Slashdot Mirror
Return of the Mac
Ben Gutierrez writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay on the Return of the Mac which begins with: 'All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.' Tim O'Reilly said some similar things in Watching Alpha Geeks . From the article: "My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get."
That said... BSD is dy^H^Hthriving.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since around 1993 I've been messing with Unix. SCO, Slackware (1.0-ish), RedHat (pre 4.0...on Sparc!), Caldera, Irix, SunOS, etc.... both in userland, on the desktop, on my own servers, and a professional sysadmin.
I've got a mac now. The first of my life, from someone who wasn't ever a mac guy (and was probably more 'anti-mac' than most.) My g/f has one too -- more than once I was like 'just open a terminal and do....'
The fact that she doesn't need to know what the terminal.app is? That's the best part..... I get what I need, she gets what she needs.
In other news, open source fanatics dislike Microsoft.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
...as this is the first time I read slashdot on my new Mac Mini.
You can.
Albuquerque PC
I would switch if games didn't come out until a year after the PC version does.
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
This was said in the early 90's, the mid 90's, the late 90's, the early 2000's and now again. Till Apple has 5% of the market it's rather pointless. Never the less, till they open the OS to the rest of the planet, it's going to be just where it is. And by open the OS, I mean the WHOLE OS, not something I can get from FreeBSD...
It's UNIX-based! What hacker doesn't want something that uses UNIX. Besides... Linux is sooooooo 90s.
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
The Mac fashion hits the geek crowd!
get a g3 ibook. runs all but the greediest of os x apps just fine and i picked one up from a guy at work fro $100....they go for about 3-400 on ebay.
no i have not shot my gun in the air and gone 'Ahh!'
Last year's Usenix conference was full of Powerbooks. Most of the top dogs in the industry. That prompted me to buy a PowerMac. It's the best computing decision I've ever made.
What's your point? I don't like Dell laptops... IBM sold their laptop division to some no-name, can't be yet trusted for quality company over seas... what's that leave us? Yes, Powerbooks... they're great hardware... I'm not a Mac lover... but I have had to work on PPC hardware, and I do like the power it has over similiar x86 based laptops... and OSX is a nice unix environment with a pretty shell... now if the powerbooks still had OS9 on them, there would be no way I would buy one...
That's the seller, an OS that's stable and powerful, on hardware that's powerful... Less to do with it being Apple, more to do with being better than Dell and HP and the rest of the crap out there.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
well that accounts for 0.0000001% of the worlds population, whooo revolution, in your face Amiga !!!
Self-righteous Apple fanboys in one corner.
Foaming-at-the-mouth Linux zealots in another.
This could get ugly, folks. I'm sure the *BSD crowd would chime in too, except that a judge recently orderd the feeding tube to be removed.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
at least at my university, it seems as if apple have changed their image. No longer for graphic designers - it's for people who wanna 'get stuff done' with their computers
Also, their laptops are pretty much class dominant, and compare favourably on price with the high-end thinkpads in the powerbook range.
Business Voyeur
But it's true - all my friends form Unix/Linux years who can afford it buy Macs. Especially Powerbooks.
I have an iBook, and love it, however I run Linux on it, Gentoo before, Ubuntu currently. All funcitions are supported, it's a perfect match in my opinion. Ppl that gripe "why would you run Linux instead of OSX, OSX is BSD!" just don't understand the diff, and that's fine, OSX is a fine OS for most, but for me Linux is the only way to go to have complete freedom.
bo
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
ha! troll'd!
I'm sure we'll see a sharp decline in the number of ingenious hacks out there as these developers spend their days holding shift and watching expose in slow motion.
Maybe they are just tired of x86 and Mac is a good way to get a good power pc based computer.
That statement would defintely hold more water if they actually had numbers from five years ago to compare to. Even though their site didn't exist five years ago, maybe check out a similar site that DID exist way back then...
Please this argument is old and false.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Get a girlfriend. Girls like Macs. Borrow girlfriends computer when you need to test your code on a Mac.
Oh that's why "all the best hackers" are buying Macs. They've finally resigned themselves to never having a girlfriend.
Boring article really...
My favorite part of his essay:
"If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing."
Seriously, this guy lives in fantasy land. It's been a long long time since universities have done anything that has influence the software industry.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
FEOM
Something tells me that Paul Graham and his friends are getting close to their fiftieth birthday and have lots of money to spare... They are probably already feeling their age which explains why they can't be bothered with systems that require more tinkering.
I welcome our Mac overlords...
I have worse karma than M$.
As someone who works in operating systems let me just be the first to say no. We're sitting at 92% Linux in a 300 person lab.
Anecdotes do not statistical surveys make. "Everyone I know" indeed.
they heard statiscally their chances of women approaching them goes up 5% when they're using a powerbook.
Then it's a good indication that others will follow.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Before everyone starts to flame me, let me be more specific.
If there was a sub-500usd new mac (that is including monitor, mouse and keyboard), probably I could fork over the cash for one...
But lets be honest, if I can get an AMD system with a 15inch LCD screen, Sempron 2200 proc, and half a gig of ram for about 450usd, how am I gonna convince my wife that I should buy a 600usd mac mini, plus 250usd for the monitor, plus the keyboard and the silly one button mouse?
Any ideas?
No sig for the moment.
with the design of OS X and it's grandparent OS, FreeBSD, why wouldn't they switch?
If it can perform almost anything the old OS can perform but with the polish and graphical wizardy apple has shown in OS X, plus with the support of using a now "semi-mainstream" Operation System.
Linux is still a viable option, but seriously.. how often do you hear of people with Macs running linux instead of OS X now? How is support doing for non x86 Linux these days?? Saw it coming
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I'm at university, and I know a lot of computer scientists (particularly of the theoretical sort) and scientists of various other disciplines around here that love OS X. Just like using a functional language like Lisp versus using assembly, using OS X takes some of the responsibility for mundane, largely unnecessary tasks out of your hands and frees you to do the computing work that you need to do.
Sure someone well versed in systems or operating system design would be able to get more out of Linux if they took the time to optimize it, but most "hardcore hackers" I know around here sure don't have that sort of time.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
I haven't seen people making the server switch... only using Macs as fileservers for Mac-heavy networks. I'm not aware of any large businesses using them, nor popular websites outside of Apple.
Obviously there are some clusters of them that make the news all the time. I'm not trying to troll, just wondering if there's a future for Xserve beyond niche markets.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
seems like geeks are dumping linux for mac, while windows retains its marketshare. which makes sense since os x has the one thing linux lacks ... a good desktop.
at this years Networkshop (Academic Network event hosted by JANET) about 50% of the laptops were Apple Powerbooks. Last year there were about 2 powerbooks total. This is a direct effect of 1)OSX now being mature 2) OSX being based on BSD - and more OS tools running on it - and finally 3) being able to 'just work' without spending a large portion of your admin time patching the damn system.
Most /. advocacy seems to stem from the following:
Macs aren't Microsoft (unless you used Word or something on them)
You can install Linux on them (not that you can't even an electric toothbrush these days)
They were an underdog, which made those really cool Apple ][ computers back in the day (some of us have the emulators installed on our PC's and still fiddle with them.)
They had a sense of style, which the monolithic PC companies still can't seem to get (PC's, seen them lately? Was Dell/HP styling inspired by pinching a loaf?)
They were evolving, which always inspires some hope.
did I miss anything?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"...and grandmas who were buying Macs..."
Now i know what to ask when Christmas comes around!
"Never trust a computer you can not throw out of a window..."
I can't help you with the solid gold house, but I do have some liver and onions if you like. ...heeey... Aren't you the guy I gave a plate of blintzes to to paint my fence?
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Quit being a fucking elitist.
... the weekly "the Mac is Back" post.
Does this need to be reinforced?
I used to have 3 or 4 computers to be able to do everthing I needed, and now I have "The ONE"
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Dinosaur Jr. Are back! dinosaurjr.com
I noticed this trend (geeks switching to OS X) a few years ago. Most of the alpha geeks at Seattle Wireless were using iBooks around 2002. At that point, I knew Apple had a bright future ahead. Not only have I switched my main computer to a 12" PowerBook, but I also invested in AAPL stock. Now most of my roommates have iPods, more than half have PowerBooks, and the rest want a PowerBook. Many of my friends are switching, and it will be only a matter of time before lots of the general population does as well.
Thank you for the only sensible response I have received so far...
No sig for the moment.
I am not a Mac fanboy by any means but they are awesome machines. I think the O'Reilly article missed the point in his article though. The reason people are switching to macs is that you can do those things like office apps that windows machines are a little more useful for and can run a lot of very powerful Unix apps just by hitting a line command. Of course Macs have their downsides too but there a lot of damn good reasons for the switching in the article.
I would say if you have to make a choice between wife and cool mac os x - you are in wrong boat already.
He said one, not half of one.
'All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.'
Then why isn't Openstep more popular? Is it that if you have a Mac you don't need it? Or is it because most of the 'switchers' are recent converts, and Openstep will pick up in popularity for their non-Apple systems later?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Maybe all the hackers are just tired of calling their kids because the internet is broken again.
I can afford 20 Macs, but I still won't buy one.
Linux remains the favorite.
Here's the obligatory rebuttal. You're forgetting the software. You can put Linux on it for free, but you're not getting nearly the user experience you get with a Mac. Or you can pay for Windows and the software that runs on it. That will bring up the cost of that $450US system. Still, not the same user experience. With a Mac, it's the compete system your paying for, not just the hardware.
Cepstral: Quality TTS for OS X, Linux, Windows
The article concentrates on hackers liking the features that Apple adds to the modern Mac, but how many of the programmers and power users jumping ship from Wintel (or WAMD) machines are doing this because of BSD? The main reason I got my Mac Mini was because it is smaller than the Linux server I use right now so it's easier to deal with. I might eventually use it as a Mac client machine rather than as a server once I figure out how to set up my media system, but right now it's just another *nix box to me. Apple really did the right thing by loading OSX with a ton of developer tools and allowing the community to do much of their work for them.
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Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
> It's not enough to make it "open." It has to be open and good.
Its simply just good at being better than everything else.
Oh come on now, they're only about 1.5 times the price of a generic PC based laptop. The quality of the system and OS is well worth the premium price you pay. If you want to gripe about something then gripe about the fact that the hardware seems to be hard as hell to upgrade. I was looking into what it would entail to replace my iBook's 30GB hard drive with a new 80GB drive and it seems like you have to practically take the entire thing apart including dozens of screws (phillips and hex). It's pretty daunting to say the least. The process to replace the hard drive on my Dell Inspiron however is to remove a single phillips screw, slide out the drive tray, replace the drive, slide the tray back in, screw the screw back in and voila. I really really wish Apple would include this nice feature in their next revision of the powerbooks. The other thing they really need to consider adding is modular bays. I should be able to slide out my DVD drive for a second battery for example like I can with my Dell. These are my two biggest gripes with Apple. Sure, I can add an external firewall drive, but that kind of negates the point of a laptop. ;-)
At Higher Education conferences like the ones that eduCause and Internet2 host, the amount of Mac laptops has gone from around 20% to 60-70% in recent years. I switched after using a Thinkpad with Linux for years. The fact that it can be put to sleep and wake up properly (something that seemingly nobody can get working reliably under Linux), and can easily work with projectors without editing a configuration file sealed the deal for me.
Damn one button mouse though, I wish Apple would just give up on that.
Finkployd
> Last year's Usenix conference was full of Powerbooks.
This is an example of Principle of Similarity and Principle of Social Proof including "The Number of Sources" Effect.
> Most of the top dogs in the industry.
This is an example of influence using authority, including High Status
> That prompted me to buy a PowerMac.
Aha! The requested target action!
> It's the best computing decision I've ever made.
Principle of Consistency
p.s., I'm not mocking you. I just noticed a bunch of statements that match the midterm I have Thursday night. Thus, this post counts as "studying"
p.p.s., I love my PowerBook
p.p.p.s., Please note, reading the above post qualifies you to place out of a graduate level Consumer Behavior marketing class.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The hardware is beautiful. It's well thought out, well laid out, lasts forever (battery wise and durability) and *gets girls to come over to your table look at it*. The alternative, at least for laptops, is IBM... at twice the price.
Now they even have a working scroll implimentation (which was a crippling omission, my NEC had a scroll stub for ~3 years before Apple thought of something).
And yes, your brand new very pretty computer will work well with Linux just fine, so there seems to be little downside at all*.
*Apart from lack of 3D card support, and for some reason Apple use crappy propriatery 802.11g cards with no Linux drivers. Mystifying.
Beep beep.
I just switched back to Mac after a 9 year hiatus. They really are sweet machines.
So these guys are already maclovers, driven away from their favourite platform by the suckyness and unsecure future of System 7,8 and 9. Now, with OSX actually making the Mac a rather nice, geek- and user-friendly system, they return to the system they've been pining for ever since they left "home". Not surprising.
Lemon curry???
I just recently switched. I traded a couple of old thinkpads straight across at a local computer surplus store (ironically enough, called "computer surplus"). This is truely the best "expreience" I've had with an OS. I've used Linux for about 10 years almost exclusively, and now here I am. An apple guy. From what I understand Taco uses an Apple now, as does Linux himself (although he runs linux on it, expect more stable releases for PPC from now on).
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
It's official: Mac zealots will do anything to silence any criticism of their little darling.
Thank You Apple for bringing Power within reach of the common man!
All the glory of UNIX (esp. bash) with *MODERN HARDWARE* support (after 4 years, my netmd still won't work, and after 6 months, neither will my m-audio sound card).
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
My kid brother can aforde a mac mini on lunch money...
Tell your kid brother that I and all my geeky friends would like our lunch money from the last six months back, uh... please?
- DVI video (no VGA)...didn't PC folks always mock Macs for having non-standard video ports?
- no floppy drive...ditto
- monitor that rotates into "portrait" mode...instant flashback to old Mac "PageMaker" displays (with SCSI monitor cables!)
- all-black look (NextStation, anyone?)
- borderless form-fitting keyboard (IIgs!)
- nary a PS/2 port
- LCD-only monitor option
Now, I'm not saying that any of these things are new to Dell/Wintel, or that Apple necessarily invented them. But they are all attributes which were at one time commonly associated with Apple, and they're now part of our default corporate Dell configuration.It's a weird world.
(Disclaimer: I have Windows & OS-X boxen at home.)
I bought an iBook to try out OS X, "cos I can always put Linux on it if I don't like it".
Needless to say, 18 months later I'm still running OS X and I'm actually getting stuff done, not recompiling the kernel, trying in vain to get my modem working, or trying to get some source code to compile which I just pulled in from SourceForge CVS.
Talking about the hardware, Macs are what everyone would desire from a computer (especially laptops). Instant start up with "Sleep" function , battery that lasts at least 3 hours, a really good warranty, latest technology available (firewire, bt, 11g, etc.), and the list goes on..
and then there is the software part: Mac Os X is great both for hackers and for novice users, that is to say that you don't need to spend time to learn how to do "desktop stuff" and you can concentrate on the "dirt work".
Thank you Steve
i got a powerbook because of 2 reasons. I needed a laptop and osx is based somewhat on BSD. I have the terminal where all my familiar utils live ( I'm an engineer and use linux at work) and a nice interface for all the gui inclined applications plus it's stable,fast, and secure. Since then, I have bought an airport express to stream music to my sterio and an ipod mini (my car got broken into and my radio stolen so instead of replacing it i just got an ipod). It never ceases to amaze me how apple products JustWork(tm) with each other. I'm fighting the urge to buy a mac mini and complete my transformation to apple fanboydem.
:shrug: they shouldn't make such good products then maybe i wouldn't buy them.
I suppose i'm apple's wet dream of a customer
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
"You know what this is.
Yo' bitch chose me."
http://imdb.com/title/tt0070350/
Did anyone else notice that Robert Morris is a principal with Y Combinator ?
Interesting, to say the least.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
I was at CodeCon this year and almost everybody had Mac laptops.
However, I disagree that this portends a wave of Mac specific software. Hackers are using these computers to write cross platform software that will run on the whole range of free Unix systems, the BSDs, and Linux. They're not writing in Objective C or putting in Mac specific code, because they know that limits their audience to the few percent who have Macs.
They get the benefit of a good looking, easy to use development platform while developing code that can run anywhere (except Windows). It's the best of both worlds.
This is true for me as well. The only thing keeping me from switching to Mac or Linux are the games. It's really kind of depressing that those platforms don't have better support, and even if they did I'd still want backwards compatibilty for all the titles I still play from the 486-era and up.
I would actually pay money for an OS that had the compatibiliy of Windows but let me do what I wanted with it.
In other news, "its 78 degrees outside".
C'mon. OSX is way better than their other crap OS's, how many times do we have to concede this? Old news.
Why pay $250 for a 15-inch monitor? Why get a one-button mouse?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I run Linux myself, but certainly do I crave the Apple iLife experience...
No one here in my country (name withheld to avoid further spamming) pays for windows, thought... piracy runs rampant...
No sig for the moment.
"'All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs."
"All the best..." originally switched from their respective platforms to Linux. Now that Linux is popular (with all that, that brings), they're switching to Macs (or you could say that indirectly they're switching to BSD). Kind of validates the BSD philosophy.
If I had +10 Troll, I'd use it.
This argument is a bunch of crap. The Mac Mini is a Mac. $499 isn't going to break the bank. How many of you have blown way more than that on x86 parts alone? You can pick up an older G3 on eBay for next to nothing these days.
Who the hell marked this as "Insightful?" You turkey!
But, as enjoyable as those debates are, I just want to make a point about one thing Graham said:
I think this is only very slightly true, or maybe it depends on your definition of "ordinary". To me, "ordinary" implies "total newbie." Not to mean that in a negative way, it's just how it is.Most people in this world don't care quite as much about computers and tech as much as we do (gasp! - sacrilege!). Sad but true.
So honestly, I can't see the vast majority of "ordinary people" wanting to learn any of the things that people like /.ers would enjoy, like programming for instance.
Your average Joe is *not* going to be a stylin' C++ wizard in 10 years. He's going to be using fancier machines than we're using now, of course, but he's going to want to have stuff that works without knowing HOW or WHY it works. That's how it's always been, and I can't see that changing.
I predict that the eventual slowing down and then stopping of the ipod's dominance will result in less mac users again... this feminine industrial design/ipod thing will run its course and then I think we will see the users migrating less.
I bet you also voted for whoever your favorite actor told you to.
Sheep. Baaaaaaa! B-a-a-a-a!
I work at a development house that makes network security products. Three years ago there were a couple people with powerbooks running OS X. Today it is about half of the company. Last week a senior developer was talking to me about our latest hire. He's an experienced, professional coder. It had taken him a week to get the thinkpad we gave him up and running the Linux distro of his choice and configured to work with all our servers and testbeds. Thats 40-60 hours of work gone. How many powerbooks could we have bought him with a corresponding amount of cash. He was considering mandating powerbooks for all new hires unless they had a good reason to use something else.
OS X is making some huge inroads into the computer security field. It has certainly gained a huge amount of penetration here in just 3 years. Even some of the the managers have switched after looking over a developer's shoulder for a bit. You'd never guess Apple had a 5% market share from a walk around this office.
I was in the market for a new laptop.
Intention was to get a *nix machine.
Looked at the tuxedo iBook (toilet seat days).
Configured a Dell to as near as possible identical.
Price difference $50. (Favor Dell)
Bought the Mac. (Less loose hardware, PCMCIA etc.)
First, you have an ibook wich are not meant to be upgraded.
:)
The
power book line is user serviceable in this manner, the bottom comes off with a few screws and the HDD is right there.
On the g3 powerbooks (the best they ever made) the HDD, and RAM are right under the KB and are easy to get at, AND it has modular bays that can be for drives or TWO Batteries at once (for up to 9hrs of bat life)
Still... the ibook does suck to upgrade, but it can be done!!
ONLY 1 1/2 times more expensive? That is quite a bit more expensive. I was thinking of buying a Mac, but I have a friend that spent about $2000 on a G5 and it would choke after loading about 10 or 15 VSTs in Cubase SX. My PC that I bought well over a year ago (which cost around $2000 also) can handle the same VSTs fine.
So as much as I want a Mac, it does cost quite a bit more to get a comparable system.
Everyones starting to use Macs. They're the next cool thing. And they're so much easier to use! In a few years, Apple will own the personal computer market.
You can pick just about any year in the last 20 and somebody somewhere was making this observation.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
Ive been thinking about "switching", but when I looked at what replacing my current hardware with *like* hardware, I was horrified. A laptop configured like my current laptop was about $3200 (I paid 1500$ for mine). Desktops were more humane but still out there. I guess I cant afford yuppie-shic :)
Also, apple seems increasingly like Microsoft, with the anticompetitve behaviour (suing journalists for instance). It seems to me Apple wants to be the next Microsoft, the cluetrain hasn't made enough stops at Apple yet (read the cluetrain manifesto). Im not jumping ship on Linux for a more restrictive enviornment. I want OGG on an ipod :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
And a rocket car!
He's not one of those turkeys that rushed out to buy a Sidekick II just because "Paris Hilton has one."
:P
Or is s/he? Hrm...
Hey OP, got a Sidekick II?
Odds are you already own a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The keyboard and mouse are USB, and the monitor output requires a $20 dongle. The machine itself is $499, and the dongle kicks the price up over $500, but it's still close.
That of course assumes you're retiring some computer recent enough to have a USB keyboard and mouse, a computer which is still probably usable for most purposes. So it may take another two or three years before it's time for a new computer for you. At that time you can get a brand-new keyboard and brand-new mouse and brand-new monitor, or you can increase the Wife Acceptance Factor by claiming you're saving a few hundred bucks by reusing the old pieces.
Monitors in particular haven't improved much lately. You probably even have a CRT sitting around gathering dust. Unless you have a particular sensitivity, remember that people used CRTs for years without too many ill effects. LCD screens were a luxury until really recently.
Welcome to 2005.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
Return of the Mack http://www.anysonglyrics.com/lyrics/m/markmorrison /returnofthemack.htm
"If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing." Uh huh. The last time I checked my mom wasn't running a linux box.
I love my PowerBook. I bought it about 3 weeks ago and it's awesome. I was a staunch Gentoo user, and I still have a fondness of it. But, I got sick of having to spend a lot of time making things work. Can't say how long it took to get dual display to work right in KDE (and I still never figured out the blank virtual terminals I got due to the nvidia driver! grrrr) Things just work in Mac, and I haven't sacrificed any usability. The prompt works great. My profs are all switched from Linux to Mac OSX, and I will recommend to everyone I know to do the same. Hackers or beginners alike. It's an awesome OS. Can't wait for Tiger! Grr.
Ya know, if you're going to buy the mouse seperately, there's no reason you have to get a one-button mouse. Despite what you may be told, Macs DO INDEED SUPPORT mice with more than one button, thanks.
.. because there aren't any good GAMES!
I'm no Mac fan, but you're an idiot. $299 w/ keyboard, mouse, monitor and speakers? Most monitors alone cost $299. Even if you slapped the absolute crappiest parts together you would be hard pressed to make a profit off a $299 computer.
But iBooks are ugly. Powerbooks don't look like a cheap toy.
By using whatever monitor (and keyboard and mouse if they're usb) you already had, and getting the 1.25Ghz mini for $499 instead of the 1.42Ghz for $599.
And if you don't want a one button mouse, then don't buy one. Multi-button wheel mice work fine on macs, and don't even need drivers for the first few buttons and wheel.
I find it really absurd that after years and years of people clamoring for a low priced bare bones mac, now that apple has released one, many of the same people are now whining that the mini in fact *is* a low priced bare bones mac.
Just what I have been saying on Slashdot for years:
Macs Rule, PC's Suk.
So, I was a die hard Windows user, been that way since 3.0 (3.11 and 2k were my favorite releases), but 18 months ago I switched to Linux (first SuSE and more recently FC3). And now I'm thinking of a PowerBook.
