TMH
While iWork is an elegant and better replacement for MS Office in many ways (and probably for most users,) Numbers, as cool as is is in places, is pathetic for any meaningful number crunching. Even doing a mildly mortgage comparison is more than it can handle. Maybe in another version or two, it will become acceptable.

Robomac, whether you think Macs “can run enterprise critical Apps” depends on your “enterprise” and what is “critical” to it. Macs are a solid presence in many enterprises especially Unix centric and academic/research-oriented areas (take a look at bioinformatics.)

While I’m sure they are important to you and others, none of the apps you mentioned are important to me. Obviously, the more esoteric the app, the more likely it will be limited to the platform it was originally developed on. There are often quite nice, but little known alternative SW packages available on the Mac. Options on OS X are expanding exponentially and will only continue to do so for a long time.

I too would like to see more Macs running Ansoft Designer, LINC2, Microwave Office, Matlab, LabVIEW, PADS, and other engineering apps (where I work). It just not gonna happen, man! Replacing MS Office with iWork will not cut it. What critical enterprise apps are you talking about? Oracle? DB2? SAP? What? None of those are OSX and MS Orifice is not a critical app, period.

Replacing Orifice with IWork is probably one of the best moves you can make, Orifice is a total piece of junk. Out of the software that you mentioned, Labview is the only one I recognized, and it’s available on OSX.
I do a lot of CAD work – while it’s limited TurboCAD offers great value for the cost. If you are a pro and doing a lot of heavy design work (which I’m not, I’m a salesman) Punch Shark FX is a killer package.
And that takes care of me.

Now that Win 7 will be a solid release, the enterprise will migrate from XP to 7 and not from XP to Snow Leopard unless somehow Apple managed to include the old “Red Box” idea to run .Net/Win32 apps natively. Keep in mind that many companies code some of their critical apps using Windows tools – aka .Net Visual Studio, Delphi, etc. If finance or production dept runs on custom code based on .Net or Win32 then forget Macs there, period. Unless, of course, Macs run Windows 7 on bare metal not virtualization.

In my case, that’s not an issue. Because of who and what I am, IT has to put up with what I want, not the other way around. There are advantages to being at the top of the food chain.

Honestly the last time.

All modern kernels use internal functions to “copy” information from user-mode programs. These functions can easily be given 64 bit integers. Only such calls would need to understand the 64 bit virtual memory tables or interact with the 64 bit features of the Intel chips. Because of this, the holdover of mapping user programs into the kernel address space is a minor optimization at best which can be done away with easily.

The structure of Mach, which underlies Mac OS X, probably also makes this easier, and may also make it easier to mix 32 bit drivers into 64 bit kernels, since Mach has a stronger kernel component separation model than many other Unix kernels, and makes much more use of message passing paradigms than other kernels which make more use of direct function calls.

As for user programs addressing more memory, memory is divided into physical 4K or 8K page frames. These are manipulated by the kernel and attached to file caches or virtual memory page tables through data structure manipulations. The kernel does not need to address all of physical memory through virtual addresses in order to do any of this. In the 70’s it was quite common for operating systems running on 16 bit processors to work with several megabytes of physical memory using these kinds of techniques, so this is nothing new.

It seem a bit annoying, even so, that 32 bit EFI forces use of 32 bit kernels in Mac OS X. This means that the kernel runs somewhat slower than it could, though this probably doesn’t have too many other effects.

I use an old dual G5 Power Mac for multimedia roles and it’s great. Three Mac minis power my TVs and network home server. Macbook for the wife. iMac for the kids.

See a pattern there, ‘hatter? I love Macs. Have used Macs since the Mac II and Apple IIGS as a junior high geektoid. I know Mac history and thanks to Dan’s weekly history lessons I get flashbacks.

Your opinion about the Mac’s role in the enterprise though is an illusion and a wishful thinking for you and others like our man Dan Eran.

I too would like to see more Macs running Ansoft Designer, LINC2, Microwave Office, Matlab, LabVIEW, PADS, and other engineering apps (where I work). It just not gonna happen, man! Replacing MS Office with iWork will not cut it. What critical enterprise apps are you talking about? Oracle? DB2? SAP? What? None of those are OSX and MS Orifice is not a critical app, period.

Now that Win 7 will be a solid release, the enterprise will migrate from XP to 7 and not from XP to Snow Leopard unless somehow Apple managed to include the old “Red Box” idea to run .Net/Win32 apps natively. Keep in mind that many companies code some of their critical apps using Windows tools – aka .Net Visual Studio, Delphi, etc. If finance or production dept runs on custom code based on .Net or Win32 then forget Macs there, period. Unless, of course, Macs run Windows 7 on bare metal not virtualization.

So, when Daniel proves to me that the enterprise will gravitate to OSX with the release of Snow Leopard and not Windows 7 then I will praise his Mac illusions for I too have my own opinions on tech (no just Mac) matters.