...

What is "compatible hardware" in this case? Are you talking about the 1990s clones?

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.

Bennett,

    If these are your take-aways from Burning Man, I am sorry. It is apparent that you just didn't get it. You had a technical experience, but apparently not an emotional one. From your article, it sounds like you were a perfect spectator; but not a participant.

    I've only been nine years, and I'd happily share all my tips with you. I have no problem 'making it easy' for people. But if they came back from the event with nothing to share except how to make it easy on themselves I would wonder why they bothered at all.

    You can camp with my crew next year. We aren't the perfect camp, but nobody from my camp has ever come away with this dry of an experience.

The devil's in the details, in this case, the definition of "pretty much."

From the linked article: "It is currently appraised at over $25,000, potentially making it the most expensive "personal computer" ever!"

There's an Apple I up for auction that is expected to haul in half a million.

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?

It's important to note that a "war on jailbreaking" is really a "war on exploits."

I don't see how you can be against Apple trying to get rid of every exploit that it knows about. All these jailbreaks are really exploits that could be used to install bad things. You could argue that Apple should provide a way to install alternate firmware, but that's another discussion. (and one that will not get very far, I think)