Leaving Windows wasn't a problem, but sticking with Linux is. Sure it's very fast on my machine, and I have all the familiar Unix tools from the GNU chain, but so much doesn't work right. Linux on the desktop is close to a joke. I've tried both GNOME and KDE and neither is bug free (cf. Win2K which was very, very stable), and there are so many hardware incompatibilities that it's a pain.
Ultimately, I want to support F/OSS, but I may have to switch because it's a productivity drain for me to discover that gnome-panel has crashed something and now Evolution can't open the File dialog. Ugh. Or figure out why gaim's icon disappears in the tray some of the time, or have gdesklets eat the CPU for no apparent reason, or...
John.
I can get an on-site service contract for IBM gear here no problem but Apple (Siemens) will only show up if you're within 100 miles of ~ 10 major US cities.
That's a deal breaker for local businesses, even those who use Mac desktops.
Too bad - Tiger Server is nearly what I turn Linux boxes into but you have to run your business on hardware you can support.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
you can put Linux on it for free, but you're not getting nearly the user experience you get with a Mac.
Some of us would consider that a good thing! Running Slackware 10.1 with Fluxbox here and I couldn't be happier. We have a handful of Macs at work and I dread having to use them. OSX suffers from even more chrome and stupid gimmicky visual crap than the default dreaded WinXP desktop.
If Macs float your boat then more power to you but realize that for some of us Macs just make us cringe.
Please note that the Mac Mini isn't really usuable at the $499 price point. A bump to 512mb is required and I don't think I would own one without a superdrive.
Powerbooks are very pricey. Worse the superdrive is a $150.00 option on most of them which further increases the pricing.
The key issue is relevance. People will have a hard time swallowing the price of any MAC when they can see a similar looking and peforming machine running windows for a lot less; in some cases half.
I priced a 15" powerbook recently with a superdrive and the cost was over $2100.00. While the OS is technically superior to Windows that does not excuse the cost. I am curious which major manufacturer actually makes the powerbooks.
On a side note instead of a mac mini I would recommend a iMac to people new to the mac experience. The all in one, comes with all needed items, is a much better option.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Nope.
Daily Apple Love-in.
Or you can pay for Windows and the software that runs on it. That will bring up the cost of that $450US system.
Dell sells $299 all-inclusive systems with Windows and WordPerfect included. Try again.
-mkb
What's the ratio of Linux/*BSD-praising stories to Mac-praising stories again? Slashdot is a Linux/*BSD advocacy site if anything - if we're solely to count the knee-jerk reactions of story descriptions, that is.
Paul's a little late coming to the Mac table. The trend of 'hackers' moving towards Macs/Powerbooks was very evident a couple of years ago at OSCON 2003 where it seemed that almost half of the attendents had Powerbooks.
Wow. You are awesome. Just incredible. You use your current computer WITHOUT a mouse, monitor and keyboard? Wow. Can you bestow your super powers on us mere mortals?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
the choice of the uninformed. "gimme my IBM back!" "no... i enjoy your suffering and you need to learn to support apples" -the next day- "hey , i figured out how to make this thing useful. i'm installing linux on it." "no! that's not why you have it! you're supposed to learn to support them!" "i did. i just couldn't figure out how to make it a useful business appliance... until now." seriously, this has been the worst computing experience of my life. i've never had a more useless laptop. the list of things i hate goes on and on. and then "based on BSD" lie isn't nearly enough to convince me to switch. especially since it's "based on BSD" like windows XP is "based on DOS." these last three months have actually made me appreciate windows more... which is sad, since i haven't owned a windows machine in years. the apple nuts will no doubt flame me for this, but that's ok. i think differently than you do... or maybe it's just that i think at all.
Linux is not Windows
The 1.25Ghz mac mini is sold here for the equivalent of 600usd, just to clarify...
No sig for the moment.
On Linux and Windows, I can use OpenOffice.org but I hear the Mac version of OpenOffice is not usable.
Would I have to buy (MS) Office software for the Mac? /Mark
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Apparently the engineering group at Mirapoint (http://www.mirapoint.com) has switched to Powerbooks. 3 out of 7 of in my systems engineering group have Powerbooks, including this one. The others are interested but are hoarding cash.
If we can get ActiveX controls implicated on some Terrorist Watch List, I'd have much much less use for Windows at work. If I can kick my gaming addictions, I could lose Windows completely.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
"Seriously, this guy lives in fantasy land. It's been a long long time since universities have done anything that has influence the software industry."
Seriously it's been a long time since the software industry listened to academia...and it shows.
Along with Apple.
yeah. right.
Lisp is dead.
The computer section at Barnes and Noble is dead.
And Apple's making a big comeback?
Is to have Paul Graham say that "Hackers prefer "
Solid gold house might not be too confortable. ever touched something 24k? Not a pretty picture.
Where I work, we have one hard core Mac user. He convinced 6 people to try out Mac's. It was a mix of mini-Mac's and powerbooks, and only one kept it more than a month before taking it back. Personnally, I haven't tried one out yet as running Linux with Fluxbox as the WM just rocks, plus the whole OSS ( GPL ) philosophy is something I don't want to compromise on ( assuming I would be running OS X, and not Linux on the Mac ).
These guys ( and gal ) are all security engineers with CISSP/etc certs whose job is to protect the company's assets ( which are 90% digital, billions a year ), so I would say they're pretty l337, too.
Anyhow, I didn't want there to be some rosy picture of everyone switching to Mac's when that is not the case I think it is a strong trend just like Java applets, dot coms, and other fads once were, but how long will it last?
On the other hand, I haven't seen anyone who was unhappy with their iPod or miniPod.
I can't afford a sig!
..how am I gonna convince my wife that I should.. - why, refuse her sex for a change! *smirk*
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Gainful employment is reserved for the elite now? Wow, the American dream really HAS died.
That was classic intercourse!
You are joking, right? Perhaps he was a little off in suggesting that universities are trend-setters, but your comment is far more uninformed.
Clearly you're not aware that many of the technologies that you take for granted originate in CS research. For example, the work that Larry Page and Sergey Brin did at Stanford gave us Google. . I'm realibly informed that they have some influence in the industry these days, no?
Three years ago I bought a Powerbook, my main environment before then was Debian on a desktop (running KDE). Although I certainly enjoyed my mac, and it did get the job done, in the end the incredible lag in hardware (in portable systems) has led me back to Linux.
The sad thing is that three years later, my powerbook (G4 800) isn't really all that much slower than the top of the line powerbooks today. On the other hand, for half the price I bought a new laptop that is as thin, runs a resolution that blows away my old mac and is at least 3-5 times faster. (HP NC8230)
Linux on the desktop has come a long way since I left, and I must admit I'm thoroughly enjoying Gnome, especially hacking away on the new, very excellent Mono apps now coming out. (F-Spot even at it's young age beats iPhoto in my book)
I'm really flabbergasted at just how good the desktop now is on Linux. One huge contributing factor to that is Firefox, three years ago all we had was an aging Netscape that was horrid. Thunderbird also fills the roll for a great e-mail client. Good old emacs is my editor of choice (with a dab of Eclipse running at warp speed compared to my powerbook) and having the source for my photo viewer makes life so much better.
In short, my predicting is that the pendulum is going to swing the other way again, Mac portable hardware is no longer cutting edge by any regard, and the Linux desktop is now fantastic.
I can honestly say I'm not missing Mac OS X one bit.
-Nic
The Smart use *nix
The elite use a Mac!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I've been a Windows user for as long as I can remember, but I recently switched to a Powerbook. I'm currently a Graduate student working on my Masters of Computer Science and my thesis advisor had a powerbook. He got me really excited, and I started noticing that the majority of faculty in our CS department have macs as well.
After making the switch, I couldn't be happier. I'll never go back.
yeah, like the MIT compsci people want to to eat the Berkeley dog food when they have their own exokernel project?. Just cos' the powerPC is more power efficient don't mean you get more bang per buck than an x86 arch, only more bang per watt.
Soundproofing Acoustics noise
Tell her that the Mac Mini goes with the look of the house, and that the generic PC comes in a big, ugly beige box.
Tell her about iLife: iMovie HD, iDVD, iPhoto, Garage Band, iTunes (but you can get that one for Windows). Quicken, and Appleworks, too. That $450 PC includes what software?
Remember that the Mac Mini includes a ATI Radeon 9200 video chipset with its own dedicated 32 MB RAM, and a slot-loading DVD Player/CD-RW drive. Those are all extras on the PC...
...hackers everywhere heard muttering
"It's a UNIX system; I know this..."
When you think about it, Macs really are the BMW of computers. They're classy, expensive, reliable, have good resale value, and are bought for unappreciative kids with rich parents. Some people will hate on you for owning one, but they're really just jealous.
Who said anything about buying one every month?
You're the stupid prick that claims to want one. If you want one, earn some money and buy one you lazy twat.
That was classic intercourse!
This trend may finally give Apple an opening in the business world. A very common objection to using Macs in the workplace is "We only know how to support PCs." By "subverting" the techies themselves, they are influencing the people the decision-makers will consult for the next upgrade cycle. It may still be true that nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft/IBM/etc, but at least Apple will be considered a real possibility now.
Most PC users don't care about style, they care about price/performance. It's silly to assume that a company like Dell can't afford to hire industrial designers just as good as any who work for Apple. There's just no ROI in doing it because Apple is "cool" and Dell isn't.
It just turns out that being "cool" is less profitable in the personal computer market.
Do you have any sort of justification for your totally made up numbers? You couldn't cover the R&D for OS X and iLife for $199. You also couldn't get much of a monitor for less than $100.
Want to buy a $200 computer? Knock yourself out. Stop whining about how 'expensive' the mini is. Hell, Steve could bring one to your house and offer you a blowjob, and it still wouldn't be cool enough for you...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I'd love to get a new Mac, but then I go to the store and check out the prices.
Holy mother of god, there's no way I would plop down $1500 for a powermac when I could get an equivilant PC for 2/3 of the price (With decent components).
Why the heck are Apple's so expensive?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Thank you slashdot for posting every single paul graham essay as he posts it each week. I thought you might miss one and I was worried. I cannot get by without my "true hackers do this" or "a hacker should do that" from the oracle that is Paul Graham, creator of the Yahoo Store, truely the most ingenious invention of the past century.
A quick trip over to http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore/ shows a 17" PB loaded with
1GB DDR333 SDRAM - 2 SO-DIMMs
100GB Ultra ATA drive @ 5400rpm
8x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
AirPort Extreme Card
Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
AppleCare Protection Plan for PowerBook
1.67GHz PowerPC G4
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (128MB DDR)
17-inch TFT Display
Model include scrolling trackpad capability, AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth 2.0 + Enhanced Data Rates, Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS), two USB 2.0 ports, Mini-DVI-to-VGA or DVI-to-VGA adapter, and 56K modem (v.92).
Subtotal $3,198.00
This what you got for $1,500?
Nahh ... they're talking about POWERBOOKS here: the Mini is still for grannies, designers and other "undesirables"
/me jealous
Heh -
isn't so much the Linux to Mac switch. That's not a very big jump, especially with OSX being Unix-based.
The big thing is the Windows to Mac switchers and, more importantly, the role that the iPod plays in influencing that switch.
Windows users who buy an iPod to use on their Windows machines end up getting a slight taste of what it's like to use a Mac. iTunes is presented in the OSX GUI style, and the iPod itself is a fine example of Apple's signature simplistic beauty.
Once their curiosity has been raised and they see the almost cult-like enthusiasm that Mac users have for Apple and its products (and you know it's true), they start looking at Macs to see what all the fuss is about.
Then, after playing with one in their local CompUSA, they're hooked like a heroin junkie. (but I mean that in the nicest way.)
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
What amazes me most is how short of a time it took for OS X to get put together. Most everyone agrees that the first release was more of a public beta, but even X.0 was an amazingly mature product for something completely new that had been started mere years earlier. I heard a report that as many as 10,000 engineers had worked on OS X at some point in the course of its development years.
I'm sure it didn't hurt to have NextStep to build off of.
Hey, what are you using right now to read my post? A monitor? Wow, there's that problem solved.
What are you using to click on the Reply button. A mouse? Good! Two down, one to go.
Now, what are you using to make the letters appear on your monitor. A keyboard? Brilliant!
What were you complaining about again?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
No your an idiot. Dell sells 2.40GHz systems running Windows XP with 17 inch monitors for $299.00. Apple should be able to do something similar. Even if in the short term they only broke even and didn't make a profit, in the long term it would introduce a lot more people to Macs and do a lot to increase their userbase.
There are no better bang-for-the-buck PC alternatives, although there are PCs with less-expensive hardware.
An excellent idea. My G3 "Pismo" Powerbook served me well all last year .. I had to sell it to my sister to help pay for a new G4 PowerBook last month, but it is still happily in service. They also make great bed-lap DVD players too. (hmm, should I post anonymously, having said that?)
Another alternative might be to look at G4 "Titanium" Powerbooks too. They are fast, sleek and the screen is beautiful. They're about $600-800 on eBay I think.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
It must be the easier to use one button mouse.
No offense... I'm a Mac user myself... but please stop touting an ATI Radeon 9200M wtih 32 MB of RAM as a good thing, it make us look bad.
Don't you have a monitor? If not, you can get a 15" CRT for like $50. They sell it w/o one because pretty much everyone has a monitor by now and are likely retiring some old PC to check out the new cheap mac.
And you don't have to buy their one button mouse. I use a Microsoft Optical USB mouse I bought for $19 to use with my laptop when at a desk. Plugged it in, all the buttons worked without any config. Even the right click was pre-mapped to control click.
You can buy and use any USB keyboard, but I would recommend using the Apple one so you don't have to remap a few keys (Alt and Windows keys to Option and Command for example). Apple finally got a clue on pricing it's keyboards, they're under $30 now.
...by running a dual boot laptop : XP (becuase I still get things in MS format) and Linux (becuase I LIKE linux). and I know I cant be the only one out there doing that, can I ?
Xserve shipments soar 119 percent
And on the storage side:
Oracle endorses, uses Xserve RAID (2)
And I can only speak for ourselves, but we're using Xserves in our datacenter, but not for serving Macs or Mac heavy networks: just as general purpose UNIX servers, with very nice administrative capabilities.
Nobody has mentioned fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net). They are a "Linux" distribution to run on top of OS X. I quoted "Linux" because they have almost everything but the kernel (it uses the OS X kernel). Fink was the reason I decided it was time to use OS X as a Free/OPen source friendly laptop. None of the two authors even mentioned it!
Fink uses a packaging system similar to Debian, and it includes most of the apps people use under Linux. Many of them require X11, which is now distributed with OS X 10.3
It's probably one of the few ways of getting a major brand notebook without paying the Windows tax.
if graham's logic had any truth to it. microsoft would never have existed. no self respecting hacker used windows, he sure never mentioned it, but there is an amazing amount of software for it, and software sells hardware right?
Only rabid Linux advocacy is okay? Look, OS X is a great UNIX system with the best GUI most people have ever used. What's wrong with pushing it as a functional alternative to Microsoft along with Linux? We never see "Slashdot is a Linux advocacy site!" complaints in Linux articles. What, you thought Linux would be the only good alternative geek OS forever?
"These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get."
Since when have "OS hackers" risen to the top of the computing food chain? I bet they don't even use assembly language.
"This could get ugly, folks. I'm sure the *BSD crowd would chime in too, except that a judge recently orderd the feeding tube to be remove"
Tacky. Hopefully we all will get as much merriment from your death.
Paul Graham says that LISP is making a comeback for the same reasons ("all of my friends at MIT use it"), so take this story with a grain of salt.
Shit I'd love to have one. I'm just not willing to cough up the $2k entry price.
...you can afford it.
You're off by a factor of 3 or 4 there. The entry level Mac starts at $500...
I'll stick with my sub $500 pc that does everything I need it to.
Ten years ago that was just getting popular in business, too.
I think the hardcore OS-loyalty is coming to an end. It's comparable to adolescence. First, the computer industry and those who used the products it produced were "immature" about certain things. It was nothing more than simple brand loyalty (except in this case the brands were operating systems and varying hardware set-ups). Now, as the computing community grows up (we all know the first major computing generation, and most of the people reading this article are Generation-X) their aged attitudes are reflected in what they buy. The old days of fighting about what's better in forums are getting old to most people. I think the time has about come where people are going to find what they like and use it, Mac, Linux, Winblows, etc. So, it shouldn't be surprising that people are going to switch to Mac. Slowly but surely the compatibility barriers are breaking like a contemporary Berlin Wall. And soon Mac, Linux, and Winblows people are going to live in the same metaphorical computing Germany. Two things: 1. There were a lot of analogies in that, I'm sorry. 2. While spell checking, I learned that Microsoft Word will not let you add Winblows to its dictionary. I'm sure there's a technical reason why, I don't care, let me have my fun.
I was saving up money to get a G5 iMac, when it suddonly struck me that even though i still was a couple of hundred short of being able to buy a iMac i could get:
3.2 P4(800FSB)
1 GB Ram
Geforce5900FX
x16 DVD-R
A pretty cool ALU case
TWO 19" viewsonic TFT screens, with way faster update speeds than the apple screen.
Everything in the machine is faster/better than the elements inside the Apple, the screens are larger. And it was a good deal cheaper than the iMac would have been.
If Apple wan't my business, all they have to do is make a model with a sane price/performance ratio.
After just settling with Apple Records over copyright/trademark infringement, Apple now announces a newer, more powerful computer for those needing more than the Mac-mini has to offer:
The Big Mac.
McDonald's has no comment, but says they'll be in touch...
I think you missed one.
/. liking them? :) They're just good computers with a good OS. Much better than Microsoft's at the moment.
* Well-built computers with a stable UNIX operating system, a great GUI, a large number of mainstream apps, and the great Cocoa development system?
Macs can't just be that good that there has to be some sort of "real" reason behind
Apple laptops are definately some of the best out there. Cool, silent, long battery, great wireless range, solid construction, lightweight. The PPC architecture has some efficiency advantages over the eternally backwards compatible x86. Unless you want to run Windows, there really isn't any advantage to most x86 laptops (other than maybe a slightly cheaper price tag). While I like OS X, the hardware is more important to me than what OS is on it.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
those blintzes were terrible!
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
They wouldn't buy, they'd build their own. Ready-made boxes are for wimps. Real men (and women) custom build their machines. After some very bad experiences with my first two machines, I started to build. I can tell I'm never buying a computer built by someone else, call it a mom-and-pop beige box shop, or a brand name. And yes, that includes Apple too.
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
Is there any way slashdot would share the percentage breakdown of hits by OS like he does at the end of the article?
They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
That's great for OS hackers, but what about us hardware hackers on a budget? The only thing keeping me from switching to OS X is that it only works on PPC, and there's relatively no custom aftermarket for that. If you could buy your own PPC parts and build your own kit, then buy OS X for it, I'd switch in a heartbeat. What I wouldn't give for a dual G5 nForce4 mobo... Granted, nothing compares to the coolness of Apple hardware, yet even that isn't enough make me give up the joys of building my own kit, and with a limited budget that precludes me from buying both a Mac and a custom rig, I'll always go with the latter.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Better translation: "I saw top industry people using Powerbooks. Since these are knowledgable people, I checked one out to see what the fuss was about, liked it, and got one."
You do realize that probably the majority of Slashdot readers here who use Linux also first tried it because other, much cooler people were raving about it? I first tried Red Hat 5 because I was told about this cool operating system that never crashed and was the "latest thing."
Those are products not technologies. Do you think that the latest Intel hardware doesn't use a RISC core that University researchers came up with the original idea for, that MS Windows isn't based on GUI ideas that came out of Xerox PARC (a research lab)? Heck, even the spreadsheet was invented by Dan Bricklin (of Harvard Business) and Bob Frankston (who has a Masters from MIT, also a research lab). Sigh. The technology was there before, you're just citing the knockoffs.
Does it come with specs like these: "...an AMD system with a 15inch LCD screen, Sempron 2200 proc, and half a gig of ram..."?
The $299 Dell I see comes with a similar processor, 1/4 gig of ram, and a CRT monitor.
Cepstral: Quality TTS for OS X, Linux, Windows
heh, like LISP and smalltalk (and emacs), for example?
Yeah, so some of it catches on, some doesn't. What else is new? This guy is just shilling for Apple.
Macs are nice, but overpriced. If they get popular enough, soon someone (Dell? Sony? IBM?) will copy the concept, but sell it *much* cheaper. Might take a few years.
in computer science house, one of the clubs i'm in at RIT, the number of mac laptop users has skyrocketed in the past few years. it's probably even the most common laptop in the club now. i've seen similar trends across the CS department, but not nearly as high as this club in particular.
- tristan
have you ever looked at the video systems that come in these cut rate PCs?
the Radeon does look good by comparison.
very few super-cheep PCs even have dedicated video ram.
sure its not the ultimate top of the line, but we arent talking about a top of the line computer.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I got tired of the hype and high prices.
With Linux, I got pure software freedom and lower prices.
I noticed that more people are switching for Apple to Linux these days.
The beauty of OS X, though, is that not only are the NeXTStep APIs there, but you can also develop X Windows apps, Python, PERL, Lisp, Java, C, C++... what can't you do? Heck, if you had to, thanks to the Mono folks, you can even do C#. All that with easy administration, no viri ( yet! ), a solid *nix security model, great *nix compatablity and a solid foundation of user apps. It's a real computer geek's wet dream, and nobody should be shocked to see lots of programmers ( given the choice ) picking Apple machines as their primary development box.
The anti-Apple trolls are out in full force in this article, and getting modded up for it.
It's trickle-down effect. If the top industry players are using them, universities are using them (remember how most people used UNIX in college and so tried out Linux as a result?), and the media industry is using them, then chances are that everyone else will take a look to see what the fuss is about.
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.
Good for you. All the best hackers I know are building their own machines and downloading Linux for free.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
The OS X is great, but he could have had all that in 1988 on NeXT.
(Let's not forget A/UX -- I mean for historical humorous reasons.) I always thought is was a tragedy of history that Jobs and his big ego was forced out of Apple in 1985. We could have been at this point of evolution 10 years ago, had he never had to start a separate company.
Amiga, Next, Mac 9, Mac OS X, I still have them all; they all have some nice features. Plus linux on alpha. Today I'm using Solaris 10 on an UltraSparc. (If Windows sucked, at least it would be good for something.)
No need for herd behaviour, they're just machines.
I like Macs. I dislike the Mac fanclub. And I dislike the idea of giving up control of my hardware to one company. I would hate to see everyone jump on the Mac bandwagon(in terms of running something like Linux on it), only to get locked out when/if it becomes a threat. Ask the people who ran Umax or Power Computing what it feels like.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
Hi,
We had far too many problems keeping Windows machines happy around the house, so I did the following three-step program:
1. Installed lots of F/OSS solutions under Windows.
2. Converted my family to use these new tools.
3. Switched to Linux and OSX using the same tools.
The Linux installs (Ubuntu, etc.) use OpenOffice just fine, but we have a couple of Mac OSX machines (for the iTunes app, mostly.) On these machines, we use NeoOffice/J, which is a very nice port of OpenOffice into a native Mac application.
It works very well, no complaints from anyone. I use the spreadsheet frequently, and I've used their presentation software quite a bit too.
Well worth checking out.
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php
Best wishes,
-greg
Please enlighten me on this:
1.Can i from a mac conncet in an easy way to Windows (mean both "map up a drive" and thru "terminal server like software")?
2.If i run iphoto and itunes can i have the actual songs/pictures on server running windows or linux?
Thanks
AC
That's $299 after about $150+ in mail-in rebates, and a bunch of cheap-ass components (video chipset, and such) that were beyond bottom of the line two years ago.
The worst thing about OS 9 (and earlier) was system extensions. In theory, they provided some great functionality as a type of OS plugin. In practice, they were a pain in the ass, and led to most of the instabilities of OS 9 (and earlier). At least this was my experience.
My bread and butter is video, and to run FCP under 8.6 or 9, I had to run with a very trim extension set. If I wanted to do anything else, I had to reboot the machine with a different set of extensions. Major PITA.
