Sun's hardware business is mostly irrelivant, and both IBM and HP are in the process of switching away from providing hardware (Especially IBM). SPARC was already mostly dead by the time that Oracle bought Sun.
The prize Oracle was after is Java, and they have already begun the long process of squeezing large enterprises with Java "commerical" features flags.
Exactly. You couldn't build OpenSolaris without proprietary blobs, the build process only worked correctly inside Sun's network, code contributions were not accepted. Under Sun the OpenSolaris project had already started to take technical decisions behind closed doors more and more (it was easy to confirm this from their bug tracking system that differentiated between public and private tickets). I dont understand why people think Sun was the open source god in the sky. Perhaps too much emotional attachment from the "good old days", but I can't relate.
6 or so years ago I thought Solaris would have a fighting chance. I was naive.
Maybe there is a startup opportunity to sell spare kidneys, and even lungs and liver-halfs too! Maybe even a cash-for-corpses business, we need to get rid of these ridiculous self-serving medical regulations. DISRUPT!
When you can grow back your kidneys, lungs, and livers, this will be a sensible extension of the idea.
I initially wanted to make this comment sarcastically, but really, if we become capable of regrowing organs within your body you could legitimately make a business case for it.
In a typical adult recipient LDLT, 55 to 70% of the liver (the right lobe) is removed from a healthy living donor. The donor's liver will regenerate approaching 100% function within 4–6 weeks, and will almost reach full volumetric size with recapitulation of the normal structure soon thereafter. It may be possible to remove up to 70% of the liver from a healthy living donor without harm in most cases. The transplanted portion will reach full function and the appropriate size in the recipient as well, although it will take longer than for the donor.
You know you make new blood, and people donate blood regularly? Apart from small slices of liver, your organs don't really regrow. You could donate/sell one of your kidneys, but we now know there are negative long-term effects of that.
Somewhat OT, but kidney donation is surprisingly low risk in the long term.
"Compared to the general public, most kidney donors have equivalent (or better) survival, excellent quality of life, and no increase in end-stage kidney disease"
I would suspect that there is a selection bias here, as a whole lot of the low end of the general health distribution would prevent you from donating a kidney, or at least make it less likely. So you'd expect them to do better than average if donation had no effect.
To know if there is an effect, you need to not compare to the general public, but to a subset similar in factors which are associated with the outcome measures to kidney donors.
You can sell plasma, can you still sell your blood in the US? I know you could on one point, but people with blood-borne illnesses shouldn't give blood, and with a financial incentive there were problems with people lying about it.
Yes. It ends up being unprofitable to buy from donors directly, but it is still legal. There is also a thriving secondary market in selling donated blood, the Red Cross for instance makes a large amount of money selling blood.
Just reverse them (so the GPUs are venting up) then have right-angle dongles (which are very Apple now) under a magic magnetic lid compartment. Or, recess them enough (increase the case height) enough that you can plug in normal DP / HDMI cables.
I like it, but it's not proprietary enough for Apple to make. They didn't come out with a single upgrade GPU for the Mac Pro dustbin design, so I doubt they care much about selling modularity or upgradability these days. Their message is clear: "upgrade" means new device, which means all the products they sell are disposable appliances.
IMO, they could open up MacOS to work on some variations of hardware and sell it for $300-$500. They would still make the nicest hardware, but since desktops and laptops obviously aren't their main focus anymore, they could still offer power users good tools to build all these amazing mobile apps on without limiting them to their current slim pickings. Hell, even just make XCode cross-platform. Even just let it run on X, and use the Windows Linux subsystem to support it.
Using two standard full-length cards is just lazy design (even if he made it a point to use standard components). The GPUs should be on boards like they are on the current MacPro and attached to the monumental heatsink. This add two fans to a design that absolutely doesn't need them. The SATA disks also seem misplaced - it should extend PCI-E storage or, even better, DIMM flash modules: big Xeons have 4 memory channels per socket, enough for letting a couple of those go to storage. Having one single bus for everything makes the machine much neater.
> The GPUs should be on boards like they are on the current MacPro and attached to the monumental heatsink
This is the exact problem with the trashcan, it's a computer made for GPU computation (one of the trashcans GPUs isn't even hooked up to the display it's purely for computation) yet you are stuck with proprietary versions of GPUs that run the wrong sort of code.
Almost the entire GPU computing community works on CUDA, the trashcan cards don't run CUDA and because they're proprietary they can't be upgraded.
The right solutions are either this design or one where there is a heatsink+liquid cooling bracket system where you can attach a GPU after taking the stock cooler off to. Which is also very common thing to do for people in GPU computing. The latter invalidates your warranty so this design actually makes sense.
Just like the designers of the current Mac Pro, you don't get it.
This design (even though it doesn't work in reality) is about creating something that is functionally like the earlier Mac Pros. That means commodity off-the-shelf hardware can be used, not just specialized or outlandish components that are going to be very expensive, if anybody bothered to produce them at all. The current Mac Pro still ships with the outdated GPUs it originally was introduced with, with no upgrade path foreseeable.
And all of the performance improvements are in the GPU space. A 2 or 3 year old CPU is not that big a deal but a 2 or 3 year old GPU? I believe it's an order of magnitude slower (or more).
You don't need a polyfill to deploy Webp. Chrome automatically sends webp in the Accept headers for images, so on the CDN level you could implement some logic to seamlessly swap in Webp images for the browsers that support it. Imgix does this for instance.
