It is just entering the consumer arena. Hence it is expensive. However since it is entering the consumer arena, we see companies like Youtube starting to support it.

put it another way: WinXP is still roughly three times as popular as Win8, and even Unity is probably more popular than WIn8 but no meaningful is data available.

1) That's not a US rule, that's a merchant/payment processor rule, because they are worried about fraud. Not saying it makes the most sense, but that is why it is. In Europe you'll find that ordering from some Eastern European countries can be difficult/impossible for the same reason.

2) Duh. That is true of all countries. In any country the authorities can legally compel access to things in the country. That is kinda part of being a country. The issue is them doing it illegally, or at least in ways that ought to be illegal. However complaining that they can legally access data is silly, since all countries operate like that. If you think that France cannot or does not get warrants to look at servers in their country when they suspect wrong doing, you are naive.

3) This one is a real problem, though I wonder how it stands in other countries. I know Canada can do it as well, I haven't looked in to the laws in other countries. Many may actually allow it. The US really shouldn't, but I fear it may not be alone in this.

I bougth a copy of Tannenbaum's book (still have it), but could not afford the mag tape. Free it was not!

Bon't forget VMS (Ptrobably an off-shoot of Druidism) or RSX (modern form of Nerthe).

CPM anyone?

Here in Europe, most Christians believe, in your terms, that the picture of God as an elderly jewish gentleman sitting on a cloud (played by Orson Wells) is a useful way of anthorpomorphising nature to explain the universe to children, and a more adult belief system is, as described in John 1: (to quote a previous AC) God is Physics. Physics is God. Immutable, with no beginning or end.. In the phrase traditionally translated as "In the beginning, the word was with God, and the the Word was God" the word for "word" in the original Greek is Logos, which does indeed mean "word" but also is our modern word "logic" and means, in modern terms, "the laws of physics and maths". Additionally, the Bible teaches that the creative force that determines which of many possible transitions occur, and when (explained in science as not specifically predictable, but only statistically so) is love, and that the way to happiness is through pleasing others. These are a useful thing to know in your every day life, but not learned in Science lessons.

About 47% of Europeans think that US Republicans have yet to descend from the apes. A further 40% think they have yet to descend from pond slime.

the NSA is NOT using any of this to prosecute Americans in American courts,

Probably not - they are on good terms with GCHQ, who will have explained to them that the trick is to use this data to find out what they CAN use against you.

Well let's see, what do we use at work... Cadence. No. HFSS. No. Hyper-V. No. ADS. No.

Hmmm... Maybe not so much. There's plenty of shit that doesn't use OpenCL, but where you want speed and big memory, but there's little to no GPU use.

Also you find a lot of stuff that does GPU acceleration, wants CUDA. The research labs we have that do GPU based work are all NVidia all the time on account of CUDA.

Say, RAID-6? That's what you do for drive failures. The problem with drive failure isn't replacing the drive, but the data and the downtime.

With most workstations, this is easy, you can get a RAID controller, usually integrated on the board (Dell's PERC 710s are great) and you can knock in a bunch of drives and go. High performance, high resilience. No such luck on this new Pro.

Another option would be a good external system. Maybe a heavy hitting iSCSI or FC array. That's where you go for really high end, lots of storage, reliability, etc. Ahh well you are kinda screwed there too. No cards to add FC to the pro, and OS-X has no iSCSI initiator, which is shocking for a modern OS, Windows got it in 2003 and Linux in 2005.

Also you might want to look in to SSD failure rates. They aren't particularly high, but they aren't particularly low either. Oh, and they are workload dependent as well. I loves me some SSDs, but don't think they are rocks on which you can build your house.

This is the thing all Mac fans seem to miss: Apple often throws in expensive shit that people don't need, and would rather not pay for. You discover that with SSDs, they are pretty much all "fast enough" for most tasks, meaning they are not a significant bottleneck, if one at all. You can see this upgrading a SATA 2 SSD to SATA 3. You get twice the bandwidth, and benchmarks bear that out, but you notice no operational difference. It was already fast enough for what it is tasked with.

Even high end stuff in nearly all cases. Like streaming audio samples. SSDs are the best shit EVAR as far as those of us that play with audio samplers (NI Kontakt and the like ) are concerned. What you find is that all limits go away with regards to the drive. Want to stream 2000 voices at once? No problem, even "slow" SSDs are fast enough for that no problems.