Once you took the time to do all the tweaking, OS 9 could be pretty good if you were doing one thing at a time. It was what it was. However, I really don't want to go back. For it's shortcomings (which I find few and far between, YMMV), it is miles ahead of OS 9.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
One reason Apple is more streamlined than Windows is that it refuses to keep backwards compatability. I'm wondering where all those switching will be when Apple gets up to OS12 or 13.
They can switch. I'll stick with *nix and free updates, and save myself $140 every other year in upgrade costs.
Yes, mac laptops are more expensive than their pc counterparts.
...yes, geeks want power and function, but even they want stuff that looks good.
Yes, pc's still get some things before macs (java 1.5 for example).
But you know what, here's a little unscientific anecdotal evidence.
April 2004, my networking class at Purdue:
Some kid walks in with a new toshiba laptop, opens it up, and follows the notes online while the professor talks, no big deal.
A few days later I do the same thing, only with the new G4 iBook I'd be waiting on for a few weeks. I seriously have a small crowd sitting around me going "holy crap, what is that? is that a mac? wow, it's so cool"
ce n'est pas un Sig.
The rest of us, those who use and contribute to stuff-that-works, can happily coexist: My servers all run Linux, of course; but the boxes I use hands on every day run OS X, of course...
you had me at #!
Linux - Student at University of Helsinki
Not to mention that most people latched onto Linux because they had used UNIX in college and liked it.
Dang, I really don't get the appeal of OSX...I've got into dumb arguments here on why the dock doesn't "work for me" (odd blend of "shortcuts" and "tasks"...long story.)
But mostly...I dunno, most of my interesting work I do on a server command line. All I need is a decent text editor, some misc tools, and a web browser, everything else is almost inconsequential, and I find Windows UI to be surprisingly well designed, if not very innovative.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Are you saying the PC, MS Windows and MS Office were around before the internet, and Unix?
Well at least you haven't been modded insightful (yet).
The way moderation has been lately, I'd half expect you to be at +5 by now.
Four weeks, Twenty papers, that's two dollars
"And open and good is what Macs are again, finally."
Uh, the author really needs to rethink this.
Apple (Macs) are anything but open. Yeah, go ahead, start spouting off about Darwin and such. And when you get done, try to remember that little Aqua thingy that any Mac app needs to use to "look cool". Try to remember that everything in that laptop (it's a laptop, *Book is a trademark. Kleenex, tissue, same diff) is tied to Apple in one form or another. Not to mention you can't buy the things from anyone other than Apple.
I'm not saying these are bad things, one could say that this one vendor approach is a strength, allowing all Apple hardware (within reason) to present one set of interfaces for software to use. I could see that. But open? No.
Anything is possible given time and money.
His name is Linus. LinuS
Why does everyone make this mistake?
He named it Linux partly after his own name, and partly after Minix, the system he designed it after.
The great grandparent post already mentioned Linux. My cross-eyed reading style missed it in the shuffle.
Knock my ass down to Redundant Town.
"I find it really absurd that after years and years of people clamoring for a low priced bare bones mac, now that apple has released one, many of the same people are now whining that the mini in fact *is* a low priced bare bones mac."
First let me state, I understand what the Mini is and isn't, but induldge me and let me show you why it might be a disappoint for what most people consider a barebones system.
I rarely have the cash to drop on a totally new system and I don't like wasting perfectly good hardware. My process has always been one of upgrade. A barebones PC in the same price range as a Mini is still upgradeable. You can add more RAM, a new video card, more internal hard drive space, put a DVDR in when you have the extra cash. It can grow with you and get better and faster over time. So you start with something fairly limited but you build on it.
With the Mini upgrades are a significant problem. No you won't be able to ever swap out the motherboard or CPU. Because there is a single DIMM slot, any memory upgrade means you are tossing out the old RAM. You can't double 512MB to 1GB by buying a cheap second chip, you effectively need to purchase a total of 1.5GB of RAM to do the upgrade. You cannot upgrade your video card ever. Upgrading your internal hard drive means tossing out the old one, since you have only 1 mount point. You can add external hard drives optical drives but you will pay more than the equivalent internal unit. The same goes for any expansion card (video capture, sound etc.) - if you are lucky there will be an external version, if not, you can't use it.
I'd love to see a low cost Mac that you could upgrade and make better over time. It's never going to happen. Apple has to stratify it's product line to prevent cannibalization. They don't want high end users (professionals) using Mac Mini's. They want the Pro Tools engineers, Final Cut pro editors and graphic designers to be using fully decked out PowerMacs. They do not want you to be able to get the equivalent power on a lower end machine.
So in a nutshell, a barebones Mac Mini and a barebones PC are very different animals.
I know from my needs that I am obviously best suited for a PowerMac. It has the expandability I require. I just can't justify the cost.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Dude, if you want a unix that Just Works with a desktop that doesn't suck a golfball through a garden hose, your next hardware purchase needs to be a mac.
:P
And if OS X burns your ass, you can always install freenix on it.
When OS X came, everyone in the Linux/BSD camp said "Cool, the best and smartest thing to do for a vendor - take OSS and build and polish it around your plattform." And everyone said they'd wait until OS X has lost it's glitches and matured. This has happend with Panther. That's why everyone who needs to get 'computer stuff done' with zero hassle and no hardware compatibility problems is flocking towards Apples OS X. Including me.
... Now if you excuse me, I gotta get going and try out frame skimming on Blender with my new Griffin Powermate I just got for my iBook today. :-)
x86 Linux is gaining ground here in germany. Corporations are pondering the alternatives to MS left, right and center, while just the other day a guy at Saturn, a german mass market electronics chain, told me that the mac mini is selling like hot cakes with iMacs going away in its wake and that they'll stock up seriously on mac games within the next few weeks because of that. They currently have two mac compliant games in stock and plan to have 30 in stock by the end of next month!
It's as I've said earler: Linux from below, OS X from above. We have some interesting times ahead of us in IT.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Maybe you can sell your wife the same way I did. She hated how our old windows box slowed to a crawl frequently due to malware, adware, etc. I'm sure I could have kept up on all the service patches and updates and adware programs and virus protectors, but screw it. My mac works. Always. With no complaints and no effort on my part.
By the way. Virus protectors are as bad as the viruses themselves. Does any body else complain about these pieces of crap?
Jack
and about as interesting as the return of bell bottom pants. (though not as interesting as the return of the mini-skirt).
Paul Graham seems to be greatly concerned with fashion, viz his previous "all my hacker friends hate Java and love Python".
It's great to see that people can be as vacuous about technology as they can be about clothing.
-- "Most people prefer a popular myth to an unpopular truth"
I was there when the Mac was introduced (we got to see a pre-release model). I was using it on-and-off during the 90's. It's not even worth disputing Graham's confused and erroneous ramblings point-by-point. Maybe Graham's view is warped by his Lisp view of things: the Macintosh has been a long-term haven for Lisp hackers, both because MCL was pretty good and because Lisp hackers didn't have much of an alternative when all the other commercial choices tanked.
But one point is important, and that's Graham's promotion of OSX as BSD-based and open. Graham is a long-term Lisp hacker, and until Lisp became commercially worthless, all good Lisp implementations were proprietary and commercial. Graham apparently hasn't cared about platforms being open in the past, and he has been part of a crowd that has been railing against UNIX/C for twenty years. When he promotes OSX because it has BSD underpinnings and is supposedly "open", I think he is just catering to the crowd and reiterating things people want to hear; he doesn't really care whether they are true as long as they promote his currently favorite pet platform.
Whether Graham is disingenuous or merely confused, it's important to be clear about OSX. While parts of OSX are "open" and Apple is smart enough to reuse useful open source software (they just don't have the resources to do everything themselves), crucial parts of OSX are not open, among them the GUI, the graphics subsystem, and the toolkits. Apple has been quite clear about the fact that they view these parts as the value proposition of their platform, and they have been defending it.
Use OSX if you like, but don't try to pretend that it's an "open" choice.
I was totally serious, I bought the x86 machine I was speaking of and saved about $350 on a machine that has more horsepower and generally is better in everyway execpt power consumption.
Aren't I allowed to feel they're to pricey compared to the alternatives or ?
No offense, but why don't you just give 200 bucks to the rough looking kids that hang around their highschool, to just steal you some macs from a store.
Hey if they pirate the software, why can't they pirate the hardware, then that'd be cheap too!
I'm the first to admit that I've lusted after Mac laptops since the day were introduced. I've even owned one. One of the things that I wonder about is Apple's stance on DRM. Seems like everyday I read something about Apple putting more restrictions on things like iTunes. So, my question is, where do folks draw the line?
Most PC users don't care about style, they care about price/performance.
Most users don't know any better. They've been raised by Wintel to believe that all computers are big, beige towers that are hard to use. They've been told they need 2ghz and a GB of RAM just to check their e-mail and send pictures.
Went from OS X server on a crotchety old blue G3 (upgraded to a g4/500 w/ a gig of ram) and a pile of firewire hard drives to debian on a cheapass x86 box with a 1tb SATA RAID. The box runs netatalk 2 and doesn't need to do anything else. Works perfectly.... and the PC and drives (with a stupid amount of ram, gigeth, etc) cost less than a base XServe.
I've been using macs daily since '98, and with the move to OS X, file sharing went from ACLs to unix permissions and suddenly there was no essential difference between using linux and using macos to the end user.... Since X came out and netatalk got useable, I've never had a compelling reason to use OS X on the server - but then, a server is (ime) a thing you set up once, lock up, and leave sitting in a rack until hardware dies. It probably helps that I'm a lot more comfortable with debian on the command line- it's easier to update and maintain a debian system without having to be at the box, in my experience.
But my job has no call for Serious Computers. So, YMMV.
Linus doesn't like Mach, he says it is inheritly slower than "his" kernel. I think he is probably right, but not by an amount that really matters. Apple has been focusing on "micro-locking" critical sections in Mach for Tiger (and I assume even more for the next rev). This trend started as FreeBSD 5 tried to catch up with Linux 2.6, enough though the FreeBSD 5 kernel is unrelated to Mach. Why are they doing this? They are preparing for the day when there will be n cores, for n = 4, 6, 8... I remember an statement (was it Minsky?) that an n-way multiprocessor sysstem has performance of order n/log n. This does not have to be true in the future, and even if it is - we still win.
Also Apple has IOKit and "prebinding" which remove the need to keep multiple old copies of the *nix libraries for every binary you don't want to rebuild with every new release, and every device driver as well. Even Windows has this to some extent, this was an esssential feature for the non-hacker to use MacOS X, and damn nice convenience for hackers, too!
I love Linux. I love the Mac.
.net architecture and I love to do hobby programming.
I'm however using windows almost exclusively. Why is that? Well, I've invested heavily in learning the
I program for 8 hours at work, then I go home and program another 4 hours, and I want those 4 hours to be productive, I also want those 4 hours to help me be more productive at work.
If I used Java for work, I would probably have a Mac or run Linux at home.
PS. Yes, I know about mono.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Sorry, I don't want to be staggering around chasing after my alarm clock...!
No offense, but perhaps you should spend less time building PC's and more time looking for a better job. Windows users are cheapest people I've ever seen!
If he's unhappy with his purchase he should have just returned it instead of trying to convince the rest of us that it was such a great idea.
You're kidding, right?
Yes, you missed the fact that Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel and is Unix under the hood.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
The level of Mac advocacy on Slashdot is out of control, and, in many instances, borders on fanaticism. This is a serious problem. I have seen perfectly balanced posts get modded down because they might have parts in them that could be construed as having something negative to say about Apple. This is unacceptable. If the Slashdot community cannot look passed their own biases to recognize a valid argument, then they are no better than those whom they despise, and, indeed, are at risk of becoming despicable themselves.
Was Henrik Wann Jensen's masters project at the Technical University of Denmark.
I think the excitement will grow with the release of Tiger and then shift over to Longhorn after Microsoft dumps billions of ad dollars onto the world market.
Of course if Longhorn is a turd...
My point was that Windows and some productivity software is probably included in that $450.
-mkb
True Linux hackers eat their dog's food.
UNIX proper (the API, the shell, the commands) is only 1% of "Linux" these days. The rest is provided by infrastructures of KDE and Gnome.
Which is good, because UNIX, as much respected and constantly hyped in the community as it is, must go, because it is obsolete (and has been for quite a while). Creating BeOS was a move in the right direction, but BeOS is only a desktop OS; there is a need in a modern, efficient and well-organized server infrastructure as well. Longhorn, with its object-orientation and a database-like file system is Microsoft's answer to that need; OSS community has to have an answer of its own; and UNIX is not an answer.
And what exactly is the mac mini, state of the art?
The reason most of these lower cost PCs use onboard video is because most people are not running 3D games. For most business users, you will not have any benefit from using a Radeon 9200 to run Word. Nor will Grandma see any benefit from using it to view pictures of her grandkids.
Most of these lower computers come with an AGP slot. Which means you can upgrade it. Yes it is an additional cost, but really how much cost is that? Well the closest I can find is a Radeon 9200 64MB which will set you back a cool $50.
It should also be noted, that you can upgrade the PC with a better video card than a 9200. An option you don't have on the Mini.
So yes you can play World of Warcraft on the Mini, but I would bet your performance in Doom 3 is going to leave somthing to be desired.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
You can all think for yourselves! You don't have to buy a Mac just because some the techie friends of a friend of guy-you-don't-know did !
Weigh the relative costs of the hardware against the relative benefits it will get you. And then go and buy open-standard, off-the-shelf, PCs and the parts for it.
Or at least do the easily-led-cultist thing properly, and become a Scientologist...
Tell her about iLife, including the ability to make movies very easily, or iTunes, which is a really cool program, or Safari (cousin to Firefox) and how you don't have to worry about the associated costs of programs to protect your computer from spyware, viruses, and other fun malware. And, you can use any USB keyboard and mouse (even, gasp! a multi-button one, which can be had for like $19). The Mac Mini is tiny and silent to boot. Take her to an Apple Store or retailer, let her look at it, then be a man and buy the thing anyway, her opinion be damned.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Hardly! Apple laptops are notorious for quality control problems and just plain breaking. Maybe this is because people like them enough to carry them around everywhere...
Anyway, until they come out with a ruggedised laptop with a scroll nipple and two buttons on the trackpad I'm sticking with linux-on-x86.
Only someone who has never seen OS X "run" (for lack of a better term) on a G3 will call this comment sensible.
Don't forget the AMD system will substantially outperform the Mac-mini, which is based on 3-year old technology
Vote for Pedro
And what sort of geek would tell his wife he can get something he doesn't want for less than something he does.
Seriously.
[)amien
Well, that's about all I wanted to say. Anyone else have something on their mind?
Piece o' cake. Inform your lovely wife that it is now *her* responsibility to keep the machine in order, download the daily virus definitions, defrag the machine, uninstall the spyware, etc.
:)
Her immediate response will be, "I don't have time for that stuff. I just want to use the computer to get my work done. I hate computers; you know that."
Then you say, "That's what I want too. So it's agreed - we'll get the mac." Then just for kicks you point out Mac hardware will probably last a lot longer than the cheaper Dell stuff she was looking at.
If that doesn't work, try getting on your knees and begging like a puppy. It worked for me
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Hey, if Linux Torvalds thinks that a mac is good enough for him, its definitely good enough for me.
Does that 450USD system have onboard or dedicated gfx?
Does it use shared ram or dedicated VRam?
Does it include any software similar to iLife?
Does it include Windows XP Pro?
Does it include a DVD-Combo drive?
Does it include CD Burning software?
Does it include a USB Keyboard with USB ports?
Does it include Firewire ports?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
From the Puget Sound Computer User:
AMD Sempron 2200
ASRock K7S41GX
40GB 7200rpm HD
256 MB DDR 3200 Ram
52x CDROM
1.44 Floppy
6 USB 2.0 ports
32 MB Shared Video
Built-in 10/100 NIC
On-board sound
1 AGP 4x/ 3 PCI / 1 AMR
350W ATX Case.
$255
Next page 19" monitor for $80.
How do you right click a mac??? OOOH, WAIT! You don't...
(as I sit here with my 5 button mouse, worshiping its functionality.)
PLUS, hackers might like a mac, but for the Engineers of the world Macs are best used for paper weights. I can't think of a single engineering specific program for a mac. If anything, the engineering software is moving or adding functionality to Linux.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
I'm sure the Apple guys are perfectly happy as they've got the money off me all the same... rather than seeing it go out the country to some nameless beige box shifters...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
whats your point? that the mac mini isnt upgradable but these cut rate PCs are?
they have the same target market... the low end. sure, you can put a bad ass card in that cut rate PC and you will have a cut rate PC with a bad ass video card... still not a good gaming PC for a variety of reasons. yes... you could keep upgrading it but by the time you are done it wont look very much like the computer you started with.
the mac mini trumps similar PCs with its video hardware and that is all there is to it. Its not fair to compare the mini to computers that are in a totally different class. The mini is not meant to be a gaming powerhouse but it does have pretty darn good video hardware.
you simply cant say that about cut rate PCs
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
My kid brother can aforde a mac mini on lunch money... Please this argument is old and false.
Most people would prefer their next computer to be an UPgrade...
Personally I don't find NeoOffice/J, the Mac version of OpenOffice, very good, but a lot of people seem to like it. I went for a word processor called Mellel, which is rather inexpensive and which I find works quite nicely.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
Or maybe you don't remember the good deals given to college students to get/use Windows Machines at their Universities just a few years ago. Mac and Windows were fighting for mind share back then too. But now with OSX, and its power, and the ipod many students are going to Apple nowadays.
Thats the problem with PC and Mac $500. Apple makes a name for its self in providing the best quality parts, Dell is a mass producer, thats their entire gimic they dont inovate they dont create they buy up cheap parts and churn out finished products for dirt cheap. But as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. In Apples case though, as anyone who has actually used and looked inside a Mac Mini can atest to, they actually DESIGNED this thing to be 500, they didnt just get dirt cheap parts.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
why do you even need word perfect?
one can type fine looking letters with wordpad.
windows does not however come with iTunes (sure it includes "disappearing border" WMP), iMovie (as opposed to "how many times can i crash a 299 Dell Box" Movie Maker), GarageBand (hmm Recorder?) a calendar, cron, webserver, ssh server, perl interpreter, and let's not forget the secure and tabbed browser (Yikes!!!).
However the 299 windows box does include a 2 button mouse and probably an evaluation copy of Norton antivirus.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
yep, just wait till you try copying a 17MB file on that thing for your freelance gig, the AMD system is at least 10/60 of a second faster. All depends what he needs that machine for doesn't it. What's the software like on that AMD machine?
They want the xterms to look pretty while they're logging in to the Linux box across the room. ;-)
(Just so everyone's aware: just kidding... mostly.)
Where the hell did this "Mac = Freedom & Liberation" movement come from? You people are slaves and you don't even know it.
I'd put up a good fight for Linux, but you masochistic mac fundamentalists are truly insane. Next we'll have Mac suicide-bombers going after random buildings up in Redmond. Seriously, get a grip people.
Anonymous-Cowarding doubtless in admission that this is a troll.
I run OSX 10.3 on a 366mhz G3 iBook with 192mb of RAM, it's fine for wordprocessing, surfing, and multimedia use and isn't any slower than Windows XP on a Pentium-2 366.. which most people would agree is a workable pairing.
10.1 and 10.2 were slow on G3s. 10.3 is fine. As a Windows-refugee I'm still puzzled by an OS that gets faster on older hardware with every release...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
easy... you just plug it into the network and use it as a webserver.
ssh into it from anywhere in the world.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Some number of years ago I bought an iMac for my parents to use to surf the web, do some simple word processing, scan in photos of the kids and make picture CDs. Recently she wanted to upgrade her printer. The printer driver only supported os 9.1 or os X. Since the box was running 9.0 it was time to upgrade. I tried to find a copy of 9.1 figuring it would be more likely to be compatible with the older iMac. Unable to find it I got a copy of osX. That's when the trouble started. Seems the old iMac required a firm ware upgrade. But if you follow the install instruction for os X you don't find this out until the os X installer comes up and says you need a firm ware upgrade. The exact phrase is exit the installer and upgrade your firm ware. The problem is after that the installer won't exit. The Finder won't find and holding the power switch in wont turn it off. So after a while I pulled the plug. Then the iMac wouldn't boot. It wouldn't even eject the now stuck CD. After calling Tech support and going through about 5 dudes, several days and lots and lots of power ups holding down the mouse, holding down this set of keys and that, I got nothing. One techi had me open the case and press a firmware short out button which was supposed to reset the firmware. Nothing. I paid a premium for that iMac in terms of price/performance expecting it would work better or be less of a hassle in the long run. But that was not the case. The help desk guys kept telling me that my power supply or switch must have gone out just when the os X installer was trying to exit or that my firm ware was corrupted just at that moment. They were less than helpful. I eventually took the thing apart, pulled the stuck cd out and returned os X. Fortunately Fry's took it back even though it was obviously opened. So, I then further disassembled the machine with an 8 pound sledge hammer. That was fun. Now my mom has a PC from Dell. much less costly than buying a mac. $400 and it came with a monitor. You can't by a mac for that. No sense buying a 'better' box if it's not any 'better'. No more apple products here. ______________________________________ There are 10 kinds of people, Those who know binary and those who don't.
There's a better way. And I think the marketing types at Apple should pester some of their techies to make it happen.
I want to install a new program on my work computer (running WinXP Pro) that will track every program I run for two weeks or so. At the end of that period it should report to me how much of what I ran is available under Mac OS X.
I've written more details (same from google cache) on this, but some key points are that it can show alternatives even if the same program exists (e.g. Office), it must be open source, it must be honest about the mac capabilities (e.g. "program X will work for most users, but may not be compatible with a corporate server environment because of blah blah").
Of course, this might work to convince people to switch to a linux desktop as well, but the linux desktop has bigger issues to cover than just application compatibility.
___
Cognitive Overflow
more than yo
Some of us have more important things to spend money on - wives, children, homes, et cetera.
think about this, 59million americans chose bush, no wonder mac is back, by a lot stupid guys.
Another Apple story ( 2nd today ) why ... we all know that MacOSx is some sort of BSD...
We all know they are cool.
We know they are pricey
We all want one.
Besides this is one man's view of the world. And then if you ask somebody else he will say that another type of gadget is cool and great.
I did not expect this from you, very dissapointed.
That strategy can have some nasty reprocusions, you might consider a different one.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
To be fair, the keyboard is probably a ps2 and without the apple keys.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
The entry price is not $2,000, have you been living under a rock? Please, go to the Apple website, and take a look around.
I'm sure www.apple.com/games will surprise you pleasantly
I'm so pleasantly surprised that I'm laughing my ass off. Sorry dude, but Macs are as far behind in games as they ever were. And, as for that site, the big graphic on the front-page with "Edutainment" plastered across it isn't helping their image.
One thing I love about Apple is the way it's packaged. It's like nothing else I have ever seen. Everything is so neat, color coordinated. I swear I feel like I am on 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' when I open a new Apple box - whatever it may be. However the reality of this is that I do not see people buying more macs. I see them buying IPODS, and airport express with i-tunes, I see them buying music at the imusic store, but not the Macs. Hey I wish Apple all the best! It shows an American company can make a product as solid as the Toyota and as pretty as a Mercedes! However this essay is not exactly something I can agree with.
Like I said, do your wives and children a favor and find a better job. I haven't bought a computer in years. My employer buys them for me as well as my internet access at home.
I hardly ever disagree with Paul Graham, but this time I think he's forgotten one important fact. Apple has a monopolistic stranglehold on the Mac. The PC beat the Mac because it was an open system. As long as Apple follows the philosophy that only they can profit from the Mac it will remain a niche platform. No matter how good it is.
The low end Dells do not include an AGP or a PCI Express slot. You're stuck with the Intel Extreme with shared memory.
Way back when, being alpha geek was a big deal.
Now it's an interchangeable part: Some guy
in India can do his job for 1/10 the pay.
