Among Servers, Apple's Mac Mini Quietly Gains Ground 367
Nerval's Lobster writes "In 2005, the first business to offer colocated Mac Minis inside a data center made its debut, provoking criticism on Slashdot of everything from how the Mini was cooled to the underlying business model. But nowadays, more than half a dozen facilities are either hosting their own Mac Minis for rent, or offering colocation services for individual consumers and businesses. While some vendors declined to give out reliability information, those who did claimed a surprisingly small number of failures. 'If Dell makes a small little machine, you don't know that they'll be making that, in that form factor, six months down the road, or what they're going to do, or how they're going to refresh it,' Jon Schwenn, a network engineer for CyberLynk Networks (which owns Macminivault) said in an interview. 'We've had three model years of Minis that have stayed externally, physically identical.' Customers are using Minis for all sorts of things: providing Mail, iCal, and the Websites for small businesses; databases, like Filemaker or Daylite; as a VPN server for those who want an IP address in the United States; build servers for Xcode; and general personal servers for Plex media streaming and other fun projects. Some are even using it for Windows."
Re:A new fad? (Score:5, Funny)
LIES! OS X is NOT UNIX. It's sorta-kinda-BSD-abomination-whatever-Mach. It's arguably a lot less UNIX than Linux, which is specifically not UNIX. The only UNIXy things about it are the GNU parts, and GNU's Not UNIX.
Just for the record, I say this not as a Windows fanboi, oh no. I say this as an IRIX hardcore aficionado. Now, I will grant you that my DateTime struct is BSD. I admit that, and I apologize for it. But the rest is Bell System V Release 4, the One True Operating System; and I can ASSURE you, my friends, that OS X is emphatically NOT SVR4!
Proof? PROOF? YOU DEMAND PROOF?!
Bring up an OS X box from bare iron. Was fdisk involved? Did you need to bootstrap the thing from sash? Did your disks have slices, not partitions? Did getty enter in to your thinking? Was tar involved? Was it gtar, because THAT DOES NOT COUNT? DO YOU HAVE A FRAME BUFFER INSTALLED, YOU FILTHY HEATHEN? 19200/N/8/1?!?!?!
Nope, none of the above. Your machine goes "bonk" when you fail to enter your home zip code so that Apple can send you valuable offers of future services. If I tried to give a real UNIX box my home zip code so that I could receive valuable offers, it would probably detonate with the fury of a thousand Hiroshimas, AND the kernel would panic.
tl;dr, GTFO my ARPAnet.
Re:becasue Apple never (Score:2, Funny)
Re:And the moral of the story is: (Score:5, Funny)
7! isn't bad, that's just over five-thousand.
Re:becasue Apple never (Score:4, Funny)