nvidia

Craig White craigwhite at azapple.com
Wed Oct 31 03:48:57 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 22:02 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 13:22 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> >> Craig White wrote:
> >>
> >>>>>> The relevance is that the Linux faithful like to regurgitate the lines 
> >>>>>> about how stable interfaces and binary drivers can't work when in fact 
> >>>>>> they work just fine and the majority of the world runs on them taking 
> >>>>>> advantage of the vendor's expertise and desire for a competitive 
> >>>>>> advantage.  Just a reality check...
> >>>>> They do?
> >>>> http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp puts Linux at 3%. 
> >>>> Somewhere I thought I saw that current sales were around 8% Mac compared 
> >>>> to the overall 3.8% though.
> >>> ----
> >>> those numbers just don't look right. I refuse to believe that Win98 is
> >>> and has been under 1% and Vista is so small.
> >> Vista has not been well accepted at the enterprise level.  Something 
> >> about changing driver interfaces, perhaps...  Microsoft has been forced 
> >> to extend their support for XP and Dell continues to offer it.
> >>
> >>> As for Macintosh sales being 8%, I haven't seen any such report...that
> >>> would be a significant increase.
> >> It is significant. They are up 34% this quarter from a year ago with the 
> >> PC market only growing at about 15%
> >> http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9801997-37.html
> >> And with Leopard they are officially Posix compliant and UNIX 03 
> >> registered.  And they have dtrace.
> > ----
> > 34% increase in Apple bluster. Article was about iPhones/iPods
> 
> Quote:
>   "Mac shipments were up 34 percent compared to last year"
----
that's still an unsubstantiated Apple claim which has no relation to
market percentage itself.
----
> > 
> > Nothing there suggested any Apple percentage of total desktop sales
> 
> Quote:
>   "It's also clear that Apple is gaining share on the rest of the PC 
> industry. Last week IDC and Gartner had the worldwide PC market growing 
> at around 15 percent, while Mac shipments are growing more than twice as 
> fast. Apple sold 2.1 million Macs during the quarter, a company record 
> and 400,000 units better than its previous best"
> 

> > Not to mention the Apple Tax so you can pay for an OS when you already
> > have an OS.
> 
> Can't argue with that, but the family pack at $199 for 5 licenses isn't 
> that bad and a reasonable tradeoff for things that "just work". How much 
> is it for one RHEL these days?  Plus it is worth something to be able to 
> legally play dvd's and mp3s.
----
You can't use the 5 pack in businesses, they are specifically excluded.
In fact, that is discriminatory pricing which really doesn't make much
sense at all.

I don't watch dvd's on my computer and used my Windows iTunes to rip my
CD's into iTunes (legally). I used Linux to rip my DVD's into m4v/mp4
format...does that make me a lawbreaker?
----
> 
> > Finally, I got my mailing from Tidbits and it seems that all is
> > definitely not rosy with Leopard
> 
> I haven't updated yet but so far I haven't heard of any showstoppers. 
> zfs didn't make it in though, which is a little disappointing.
----
showstoppers is always relative...I have to support the suckers.

http://db.tidbits.com/issue/902  This is from people who love Macintosh

I used to be vp of Apple user group...I am so disenchanted with Apple.
The way I figure things, there is little difference between Apple and
Microsoft with the sole exception being that Microsoft has enjoyed
tremendous success selling desktop and server OS's.

- They couldn't care less about businesses.
 
- Have to pay $100 annual extortion fee to get systems serviced in under
2 weeks.

- Their hardware is terrific but excessively priced (all Apple mice
excepted). In fact, all of the Apple users tossed out their Apple
'mighty mouse' in favor of cheap, Kensington optical mouse.

- Their user interface is entirely confused, ever changing,
inconsistent, disadvantaged.

- Single button mouse, finder that continually morphs. 

- Sherlock has continually sucked. Dock sucks. Top Menu bar sucks. Worst
thing about Macintosh...users have to be told where their files are
saved - incredible.

- They've done nothing to further development of OpenOffice.org
software.

- LDAP automount of home directories requires - of all things...an
unauthenticated initial connection to the Linux server via AppleTalk
(yeah, I compiled AppleTalk kernel module), and installing updates
(10.4.x) shuts AppleTalk off and users can't mount their home
directories until I log in as Administrator, turn AppleTalk back on and
then log off again...perpetual beta. Probably not much hope that they've
changed this on Leopard but I am not encouraging them to update at this
point either.

Hardly surprising that a whole bunch of updates have already come out
for Leopard...perpetual beta

The last 4 new Mac's that my office brought in took 3.5 hours to
download and install updates onto shipped OS (time included 2 restarts).

Craig




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