I would buy a mac but: 1) I play games 2) I build my own 3) While you can find old Macs for low prices on ebay most of the time people will give you PC hardware just to be rid of it
Sue fan sites
Tried to use the DMCA to remove content from source forge
Promise upgrades but never follow through(ibook,performa)
Use DRM to lock product(itunes) to device(ipod) and threaten to use the DMCA to protect the lock in
Reciever of numerous customer lawsuits from selling used products as new, and to lie about about the battery life on ipods
For a company with only less than 3% market share, they sure seem to get sued a lot for shoddy products or unethical business behavior.
And this post will probably last 5 minutes before apple fanboys troll, or flamebait it even though i just posted facts.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
windows does not however come with iTunes (sure it includes "disappearing border" WMP), iMovie (as opposed to "how many times can i crash a 299 Dell Box" Movie Maker), GarageBand (hmm Recorder?) a calendar, cron, webserver, ssh server, perl interpreter, and let's not forget the secure and tabbed browser (Yikes!!!).
Considering you can get stuff similar to all all of that software (with the exception of GarageBand & iMovie) for *free*, I wouldn't see that as an issue.
Even then, not everyone is in a band.. I don't really see why GarageBand is part of iLife, IMHO. It seems like something only 10% of people would really use.
I never really understood why everyone always salivates over iTunes. Unless you own an iPod, it's just a pretty ram-sucking jukebox program.
Foobar2000 + ColumnsUI gives you all the same features, with 1/4 the RAM usage.
A three button USB mouse is $25 at Wal-Mart. ALL USB mice work in Mac OSX. Stop the stupid ignorance and ignorant ranting.
Actually, it is rather blind. I suppose opinions might differ on whether it is foolish or not. When not taken to an extreme, it is only being blind in certain areas as opposed to all areas.
Hahahahaa. You are funny.
Why can't you admit that the pretty darn good Radeon is a $50 part?
At Christmas time I saw an HP PC at Wal Mart with these specs:
Celeron 2.5GHz
256MB RAM
40GB HD
CDRW/DVD combo
17" CRT
Selling for $500. It had an AGP slot. Are you HONESTLY going to tell me that this machine is going to perform worse than a $500 spec mini if you throw a $50 Radeon in it?
Yeah ok so go ahead and say Celeron sucks, Wal Mart sucks, it sucks. Whatever. For most people that is a very powerful PC. My girlfriend uses a 2GHz Celeron with 256MB of RAM and never complains. Hell she even runs 3D games with it. When I offered to upgrade her she asked "why?"
You get a Mac Mini if:
You absolutely want a Mac
You don't care if you can't upgrade it easily
You can't afford a better Mac
Hell, if you are buying a Mini and you don't already have a monitor to go with it - I would heartily suggest you get an iMac G5.
"the mac mini trumps similar PCs with its video hardware and that is all there is to it."
OK, well then thusly:
"the low cost PC (same price range as an mini) trumps the mac mini with it's capability to upgrade to better video and more RAM at low cost"
I'm glad you love your Radeon 9200. Enjoy it. You are never going to have any option to get anything else in there.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
But lets be honest, if I can get an AMD system with a 15inch LCD screen, Sempron 2200 proc, and half a gig of ram for about 450usd
Show us this marvelous machine that costs $450 and includes a complete operating system and equivalent software to match iLife and AppleWorks (or iWork for another $80), and an LCD monitor that won't make your eyes bleed, and 512MB of RAM that's worth having. Seriously, show us this machine. You were talking about something with no software, right?
how am I gonna convince my wife that I should buy a 600usd mac mini
That's easy, just sit her down in front of one for a few minutes.
, plus 250usd for the monitor, plus the keyboard and the silly one button mouse?
(1) Odds are you already have a perfectly good CRT monitor at home or you can get one for $120. If you want a decent LCD, you'll pay for it whether you get a Mac or a PC. Any monitor with a standard VGA or DVI connector will work with the Mac mini.
(2) Odds are you already have a keyboard. If not, USB keyboards go for about $25. You do not need to buy one from Apple. Any USB keyboard will work with the Mac mini.
(3) OS X has been around for what, five years now? And for five years now, OS X has had context menus and support for mouses with two or more buttons. Mine has 5 buttons including the scroll wheel/button. You do not need to buy a "silly one button mouse" from Apple. Any USB two-button scroll mouse will work with the Mac mini.
In the end, as so many of us have realized already, the cost is now very low, and very well justified.
Dell sells $299 all-inclusive systems with Windows and WordPerfect included. Try again.
Does that include DVD mastering software? Movie editing software? A music creation program? When people talk about the Mac experience, they're not talking about word processing.
Everyone is always pushing mac from a "windows switch". There is unfortunatley not enough Linux switch and power user switch websites. Going to websites explaining the diffrences from going from windows to mac always makes me feel like a dumbass. If anyone is aware of some good sites for powerusers I would appreciate a reply. I have however found a website with excellent applications for Unix/Linux/Power Users switching to the mac.
your academic and corporate environments.
They are raking it in doing their own stuff for their own reasons and doing such a great job of it that everything and everybody else looks, well, a little green at the gills in comparison.
Tha fact that it works for you and what you need is entirely imaterial to Jobs.
Now if only Gates would cotton on to the fact that Apple's starting to eat his lunch by NOT even trying to compete with Microsoft but by putting out by putting out great stuff that's really usable.
I'm sure that "How Apple Won The War By Not Fighting It" will make great reading in my dotage.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It's not a lack of money, it's realizing there are other things I can spend my money on for my family rather than frittering it away on a particular brand of computer.
(And not that it matters, but I do have a work provided machine, along with wired and wireless network access. That doesn't account for all the other machines in the house.)
Serious question... I've been on the fence about macs for the last year or so, but I pretty much only purchase laptops and it seems to me this is the one place where the one button argument actually holds up.
Does anyone who uses a powerbook/ibook constantly find that this isn't irritating? Or is it just that with the design of the OS you don't notice, so then what if you have it booting linux? For that matter... if your plans are to boot linux anyway, are you being silly with the Powerbook/iBook purchase?
Honestly curious, in the market for a new laptop in the next couple of months and am either going Powerbook or Thinkpad, but have no experience with the Powerbooks.
Thats like saying "When you can get a compact car for $12,000 how can I convince my wife I should buy a $30,000 SUV or sedan?". A PC and a Mac are two totally different things, you can't compare them directly. You have to judge what best fits you needs. If you are only trying to get yourself to work, maybe a cheap compact car is a good idea, if you have a big family to cart around you should probably look at plunking down the extra dough for the SUV or sedan.
apple.com/macmini/
While the RAM issue is certainly present, given that for the time being it's unlikey you're going to give up your PC, why not put the old mac mini ram into your PC?
But that aside, yes the mini is rather tough to upgrade if you like to resuse stuff.
You don't need to pay a whole lot to add an additional drive, just put the old (or new) drive into an external case.
But if it's the internal expansion you crave, why not pick up a used/refub G4 tower?
It may cost a hair more, but if the expandability is what you want, that may be the price you have to pay.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Uh huh. A USB-PS/2 adaptor will cost you about eight bucks, and the Windows key works just great in place of the Command key.
I'm sure people could make up all kinds of reasons not to buy a mini. I mean, it would probably give you cancer if you ate it. That's probably a good reason not to buy one.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Wow. You are awesome. Just incredible. You use your current computer WITHOUT a mouse, monitor and keyboard? Wow. Can you bestow your super powers on us mere mortals?
It's called a laptop, jackass.
...Nor will Grandma see any benefit from using it to view pictures of her grandkids...
She might benefit if she wanted to see a VIDEO of her grandkids. She also might benefit if she doesn't have to worry about getting her computer infested by a wide variety of worms, trojans, viruses, spyware and other malware that continually plague Windows users unless they spend a lot extra money and time to have proper anti-virus software installed.
All theory is gray
They're meant to be upgraded, just not by the user.
I would be careful about purchasing g3 iBooks. I have owned two g3 iBooks and they both have had logic board issues that are not covered under Apple's logic board repair program. The overall quality of g3 iBook's are suspect in my book and you may just want to save a bit and just buy a g4 instead.
OS X runs great on the g3 iBooks provided you have 256 MB of RAM. 128 MB runs OS X but not much more. I could keep a browser of varying flavor open, iTunes, and one other app (Mathematica, et cetera) open before experiencing significant slow down. I really like iBooks but "caveat emptor" if you seek to buy an older model.
*free*
sure, but you might want to remember that you get what you paid for.
secondly, if his wife can't see the benefits of iLife, how the heck could she install IIS, or Apache, configure it and use it?
iLife also has iMovie, and iDVD, which are nice for showing your friends and family a nicely put edited vacation video, instead of showing them 5 bags of 4x6 pictures.
you're right about garageband, most people do not need it.
what i find interesting is how microsoft advertises "your potential, our passion" and show kids playing in front of a potential live audience.
makes you wonder, what software has microsoft made to realize that potential, while apple has made garageband?
or maybe microsoft is just pissing the same koolaid over their users as they do with security...
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Only if you define "pleasantly" as last year's games.
Look, I love my Mac; my family owns 5 new ones between us, but the game selection is poor.
We play stuff on our PS2 and XBox, so it doesn't matter.
Perfect! I may have to go anywhere else but my house to use my computer, but damned if it isn't geeky!
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
Bravo my friend. You're braver than I am that's for sure, but I admire your courage.
holy crap,
while i was rabidly spewing off some other posts, i totally forgot about USB-PS/2 adapters.
let's not ever mention this again.
man this topic has me foaming at the mouth.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
yeah but on a laptop this does actually make a difference... especially for those of us who fly coach, there's not really any room for an external mouse.
Less profitable? This must be coming from a person that didnt' buy Apple stock back when it was 14 dollars a share and the company was sitting on 2 billion in cash. . .
Many other low end computers do have AGP slots. Contrary to popular belief Dell is not the only PC manufacturer.
How about $540 for this:
Athlon 64 3000+ CPU
512MB DDR 400 RAM
PCI Express Nvidia 6200 128MB video card
80GB Hard drive (7200 RPM)
52X CDRW/DVD combo drive
Includes mouse and keyboard
Oh I guess the typical response would be "it's ugly". Well change the case option then.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I bought my ibook G3 on September 17, 2002 when I was working at the VLT...my reasoning was simple, with BSD, I could compile and run all my science software as well as run Apache and MySQL for web application development on hardware that was predictible...I was too old to fiddle with all the configuration crap everyone else at the VLT was going through just to get linux up on their Dell naotebooks.
So, I can say without a doubt, the software environment I am working with on my ibook is the best I have ever seen and I won't go back to anything else...BUT!!!
It hurts to pioneer!
So far my ibook has been through 2 logic boards, and on "good" friday, the third one died. Very annoying Mr. Jobs. And, as a frontline geek, I am a little distressed to see that the recall for the flawed itital batch of ibooks expired on March 18th!
I will take it in anyway and scream until it is fixed.
I don't work at the VLT any more, but I am told that ibook G4's and powerbooks now outnumber the Dell machines...scientists are switching too.
A G4 with a 167mhz FSB is not a POWER anything.
Its a nice computer, but hardly enough to make you switch from a Pismo from 5 years ago.
Apple, instead of "Think Different", how about "Try Harder".
three one-year-old PCs used for the price of one new, a low-end KVM, load up XP Pro, Knoppix, BSD, and go to town having techie fun experimenting away. Why feed Jobs' ego and wallet just so I can pretend I think different(ly)?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
How did all the bullshit "If I could afford one" crowd survive 5-7 years ago when ALL computers were over $1,500? Oh yeah, you are talking out of your asses... you are afraid to try something new so you insert the lame-ass exscuse "too spendy". Got your PSP right? iPod? Car? insurance? green laser pointer? pda? Ok then... I call you on you argument!!!
"There are developers out there who are better than I am"
i.e. "most of the them"
No your an idiot.
You should probably move out of that glass house, or learn how to use contractions.
I don't know about you, but my existing XP box has a monitor, USB mouse and USB keyboard. If I bought a Mac Mini, I could plug these devices into it... no extra cost.
I was lucky enough to need an OS X system a few months before the Mac Mini was released; the 12" iBook (you know, bottom of the line) I got is fantastic. Much better than my previous (Dell) laptop.
Hitting up eBay for an older, complete G3 system probably won't be too expensive.
- chrish
RISC Processors are cool.
And before one of you zealots labels this as "flamebait" please recognize that just because I disagree with you does not mean I am trying to start a war, I just think don't agree with all this Apple advocacy.
It's more about making the best use out of the components for the lowest cost and getting exactly the components I want.
The last time I upgraded my computer, I also upgraded my son's and his mother's. This was a lot more cost effective than throwing everything out and buying new ones.
And yes I do have other things to spend my money on.
My job is just fine and I could wrangle an company computer of them if I wanted to, but I don't want a Dell. I instead have negotiated for reimbursement of computer components.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
"Are you HONESTLY going to tell me that this machine is going to perform worse than a $500 spec mini if you throw a $50 Radeon in it?"
After the Winbox has spent a few weeks on the Internet? Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee it. Remember - low-end boxes are generally targeted toward low-end users. Non-savvy "hey, Mr. Mseko is offering me $20K for my help in this matter!" low-end users.
Ask yourselves this - if a family member was asking you for a system, and you knew you'd be stuck supporting it, would you be happily touting Windows? Not me. I value my time, been there done that. Kill a few hours of my valuable time and any "savings" have vaporized. And that's just for the first malware crisis.
I've got a mixed Win/MacOS LAN here. It takes time, effort and good deal of active forethought to keep a Windows box from getting 0wned. Trivial for us tech types, but beyond the grasp (or cares) of the low-end user.
So all the Hardcore OS hackers are switching to macs. That wil be great for Apples bottom line considering these guys are like .00001% of computer users.
This article is completely retarded too. Much respect to Apple, but Zonk's mother should be punched in the kidneys for even birthing the demi-god who posted this rubbage.
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
I'm worth quite a bit of money and didn't get taht way by paying more for something that wasn't worth it.
...My process has always been one of upgrade...
So throw out your old big, noisy Windoes box and UPGRADE to a small, quiet Mini. By the time you do all the upgrading you are taking about you will have spent as much or more, especially if your time is worth even minimum wages, than what the Mini costs. In the end you will still have a big, noisy, ugly PC box with a lot of outdated software. Guys like you would complain if Apple gave their computer away for free!
All theory is gray
I assure you, even the low end Intel onboard video is quite capable of playing back full motion video in a number of formats. You don't need to exaggerate.
As for the additional tangent - I'm not arguing about the nature of the OS. The discussion was about the video options on the Mini.
I just get tired of everyone raving about how wonderful the video is on the Mini when it's the low end of the last generation of ATI's chipsets. It's a less than $50 part. Whoop dee do.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Yes, and that $500 headless mac would get me a factor of 1/3 to 1/4 the performance of a similiarly priced PC. (Random numbers pulled out of my ass, without any factual basis by the way, just to enhance my point.)
:-)
Don't get me wrong, its well within my financial means to go buy a $2,000 G5, cash, right now, I just can't justify it. I will not get 4x the work done, or 4x the quality of work. Do you really think that photoshop will perform better on a $500 Mac-mini-whatever than my $500 white box PC?
I could also go buy a Rolex, but its just not worth it to me. My cheap (in comparison) watch keeps the time just as well, but it may not look as "cool"
OK, great. None of what you said changes the fact that a $299 Dell box comes with useful software and an OS, which is what I was trying to prove in the first place.
-mkb
You get exactly what you pay for with the Mac, which is a better computer for the majority of us.
You do get more hardware bang for the buck with a "consumer" PC, but not in the software area. The software that ships with even a Mini is easily worth more then that PC's CPU, Mobo, Memory and vid card combined, considering there is absolutely no equivelent on the PC side at all. The Mini, IMac, or any modern OSX Mac can do more out of the box then all consumer PCs on the market.
I have two consumer PCs similar to the one you described and one workstation PC and their overall value are no where near even my 2 year old 1GHz TI book. I use my PCs as a "cheap" rendering solutions and occasional games, but other then that, because I have XP Pro installed on them they are "very poor" computers when compared to any of my Macintoshes.
As for better elements that all depends on who you are buying your parts from. First of all a G5 outclasses a P4, it may not be as fast for 32-bit operations, but its only PC equivilent is an Opteron. And if you know anything about PC's an Opteron costs way more then a P4. This is also true for the mobo it requires. So your're not comparing equivilent systems. The iMacs components are closer to a workstation in some areas. Basically the Mac uses higher grade components which cost more. The G5 towers are true worksations, if you're wondering why their price is even higher.
Another thing, Apple is the "only" computer company on that planet that can offer true "software/hardware intgration." This area is key, it is the main reason why there are no OSX viruses or Spyware. PCs do not have that luxary and until it happens (Which will be a very long time.) they will never be as good as even a Mini for general use. It's a trade off. Buying the OS seperate from the PC components may be fun (At least for me, it's a hobby.) But everything is disconnecting, everybody has their own software utility and cheeseball interface, which sometimes leads to problems.
And a rule of thumb, never buy any ugprades from Apple, because that area is expensive. The same is true for most retail comps. Only buy the base unit from them, then add the Memory or larger HD yourself.
If you're only in for gaming, then stick with a consumer PC, (They are the best choice for this.) but when you become interested in all other areas, or would simply like a better computer then buy a OSX Mac. I strongly recommend a MIni as a starter. There is nothing wrong with owning both platforms. They coexist nicely now days.
Think about it this way. If the PC you described were a Camaro, then the iMac would be a Lexus. The Lexus isn't nescarly faster and does costs more, but it's certainly a better, more reliable car, with a nicer interior and is worth its asking price. When I see a Camaro, I think "cheap."
Oh the shock and horror. Apple is a "corporation" which has to protect its IP and trade secrets from being leaked to the competition.
# Tried to use the DMCA to remove content from source forge
See above.
# Use DRM to lock product(itunes) to device(ipod) and threaten to use the DMCA to protect the lock in
I have news for you, the labels want and demand DRM. But it can be easily circumvented legally with a thing called a CD-R disk.
# Reciever of numerous customer lawsuits from selling used products as new, and to lie about about the battery life on ipods
Those lawsuits are being pushed by disgruntled resellers, not consumers. Have those cases been proven?
Does the competition speak honestly about their battery life? No. Companies like Dell and Sony forget to mention that their "numbers" are based on testing using the lowest bandwidth settings with no user interaction.
YMMV but I've experienced battery life on my 2nd generation iPod which exceeds Apples claims for battery life but then again, I don't use the backlight and I'm not deaf. What this means is I usually listen on Shuffle mode and my volume is less than a fifth of full volume.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
how many of these geeks run their mac with a fullscreen console?
strip away aqua and the rest of the gui and what you have is a modified openbsd running on powerpc.
someone hand me that yellowdog or mandrake install cd and a powerpc computer...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Or you can pay for Windows and the software that runs on it. That will bring up the cost of that $450US system.
I am addressing this quote from the original poster. You can buy all-inclusive systems from Dell for under $450 that include an OS and other bundled software. Windows will not bring up the cost of that $450 box. Whether it's got the "Mac experience" or not is not what I'm talking about. I didn't even mention it once!
-mkb
Of course. Windows users can get all the software they want for free. Don't like this answer? I don't like it either but it's called reality. And this is what many of them answer when you tell them software is included in the price: 'Who cares?'
Isnt that a bit of a broad statement? When I mod kernel code, Im usually running the OS Im coding for. So if you're implying running, for instance, linux on the powerbook to write your kernel code, why pay the apple tax? Is the hardware that much better than another high grade laptop (or desktop) that usually cost significantly less?
I like the apple concept and its useability, but I personally write alot of driver code and dont see how I can do this from a different OS easily.
Is the cost of an apple upgrade really worth it when all you're going to do is run Linux? Is the hardware that much better?
So Abreu sez:
/. right this instant? (Assuming you're not using a laptop.)
"But lets be honest, if I can get an AMD system with a 15inch LCD screen, Sempron 2200 proc, and half a gig of ram for about 450usd, how am I gonna convince my wife that I should buy a 600usd mac mini, plus 250usd for the monitor, plus the keyboard and the silly one button mouse?"
Pardon my French, but what the goddamn fucking fuck are you using to access
You obviously HAVE a keyboard. You OBVIOUSLY have a monitor. Odds are that you have SOME kind of input device akin to a mouse or a trackball.
That's whay the Mini is sold without all that other stuff. If you're upgrading from a Windows desktop, you already have the peripherals.
And, frankly, unless the Apple Enforcement Gundams are pointing guns at you, you are not being forced to even contemplate buying a Mac Mini, no more than you are being prevented from buying that AMD system you mentioned.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
It is obvious you know little about business. First of all a mac is more expensive to produce then a crappy dell. It has quality parts and a processor that will run loops around anything you can get in a dell. It is a superior computer from a hardware standpoint. THat is why it costs more. You can argue the operating system point until you are blue in the face, but if you look at the statistics there is no dell on the market that can compete with the top of the line MAC. Second of all, there are numerous examples of a company selling a product for a loss in order to "generate a larger market share" and all these examples have something in common. The strategy backfired! Unless you are already a market leader (which apple is not) or unless the majority of your revenue comes from a different but related source (licensing) then this approach does not work.
You're right that emulators are one of the mac's few gaming strengths.
Nice thing about that is that the mini totally blows x-box hacking out of the water. The emulators for it are *really nice.* The hardware's more capable. There's no need to futz with modchips or the mechwarrior hack. It's smaller, quieter, and supports firewire harddrives.
So if you are heavily into emulators, it's the last "console" you need to buy for a long, long time.
"Productivity" software?
Last time I checked they only bundled MS Office and worse...
SCNR
But the real question is, would you prefer a blowjob from Steve Jobs, or would you rather take it up the ass from Michael Dell and Bill Gates?
[waves at moof]
I use a little 2 button logitech travel thingy on my Powerbook. When I'm too lazy to pull it out, then I'll used the dreaded touch pad and the "Control-Key" as my second mouse button. I can use it, but all touch-pads cause pain in my wrists with extended use.
Even if Apple does get around to shipping a 2-button mouse, which I heard rumors of, I'll still stick with my Logitech mice. I have a MX1000 on my DP 2.5 and MX700 on my DP1.25. Two of the best mouses made to date an I have access to every button. And I wouldn't use my Touch-Pad more even if it had 2 buttons.
If it was my son and I new he wanted to play games on it then I would go with Windows. If it's in my house and I have control over the LAN then I don't have a problem.
If it's someone else asking me I will state both sides of the story. I will note that the Mac has less problems with viruses and spyware. I will ask them what software they need to run. Many of them have specific applications they need to run on Windows. Many of them are looking for a computer to play Half Life 2 on. Fine. I also give them the card of my friend's company that does $50+ parts pc repair if they choose to go the Windows route.
Alternately, you can run Linux or FreeBSD. I use both as well as Mac and Windows.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Another Apple Apologist, seriously, you people are beyond me.
Revenge of the Mac?
...the rest of the story.
(cue old geezer music)
..slide the tray back in, screw the screw back in and voila...
How much thicker and heavier and uglier is that Dell? How long does its battery last? The iBook is, like most consumer elctronics today, not intended to be serviced by the user. When was the last time you upgraded your TV, VCR, CD or DVD player? The higher priced Powerbook is upgradeable by anyone reasonably skilled. I have a 250G external drive connected to my Ti PB when I use it at home with an added monitor. I keep only the files I think I might need while on the road on the internal HD. My iPod doesn't take up that much extra space in the PBooks case either.
All theory is gray
I don't know if they offer this on the Apple store website in your region, but there is a Special Deals link on the front page of the US store. You can find refurbished macs and last years models (new) for good prices. I've had very good luck with refurbs. YMMV.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Good idea. Oh yeah, and I was wrong. They're only four bucks.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Hey, that's what they call it!
-mkb
If Macs float your boat then more power to you but realize that for some of us Macs just make us cringe.
A good part of that is what you are most used to, you're more comfortable with and more efficient on. Now, if you'll just have a sip of this koolaid, and step on this nice bus that will take you to the Apple re-education center. . .
