Consequently, Apple market share is also considerably on the rise. Up to 14% now. One might say that that is an insignificant number but in a soft economy where other manufacturers are seeing less purchases, this is a real win for Apple.

Why is this case?

Now the author of one of the above articles contends that this is due to Apple’s new product lines, aggressive marketing and the whole Mac vs. Windows feud in light of “Vista.” I would argue that while those factors certainly hold true there is also the total engineering superiority of all Apple products.

With an Apple product, everything is thought through and accounted for elegantly. The ports are neatly lined up, the body of an Apple product is smooth to the touch, the best materials are chosen and the software….ohhh the software. That’s Apple’s secret sauce. MacOS X. That and the iPod. Apple has the iPod “halo effect” going on where people buy iPods and then fall in love with Apple products and eventually MacOS X, the ultra-well engineered operating system based on reliable BSD UNIX and optimized for the modern GUI-using world. They also have a sweet-heart deal with Intel to keep them on the technological edge of development.

I would assert that Apple is on their A-game with regard to market and that they are going to prove to be a juggernaut to stop. With new, innovative products like the MacBook Air constantly being churned out Apple is clearly paying attention.

I came across a deal for an Intel Server for $60.  It features a 1.26GHz Intel Pentium 3 CPU with 512k L2 cache, 1 GB of ECC memory, dual-NICs and a management port.  All-in-all, a steal.  It simply needed an IDE hard drive (or two) and some disk trays which I obtained for a mere $12/ea.  A perfect system for… OpenBSD!

I am now in the process of configuring this beast to be my replacement NATing firewall.  Its hostname will be iris.penguinmilitia.net named for the Greek goddess Iris, messenger of the Gods to humanity and the personification of the rainbow.

On Friday, Master Joe will instruct me in the art of PF under OpenBSD so we can get this thing working.

Best of luck to me!

My solution to the problem was to build a 2.5TB (RAIDed) NAS system running GNU/Linux (CentOS 5).

Here are the specs:

- Super Micro PDSLA Socket 775 Motherboard
- Intel Pentium D 805 dual-core CPU running at 2.6GHz
- 3GB DDR2 533MHz Memory
- LSI Logic Megaraid 150-6 SATA RAID controller (no software RAID for me)
- 6 Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA disks. 7200rpm, 16MB cache.
- Cooler Master 650W power supply
- Norco 4U server case with 6 internal HD bays
- Zalman CPU cooler

This system was built in August of 2007 and has served me extremely well ever since.  Disk I/O on a traditional PCI bus can be a bit slow at times but it is more than adequate.  My next upgrade to the server will be a motherboard with PCI-X (no, not PCI Express) support.

Welcome to the new blog of the über nietzschean.   I have dropped Drupal in favor of WordPress for my future blogging activities.  Although it does not support PostgreSQL much to my dismay, I am willing to accept it.

Expect many posts to come and hopefully no performance issues (MySQL, UGH).