I'm a new parent too. I also had these dillusions of grandeur. If you're unemployed but still have $50 for each place you want to monitor, plus enough USB cables to hook them all together, it's possible, but it'll take some time to get it all set up.
All free time from here on out will be spent with your new kid. Or sleeping. Yes, sleeping is now part of "free time", and you will have to balance between getting your full 5 hours of sleep and the other things you want to do. If you're paranoid about a babysitter while you are out on a date with your wife, not even a camera will make you feel better. What's the ideal situation, you are out at a fancy restaraunt and between tender looks you glance at your webcam to find your babysitter beating your kid? You won't get home in time to fix anything, no matter what it will be too late and the damage done. Go the 20/20 route and get a video camera. Nobody in the real world thinks their video can be doctored.
Really, you won't be going out dating, you'll be too tired for that. Work extra hard (not checking the video feed) so you can get home earlier. If there's someone at home while you're at work, go on ahead and set up an honest webcam and ask the nanny or whatever to show you the kid at specific times. If you need to have evidence to punish a babysitter (get a new babysitter or don't leave the house until your situation changes!), get several video cameras and be clever with placement.
Let the kid have a life now. Realize you can't be there 100% of the time. Your main purpose is to provide guidance and help clean up when the kid screws up.
Maybe not, but it's been a long time since you could buy an x86 machine that lasted as long. Back in the early 80's, I remember HP and DEC PC's that would wear like a tank. Today, every x86 machine I see is flimsy as hell.
Earlier this year I retired a Thinkpad 750. 486/33 laptop. Bought a very long time ago (1993???), and has long since been fully depreciated. It ran Debian very well, although dselects were taking a long time to load.
Please compare Apples to comparable quality PCs. As Mac fans we are very quick to point out that Apples are priced to compete against comparable quality and performance x86, yet we bash the x86 world's quality citing the bottom on the line Dells and eMachines. Apples have their strengths, and as far as hardware goes they're in-line with similarly priced x86s. Software, in my opinion, is where the Apple lines earn their value.
I sure wouldn't want to be in Steve Jobs' shoes knowing that the same minds behind the Yahoo/Broadcast.com integration are now coming after my customers.
Remember when Yahoo was a search engine? And one day they started using other search engines under contract because Yahoo couldn't keep up any more? Yahoo does a good job rebranding other people's work (news.yahoo.com...) and presenting it in an integrated location. iTunes Music Store will continue to fluorish. They're popular right now and they know it. If iTMS wanes in the slightest, I bet they start licensing all over. They already have a referral program.
If you're playing a game with someone within 100 feet maximum, shouldn't you be able to see and/or holler (holla for all you kids) at them?
What if the parents are trying to watch the TV in the same room? In a long plane / car ride? Several college students in a lecture hall? The deaf get to play these games cooperatively too!
There are many instances when short distance text chat would be useful to me. Being in noisy or quiet situations are an example. Your comment seems to imply that every DS gathering will be LAN-party-esque. Surely, yelling at teammates and competitors is fun, but not every game-playing environment is conducive to that.
My mom knows that I enjoyed Star Wars and even bought a great number of the Lego sets a few years ago. I think my wife and I may have singlehandedly kept Vermont Toy and Hobby open for a while...
My mom heard on the TV a long time ago that the Star Wars DVDs were coming out. Last time I talked with her, she excitedly told me that the release date was coming up, and of course I knew about it, but was it marked on my calendar? I tried to fend off this Christmas gift in the making becase I recognized that excited tone in her voice.
Most of us have a decent ability to explain pet peeves and flaws in our obsessions to others with similar backgrounds or obsessions. My mother has nothing in her universe that can compare with enjoying Star Wars. She sees bad acting and a story line reminiscant of the Lone Ranger and his predescessors, so she thinks that even better special effects and additional scenes can only make it better, can't they?! I tried explaining the cantina scene to her. She remembers vaguely that there was some violence, but she remembers Han Solo (Harrison Ford) being involved. I explained that Lucas changed his mind on who shot first and the repercussions involved to me.
I'm not sure I actually got through. The difference between Han Solo defending himself and shooting first (under the table no less) is a world of character development to me, and my mother seemed to understand what that meant in terms of defining who the characters were. I told her that we had just inherited the laser disc version of the original triology so that one of these years we'd just have to transfer that to a better version. Of course, we could save ourselves the work and just find a torrent since we have all the source material bought, paid for and licensed just not yet ripped to DVD / MPEG.
Of course, maybe she was just listening to the sound of my voice. I probably should expect the DVDs under the Christmas tree this year. I have to ready a look of absolute childish joy on my face because she cares enough to remember my insterests.
Why can't these interesting people be interview or written about when it's not tainted by the desire to pitch their new product. And no, this is not limited to games.
I have no new products to pitch, yet I assure you that I am interesting. In order to make myself more desirable and neutral, I'm involved in a project at work that I cannot mention to people I don't know personally and certainly not to the press. Let me assure you, in 3 years time you will have wished to know my story now!
I will have nothing to discuss aside from my perspective on world politics (on which I do not claim to be educated, only opinionated), my opinion on recent and near-future computer architecture / semiconductor fabrication, and my 10 month old daughter (who is walking now).
Just because you don't agree with my argument, doesn't mean it's flawed.
A 1300 dollar computer will last you about three years tops.