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I look forward to your in-depth discussion of how Soviet Communism is superior to Capitalist Democracy.
- Crow T. Trollbot
windows and word perfect are as useful as an 83 chevy monte carlo with a tape deck.
.doc?
sure it'll probably get you from A to B, and let you listen to your own mixes, but for a little bit extra you can get a nice reliable compact car that can run for years without critical monthly patches.
does word perfect even save files defaultly as
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Mod this guy up.
That really is the biggest plus for the mac - it just works and won't randomly stop doing so like "that other OS".
That alone is well worth the money.
Anyone who's ever had to clean up a family members' or friends fucked up wintendo box will agree. The total global worldwide amount of lifetime wasted by humans on Microsoft Windows bugs and design failures deserves a footnote in the history books of this decade...
I don't know what I love more, the way you can be so cruel, or the way you hold me afterwards, as I sob softly into your shoulder.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Now it seems to be a "true geek" you have to have a laptop
I like how much laptops have advanced, but I still find that they don't give you that feeling that you get when you build it yourself
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
How many eons will it take for her to forget this? You, Sir, are brave, crazy, or both!
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Because I'd have to replace the case with something that didn't make me puke whenever I turned on my computer.
Besides, you are totally missing the point. Most people would gladly pay twice what the hardware is worth to be able to run Mac OS X. Now, that may not make any sense to you as a (supposedly) potential switcher with little to no experience with Mac OS X and all the bundled software, but the fact is that it's the software that sells Macs. Mac hardware is pretty good, but I the hardware I use in my custom x86 machines is also just as bit as good, if not better. The reason Macs are still used and liked is the software. Period.
Moof.
Please name one other company that sues their fan sites.
# I have news for you, the labels want and demand DRM.
So so why does apple threaten to use the anti cirumenvention part the DMCA against real if real goes ahead with their harmony project thats allows ipod owners to play real media files? Sure sounds like using DMCA and DRM to hold a lock on a market. I don't think labels would care if ipods ran real media files, nor do i think customers would mind the abililty to run real media files on their ipods and would actually prefer a choice in their online store selection. And choice is the keyword, apple doesn't want their customers to have a choice.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Then I will be switching to a Powerbook. The PC get delegated to strict gaming duty after that and nothing more.
Heck, it's even attractive to those of us whose background in C is more of the "int" variety.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
....when there CVS was dying. They havent given back to the BSD crowd and Theo will never buy an Apple again. Im stearing clear.
9 30286)
(I posted about this earlier but I thought it was relevant. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=142345&cid=11
is the Kiss of Death. It happened to NeXT Computers and Jobs knows what it means to have a platform highjacked by all knowing God's of Computing.
Jobs will not tolerate Guru's and there won't be any free Powerbooks to get the *Cool Factor* built off them either.
I just bought a $470 computer from Staples for my mom's shop. It's got 512MB ram, a 2.8ghz Celeron, 80gb HD, Windows XP Home, an 8x DVD RW drive, 8-in-1 card reader, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers. None of it is exceptionally high quality stuff, but it's a quick machine and it does everything she needs it to. No, it's not as slick and cool as a Mac, but slick and cool were not her top priority, price was.
Well, call me negative, but "Microsoft Productivity Software" is two contradictions in three words to me.
If everyone on Slashdot participates here, the cost argument goes right out the window.
So, does your Dell or eMachine come with:
:)
* iMovie
* iDVD
* iTunes
* Garageband (equivalent software on Windows might be Cakewalk Home Studio, which sells for about a hundred)
A webserver, PHP interpreter, Perl interpreter, and any other UNIX software you can think of
* An e-mail app that doesn't suck?
* A secure browser?
* And much more?
Oh, okay. Cya.
OP said:
Here's the obligatory rebuttal. You're forgetting the software. You can put Linux on it for free, but you're not getting nearly the user experience you get with a Mac.
OP was discussing the "Mac experience" - it made sense to assume replies would also be referring to that. And to add the same suite of applications included with the Mac would bring the cost well over $450.
My iMac 450MHz is named "style-over-substance" and my mini is named "appeal-to-pity".
Note also that due to network effects, users of a platform have an incentive to find more users for it. If articles like this can convince people that cool things will happen because more hackers will use the platform, this may become self-fulfilling.
And yes, my main Linux box is named "bandwagon", so I'm quite aware that a lot of the behavior of Linux fanboys can be explained this way as well.
PS: Apple's episodes of "we must control the platform" (exemplified by the original Torx-screwed-shut Mac, disappearance of the iMac mezzanine slot, slapping of OS X rethemers, etc) make them a strange long-term commitment for Real Hackers, as opposed to just the digerati.
Gaming is the only real reason to stay away from Macs
I played game a lot on my previous PCs. So much so that one reason for me recently getting my first Mac, albeit a minor one, was that, I thought that since the Mac has so few games written for it that I won't be able to find games to play on it. Therefore I wouldn't be playing computer games as much as I would be on a PC. I needed to curtail the time I was spending gamin on my computer.
Wrong!
It turns out that more and more games are being written for Macs. Like Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Talk about stealing my life away. And on a Mac too!
Rich
Yes, and that $500 headless mac would get me a factor of 1/3 to 1/4 the performance of a similiarly priced PC. (Random numbers pulled out of my ass, without any factual basis by the way, just to enhance my point.)
you shouldn't pull stuff like that out of your ass, you can do yourself an injury you'll regret for the rest of your life.
I just upgraded my son's PC for his birthday, and I've just got a Mac mini. He's got a PC because he's a gamer, and his PC is a hell of a lot more powerful than my mini, but just the upgrades ended up costing a significant chunk of the price of that mini... so I think I have a pretty good idea of what you can get for $500.
And, basically, right now, across the board... the "Mac Tax" for equivalent hardware to a PC is about 50%. You'll end up paying 50% more to get a Mac instead of a comparable PC. Oh, it's not exact, and there's a lot more options on the PC side, but the days when the cost hit was a factor of two and a bit (I don't think it was ever a matter of three or four times) are gone.
Do you really think that photoshop will perform better on a $500 Mac-mini-whatever than my $500 white box PC?
Um, you really want me to say that it's *cheaper* than the comparable PC now? No, that'd be a bit much, right?
It performs better on my Mac mini than on my old IBM Thinkpad, which is not quite up to the specs of a modern $500 white-box PC but beats the Mini in every "objective" dimension. So I think it'd be pretty close to comparable, and the rest of the system just fits together so much better than Windows that you might be most amazingly surprised how much more you get done.
Or not, I don't know, some people hate OS X. Maybe you're one of them... but if you're thinking that it'd be good for you I'm thinking the price difference shouldn't be as big a hurdle as you're making out.
OK, genius.
.doc files?
1.) iTunes is free.
2.) WordPerfect has its own format, which I'm sure it uses by default.
3.) Why does it matter whether it can even understand
You apparently didn't even read my reply. I am not arguing the benefits of a Dell vs. a Mac. I have not even hinted at that. If you cannot grasp that, please stop advocating Macs, because you are a very bad example of the rest of us.
-mkb
I'd call you right, but I don't write advertising copy.
-mkb
However, my powerbook purchase brought the joy of computing back into my life. I frequently read the comments of those who decry the overpriced Mac when compared to constructing your own box (which I used to do - and I still believe that a Mac is equivalently priced with Dell/Gateway/IBM hardware, when all things are factored in properly) and while true on one level, it misses the mark on the total picture. That is depending on your interests and usage desires:
Life got a lot simpler when I replaced my wife's Win XP box with an iMac. No more weekly degunk sessions, antivirus, malware consternation and constant admonitions for her to be vigilant about keeping her machine clean were necessary. And she took to it like a charm -- things were unfamiliar (and still sometimes she stumbles on a Win -> Mac how-to-do question) but she is enthralled with it now and spends more time on email/web browsing than she ever did on the Win box. The iLife/iPod deal is just gravy and really we've experienced firsthand on how much more hassle-free life became after the Mac switch.
So, I'm not swayed by saving a couple hundred dollars. Just like I wouldn't buy a Kia or a Yugo, I'm not going to opt for a bargain basement PC over a quality machine like a Mac. No, it's not perfect and presents its own set of flaws, but at this juncture, it seems to be the product of greater quality for me.
AZspot
"all these examples have something in common. The strategy backfired" All of them? ALL of them? I think you're full of it, and I'd like you to back that statement up with some FACTS please.
Windows users can get all the software they want for free.
No software would include no Windows, and you can't get Windows for free, legally. So you get to start out with a hacked, illegal copy of XP with your new $450 PC with LCD and 512MB RAM (which we still haven't actually seen at that price). To anyone who is willing to do that to save a few bucks, I say "Have fun".
it made sense to assume replies would also be referring to that
Not when I have TWICE quoted the exact section I was talking about! TWICE! Are you that dense?
And to add the same suite of applications included with the Mac would bring the cost well over $450.
Well over? Unlikely.
-mkb
Most of the conferences I attend involve UN environmental and development programs, but even at those, I'm seeing a lot more Apple notebooks than I did six months ago.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
i'm not a genius, so there's no need for patronizing
.doc"? again it's there, but so is my tailbone.
1.)you're right. how easy is it for an average user to install cron-like system, a perl interpreter, or a webserver on a windows box? just because they're available for free, doesn't mean they're easy to use
2.) so what happens when a user emails someone else a word perfect document? "eerr, chief i've got word on my computer, will you save your document as
3.) useability.
299 stock dell should not be used as a viable alternative to a 499 stock minimac.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I don't know how much you value your time, but mine is worth more than pennies an hour. Given the amount of nit-picking you're doing about $50 worth of hardware, given the far superior software package, security, and visual appeal, you aren't someone who will be swayed.
My god, people will come up with all sorts of excuses. You can pay $500 for something you want that will work as advertised, or paying 80+% of that cost for something that won't.
And sure, I can come up with some freeware crap-fest software to install on a Windows box to make it sorta work if I wanted. But that's just pathetic... I'd spend hours doing it, the software would be anemic, and my OS would be crippled.
Where's the comparison again?
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Actually, yes.
I've got a 1 Ghz PowerBook (and no I'm not doing bait and switch) that's actually slower then the new Mac Minis and it ran faster then my girlfriends HP with a 2.5 Ghz processor, 40GB HD, CDRW, 15" CRT, 128 MB ATI Radeon 9500. And not just web browsing and making documents... I also play WoW.
I was saying to my sister that Apple's integration between the file system (HFS) and the command line wasn't all that good (eg. if you cp mv files with resource forks, the resource forks don't get brought across). I understand this is to be fixed in Tiger, but it's annoying that it isn't done in the current and third revision of OSX. She's talked to a number of people at Apple and their take on it is that it's a surprise to Apple that all the Unix geeks are actually taking to OSX. A pleasant surprise for them, but still a surprise.
Clearly at this time that is just not true and it can be proved easily.
Most people's next computer is going to run Windows XP.
Next?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Man /. is crawling with grammer nazi's these days, do you sit up at night crying someone spelt mississippi wrong?
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
You can change the case at time of purchase. The Coolermaster and Trinity cases are pretty nice. Or you can get a plain vanilla case if you like.
Believe me I have plenty experience with Mac OS X. I support OS X and Mac OS 9 machines. I've got two on my desk at the office. I've used Macs far longer than I've used PCs. I also run Linux and FreeBSD.
Computers are tools, if iLife floats your boat than I certainly wouldn't argue that you shouldn't go that route. Personally I find it annoying that Apple railroads you into specific hardware options with their stratified product line. Of course I understand why they do this.
Obviously if I wanted to switch to a Mac as my main machine than I would need to get a PowerMac. It is the only model flexible enough and upgradeable enough for my needs.
But I run Windows at home. Why? Well like you said it's the software. I know the system in and out so spyware and viruses haven't caused me any problems. When I'm at home I mostly use my computer for remote connectivity to work or for gaming. Since I game, I prefer the wide array of gaming software available on the PC. So just as someone who is stuck on iLife and willing to pay extra for it, I'm willing to put up with Windows idiosyncracies to play Half Life 2 or City of Heroes.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
So you are just itching to buy yet another keyboard, mouse and monitor? With iMacs that force one to acquire the built-in monitor there were complaints about the forced bundling. Now that Apple has an option that doesn't require you to buy a new monitor we still hear nothing but whiny complaints.
For anyone who has owned a computer the cost of upgrading to Mac OS X is no more than $600. The excuse that it costs too much is gone. Find another one.
I'd buy a powerbook on 2 conditions:
1) I could afford one at the time
2) the thing shipped with a 2 button trackpad.
and I know what you're gonna say- you can connect a 50 button mouse up to it, but damnit I want a laptop, damnit I don't want a mouse,and damnit I want 2 fricken buttons on my trackpad.
My current job has me digging my way out of debt and is letting me use a company Thinkpad T42. It's truely an awesome machine, so I'm not looking for a personal machine for a while.
if I do change jobs and have to give it back, I can only hope that apple has gotten over the one button trackpad. With it being in the news that they're considering a 2 button mouse, I can only hope that trackpads are next.
If/When they announce that, I'll start saving up.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
I think the point regarding the video card is that there are many cheap PCs whose onboard video cards share the main system memory instead of having their own dedicated RAM. To spell it out, you end up with less system memory available for other tasks.
Of course, extra RAM is cheap, but there are many people who buy cheap PCs who wouldn't think of adding memory or even know how to.
Anakin Simpson: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy--ooh, donuts!
I'm sorry but that is a troll. What kind of pre-built machine are you seriously going to get for 450 USD? A 15inch LCD? Why would you want to artificially limit your workspace like that? Why not get a decent 19inch CRT like an LG instead?
My $470USD Cisnet (yeah, funky brand) machine machine came with a 17" Phillips CRT.
Does that 450USD system have onboard or dedicated gfx?
on-board graphics, like the mac mini.
Does it use shared ram or dedicated VRam?
Shared, but the computer is only used for 2D apps, and with 512mb of system ram, it has plenty to share.
Does it include any software similar to iLife?
No, but that's not what the computer is used for.
Does it include Windows XP Pro?
No, it includes Windows XP Home, which is fine, because I don't need to do Remote Assitance, or put the computer on a network with a Domain, or the 6 or 7 other things specific to Windows XP Pro.
Does it include a DVD-Combo drive?
Yes, but it'll be used for burning backups, not making DVDs.
Does it include CD Burning software?
Yes, a copy of Nero 6.something
Does it include a USB Keyboard with USB ports?
No, it came with a PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse, leaving the motherboard with 4 unused USB ports.
Does it include Firewire ports?
Just 1, but I don't have any firewire devices.. USB 2.0 works fine for me.
Ask your wife if she would rather (you) spend time updating the virus software and removing spyware DLLs, or if she would rather (you) spend time with your children. Check mate.
You haven't provided enough information for anyone to draw a conlusion since you didn't say how many total shares there were outstanding.
In any case, profits obtained by an individual investor based on lucky timing have nothing to do with a companies profit. Many people made a ton of money on dot-com stocks of companies that never saw a dime of profit.
Actually, I think he's been promoted to Major.
Sorry, it looks like the mini doesn't use onboard graphics... It's got a Radeon 9200. I just assumed it used on-board video because of the small size.
I know what you are saying about Linux being a joke on the desktop. I've switched from nasty RPM based distros to gentoo to Mepis Linux. Mepis is a debian variant, and it JUST WORKS!
I really enjoy the simplicty and freedom (yes, as in beer) of Mepis. Anyway, I would recommend it to anyone. Even my 13 year old sister runs it. Even one of my college friends who is a humanities major has no problem with it. Just my $0.02
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
That should have been "company's".
Amusingly, Morgan Stanley has already predicted that Apple share will rise to 5% of the market this year. It was even posted on Slashdot.
So, how's that foot taste?
crawling with grammer nazi's these days
No apostrophe for plurals, please.
Apple (what the entire article and this thread is about)- 2 guys in a garage.
Microsoft (the giant everyone loves to hate) college dropouts.
I'm sure Apple relates more to this story than your examples.
You made my point. Disposable products with no upgrade path. Lets take the games market(second only to movies in popularity), running a popular game like sims2 or world of warcraft on 2 year old hardware is not going to be fun. Luckily on the pc side,you can buy a $65 new video card. Which is a lot cheaper than shelling out $500.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
"In the end you will still have a big, noisy, ugly PC box with a lot of outdated software."
Guys like you have to through insulting and pointless adjectives in don't you?
I've never called it a puny, weenie, gay looking little underpowered Mac.
Do you think the G5 is the only attractive tower ever made? Or the only quiet one?
Do you think that what's under the hood might be more important for some people than the size?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Even 256 is a little low with the G3s. You can get a 512mb stick of ram from crucial for ~$100 that will make life much nicer. P
-- My dog can beat up your dog.
That's right... legally. But in the real world such details are not important. That's also a big obstacle to open source adoption, too. 'Why should I use The Gimp if I have also Photoshop available for free?'
There sure was something seriously wrong with your GF's PC.
Dell 2.53GHz Pentium 4 Runs Circles Around Fastest Mac G4
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I guess I should have been a little more clear. . . Apple has been profiting on cool for quite awhile now. Forgive me if I am wrong, but I believe Dell and Apple are the only two companies making desktop PC's that have been profitable for quite a while now, then again I haven't researched this in quite awhile. Anyway, my point being, you don't rack up over two billion in cash and drive your stock price up over 500 percent in todays market (I hope) by not taking in profits. As far as my investment in Apple stock, it had nothing to do with luck and it had everything to do with sound research and optimistic timing. If you are investing in the market today based on whims and luck, oh man. . .
That's because your kid brother is probably American (and overweight). Well, I ain't. /. is in that language (OTOH, Americans are such dick heads that they never learn to speak *one* foreign language properly - and Spanish doesn't count).
So fuck you, you are an asshole! This is the internet dude, there's a world. We just write in English, because
Sorry...
I've seen the BOFH columns in The Register for awhile, and never had a clue what it meant. I figured out the "from hell" part, but "BO"? Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been confused by that column. None of the columns ever seem to explain the acronym, but I did eventually find it.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
i'm not a genius
You got that right.
so there's no need for patronizing
Well, that's all you're going to get, because you continue to argue points that we agree on while completely ignoring what I said in the first place.
-mkb
The hardware lock in is also my problem with Macs. You are just limited to this specific hardware.
Moreover if you buy Mac hardware you have to live without Windows, which is often not possible. There are a lot of situations where I just need some software that's only available for windows. There's no way to e.g. install vmware, or repartition your harddisk and install Windows XP. This can be a huge drawback.
I tend to use a dekstop PC, I don't use a laptop. Mac desktops are not easily upgradeable, therefore a noname PC is still the far cheaper and flexible solution.
I think the Mac has it's niches, but the reason why it's not more widespread is similar like Linux: missing software and hardware lock in.
You can tell wordprefect to save files defaultly as .doc. Otherwise it will save them as .wpd, a format that hasn't changed since version 6. We are now on version 12.
I had 8 macs before I was force to switch to PC. Back then, there were things Macs could do that PCs could not....Now, that is not the case. PCs can do and do well everything the Mac can do.
Pet Peev....
I like Win/Linux ability to do FULL screen and switch between full screens. The MAC desktop does not go full screen when you click on the maximize button. It only fills part of it, page size.
I also DON'T like iPhoto. It gets bogged when you get too many photos. Uses clugy db and you need to export pics for other uses.....
OS-X is NOT all that........
quote:
Are you HONESTLY going to tell me that this machine is going to perform worse than a $500 spec mini if you throw a $50 Radeon in it?
no... but I will tell you that that computer with any card put in it is not going to be a great gaming rig. Sure, adding the Radeon to that box will get its video performance up to snuff with the mini... whats your point? why didnt it come with one in the first place?
My original comment was in reponce to someone saying that touting the radeon in the mini is a bad idea because its not a very good card... I simply pointed out that it is superior to the video hardware that comes standard in a low end PC.
For the record, your the one that brough up 3d games (like anyone on a mini or a low end PC is concerned with playing high end games)
The mini has the right video hardware for its price point... it is not underpowered when it comes to the video needs of its target users. Get over it.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Show us this marvelous machine that costs $450 and includes a complete operating system and equivalent software to match iLife and AppleWorks (or iWork for another $80), and an LCD monitor that won't make your eyes bleed, and 512MB of RAM that's worth having. Seriously, show us this machine.
S EARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
c ription=20-161-615&depa=1
c ription=24-160-137&depa=1
I'm not him, but whatever.
http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4199563?site=sr:
Plus this:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?des
And this:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?des
Computer: $280
RAM: $35
Monitor: $176
Total: $491 (So maybe the guy quoting $450 was pushing it a little, but not much)
Comes with Linspire, OpenOffice, Gimp, etc. For the sort of person who'd be buying this, it's a LOT better software package than Windows XP (good ease of use, virus / spyware immunity, already has an office suite, etc).
I've seen this very computer in the Sunday ads for $180, which with the RAM and Monitor would come out at $391.
But...the Mac mini looks cooler, you can install Linux on it like a PC if you want to, fits in smaller spaces, can run OSX (probably it's biggest attraction), and mac people won't look down on you if you have it.
Man, do your homework before you decide to call someone a troll.
Here's a Fry's ad I found in today's paper:
3.2 GHz P4 with motherboard based on 848P chipset (with onboard sound): $130.00
So, that's the heart of the machine there.
Throw in some RAM: 1 GB $100.00
Hard Drive: 200 GB $100.00
Graphics Card: Radeon 9600XT 125.95
Total: $455.95
I don't know about you, but I'm fine using Linux, so I'd toss the "XP Pro" requirement. I could have included all your drives & keyboards, but I didn't feel like it because there are at least five different people I know who have old Keyboards and DVD/CD burners lying around who'd just give one or two to me if I asked. Not to mention I have all that stuff lying around anyway. So, that's another advantage to the whole thing, is you're not forced to buy all new components if you've got some old ones lying around. Anyways, that's my take on it.
When I purchased my notebook, I paid over $1400. I could have purchased a PowerBook for $1500.
However,
- The 12" PowerBook has a low-resolution screen. XGA doesn't cut it for me. My notebook is SXGA+, which gives me almost twice as much working space.
- I run Linux. Yeah, OS X is nice, but it's still a commercial OS. I could run Linux on a Mac, but, what's the point? Why not get a cheaper PC?
- Quality is not an issue. The CL-56 I own is a solid, well-built notebook. I got a 3-year warranty standard, 24/7 service/support, and a very-nice shipping policy. All of this is *included* in the price of the notebook.
- My notebook has a 7200rpm HDD. It's quite a bit nippier than the 4200rpm drives used in the low-end PowerBook.
- Unlike the Powerbook keyboards, the modifier keys aren't shifted to make room for FN.
- Battery life with my current notebook is *excellent*. I don't know if the Powerbooks get 5 hours, but my notebook certainly does.
- Pentium-M is fast. Really fast. My 1.7GHz CPU is both fast and cool.
- My notebook has Mobility Radeon 9700 128M graphics, which aren't available on the 12" PowerBook.
Basically, I could have paid a lot more and purchased a 15" PowerBook, or I could have accepted a slower GPU, slower HDD, smaller & lower resolution display, and a much slower processor.
If OSX were a factor, maybe the Mac would be worth it. But a cool aluminum case isn't worth the tradeoffs I'd have to make.
* Apple makes hardware that looks good, but (generally) sucks. Goes right back to the Apple ][. If they can finally build reasonable hardware -- good on them. The Apple ][ suxored (software floppies?!?), the Mac suxored (only 128KB ?!?) the Mac II suxored (unshielded cables, unshielded power supplies. Mac OS suxored (compared with Unix, compared with Smalltalk). Apple gave us exploding laptops! (major suxor!). Am I to believe that they can produce quality now?
* Apple software is "servicable", but not brilliant. It is closed, and generally refuses to interoperate (remember, this is the company that gave us the 'cr' delimiter, and resource forks)
* Apple needs the fanboy/grrl base. Without that they would have been so dead...