So the "givashit" quotient on these hyper-fast SSDs is pretty low. If I was running a heavy hitting database maybe. Of course one wouldn't do that on a Mac Pro. For AV work? Nope, regular SSDs are fast enough and space is more of an issue than speed. You can do uncompressed 4:4:4 HD video on any SSD no problem. However you need 13GB/minute to hold it. So 1200MB/sec doesn't matter 225MB/sec is all you need and a SATA-2 SSD could do that. What you need is space for cheap. A comparatively slow 1TB SSD is more use than a lightning fast 250GB one.

It may well be redundant. The servers we use a lot of in our datacenter have "1500 watts" of power supply, divided in to two 750 watt units. They could be upgraded to 1100 watt units, 2200 watts total, if we needed. However, if you do actual load testing on the system, you find peak draw with the configuration we have to be about 600 watts, well under the limit (remember 750 is output, not input, and there's some loss in conversion). So what's the deal?

Reliability. The power is fully redundant. Even if heavily loaded, if one PSU fails the system will not need to throttle. It has WAY more PSU than it needs for that reason. That's also why the 1100s are available. We are running dual 8 core CPUs and 256GB of RAM. If we stepped up to something heavier hitting, 2 12s and 768GB for example, we'd have a peak load over what 1 PSU could handle and need to upgrade or lose full redundancy.

However that doesn't mean it is power hungry if it doesn't need to be. It'll draw around 120ish watts at idle, mostly due to the RAID array since that is magnetic and doesn't get spun down.

Of course I'd think most of this would be known to the kid of person who buys an enterprise workstation or server. That the Mac fans who like the pro don't tells me something.

Apple fans love to demand an "equal for equal" spec for comparisons, but that's silly. Party of the reason Macs often cost so much is you have to get a ton of shit you don't need. Ya, dual video cards cost a lot. Guess what? Next to nobody needs them. If you don't, they are wasted money. In a Dell, you just don't order one. With Apple? You get what you get and fuck you otherwise.

So they often lose out on pricing bigtime when you compare actual task needs. Like let's say I need a system with a fast CPU and reasonable bit of RAM. I want to run some Cadence (ok you can't do that on a Mac, but whatever). A fast quad core and 32-64GB of RAM. The Mac Pro is good there. However video needs are minimal, integrated graphics is fine, as is a $50 GPU. Oh, well there I'm screwed. While the dual GPUs won't hurt, they won't buy me anything either. So I'm paying for them and can't make use of them.

That is a problem, if money matters at least. You want to spend it on the useful things, and save it on the shit you don't need.

You don't need a Mac for AV work. Most stuff is cross platform, particularly the heavy hitting stuff. All the Avid stuff (Media Composer/Pro Tools) is either, Cubase is either, Studio One is either, Digital Performer is either, all the Adobe software is either, etc, etc. It is pretty much just the Apple products that are Mac only I the pro A/V arena.

I personally Use Cakewalk Sonar, which is PC only, and there have been a steady trickle of Mac people on the forums that are either wavering, or going PC for pro audio. Some are doing bootcamp and running Sonar, some are buying PCs because they find the cost to just be too much on an advantage.

They days of media being an "Apple thing" are long past. There's a lot of inertia in that area, after all if you've a setup and it works why change, but there isn't a technical hurdle. Unless you use FCP or Logic, you can most likely keep your exact same workflow, programs, plugins and all, and switch to Windows.

Also you are straight fucked if you have dedicated hardware that isn't USB/FW/thunderbolt. Have a Nitris DX? So sorry, nowhere to hook that up in the new Mac. Also no thunderbolt option (PCIe only for now) so you can't even rebuy it if you wanted to drop another $5000.

If all Apple keeps targeting are the people who want aesthetics, that may happen. After all, if you are doing music and a $1500 PC would meet your needs as well as a $3000 Mac, despite being less powerful, then maybe you decide that extra money would better go to some nice samples or the like.

Computers were developed during WW2 in the UK (Character based) for cracking German codes, and in the US for designing the Atomic bomb (numerical). The UK machines were all destroyed at the end of the war, and the development teams scattered. The individuals went on to develop machines that were oriented to business activities until the 60's when the goverment trashed the credibility of the UK efforts, while in the US, private inustry (IBM, CDC, etc) went on to sell the US government its own technology.

"it could transfer all the current from the low impedance side of the circuit to the high impedance side of the circuit"What does that even mean?? It does no such thing.

Because the first devices were junction transistors, early explanations were often around the common base configuration, in which this explanation is marginally appropriate.

My Mum was upgraded from a tube based IBM709 to a transistorised 7090 (same archtecture and instruction set) and not only was more reliable, it was also faster (when not IO bound). (1969) She now used a Macbook Pro.