It's not just a different clock speed, it has different memory architecture and so on. It has dual high-end workstation GPUs (which normally cost around $6,000) with some of the more expensive parts of the GPU replaced with cheaper consumer grade gear (bringing the price down to around $1,000 or thereabouts). For example, non-ECC memory. And if you boot the mac pro into windows you can't even use the cards properly, because AMD's drivers are not compatible at all and Apple's drivers for bootcamp only do a half assed job of supporting them. Enough to boot and run windows perfectly but not enough to actually use the GPUs to their full potential.

That's not true. They usually use modified versions of standard components. The current MacBook Pro has the RAM and SSD soldered onto the motherboard, and while the CPU is standard it has a custom connector and cooling system that has forced enough physical differences in the chip that it cannot be replaced. Most macs these days don't even have a GPU, they rely on intel's latest integrated ones which are finally pretty decent.

The Mac Pro is the only model Apple sells with fully standard CPU... but the GPU is non-standard, it's made by AMD but is a weird hybrid of two different GPUs that AMD sells, and Apple is the only company who can use it... one of the two GPUs in the mac pro even has a socket on it so you can plug in a bloody PCIe SSD card. On the GPU! They ran out of PCIe lanes on the processor, so the SSD has to share the lane of the second GPU which is actually a sensible choice since it's highly unlikely you will be maxing out the PCIe card (1.5GB/second) at the same time as doing serious computations on the GPU. That definitely is not a standard part.

On iOS apple builds everything themselves, they are famously known to have over 1,000 engineers working on just the CPU for the iPhone. They haven't gone that far with the mac but it's standard procedure to take components from other companies like AMD and Intel and Qualcomm but then modify to suit their own needs.

Patents *were* supposed to do that. There have been a bunch of amendments since, and now their sole purpose is to make a lot of money for big companies. Which is arguably good for the economy of countries that have a lot of big entrenched companies, and bad for the economy of the rest of the world.

I agree 100%.

For example, if you're at home when a football game is on, then obviously you're a fan of the sport.

No thanks, I won't be buying anything off Nest.

Most people who vote for the Hottest 100 do not post stuff on the internet, so the statisticians will need to account for and attempt to remove the bias towards the style of music people who are active online prefer. That's not easy.

It depends whether you consider a "vote" to be a song choice, or a person who voted.

Voters submit a list of their favourite handful of songs, they don't pick one. Triple J usually picks the number of song submissions, not the number of people who voted, since it's the songs themselves that they count.

A lot of the votes aren't by australians. Triple J streams worldwide for free and they have extremely good taste in music. Their charter requires, by law, that they do not have any ads except to promote music and culture, which means they promote music and festivals that they think are interesting, but don't collect any revenue for it.

So there are plenty of people around the world who tune in.

The event is several hours long, and it takes place on a national public holiday when everyone is off work. I've been invited to more than one party, to spend the whole day listening to music, drinking beer, eating bad food and trying to find some shade and/or water (bloody hot here this time of year!).

When did a european spy agency pay the largest security firm in the world to put a back door in their encryption?

There is nobody in the world as bad as the NSA.

Or even better, just tell google they have to stop selling services in Europe for a period of time, say 90 days. So nobody in Europe would be allowed to buy ads off Google while the ban was in place.

This would give competitors, who presumably adhere to EU law, a chance to step in and earn some revenue of their own.

Bullshit. The only way to improve is for people to point out when something is below standard. Complaints should be encouraged. You just shouldn't give credence to all of them.

And since it's impossible to settle, it's a total waste of time to even think about it. I don't know what the most often-run piece of code is. I don't have any idea. And I'm pretty sure nobody else on /. does so what's the point of even reading comments? I wouldn't be here if I wasn't bored out of my mind...

This really is the worst ask /. I've ever seen. I wish they'd asked something interesting, like "what did you have for breakfast?" at least I can answer that with some hope of knowing the answer.

It's not a dupe, it's just that everyone installs from source on OpenBSD, so signing the binary never made much sense.

My workstation PC is a mac with a pair of 27" displays, possibly a third coming. I write server side linux software on it at my day job, Mac/iOS software as a hobby (open source stuff).

And I can write and compile software on my iPhone. As soon as I commit any changes to github, within a few seconds the mac mini we have in the cloud will start running tests and doing a build, which I can then download onto the iPhone to execute it (assuming it's an iOS app).

If it's a Windows or Mac app, I can VNC into some hardware running that platform and test it there.

I was an emacs user... but none of the many linux servers I ssh into have it. I'm not going to install emacs three times a week, so I learned vi instead.

Anyway, control+a is hard to type on an iOS keyboard (possible, since a good terminal emulator adds a control key, but not productive).

My iPhone can do everything I can do on my workstation. The screen is too small to be productive at some tasks, but it can do everything.

Sure, I can't access a bash prompt on localhost, unless I jailbreak it, but I definitely have an ssh client and have logged into my server many times... even solved a catastrophe once using just my phone, vi works surprisingly well using the iOS keyboard.

They could but an iPhone is very heavy so it would add something like $20,000 to the cost of the launch.

Every gram is critical.