* Apple may be using an "open" core, but they won't open up the GUI for cross compatibility. I want to run Apple applications on my Sparc Solaris 9 box (at least the GUI), or from my Redhat box, or my AIX boxes, or my HPUX (well, you get the idea -- I have a few more different systems in the lab as well). But I can't. I could use the Apple as my desktop machine, but it won't play with my preferred keyboard and mouse (Lexmark Model M). Come on, open up the GUI client, guys!
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
You might want something with a DVD player...I couldn't load iLife w/ garageband when I wnet that route.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The default is .wpd, though.
Quoth
> I need good Unix/X compatibility for when I
> deal with the big iron.
You have got an SNA adapter for a Mac? Or a Virtual Z/OS system
Green with envy
Stop trolling Apple threads.
- learn to swim.
Yeah, I was a little skeptical when I read this about hackers switching to Mac. In fact none of the hackers I know are switching to Mac because they consider it to be too mainstream. They're all off experimenting with GNU Hurd these days. Of course having said that, I know a lot of non-hackers who are switching to Macs.
Santa's suicide mission go!
Thats all fine and good but I've learned over the many years that you get what you pay for. If you want a house full of shit, then thats what you get. Me? I prefer an Acura to a Honda. A Sony Wega to a Magnavox. A Weber grill to a Sunbeam. :shrug:
Sony build excellent laptops that are as well-designed as mac's. They also have excellent linux support.
"Foobar2000 + ColumnsUI gives you all the same features, with 1/4 the RAM usage."
Because RAM is in such short supply these days.
My G3 iBook was bombproof, and still runs just as well today as it did when I bought it, although in the capable hands of my sister who is using it at college (I bought myself a 15" PB a few months ago).
My iBook was a 600Mhz version, with the 8Mb graphics card - the last model made that didn't have the logic board issue, which has been confined to G3 iBooks with 16Mb graphics and above.
You were talking about something with no software, right?
You think good software automatically has a cost associated with it? This concept is foreign to me, please explain.
Oh come on now, they're only about 1.5 times the price of a generic PC based laptop
From your pricing ranges, you're probably American. That explains you being a dick head. Do you know how much a MiniMac cost abroad? Far more than just 1.5 times a PC, because there are import taxes and conversion rates to be dealt with.
So, you know, use the fact that you come from a richer nation and get a fucking perspective on things. Go read some...newspaper (NY Times is alright).
All this means that, no, the MiniMac won't take over the world, when it actually costs (e.g., Brazil) almost the triple of a simple PC. This is the MiniMac. A G5 PowerPC is 10 X more expensive than a PC.
I'm currently writing most of my programs in perl. So, naturally, i'm going to stick to *nix and so i'm planning to buy a small 12" iBook.
The two questions i currently have are:
*) Can i get a decent multi-bash console on OSX like the KDE Konsole application or do i have to roll my own?
*) Is there any way to hook up an old PS/2 keyboard, cause i don't want to give up my trusted IBM completly?
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
Ya, but for the same price, you can get a far more powerful PC.
Sorry, I can't help but think the Mac is overhyped. I'd definitely get a Mac laptop though.
If you want cheap stuff, shop around. The refurbs at the apple store are a great deal.
eMac 1GHz/ 256MB/ 40GB/ NO CD-ROM/ NO MODEM - Apple Certified
Original price: $649.00
Your price: $529.00
That's a mac WITH A MONITOR for $530. yeah, you need more memory. Life is tough. The emac is still a fantastic deal if you don't already have a screen.
JR
mac books are cheap unix books that really work, the main reasons for not using GUI don't hurt as on linux/xfree (amazing design, but not always useful on notebooks) and it's not far away from a system one could work on.
most unix world applications run without problems and year after year, the need of running a windows x86 app decreased to special cases.
i'd buy a mac mini so my girlfriend allows me to place it in the living room - and a powerbook to have a robust unix environment. but it won't replace my linux desktop.
I just thought that this might be a good moment to write in stating that I'm typing all of this on a Powerbook. :D
I started off on PCs back in 1989, fighting my way through DOS and Win2.11 and Win3.0. Then I switched to Macs in prepress until I left IT entirely for a few years. During that time I worked occasionally on Win95. Later I did a multimedia course that required Macs even though everybody was saying at the time that Apple was dead and even our school was considering switching to WinNT. The next few jobs I had were all based on WinNT, Win2k and WinXP, but, after having gotten a free old Powerbook from a dead dotcom and using OSX on it, I was sold.
Since then I've bought two more Powerbooks and I am incredibly happy with this decision. My Windows machine hardly ever gets used anymore.
except of course that we're not arguing the same points.
you claim that a 299 dell box comes loaded with usable software, whereas i claim that it does not.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
>> How am I gonna convince my wife? If there was a store that sold both Dell computers and Macs, then this would be quite easy: Take her to the shop, show her the Dell, and the Mac Mini, and ask her which one she wants in her living room. If she doesn't pick the Mac Mini, then something is seriously wrong with your wife.
My Dell Inspiron 4000 is about the same size and weight as a 14" iBook. The battery lasts a little over 4 hours, or 8 hours with the two batteries in it.
The iBook is, like most consumer elctronics today, not intended to be serviced by the user. When was the last time you upgraded your TV, VCR, CD or DVD player?
I don't consider a $1500 computer to be a disposable consumer electronics device like a VCR. I've had the same 20" TV for 15 years now and it still works fine. If it died tomorrow I would've long since got my $250 out of it. If a hard drive in my iBook dies after the warranty is up at 3 years and 1 month I'm supposed to just throw the whole computer away instead of just replacing the $100 hard drive in it? All I'm asking for is to make the iBook's internals a little more user-accessible instead of requiring you to remove dozens of screws and panels to get at anything. You've already said the Powerbook allows that, so why not the iBook?
I know it's in sharp contrast to all you happy shiny people but I'd like mine to resemble my *nix or is it *nux desktop. Colors probably chocolate or more appropriately coffee; the less primary the better; don't have to wait for U2 to have one made.
Any skinners out there?
Suing them and yzDock? What was the point of either of those lawsuits except to prove that Jobs is a bigger jerk than Gates even?
man, nazis aside, you're truly in dire need of a spellchecker. Not that
Otherwise expect to be flamed both on form and substance
I've never been a Mac guy. But I recently bought a Mac Mini and I must say, I'm extremely satisfied with it. OS/X is so much better than any other desktop/workstation operating system, that I'm now surprised I consented to use anything else for so long.
I think Apple has a good chance of retaking the 10% market share they traditionally held before their implosion a few years back. Many of my geek friends are "switching" to Mac.
You can emulate a 2 or 3 button mouse with SideTrack. It takes some getting used to, but it's well worth it.
There's no way to e.g. install vmware, or repartition your harddisk and install Windows XP.
Sure there is, it's called VirtualPC.
Mac desktops are not easily upgradeable, therefore a noname PC is still the far cheaper and flexible solution.
If you're a hobbyist and you like to tinker with hardware and tweak performance then you have a point. But I think most people use computers for software, most of which can be compiled quite easily on any major architecture. My 400Mhz G4 I got in 2000 is still plenty fast enough for all the work I do (including Raytracer development). I have no need to upgrade anything, but eventually when G5s get fast enough and cheap enough I will probably pick one up and get all my major upgrades at once.
Hmmm, how about a $400 2.8 Ghz P4 machine with 17" monitor?
Like this
The problem with tossing "the 'XP Pro' requirement" is that Linux isn't very comparable to OS X. Windows xp Pro is the closest it comes from the x86 side. Frankly, Linux just doesn't have the vendor support that OS X does. It all roll-your-own stuff. And frankly, I enjoy how my DVD burning works without me needing to do anything to even set it up. I like how I've got an OpenGL-accelerated desktop enabling things like Exposé.
By the way, once you've tried Exposé for any length of time, you'll wonder how in the world you ever managed to multitask without it.
In addition, some spare CD burner that someone gave you isn't exactly the same quality as the slot-loading Matshita drives that Apple uses. Plus, it has a DVD reader CD burner combination (8x24x16x24) by default instead of just a CD burner. It's also about the same size as your proposed computer's optical drive.
"Don't call it a come back, I've been here for years!"
Steve Jobs said knock you out!
I'm sorry you had so much trouble with SuSE and FC3. I tried Mandrake and FC3 and Ubuntu before settling on "plain" Debian testing. I used Windows for years until a few months ago. I knew I'd switch to Linux someday, but didn't realize it would happen so soon. I couldn't be happier. GNOME works wonderfully for me, and so does KDE. I can't recall the last crash that wasn't caused by a 3D game failing to get its sound device that was already used by another program, neither of which are made for ALSA (though I solved that in 15 minutes by looking at a log file and checking a forum post).
/usr/share/doc/packagename.
I recommend you try Ubuntu or Mepis or Kanotix, and if those don't do it for you, try Debian itself. RC3 of the Sarge installer was just released; download the netinst ISO and give it a try. On a decent connection, you'll have it installed and up-to-date in less than two hours. For the most part, with apt, everything just works, and if you need to configure something manually, you can find the info you need in the man page or
Sure, if I could afford a PowerBook, I'd probably get one too. Though, the single-button touchpad doesn't encourage me, so I would seriously consider a good IBM laptop (while they're still good) that has good Linux support.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Convergence at its best, eh?
You're waving at a sound.
Moof isn't its name; it's just the noise it makes.
What crack are you smoking?
Mac desktops are simple to upgrade, since the Blue and White G3, right up to the current generation Powermac.
G3 and G4 Powermacs had a little handle on the top of one side that released a latch. The side was hinged at the bottom and opened out easily with the logic board fixed to it. The hard drives (standard IDE btw) were connected with a perfectly sized IDE cable with a planned path (no cable mayhem inside the case). You didn't have to disconnect any cables to open the case up.
In its open state, you could power it on and use it normally (just watch that CPU load since the heatsinks were cooled by a large, slow fan that was mounted in the case and was thus nowhere near the heatsinks when the thing was open.
This design made adding RAM a snap (standard DIMMs btw), or adding new hard drives (four bays in the Sawtooth models) or changing the optical drive, or putting in a PCI card (standard PCI slots btw). It was like having the logic board out on the desk, not cramped away in an awkward case.
I know not all PCs are badly designed, but my experience has ranged from "a bastard to work on" to "annoying to work on" with PCs (both desktops, towers and laptops).
The Macs I have worked on (and that's several generations from the 9600 onwards are a peach to deal with. So well planned out.
Even iBooks and Powerbooks are simple to work on compared to the PC laptops I've had to take apart.
Plus, since Macs now use (and have used for many, many years) standard PC parts with exception of the logic board, CPU and graphics card (can use a PC GPU, but you need to flash it with a Mac ROM) you can pick the parts up as if you were buying for a PC - same hard drives, RAM, optical drives, mice, tablets, scanners, printers, network cards, monitors etc.
This ain't the coolest thing to say on Slashdot. I'm a classic .asp and budding .net developer. How is a Mac mini going to help me?
Answer, it won't.
Hardly, the performance of your Mini still sucks ass.
For the same price my free-OS system is going to be better as a development machine.
Wow, that C in Psych 101 is really serving you well. Oddly enough, you're completely wrong. That's what you get for armchair psychiatry with someone you never met, retard.
1) I link to goatse simply *because* it's so hackneyed. Profile has a place for homepage, I didn't have one, so I'm making the joke that it's my asshole up there. You missed the point.
2) I found slashdot from google. So I guess you're right, if you count Page and Brin as my friends. But the assholes won't return my calls, so I don't know how that affects your theory.
3) I don't have an idol. What, you think we trolls have some sort of guild system? Now *that*'s fucked up.
4) I'm independent because I'm independent. I troll because I like fucking with tools like you. I don't confuse the two. No, trolling doesn't make me independent. You're right, though, that would be sad.
5) Sign your fucking posts you coward, so I can put you on my friends list. ;)
The memory you quoted wont work on the computer you quoted. (the correct memory won't adversely affect the overall price though)
also, you'd probably want to replace the on board video with a decent video card. I don't know how it compares to the video card in the mac mini, but it looks pretty weak at first glance.
Paint my fence!
Most macs come bundled with appleworks (word processing, spreadsheet, etc). Openoffice/J is kinda querky but i have a xwindows BSD version of open office running fine on my macs.
I also bought pages (79.00 isn't horrid for a word processing program) and have great things to say about it.
That's impressive, by in my opinion Linux (which I have used various flavors of for several years for desktops and servers) still doesn't cut it for the average home user. Many users want a few simple apps like Photoshop Elements, and of course they can't have that on Linux. Instead, a bunch of idiots like you and me point them at something called "the GIMP". We say, "Look, it's free!" They say, "I don't care, it sucks, I want Photoshop Elements." We are not necessarily smarter than them.
/dev/hda3 thing instead of translating all that garbage into something a normal person can understand, like a drive icon on the desktop with the volume label displayed under it. What a concept, huh? Of all things, KDE still displays the device name and mount path on the desktop under the drive icon, as if that would actually be useful to the common user! I like KDE in general, but give me a break. "/mnt/storagedrive3 [/dev/sdb2]"? How is that useful to the average person? Volume labels have been around forever. Why aren't we using them, like every other sensible desktop OS?
There definitely isn't a set of applications for Linux to match iLife/iWork. IPhoto alone has no match on Linux. Besides which, we all know what happens with most of these Linspire machines. People buy it for the hardware and throw a pirated copy of Windows and about $1,000 worth of other pirated software on it. Unfortunate but true.
So, I see the machine, but I don't see the legal software and the usability that goes with it. Of course, that's just my opinion, but it's based on direct observation that tells me Linux still isn't quite ready to compete with OS X except in niche markets (where it usually kicks butt). As a general desktop OS it is sorely lacking. I mean, lately I've tried some of the very newest and most "user friendly" distros like Knoppix, Kubuntu and Mandrake 10.1, and none of them will even auto-mount a simple USB key on the desktop!
And I've never yet met a Linux file manager or desktop environment that made it easy to navigate (or even find) the various drives inside and connected to my computer, at least not in any way similar to how it works in the Windows/Mac/BeOS file managers. Linux still seems to be stuck on the whole
These kind of things should be considered showstopper bugs if we want average people to use Linux as a desktop. We do want that, don't we? So far I haven't really seen any Linux software even going in the right direction.
Hardly, the performance of your Mini still sucks ass.
For the same price my free-OS system is going to be better as a development machine.
Riiiight. Because your average home user is also a developer interested in squeezing every spare cycle out of his processor for all the compiling he does.
So it's agreed that Windows users are thieves?
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Because it's not easy.
Well, if you have sold your Apple stock and made a tidy profit, congratulations. If you haven't, the jury is still out on your stock market skills.
My point was that Dell is making more profit than Apple. I haven't checked it, so I might be wrong. I just assumed that in general there's a relationship between relative market share and relative profit.
"Ya, but for the same price, you can get a far more powerful PC."
Where?
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
I wouldn't call it theft. What I'm just trying to point out is that for an average user the software legally included with Macs does not mean a serious advantage over a PC with no software bundled. Of course, not every Windows user is like that and I'm sorry for those who might be offended for my words, it's just what I've experienced around me.
That's right... legally. But in the real world such details are not important. That's also a big obstacle to open source adoption, too. 'Why should I use The Gimp if I have also Photoshop available for free?'
I think questions like that are still overshadowed with questions like, "Why should I use this strange software with a strange name and a really strange interface when I can get Photoshop for free and it doesn't suck?" or "Why should I use this weird GIMP thing when I can own the very usable Photoshop Elements 3.0 legally for $129, which will let me color-correct my photos ten times faster and easier?"
For many people, price is not the main concern, which is why so many are willing to spend $600 on the full version of Photoshop CS. I know this because I'm one of those people. I've used the GIMP and I'd rather pay for Photoshop Elements for personal use, because in my opinion the GIMP sucks. If I had a business where part of what I needed to do to make money was editing graphics, I would pay for Photoshop CS because it would pay for itself. The GIMP simply does not compare, and price doesn't have much to do with it. As free software, the GIMP is amazing. When you compare it with something like Photoshop for real work, it's not so amazing anymore. That's the obstacle, not the price.
You're absolutly right on this one.
The powerbook is a fabulous laptop except for that damned one button mouse. As soon as they offer a 2 button version i'll be the first one in line.
Or worse...I've had a Mac Mini for about 3 weeks. My wife is 5 days late!
Lunch was $1.50/meal (+ ice cream and extras) when I was in school. Assuming four weeks in a month, and five meals per week, that's (at least) $30 of lunch money per month. Since the online Apple store's web page says you can pay $12 per month with an Apple Credit Account, you really can afford a Mac using just your lunch money, with plenty left over for a keyboard, mouse, and monitor (just not an Apple one).
Any other objections?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I've noticed that Windows users, even the ones that are used to pirating anything and everything and think nothing of it, generally have a change of outlook once they actually use the software the comes with a Mac. It's like they've finally found something worth paying real money for.
And of course pirating software isn't limited to the PC platform, so even if they don't want to pay for it they can often get a copy from their Mac-using buddies. It happens on the Mac side almost as much as on the PC side. And no, it's not theft, but it is copyright infringement, and it can still get you in trouble no matter what platform you're using.
Yes, in the same way that a dump truck is far more powerful than a sports car. I'd still rather drive the sports car, though.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Maybe this will mean less evangelizing. I have no problem with other people using Macs, but I am sick of people telling me that I should use a Mac. If I wanted one, I would get one. I can make decisions for myself!
You can't afford the $12/month that the Apple store quotes?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Back in the day, you remember, hot grits, john katz and such, Macs were derided by the slashdot crowd quite a bit. Nice to see that apple is getting the respect it deserves. I'm not saying that pre OS X was the best OS around, but the wintel crowd were such assholes to the Mac crowd. of course, those who knew better weren't assholes. Thanks Steve Jobs, for rescuing a great company, and giving it the direction it needed. It is a great day in apple land again.
Oddly enough, Mellel is the same price as Pages (if you divide the price of iWork by 2). Of course, I find TextEdit and/or markup languages (LaTeX, XHTML) meet my needs anyway...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This is the strongest argument in favor of an Apple computer. Unless you're absoloutely married some Windows application unsuited to VPC (like games), chances are you're going to spend less time on maintenance and dealing with irritations like malware and malware prevention on a Mac.
minis are not great computers. G4s have a slower bus than Athlons did in 1999, the default config doesn't have enough memory, and the video card isn't new enough to use Core Image when 10.4 is released. The equivilant Windows machine will be more powerful, and if properly maintained it will perform better. But that maintenance is the problem.
It's a fair bet that most Windows Slashdot users can maintain their machines, but most of the other people out there are waiting for their brother in law to come round so the machine can be fixed, and they can check their e-mail. By avoiding issues like that, the Mac is effectively faster because it has greater availability.
Linux is preferable for some people because it performs better, and customizable hardware (Linux users are vastly more likely to want customizable hardware) is much cheaper. But that will always be a niche market. Even amoung users capable of maintaining a Linux box, a significant number just don't feel like it.
Now that MacOS has matured (10.2 was not mature), I am not surprised to see it becoming more mainstream. The final element is for faster processors to make their way into the value lines, and that is only a matter of time.
I'm one of the few that likes to use Linux, but I am happy to see Apple succeeding.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I mean, it's not going to take over, it's not going to evict microsft, it's not going to obsolte any of the other *bsd or linux distributions, but from an old hacker's point of view, OS X is cool.
Every old hacker I know who's tried it out (at least since 10.2) has stuck with it. I know there are exceptions out there, and people who just plain don't like OSX, but it definately qualifies in my book.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Bad analogy. It's more like how a beat up, rusted old muscle car with 600 HP and nitrous is more powerful than a Prius.
The difference is that the Apple software (iLife, MacOS X) doesn't suck. Customers will care as soon as they see how much easier it is to use Mac software to actually get stuff done.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Women are stupid and know nothing about technology. Just don't tell her about the PC and she won't know the difference, you retard!
When I bought by iBook I knew it couldn't be upgraded so I custom-ordered it with all the upgrades I'd need (60GB hard drive, internal Bluetooth) to begin with. Maybe you should have thought ahead, or bought a Powerbook (which I hear are more upgradable) instead?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I had similar worries. However, over the last two years, I've found that they were unfounded. For starters, except for the processor and motherboard, it's all the same hardware. PCI cards, USB2, Firewire, DDR RAM etc. Moreover, if you're considering a laptop or the mini, the PC equivalent is no less proprietary.
I'm now on my second Apple laptop and they are more compatible with each other than any two PC laptops. For example, my Apple AC adaptors are interchangeable. That is, my G3 iBook adapter works with the new PowerBook and vice-versa. Try that with a new IBM and one from two years ago. I use the same laptop case, the same laptop stand and the same peripherals. (The peripherals also work beautifully with my Linux desktop.)
However, more important that hardware lock-in is software lock-in. This one is up to you. See, despite the commercial options, on OSX I tend to use all of the Open Source apps I used in Linux. I use Firefox, Thunderbird, NeoOffice/J, VLC, Eclipse, X11 etc.
As mentioned, hardware lock-in is a complete non-issue, as I can (and do) move easily back and forth between Linux and Windows. I use OSX on my main home machine because it works so well with all of my HW and SW. Let me tell you, Audacity on OSX is much nicer to use and look at than Audacity in Linux. (BTW, is there any explanation as to why wxGTK is still using GTK 1.x? It's 2005!)
As long as the apps that you use are available on more than one platform, your data is safe regardless of your current system. Stick to Open Source and open standards like the OASIS format and you can use whatever computer and OS fits your current needs.
Wow, way to discredit yourself with a falsehood right off the bat, Paul.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Maybe, but just because the Prius probably handles better...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Can you read? I said unless you are the market leader or making revenues off of a related product, then the strategy is not a good idea.
I bet you assume that Mac OS isn't really all that better to use than Windows too, right? Well, as you've just discovered, assumptions can be wrong...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
So true, especially on apple.slashdot.org. I'm a Mac user, but not a retarded Apple fanboi. Whenever I want to say something "not positive enough" here on this part of Slashdot, I'll have to post anonymously if I want to keep some karma.
Carbon was an important part of getting OSX accepted. It was also a reason for delaying its release.
Carbon is a compatibility layer that made it easy to port old Mac programs to the new OS. Considering MacOS 9 is utterly nothing like MacOS X, it was the difference between many App developers updating their programs or just abandoning Apple and going Windows.
It was a transitional thing. Important for the early stages, but now the OS is mature it matters alot less. Like PS2's being able to play PSOne games.
My iBook is my first Mac. You better believe that that one-button trackpad scared the crap out of me at first, because I would be stuck with it even if I put Linux on the computer. But I got the iBook anyway, because I wanted to try out OS X. I still would have greatly preffered a multi-button trackpad at that point, though.
However, now I'm glad my iBook has only one button on its trackpad. With a normal trackpad you have to hunt around (or look) to see which button is which, since it doesn't fit in your hand like a mouse. But with this iBook, I don't. It's actually easier to cmd-click (since my hands stay near the keyboard anyway) than it is to right-click on my dad's Compaq Presario laptop. It takes a little getting used to, that's all.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
2 blatantly uninformed and borderline trolling posts and you still managed to hang on to your 1 score. Maybe you should post how it took you 7 hours to tranfer 14MB on a Mac.
IPhoto alone has no match on Linux.
/home is where stuff goes, and the rest can take care of itself except for removable media, and unless the Linspire people forgot automount daemons exist, that should just appear on the desktop. Digital cameras generally support the USB mass storage interface, so those will just appear the same way. We're not talking about putting normal users on Gentoo here!
Sure it does. gthumb does the thumbnail thing, Gimp does the editing. gthumb will open the photo using the Gimp, so you don't have to go running around in your file browser for it to work, either. It doesn't do the calendar search thing, though.
There definitely isn't a set of applications for Linux to match iLife/iWork.
Cinelerra will do what iMovie does.
DVD burning, menu creation, and other iDVD stuff is supported by a couple programs. DVDauthor works, but there's GUI tools avaliable too.
