Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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As of now it hasn’t his the US East Coast yet either. Eager to kick the tires.
Best,
Andy -
It will still be early 21012 for months. NAB is early in the year (first third of the year). I’ve got my monopoly money on late March to permit any cooperative third parties like AJA or Blackmagic show their wares with it at NAB.
Best,
Andy -
So are people pronouncing it “Lah-see-pug” as a shortened “Laf-see-pug” or the more phonetically correct “Lak-pug”?
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Andy -
My question would be what is the ranking criteria of the App Store? Is it an all-time ranking or just this month? Or for current versions as with ratings? Do we know?
Best,
Andy -
If you know what combination of OS and browser will work with the drive, and your drive continues to work, then you can maintain a setup that can access your data for as long as the equipment functions. You can get VMware or Parallels and run a virtual machine just for accessing the tapes with older OS/browser combinations. But eventually, your drive will stop working and replacements will be hard to come by. If you anticipate needing to get at your data many years from now, it is time to consider migrating your data to a newer format like LTO-5. LTO has a nice, clear roadmap and is supported by multiple vendors.
Best,
Andy -
[Phil Hoppes] “Apple currently runs around 3% R&D as a percentage of sales last time I looked. Assuming this works across the board that would translate to about 21M/yr for the MacPro group.”
I wouldn’t expect the R&D on the Mac Pro to be more than a fraction of the R&D of iOS, OS X, iPhones, iPads, or MacBooks. If anything, the Mac Pro requires the least R&D of any Apple product. It is largely Intel guts and the industrial design hasn’t been touched in half a decade, and even then it was a revision of the G5 case.
[Phil Hoppes] “Figure an average engineering salary around 120K/yr that roughly translates to about 175 people to support MacPro’s. My first guess is this sounds actually pretty high to me having worked in the PC industry for over 20 years but lets use that number. “
Even if we allow that your figuring of the Mac Pro R&D budget is in the ballpark, there is a lot more cost involved in R&D than salaries. There is prototyping, materials, etc. Regardless, there is no way there are 175 engineers dedicated to the Mac Pro. Or probably any Mac for that matter.
[Phil Hoppes] “The real question Tim Cook and the rest of Apple management are asking themselves I’m sure is what is the opportunity cost of having those 175 engineers working on MacPro’s where we could have them working on iPad’s, iTV’s or some other new product. When you look at just what has been done for Apple revenue because of iPad sales alone it does not take rocket science to see that there may be better product opportunities to be spending your precious R&D dollars.”
We can look to the Xserve for guidance here. We know from statements following its EOL that the Xserve was considered to small to matter and Gartner figured sales of about 40,000 units annually. So is the Mac Pro in the same boat? The Mac Pro must have a much broader market than the Xserve ever had, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still too small to succeed.
Right?
Maybe not.
What if the plan all along was to consolidate the Mac Pro and the Xserve? What if Craig’s guess at the Mac Pro’s replacement (which I fully concur with) is that consolidated product? A workstation/server hybrid box that can go in a rack but is sold as a mini tower would be just that thing. We could be wrong, but it is certainly a plausible theory.
Intel is due to finally ship the Xeon E5-26XX chips this quarter. Stay tuned.
Best,
Andy -
I kept waiting for you to go off on the guy!
Best,
Andy -
Any filesystem that lives on spinning disk can and will get fragmented. The EXT filesystem family (the most common on Linux) tries to mitigate fragmentation, but the fact that platters are spinning under heads means physics will eventually win and a very full HDD will struggle to maintain I/O performance with even the most efficient filesystem.
Best,
Andy -
Cool! Didn’t know about those.
Best,
Andy