Dunno about GarageBand. Never used it, never tried to do anything it does.
iTunes, of course, is missing. But you have to pay money to actually get songs from that anyway.
Granted, these aren't integrated together or anything. You certianly aren't going to be dragging stuff between them. But they do work, and work well.
Regarding Linux file systems...most users need not concern themselves with them.
Regarding Photoshop Elements vs. Gimp, yes, there's more software avaliable for Mac. There's even more avaliable for Windows. For the most part, none of it is needed (aside from special cases, like people who actually need Photoshop, or MS Office). A lot of users have picked up some favorite Windows program or other, but they're not going to be able to run it on Mac anyway. At least with Linux they have a change of making it work under Wine.
Really, the main reason to use OSX over Linspire is the integration between programs on OSX, and the consistant interface between programs on OSX. For a some people, having a nicely integrated and consistant system is worth an extra few hundred $$. But, aside from iTunes, there really isn't much you can do on a Mac Mini that the Linspire machine couldn't do.
Note that if I was buying one, I'd probably go for the Mac. But, I'd rather keep my Gentoo box than have either of them.
s/rapport/report/
:p
:D
happy?
In my "defence", the Danish(which is my native language) word for report is rapport. Also, i dont really proof read my slashot messages so i you can't stand to read a few misspells here and there you should not read any of my comments
Or you can just pirate Windows. :)
The educational discount on iWork is better than the one on Mellel, though so for those who do need both I imagine it must be a better deal.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
it does it well, cheaply, quickly and is vendor-independant.
there are more ports that work on vanilla freebsd than the bsd that apple gives you.
I am free to use any notebook, desktop or larger system I want - even non x86 systems.
I agree that apple hardware is cool. but its still a single-vendor solution and that is something I find unacceptable.
apple is better than wintel - sure. but apple isn't always 'better' than linux or freebsd on x86; its just easier for some and sexier in its UI.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
...more user-accessible...
Who is saying to throw the computer away? If you bought a $3500 plasma TV and it went on the blink, you'd also have a hard time servicing it unless you have significant electronics skills. Unlike the laptop, getting your mitts into the TV could get you electrocuted. Take your dead laptop to a professional service guy, just as most people take their new modern cars to someone who knows how to deal with it. I see no reason why a manufacturer has to make it easy for an amateur to screw around with the equipment and then if something bad happens and the duffer gets hurt, get sued yet on top of it all. Most technology has become too complex for ordinary consumers to be able to fix it. The days of the ordinary, simple to fix cars and other consumer devices have gone, for better or worse. Most cheap consumer gadgets are simply thrown away and replaced with newer, fancier ones and the more costlier ones must be serviced by professionals who know what they are doing and have the proper tools.
All theory is gray
PCs, MS Windows, and MS Office aren't technologies; they're products.
And the technology underlying those products (bitmapped displays, MMUs, TCP/IP networks, etc,etc) all became popular in CS departments and research labs long before they moved out into the rest of the world and ended up into consumer products from MS.
There are two quite viable solutions here:
Somewhat unrelatedly, we control a really complicated physics experiment using custom FPGA hardware, homebrew C++ code, and native Win32 for the GUI. We also use a few open source programs and libraries. Every once in a while Windows XP misbehaves, but it's not a major timesink. We're not OS hackers, but we are power users in our own way. I suspect any other OS would cause even more trouble. Horses for courses. PS: What's with people saying Thinkpads cost twice as much as PowerBooks? Last I checked the Thinkpad is a slightly better deal spec for spec.
So when you pay one guy a lot of money, that's getting a blowjob, but when you pay two guys slightly less, combined, that's taking it in the ass? You apple zealots sure do get reality fucked up sometimes.
I absolutely agree. In my database systems theory and programming class there are 12 people in the class. 5 people routinely bring laptops to class. That list is 1 Dell, 2 iBooks, and 2 Powerbooks. There is a whole unofficial Mac "club" it seems in my CS dept. Myself, I own one of the iBooks. I am among those people who had always hated Macs before OS X. Then once OS X came out I became of the camp "Not bad, but if you want to do anything useful, with useful software, Windows or *nix is where it's at." Another negative I had always seen of the Mac is that you couldnt configure it as you could with Windows (registry, disable services, et c etc). I realize now that OS X is just as customizable, if not more That being said I received a G4 800mhz , 640 mb, 40 gig, Airport extreme iBook for 400 bucks so I couldn't turn it down. Now I feel myself hating to use my PC (top of the line everything, bought a few months ago). I fear I spent tons of money on the wrong hardware/software. The PC is now delegated to my server/game machine. The best browser I've ever used is on the mac (Camino - www.caminobrowser.org) as well as the best instant messaging program (Adium - Adiumx.com) If only mac gaming was better I would never touch a PC again - except to fix them and get paid ;-)
Did you read the article? It was about the emergence of OS X as the OS of choice among a particular group. If you can't run OS X on the "far more powerful PC" (what a load of crap that is), then it is beside the point. If your goal is to play the latest FPS with the highest frame rate then you have the right idea. But that is a significantly different topic (I also have an Athlon box built for that purpose).
You can have a number of different reasons not to use Mac OS X. Cost is no longer one of them.
"...there is no dell on the market that can compete with the top of the line MAC."
now back it up... preferably with links
NeXTSTEP was for the real men then and OS X is now.
I have to say I was bigotted. The wife wanted a mac, so I eventually caved in a bought her one. She's your typical end-user. Just wants to get things done. Her windoze PC's has had trouble with spyware and virii and the 'personal-firewalls' I've attempted to install she cannot fathom. That said, I bought her an ibook and to tell you the truth I was impressed. Firstly the bad, 1) it came with not enough ram (had to bump it to 512) 2) new UI to windoze which I unfortunately have to use on a daily basis (I've learnt to say different, not worse) 3) The thing that kills me most, one stupid button on the laptop instead of 2 or 3 which I am more used to. And a lot of the software it would appear does not implement r-clicking the way I am used to see (2). BUT (and this is where it REALLY shines) 1. Build quality is bloody excellent. 2. Doesn't burn your balls off. 3. Batterytime is great. 4. Ultimately does everything I *NEED* in a laptop with the plusses above which my acer laptop doesn't quite cut. 5. An ibook is really quite affordable, if you don't count sheer-number-crunching ability, which is what you would want to do on a desktop ideally anyway. Okay, it doesn't do everything I *WANT* like have an x86 chip in which I am architecturally a little more familiar with but hey learning to program a G4 may be fun, besides there's always C and objective-C which I am really growing to like. BTW, I have always thought C++ was crap. Objective-C is elegant in a way C++ isn't. Okay you can get it on x86's too, but on a mac it's all there... with lots of extras too. There's also a semi-decent forth/assembler solution www.powermops.org. And lastly you aren't stuck with crappy NT/2000/XP... One could argue, why not get an x86 and dump a unix/linux clone on it. Yes you could. But Apple's already bundled everything you need, it's just bloody convenient. PLUS, let's face it, some of us need to use Office to do our daily work (or photoshop or whatever). Sure there are other solutions out there, but hey, with a mac, you don't have to think too much, you just do. So yes, buying a mac has been an eye-opening experience for an x86 bigot like me. It would seem for now, I do all my gaming on my PS2 and PC My internet surfing on my wife's compromised PC desktop (there's nothing of value on it) My x86 stuff on my (hopefully) secure x86 laptop. My actual work - reports etc (some of us do work on things other than computers!) on my wife's mac - where things just work. My 2 cents anyways, being an ex-bigot I don't expect anyone to share my sentiments, but I would say if you're looking for a new laptop you might want to consider a mac, for all the above reasons.
What does matter is that you didn't get Pro. See, I need Pro, and OS X gives me those features, but Microsoft wants an extra $80 from a company or $300 standalone for XP Pro.
So, while you don't need those features, OS X gives you them. For free.
No, you're an idiot.
Like I said, and you just confirmed, there isn't a set of applications for Linux to match iLife/iWork. The smooth integration and usability is half of what makes them so great! You said so yourself. I'm perfectly aware that you can do almost anything with Linux. It just isn't easy. WINE included, and it's still a gamble whether any particular application will work under WINE anyway, even though it has improved drastically in recent years. In the end, Linux really can't compare with a Mac for a general home desktop user who just wants to surf the net, read and send email, edit some photos, and maybe make a slideshow on DVD.
/home. /mnt is outside of /home, and that's where my drives are. OS X has the /Users folder where you keep your stuff, but they also show you all the drives in the Finder, without making you look for them. Guess what? The drives are all mounted under /Volumes (it's still UNIX after all) but you never need to know that! Any storage device that you connect just magically shows up in the overall file browser, including network drives. They have the concept of the overall computer with physical drives or partitioned drives all being available to the user.
Regarding the file system, you can't treat home desktop users like users on a mainframe. It just doesn't work. Don't tell me I "need not concern myself" with anything outside of
I want quick access to every drive in my computer, including any removable media and network drives. Linux has so far failed to give me that, at least at the same level I've come to enjoy from working with Windows, Mac OS, and BeOS for the last 1.5 decades. Failed utterly. Supposedly Linux can do automounting, but so far I haven't seen a functional automount deamon. Mandrake had some automount thing going on and I always turned it off since it kept doing dumb stuff like making me eject a CD as root after I installed some new packages from it. I had to resort to the command line and knowledge that a new user would never have, in order to retrieve the CD. That's abject failure for a desktop OS aimed at home users, as far as I'm concerned. Come on, most desktop operating systems have let me interact with my drives/volumes more easily since 1990. It was easier to navigate drives in Windows 3.1 than it is in Linux.
Linux has come a long way and I'm still rooting for it, but it has a long way to go for general home desktop users. Notice how it's always a power user of some kind that says Linux is just as good as OS X? You, a power user, can have as many Gentoo boxes as you want, and more power to you. It doesn't make Linux any more appropriate for the common, clueless user. Or even for people like me. I have at least half a clue and I've been using Linux for years, and it's still clunky for me. There are too many things I still can't figure out how to do. It all comes down to usability, which is why my next computer will be a Mac, and why I recommend a Mac to any non-techie that comes to me for advice these days.
Weirdly, Linux users have by-and-large standardised on two desktop environments, KDE and GNOME, and they function alike enough for apps to be completely portable between the two. Take, for example, all the people that run Evolution on KDE (there's a lot).
The diversification of desktop environments is not what's stopping companies developing for Linux. As yet there's no viable business need, and the areas where there is enough demand (for example, Office applications) the free software alternatives are good enough to, if not kill, then certainly maim demand for commercial alternatives (witness the death of Corel's Wordperfect for Linux).
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
That's like refusing to eat until your food sprouts little legs and jumps in your mouth... AND chews itself.
I bought a iBook and lived with it for seven months (three hard drives). I've replaced it with a X-31 Thinkpad running Ubuntu. There were some cool things about OSX, but basically I don't get the hype. Plus OSX is another proprietary OS where you as the end user are locked into and at the mercy of a corporation. Not for me. Freedom is important.
The one company that might have pulled this off just sold their PC hardware division.
Can you suggest any other candidates?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,p g,8,00.asp
You can look up the prices on your own. But he's right. He shouldn't even have to give sources, anyone who knows anything about hardware can tell you this. Unless their a Mac fan boy.
For the record, I own a PowerBook, my main desktop is a PC, I run a Linux server at home, and I use Solaris at work. I'm open to everything. My brand new PowerBook is slow because my G4 is slow. Deal with it.
Yep... lunch is a looot more expensive now :-)
I've used at 366 MHz/192Meg Lime iBook (borrowed it from my Wife). Used it at work running browsers, terminal windows, XCode development (building multithreaded threaded simulation routines) and it just worked. Major problem was the 10G disk drive that I would fill up(got many warnings, almost out of disk space....). Anyway it's amazing what you can do on what seems to be such a limited system.
we don't care about the computers for everyone /. realy wants a mac mini.
nobody on
nobody wants a pink computer with rainbows painted on the DVD burner and iAMaLooser app preinstalled
the same apply to dell computer
I think what we realy wants is build a computer the way we want. Unfortunately, the only way to do this is with PCs. At least with a PC you have the choice of brand for each part of your computer and each software, which make them a lot more free.
All you have to do is strip OSX, put on your favorite uber-performance Linux distro, and you are good to go. Sure, you could build your own high performance box yourself, but buy from Apple if you are time-crunched. You get pretty good hardware, coupled with the best, highest performing software, and no incumberences on what you can do with it.
I missed the first two installments of this slashdot story, i.e., The Fellowship of the GUI, and The Two Kernels. I can't find the links. Can anyone help me?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Not sure what your post is trying to prove.....in any case, lets not forget the hidden costs. When the new virus comes out next week will you be spending your "free" time removing it for her? Will you be paying for virus and firewall software that requires monthly updating for a "free"? It would be interesting to see the extra costs involved with living with a pc versus a mac....
Nope, doesn't include any of those programs. But it does include antivirus software and my own personal firewall. Beat that mac geek!
I upgraded my trusty iBook to a Thinkpad T42p some months ago, a move I don't regret. The screen is higher res, the keyboard is ten times better, the case is more rugged, and the whole thing is a lot faster.
I'm running Linux on it, much as I liked the looks of OSX what I need for my work is xterm, Terminal.app just never felt very responsive.
Sure, I hate X11 and wish someone would develop a Quartz-like GUI for Linux, but my productivity has more than doubled since switching from the iBook. Especially when doing kernel-level work it makes sense for my laptop and the nodes of my test-cluster to have the same CPU.
Anyway, I am usually a couple of years ahead of the curve... I had the Mac before all the useless USENIX-hackers, and I switched back a couple years before they will.
Whatever happened to Mark Morrison anyway?
Laptops have a display and keyboard, and I suppose the touchpad qualifies as a mouse, a pointing device, at the least.
Hey, if we're going to pick nits...
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
that's so 1997.
Apple and Sun are the last of the old "Fork till you drop" unix companies. Nothing works that wasn't built by mothercorp (they are like Microsoft in that reguard). Hello Apollo, Zeus, Wang, DEC, Osbourne, Amstrad, Data General, Control Data, Cray Computer, Commodore, Televideo, Unisys, Burroughs, Franklin, Perkin Elmer, Sequent. Open up your arms and embrace Apple, Sun, Microsoft and other historical artifacts of the early mass computing era. The phrase they all share is "If it wasn't built here, then it won't work on ours". They won't be missed, and they will be forgotten.
Ubuntu installed perfectly on mine.
No, I know that I like OSX better than Windows XP. But that's not the point. The point is, if you need a cheap computer, and can make due with WinXP, then you can't beat the price of PC hardware.
Yes, you can argue about the quality of the hardware, or the quality of the OS, but it's irrelevant to most people.
hitting the center of the screen is easy. Hitting any pixel on the screen is easy.
I hate using a mouse now (even an optical with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel:-(), it feels so 90s.
I wish Apple would get with the tablet program already (or once again:-().
The obvious routes Apple is going to take to improve their user base has been thoroughly discussed -- like G5 for powerbooks, and a possible video iPod version. But what gets me excited about Apple is that I get the impression there is something else on the works that is going to blow us all away. I'm hoping that Apple will bring back the Newton, new and improved. It will have to blow Windows Mobile 2003 and Palm OS out of the water -- like Mac OS X did against Windows. If Steve has his way, we'd all be touting the virtues of Apple in every aspect of technology in our lives. Be afraid, be very afraid...errr, rather, wait with bated breath.
Linux at home
We're a small business -- less than 100 employees in all, but we have to run a number of servers, some for customers but most for various different employee functions.
We found that the Macs were great for a couple of things: one, they have hot-swappable IDE (older models) and SATA (newer models) hard drives, which is great for backups... set up a mirrored array and then just pop one of the drives out and pop a blank one in, then carry the first one off-site. Or, in another case, when it's the dedicated backup server, we have four IDE drives in there, each one with a different backup from a different day of the week, and then we pop Saturday's one out once a month so we have a monthly offsite. Dell et al had the same thing with SCSI, which costs twice as much. (This was a couple years back, I'm sure Dell is getting to SATA by this time... right?)
Also, we have a server that we were concerned about going down for more than an hour or so, but it's not a big problem if it's down for an hour. We can't really afford redundant servers for EVERYTHING.
So we got the next best thing: we have it set up on an xServe, but all the software, incloding the OS, is on an external firewire hardware RAID box. The xServe started acting up one day (turned out to be a bad power outlet on the power manager, of all things) and I walked in, unplugged it, carried it into our test lab, plugged it into our iMac, and rebooted. Sha-zaam... the iMac is now the server. And it would have worked with any Mac made in the last, oh, five years or so. Well, any Mac with firewire or USB2 that had 256 megs of RAM or more. If necessary, I could have extracted one of the drives from the FW RAID and put it into any of the Macs that didn't have firewire, in an extra 10 minutes or so.
And that server, from soup to nuts, took less than a day to set up.
There really are some things you can do with the xServes that have significant advantages. Sometimes it's just doing things a little easier... sometimes it's doing things you never even thought of. Like a thoroughly portable server. (Heck, I could take that hard drive down to our colo site, attach it to our backup server down there, switch over the IP address, switch the IP address in our DNS, and we'd be up and running in under an hour, even if our HQ were without connectivity or power for days. Of course, I could do that with our main corporate file server, too, but that's just because we happen to have a machine down at the colo site that is the exact same model.)
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Preinstalled OS X machines may do 3D and wireless out of the box, but they are time sinks in other ways: it takes time to install Fink and all the commercial software you want. On balance, I think neither setup comes out ahead in terms of how much time it takes to set up--you are just spending your time differently.
If you want to save time, buy a Linux laptop with Linux preinstalled. That way, you get all the Linux software and it works out of the box.
I do tech support and usually do recommend macs to people who cant find the start button.However I would love to see any operating system as flexible as linux.I have learned more about computers using linux than any other os.Its makes you think god forbid.Most of the hassles I had in the past with linux once figured out take a good minute to know how to fix next time.Is linux ready for joe six pack no.Do I think it will be possibly.I cant imagine rooting for another closed source company that scares me more than microsoft.
The new Macs are beautiful toys, but I will never make a serious investment of time developing or customizing the Mac, because the system as a whole does not provide the potential for learning, user empowerment, and security against obsolescence that are the pillars of open source software.
And I do not understand how so many technically-inclined hackers on this site can abandon those notions for something that "just works". Darwin is just an incomplete part of the Mac OS, and not the component that makes it different from its open-source brethren.
Let me address those points from above:
1. Let's say that I love how the Mac does something in Cocoa--can I look for myself how they did it, and thus become more knowledgable? No, it's closed. So I can just look at the pretty graphics like any other non-technical user. For whatever the warts of X.org, it is open for me to study and fix.
2. Which takes me to this point: I can potentially customize all of the open-source software that I use to suit my needs or whims. Having the freedom to do something--whether it be the modification of software that almost defines my usefulness to society in this age, or the right to privacy--is very important. The increasing ubiquity of software makes the former ability closer in worth to the latter each year.
3. Shall I put countless hours of effort into developing for a system--the Mac--that is completely intertwined with the fortunes of a single company? If Apple fails, I don't want my software to fall with them.
On one hand, there is a strong resistence to Java because of Sun's not-really-open implementation, and on the other a perfect eagerness to -advocate- a closed software system. I have a feeling that it was just the poor quality of Windows that drove these people to open-source OS's, rather than a spanning belief in their own technical worth and in the potential of open-source.
If smart hackers put their blood and sweat into programming for a system that is only available to the few in the first world who can afford a certain brand name, and if this invaluable knowledge becomes lost in future years if Apple becomes a memory, what a disservice to the intellectual vault of the world.
Think Paul Graham is an idiot.
I think we'd all like Linux and open source in general to become the dominant form of software. The flexibility is truly amazing, and it's nice being able to control the software instead of the other way around.
The problem with Linux is that:
- 10 years ago you had to figure out how to do 10,000 different things in order to turn it into a moderately productive desktop OS, and...
- 5 years ago you had to figure out 5,000 different things in order to turn it into a moderately productive desktop OS, and...
- today you still have to figure out 1,500 different little annoying things to make it as productive as a Mac or even Windows.
And once you go through all that you tend to forget the hell that "n00bs" have to go through in order to be productive in Linux, at least at the level that a typical Mac user enjoys five minutes after plugging in a new Mac. Yes, you learned a lot, but what you went through was like being forced to build a car and become a certified mechanic just so you could drive to McDonald's for lunch. It's nice to have a choice to go through that if you're interested, but it shouldn't be a requirement for every single user.
Freedesktop.org and other such standardization projects are a good start, but Linux needs another couple of years and much better cooperation in order to become a really competitive desktop OS. Go Linux!
Correction: should be they're*, sorry.
that's why we see so many "get a free iPod" ads, but no "get free Windows XP" ads. Or maybe those are the beta geeks.
I'm posting this from the smoke grey iMac (10.1.5) that we bought for my father-in-law, and believe me, it's a piece of shit. Jaguar might be the bee's knees, but Apple should have to refund every dollar they made on this embarrasment of an OS.
Carry on Mr. Jobs. You have your Windows 95 behind you now.
Very well said. The motherboard in my dual Athlon Debian unstable box recently croaked, and we decided that it would be a great time to switch to a Power Mac. In addition to the reasons you mentioned (Unix under the hood, many free *nix apps available, the system Just Working), OS X appealed to me because its application-centric taskbarless interface is nearly ideal for my preferred working style and I'd heard many a good thing about Apple's interface design and the keyboard support found throughout the OS and applications conforming to Apple's HIG. Thus far, I'm very pleased. Getting used to a new GUI of course involves a learning curve that I'm still climbing, but I've only had this thing for a week and I feel quite comfortable with it already. As a whole, working with OS X and HIG-conformant applications just feels smooth and elegant. I enjoyed using XFce4 and Enlightenment on my old box, but applications and the desktop environment generally did not mesh together in the same way that many of them do on OS X.
Besides, I compose music and would like to eventually set up a home studio of sorts. The particular audio software I'm interested in is only available for OS X. GarageBand is a great basic package that came free with the computer. For more sophisticated work, I would want something like Digital Performer, which gets excellent reviews and, in my experience (a digital music lab in college) is reasonably easy to use for a powerful application.
Seeeesh, and for being so behind in games they "make up" for it in price.
Mac: Baldurs Gate 2 - Throne Of Bhaal $29.95 (that is just for the expansion!).
PC: Baldur's Gate II: The Collection $19.99 (includes both the first one and the expansion).
Mac: Call of Duty $49.95.
PC: (same title) $29.99.
Mac: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation $29.95.
PC: (same title) $9.99.
Mac: Command and Conquer Generals $49.95.
PC: (same title) $19.99.
Mac: No One Lives Forever 2 $49.95.
PC: (same title) $9.99.
Mac: XII $29.95.
PC: XII $9.99.
Etc.
Yet another reason I am glad I am not a Mac gamer, and dumped that platform for a PC. Even the stuff that was crap on the PC is way over priced on the Mac side.
OTOH, I sent in my 3 year old iBook (way out of warranty) for a logic board repair (bad video).
Apple had a box delivered the next morning, and I sent the laptop out same day. Two days later it got to Houston, was diagnosed, repaired, and tested. All in the same day. Then it came back in 1 day.
I got the thing back, and the logic board was never replaced. They replaced my LCD and it now works flawlessly. I can't imagine those LCD panels are cheap, but I thank Apple for replacing my SCREEN under a logic board recall. And they lost themselves some money, because my only reason to replace my zippy 600mhz G3 iBook would be hardware failures. Oh yeah, also, they replaced one of the little rubber feet that fell off a few days ago.
Personally I find it odd that the G3 logic board repair coverage would even extend to a 3 year old laptop. I mean it is a laptop, we expect it to fail eventually, in some way, right?
happy camper.
when I was in school the ris in risc stood for reduced instruction set. Have you seen the Instruction set for the G5?! it's crazy huge. OK, decoding/encoding the instructions is super easy compared to intel, but I'm not sure how it qualifies as risc (as any fixed length instruction word would be easy).
Holy crap that is so sweet.....
You can put Linux on it for free, but you're not getting nearly the user experience you get with a Mac.
I have no idea what you're talking about here, and I'm not sure you do either.
Some number months ago I bought a used Dell for my parents to use to surf the web, do some simple word processing, scan in photos of the kids and make picture CDs. Recently she wanted to upgrade her printer. The printer driver only supported Windows 2000 or XP. Since the used box was running WinME it was time to upgrade. I tried to find a copy of 2000 figuring it would be more likely to be compatible with the older Dell. Unable to find it I got a copy of XP. That's when the trouble started. Seems the old Dell required a BIOS upgrade. But if you follow the install instruction for XP you don't find this out until the XP installer crashes after rebooting. The exact phrase is "driver irql not less or equal". The problem is after that the computer won't boot. It wouldn't even eject the now stuck CD. After calling Tech support and going through about 5 dudes, several days and lots and lots of power ups holding down F8, holding down this set of keys and that, I got nothing. One tech i had me open the case and change a little metal clip which was supposed to clear the CMOS. Nothing. I paid $400 for that Dell expecting it would work just as well as anything else out there. But that was not the case. The help desk guys kept telling me that my hard drive or cdrom must have gone out just when the XP installer was trying to exit or that my BIOS was corrupted just at that moment. They were less than helpful. I eventually took the thing apart, pulled the stuck cd out and returned XP. Fortunately Fry's took it back even though it was obviously opened. So, I then further disassembled the machine with an 8 pound sledge hammer. That was fun. Now my mom has an eMac from Apple. much easier than dealing with a PC. $700 and it came with a monitor. You can't pay me to get her another Dell. No sense buying a 'cheaper' box if it's going to cost me more in time. No more Dell products here.
Apple laptops are notorious for quality control problems because people expect more of Apple than they do of other manufacturers. When Apple had the Aluminum 15" white-spot-screen-problem, people screamed bloody murder about it. It's awful! My god, nearly half of the AlBooks had it for the first three months of shipping!
Well, I've seen that problem before. Every single one of our Dell Latitude x200 laptops have gone in for it at least once, and several of them more than once, over the three years that we have had the model. It had something to do with the case design, because the floating white cloud effect was generally in a perfect ring around a spot in the center of the screen that corresponded with the placement of the Dell logo on the back of the screen, plus in a few other apparently-random places.
Now, that's 100% of over 40 laptops. But nobody really noticed, because nobody pays attention to any particular model of Dell laptop, but when Apple goofs it's big news. Remember the 5300, which in theory could have caught on fire so they had to recall it? But none of them actually ever caught on fire. Same year, three Dells of a particular model DID catch on fire. Who suffered more from the bad press? Well, which one do you remember?
We never really noticed how bad the white-spot problem was for our x200s either... because we have also replaced all of the hard drives at least once (we've replaced each on average 1.4 times) and about half of the motherboards have gone out... some ethernet problems, some firewire or USB bus power problems, and some Just Not Booting. White spots don't look so important when you have just lost all your data, especially if you are a total yutz who doesn't follow company backup policy.
If you look at Consumer Reports, which IMO is simply the best place to look for non-biased reporting of issues of this type, you'll see that Apple has the lowest rate of 'Repairs and Serious Problems' for both their laptops and their desktops. (16%, for laptops. Toshiba and Sony are both around 17%. Dell is 21%). I'd send you a link, but since CR is customer-funded and not ad-driven, they require you to pay to see their content.
BTW, I can't imagine what we're doing wrong. We're a company of 40-45 people, with a sustained failure rate of more than one laptop a week. That's more than 100% per year. I can't imagine that we are that much harder on them than average, though we do leave them on more than most people probably do, and the people who don't leave them on all night every night are traveling a lot with them. Still, something's strange.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Which is to say,
'...because Apple is a big company that sometimes does lousy things that all other big companies do (but that nobody really notices because they aren't Apple) it is awful and we hate it.'
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Did you buy that CISNET at Staples?
To be honest with you, the -cheapest- people end up buying these things, expecting the world from them. They typically come back, complaining about the lack of software included. Did your Cisnet come with a word processing application (not including Note/Word pad??)
Although not Cisnet (but similar bundle - cheap parts) - three Northgates we sold were returned for heat sinks that had FALLEN off! The owners pulled the tower out, heard a rattling, and returned it. Countless others were returned for other issues (power supply, bad ram, etc.)
Personally, when I buy something, I don't want to have to pack everything back up, lug the thing back, swap it out, and hope for the best.
I want the thing to work. And that's the reassuring factor from buying something from Sony, HP, Apple, etc.
In my living room, I keep a 17" Desktop Killer from toshiba, and I keep a mac mini attached to the TV, bluetooth everything else.
In my 3 year old son's room, the's an iMac G3, in the computer room, I have 2 mac G4's with Linux, 2 1 Mac G4 with OS X, an Ultrasparc 10, an IRIX, a Windows 2003 Server (with 2 gigs of rams and 2 terabytes of disc), an XP Pro workstation for me and an XP pro workstation for my son.
I have some other machines floating around on the network which I've forgotten about, just stopped using them and their just running up the electric bill, hopefully calculating protien folding equations.
As to the machine at hand, it's just a computer, I like OS X, I like Linux, I like Windows, I like IRIX (a lot, wish I had something better to run it on), I tolerate Solaris (but I need it).
The fact is that the computer is just a tool, unless you're deciding what to give your mama, whether it's a powerbook or a PC notebook makes not difference. The only thing I wish I had was either Visual Studio for OS X or X Code for Windows since I tend to like both environments a great deal.
And try this; go to your local CompUSA and ask for a PC mobo with dual independent 1.2ghz frontside busses and dual processors fast enough to use them. You'll need to go to the Apple part of the store for that.
I work on Macs and PCs and the Macs feel and act like a giant Swiss watch while the PCs feel like crap.
We buy/build plenty of computers in our company, hundreds in the last 10 years, Macs and PCs. With rare exceptions, PC laptops are broken between 8 and 18 months and Mac laptops generally outlast their usefulness (5 years) and we sell them to the staff. The PC laptops are in the dumpster way sooner just by trying to use them. The Mac laptops that broke got knocked off a table, so they're little headless servers now.
Every Mac desktop in our company has outlasted 2.7 PC desktops. The PCs are dumpstered or turned into metal cases ready for new hardware typically within 2-3 years. Some PC cases are on their 3rd life.Practically everything blew up in them from the power supply to the crappy bypass caps on the mobo. The Macs outlast their useful life and they're sold to the staff for $100. We've had exactly four Macs just totally up and die in the last 10 years compared to dozens of PCs. Macs and PCs died in lightning storms but most of the PCs just started flaking out, crashing and eating their faces.
I just removed an old Mac 6100/60 that's been running as a heavily used server since 1994... along with four others as workstations for that server, all still running, and replaced them with Mac Minis. I have a glut of ancient but still operational Macs and just don't have that problem with PCs.
We were getting sick and tired of PC problems and out of 100 or so current computer users, I've seeded 35 new Macs, most of them to the PC users. They bitched and moaned for about two weeks and I haven't heard from them since. Many have discarded their home PC and bought a Mac... and an iPod... and THANKED ME for their new freedom. Really. I'm a freakin' hero.
What happens when you stack a few thousand processors of all different kinds into a room, compare the performance and compare the price tags. I did that comparing the clustered "Supercomputers" measured in November of '03 (http://www.top500.org/lists/2003/11/top5.php) which has the VA Tech room full of 2.0ghz DP G5's at #3 in the supercomputer lineup. Not much has changed since then but if anyone wants to redo this with the current lineup, have at it, but this is basically what people argue about and this many processors kind of averages out what's real:
#1 Earth Simulator, Japan, 35.86 TFlops
5,120 (680 8-way nodes) 500 MHz NEC CPUs
Cost: $350 million
#2 Los Alamos National Laboratory ASCI Q, 13.88 TFlops
12,288 EV-68 1.25-GHz CPUs (3,072 HP AlphaServer SC machines)
Cost: $150 million
#3 Virginia Tech's X, Terascale Computing Facility, 10.28 TFlops
2,200 IBM PowerPC 970 2.0 GHz CPUs (1,100 Apple G5 machines on OS 10.2.7)
Cost: $5.2 million
#4 NCSA Tungsten, 9.819 TFlops
2,900 Intel Xeon 3.06 GHz processors (1,450 Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers on Red Hat Linux)
Cost: one of four NSF TeraGrid clusters totaling $53 million.
#5 MPP2 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 8.633 TFlops
1,960 Itanium 1.5 GHz processors (980 HP Longs Peak nodes, also known as the HP Integrity Server rx2600, on Red Hat Linux)
Cost: $24.5 million
Hmmm...
If they built up the original VA Tech Apple system to cost 10% as much as the Earth Simulator, it would theoretically run twice as fast as the Earth Simulator.
The 2.0ghz DP Apple used at VA Tech has about 75% the speed of the ASCI Q using only 18% as m
Most of the stuff on
How about this:
I don't want one because they aren't as good as you think they are, fanboy.
Go on, mod me into oblivion because I don't want a mac.
my sig could kick your sig's arse...
Gaming is the only real reason to stay away from Macs.
...isn't everything.
If the games didn't come out a few months after the XBox version.
The days of using a PC for games are just about over. If you want most PC games, get an XBox. If you want a whole lot of different games, get a PS2. If you want really good games, get a Gamecube. Or go crazy and get all three for about the price of a really nice graphics card.
Then get a Mac so you can work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Admittedly not that many games support it quite yet, but if resolution is your key then HDTV support is your answer. XBox has been best with this so far but the next gen consoles should pack quite a good HD wallop.
:-)
That should put the finishing tocuhes on a lot of the PC gaming industry except for ID and Unreal engines which still have some steam left. Oh, that reminds me that Valve will be there too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why are you trolling here? The article isn't about what afroborg finds interesting nor is such an article likely to be written. Nobody cares about your preferences, especially when they are pointlessly interjected in a manner that adds nothing to the discussion. People much smarter than you (and me) are interested in Mac OS X.
Because of a considerable history of having a high price serving as a barrier (going back at least to the Mac IIfx which Harry Anderson suggested was an abbreviation for *ing expensive), it is of interest that Apple has produced a very capable, low cost Mac. Many who might be interested in at least trying OS X might find information on that specific topic interesting and useful. Your unsupported opinions and lame insults, on the other hand, not so interesting. Now, go away.
Sidenote: You probably already know, but the person who did the OS X Gnu/Emacs port is also working on a new XEmacs port for OS X that is pretty functional - take a look here.
He also has an interesting OS X programming blog here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My favourite thing to do is open a Quicktime video, select and copy it, then paste it into a new player window and start it playing. See how many windows you can get running before the machine chokes. Preferably a Dual G5 with 30" display :)
THEN play with the Exposé keys.
Learn the keyboard shortcuts and you'll have a dozen or more playing in no time.
-gko
Put in a network that locks out any non-approved computer - you can get clients for Windows, Solaris, and even Linux that let you operate without being locked out. But nothing for the Mac of course.
So you see NO macs where I work. And sometimes you see coworkers leaving because of it. Pretty damn stupid.
I'll bet my hackers can beat up your hackers! :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not only have they made no moves that way, but Darwin (the real kernel) is GPL. So they would have to close of Darwin to outsiders to even start thinking of making a DRM like solutiion.
But Apple has made no indications that they could or would do that. And even if they did Linux would still run on every exisitng system around.
Trusted computer, the real deal, requires custom hardware to really support it. When such hardware starts showing up (or Apple starts talking about it) then it might be time to worry. But so far Apple has been very happy to share its place with OS, including BSD and even Linux. They are smart enough to realize that all of the work that goes on in OS development indirectly helps them so it's never in thier best interest to shut that down.
Furthermore PPC Linux gives companies a nice "backdoor" when using Apple hardware - not the security kind of backdoor but another option in case something did happen to Apple and they stopped OS development.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> That is, my G3 iBook adapter works with the new PowerBook and vice-versa. Try that with a new IBM and one from two years ago.
I'm using the adapter from my 5 year old 600X on my new X40, so what's your point?
Not sure whether Apple fans should crow over this... the more people move to OS X, the more juicy a target it will be.
So what's next - massive Apple hacks?
DocTim
Well, I agree up to a point. OS X is better than any other commercial system, that's true.
However, as someone thoroughly familiar and comfortable with Debian/Linux, I don't feel quite at home in OS X land. It seems navigating my files with the Finder just takes so much effort, I find it very unnatural compared to MC and even Nautilus. Also, the culture of shareware is quite alien, when you know there's a lot of perfectly adequate open source tools. However, I never got used to fink (too fidgety and brittle) or opendarwin (while better, requires compiling everything, and is a bit of a hassle to configure).
So I end up running Debian on my iBook - with the only downside being that my stupid broadcom wireless isn't supported. Aside from that it's the perfect machine for me.
I do sometimes wish for a Debian port for OSX, for all the Apples around here that are being used in OSX. But I'm already grateful for Debian-powerpc.
How is FreeBSD on PowerPC? The web site seems to not have been updated since they got it to boot into single user mode a couple of years ago.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yep, we got the CISNET at Staples. It included MS Works (yeah, I know, whoop-dee-doo)
I realize it was a risk buying a bottom-of-the-barrel computer... but we took it, and haven't been dissapointed yet. Only time will tell if that changes.
Have you any prove apart from The Reg saying so, that Apple tried to use the DMCA on that one?
TIA
This statement isn't accurate at all. For 300$ you can get a Poweredge "server" computer that is totally barebones, but fairly powerful (with a pentium 4 if you get the right deal). However you then have to add RAM (128mb is not enough for anyone), a monitor, keyboard+mouse, cd writer, and any other extras you want. Oh yeah, and that's without an operating system, and I'm sure you're going to pay the additional $80+ for a legit copy of XP Home.
.
Alternatively, you can get a Dell Home machine for 300-400$ that has XP Home, no cd writer, 128mb of RAM, a 40gb hard drive, and a worthless Celeron processor. Wow what a deal
However if you look at the circuit city or best buy advertisements you can find E-Machines for about 300-400$ that really do come with everything. Keyboard, mouse, speakers, monitor, cdrw, printer...it still has a crappy Celeron processor, but still a great deal for your Mom. (or my mom, in this case).
Of course when I helped my brother build a computer I got him a Poweredge with a real Pentium 4, and added a decent graphics card and some memory to the system. He already had a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, so it ended up being a good deal for a Powerful machine.
Considering the power and size of the Mac mini, it's easily comparable with either Dell or Emachines. It's more full-featured than the cheap Dell Home machine, and more powerful than the EMachines computer. And as others have mentioned, it doesnt take $300+ in mail in rebates to get that 300$ price on the mac mini.
(my mom is still sorting through all of the emachines rebates - I think there are 5+ different rebates, each requiring a different combination of photocopies of UPCs from products in the bundle. And you just know they're going to find some excuse to reject some or all of those rebates anyway)
I have been a developer for 13 years now, Linux user /programmer for 6 years, and an OSX user/programmer since it came out.
/proc, there is almost equivalent framework, but it is scattered and each bit of nearly equivalent functionality requires its own API. Once you get past the beauty of the GUI, it has a few really annoying quirks: command-tab switches between applications only and not individual windows (this also raises all windows of an app when it is switched), and there is no standard keyboard shortcut to switch between individual windows in an app. If Aqua and/or its window manager were open source, this would have been fixed long ago.
At first, like most everyone, I was wowed by the GUI. The GUI alone made me want to use it. Now that I have had to heavily use OSX for work (server tasks, and programming) for over two years now, I know Linux is much better in many categories. Yes, OSX is practically perfect for the average user, but for server and/or super efficient code, Linux wins, hands down (the Linux kernel is far superior).
OSX server, though its admin tools have gotten better with each release, hides too much and circumvents many settings. Before version 10.3, it did not have GNU tools at its core. If you've used Linux seriously, you have no idea how dependant on GNU extensions you are until you are thrown into an environment without them (many options are missing and processed incorrectly; try putting options at the end of the command line for utils such as ls, just plain annoying). Because it is a Mach kernel, there is no
On performance, the filesystem and kernel is quite lacking. Either the filesystem or its driver does not support sparse files (files with holes). This slows down the initial creation of large files (only really an issue when using mmap i/o, but I use that often for performance critical apps). Also, I don't know if this is hardware (bus speed, ram bandwidth, hardrive efficiency, etc.) or kernel related, but some applications run 7 times faster on my 1GHz Linux box (with 1/4 the phys. ram) than on the 800 MHz Mac server. Mind you, these are apps I made that follow the Apple guidelines for high performance i/o and mem allocation.
To Apple's credit, GUI programming for an app is awesome, and you can even change the GUI and add functionalty (without even touching the binary). There is a tutorial somewhere on the net on how to add some different preference panels to the sticky notes app, for instance.
To sum up, Linux is a much better and faster kernel, GNU utilities rock, GNU/Linux is much better for a server (if you know how to correctly edit conf files), but OSX is a great choice for the average user and GUI application programmer.
I think 'Hackers & Painters' was a great book, but I do get tired of his intentionally provocative statements like this. It seems like his formula is: "I'm Paul Graham. I'm smart, I've written software for companies, and people listen to me. I have smart friends. Many smart friends, many more than you. My smart friends use product X, so a) everyone who does not use X is stupid, and b) even if you use X you're still not as smart as me or my friends." Lately X=lisp, X=python, and now X=macs. (I'm not sure about python - it's hard to keep up with the Xs.) I'd like to suggest some more Xs: toilet paper, Symbolics machines, and Hipster PDAs.
Fair enough. The IBMs (and Toshibas, and Compaqs, and Dells) I've used have all had different adapters. Good to know that this isn't always the case.
Not for me.
Hai fanboi, you say the word excuse as though someone had done something wrong by not buying an apple... By christ I better not meet you in person shill, I will loosen your teeth. You would sell your children's children for the appeasement of an advertisement. Bah. Two million years of evolution, and this is it. Why do I bother.
For the iPod battery life, the troll was probably referring to the "iPod's Dirty Secret" or whatever ad campaign that was probably funded by Sony or Microsoft. Basically some idiots found out that lithium ion batteries don't last forever, and if a full charge is used every day, your ipod battery could be useless in a year and a half.
It's a lithium ion battery folks - this is nothing unique to the ipod, and is nothing that Apple lies about. They state the number of charges the battery can typically handle on the website. It's not rocket science.
The only valid complaint really, is that the ipod battery isn't easily replacable. Oh well - that's a price of having a tiny portable media player. Now Apple will replace the battery for you, for a price, and there are dozens of websites showing how to do it yourself.
Conclusion: there is no ipod battery problem, and never was.
you shouldn't pull stuff like that out of your ass, you can do yourself an injury you'll regret for the rest of your life.
I just upgraded my son's PC for his birthday, and I've just got a Mac mini. He's got a PC because he's a gamer, and his PC is a hell of a lot more powerful than my mini, but just the upgrades ended up costing a significant chunk of the price of that mini... so I think I have a pretty good idea of what you can get for $500.
And, basically, right now, across the board... the "Mac Tax" for equivalent hardware to a PC is about 50%. You'll end up paying 50% more to get a Mac instead of a comparable PC. Oh, it's not exact, and there's a lot more options on the PC side, but the days when the cost hit was a factor of two and a bit (I don't think it was ever a matter of three or four times) are gone.
Thats what I can't get over, the entry price. To buy a piece of hardware, an os, and applications, that I might not even end up "liking" - let alone be more productive using (I'm pertty sure I just butchered the english language there, so forgive me).
Um, you really want me to say that it's *cheaper* than the comparable PC now? No, that'd be a bit much, right?
It performs better on my Mac mini than on my old IBM Thinkpad, which is not quite up to the specs of a modern $500 white-box PC but beats the Mini in every "objective" dimension. So I think it'd be pretty close to comparable, and the rest of the system just fits together so much better than Windows that you might be most amazingly surprised how much more you get done.
Or not, I don't know, some people hate OS X. Maybe you're one of them... but if you're thinking that it'd be good for you I'm thinking the price difference shouldn't be as big a hurdle as you're making out.
No, no, no! I definitely don't *hate* OS X! I haven't even gotten to play with it! But I do love *nix and I do *hate* X Windows, so it seems like it would be fantastic. The more I read and hear about it, the more interested I am to give it a shot. I seriously love the direction Apple seems to be heading, and I love being able to say that. I love having options and alternatives. And Apple is honestly, day by day, becoming a viable option for me.
What I'm really considering is picking up an old(er) Powerbook to play with. I just have so many things to do (work, running my other company, side projects, hobbies) thats its tough for me to find time to replace something that works perfectly well for everything I have to do. But, on the same token, I think I'd be doing myself a serious disservice if I didn't honestly evaluate all my options.
I just wish I had a friend that was really into Apple that could give me a crash course, and let me play around with their setup.
Maybe the answer is to simply support both, and have app-specific menus appear and disappear when you activate a "show menu" window decoration, or tap the alt key or something, and just remember the setting. I hate to say "make it a preference", as it's a copout for design, but this really does seem to demand one.
These app-specific menus that you describe at the top of application windows... these are called "toolbars" and many, many applications have had them for ages. Incidentally, they aren't modal and exactly address your concerns. Toolbars are also user customizable (super easy to build with x-code of course).
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Thats what I can't get over, the entry price. To buy a piece of hardware, an os, and applications, that I might not even end up "liking" - let alone be more productive using (I'm pertty sure I just butchered the english language there, so forgive me).
If you buy a Mac mini for, say, $575 plus tax (so you get the 512M RAM instead of the 256M), and you don't like it... you'll be able to get almost all the money back by ebaying it, and you may even be able to sell it for MORE than $575 plus tax to someone who wants one and doesn't want to wait two weeks (or more) for his.
Jeez, even grandparent does it:
The mini isn't even a contender - it's $500 price tag gets a more powerful workstation
Not it's. Its.
I'm not going to argue that a G4 would hold it's own against a P4 clocked at 2.4 Ghz
Its. ITS.
bit of a lean towards the G4 given the OS and Apps are built to exploit it's abilities.
Christ, twice in one paragraph. Not "it's." ITS. NO FUCKING APOSTROPHE.
but it's nicer than the Intel solution
See, it's OK here. You contract "it is." IT IS.
the fact that it has it's own memory is a big plus as well.
FUCK!!! You couldn't even finish the sentence without fucking up again! ITS.
Sorry, but all those wrong apostrophes really makes your writing look like shit. I won't even talk about the run-on sentences. Go get a goddamn grammar book, please! God DAMN, it makes me MAD!!
Having said that, I agree with everything you wrote.
Using emulators, they can even out speed the emulation above 100% (if asked to). And all in the same box...
actually he didnot misspell behaviour .. just as with colour.. the english spelling has been around longer than your US centric spelling.
I think what he's trying to say is that although it doesn't suit YOUR needs, it does suit him and most other people just fine. And it's cheaper.
No, it's not as high quality, and it may need to be taken back to the shop because of bad hardware or something, but as long as it's under warranty, they'll put up with it because it's cheaper.
Don't underestimate what some people will go through to save a few bucks.. look at all of those crazy Free iPod people who willingly jump through hoops and sign themselves up for spam.
My kid brother can aforde a mac mini on lunch money...
He should really consider the iPod shuffle instead, it's much tastier, and considerably less expensive. And there is no longer any warnings not to 'eat iPod shuffle' on Apple's site, so that's another plus!
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety. Isaac Asimov
If you want a 64-bit server farm, for example, Xserve is quite competitive vs. Opteron or Itanium.
Similarly, most server farms in enterprises are name brand (IBM, HP or Dell), they're not exactly "next to nothing" in cost...
Finally, Xserve RAID has a price/performance ratio that shames most fibre channel solutions.
-Stu
I recently learnt that command + ` is what you want to switch between individual windows. Now if you started command + tab and then used command + ` it will toggle backwards or the opposite direction to command + tab. Therefore there is that functionality is OS X, its just that with anything it takes time to learn all the hidden tricks and I've been using Mac OS X since the public beta and only heard about this a week ago.
You have just been avenged in M2 land.