My wife's iMac was purchased in 2000 for $1250 and is still chugging along. My father has equivalent aged PC hardware for equvalent price still chugging along. You do the math. Please refer to my original question, "Will I hang onto it for 5+ years". If the answer is yes, then the $200 per year value question holds. You point out a way to get a similar linear cost by adding resale, allowing one to bail out in the middle. I'm not saying it's 100% accurate, but it's not more than 30% off if you'd either enjoy the machine for that time period or sell it. If you're a consumer who would toss it in the landfill after a year, regardless of quality merely because it was no longer shiney and new, then thse figures do not apply. I know Macs and PCs that have stood the test of time. Heck, this year I retired a 486/66 Thinkpad that had been my personal web/mail/name server for 3 years -- which was after it had been retired from a long productive life as a laptop -- this is lifetime nobody could have expected and ended up beating the $200 / year, hard to do for a portable.
You can't say that A Ford Tempo is better than a Toyota Camary. You'd have to compare a Ford Tempo with a Toyota Corolla.
Why? How can anybody decide between the two lines if they cannot compare them? If you can't compare them, how does someone decide they want a Camary instead of a Corolla or vice versa? You're 100% right that you can't take out features when talking about features, but you'd be stupid to assume that everybody who buys a G5 iMac will use all the features it comes with. Those are wasted features and hence don't belong in a comparison when talking about value. If you're going to use all the features, then by all means, it's a valid comparison. I don't know the difference between the Camary and Corolla, so I'd have to compare the two (including price) and do my own cost/benefit analysis to see which I'd prefer.
Please don't misconstrue my statements to imply I do not believe the iMac G5 to be a bad value. I maintain it's no exceptionally good hardware value for most people (because it has lots of features most consumers won't use and it has competitors that do not charge for those features). HOWEVER, it's an excellent package when you compare the software as well. Nobody will use 100% of the hardware and software of this machine, but this machine includes a hardware/software combination that presents a good value to the consumer. Few will do more than tinker with Garageband, but someone is bound to find an application to enjoy between iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, Quicken and Garageband. If you're some abnormal poweruser who only wants the consumer machine, and will use every single hardware feature and bit of software, then the iMac G5 is an exceptionally good value, likley unparalleled.
So are you going to discuss the meat of the comment or just talk about semantics.
My intention was do discuss interesting and amusing semantics. But, if you insist.
The consumer market basically charges $200 per year on machine + monitor. Printers are priced seperately due to usage conditions. Allow me to explain my $200 per year reason. One can buy an e-Machine for $200, and it will last roughly a year. If yours has lasted longer, that's fantastic, but that has not been my experience. You can pick up a nicer machine for $400-$600, and it will last you 2-3 years. Of the Apple hardware I've seen and used, 5-7 years is a reasonable lifetime. This suggests that, if you omit the time value of money and are willing to operate a machine that is 5-7 years old worth of slowness, the iMac G5 is within the acceptable value range. Professional machines are significantly more than $200 per year, but the comparisons are similar with the G5 and higher end x86 boxen.
A real consumer value proposition would be an iMac G5 that was similar in spirit to the Bondi iMac -- take out the DVD RAM (make it CD or CD-R), take it down to a single firewire, a single USB and a single ethernet. Let marketing argue about the analog modem port and the cost of keeping the Airport adapter slot. Base the memory at 512MB and make it only a single slot so such a consumer isn't paying for slots they'll never fill. I'm betting that would cut $300+ out of the cost, and this would mean great things to the total cost of ownership for Joe Sixpack.
If you want to draw me out into the open and compare Apples to Dells and Compaqs and IBMs, feel free. When you add all the hardware together, yes, the Apple is cheaper -- but the more plain machines don't have the high initial cost of entry. You can purchase a cheaper machine without a DVD writer. Honestly, I only need a CD-R, and I could get by with a CD 95% of the time. I have no use for an external VGA, wireless network for my desktop, etc. It's like how the Japanese automakers started to eat into the American market-- they had very few options, and the base cars had standard what many American cars had optional. The Japanese car lines were simpler because there were fewer decision trees, fewer steps, fewer stops, etc., so the end car ended up being equivalent for less -- if you wanted all the options to begin with, and most of us do.
I'm an Apple fanatic. More precisely, I'm on the record as being fanatical about PowerPC and siding with Apple as the bringer of PPC to the home market. Since OSX, I've learned to love Apple itself. If you want to talk about the new iMac G5 being a good value for the hardware, that depends on a great number of things. "Do I want all these options?" "Will I hang onto it for 5+ years" If you want to actually discuss Apple's strengths, OS integration, the OSX experience, UI, stuff like that, then you get to the real value question, "Will I get more enjoyment out of this machine than a cheaper Wintel box?"
Value is different to different people.
Also, for the record, I've got Debian running on a 7600 with a 500MHz G3, and a 1GHz AlPB15" at home, but this is posted on a 700MHz P3 Thinkpad at work.
It's as inexpensive as a IBM clone and worth more in value.
Your comment is out of date. What does "IBM clone" mean today? Someone who copies the Thinkpad or Aptiva? Who cares about those? These iMacs have IBM processors in them, so from a certain perspective, these Macs are not only not IBM clones because they don't run x86, but they're not IBM clones because they are IBM.
I played The Sims when it first came out. First, I loved it. Then, I ended up realizing that I was neglecting my real life chores in order to make sure that I played the game and got my Sims to do their chores.
I'd like to play The Sims I some more, but what I want is a way to get the base game + all the expansions in one easy box. I don't want to buy a $30 game plus 5 or 6 expansion packs at $20 a piece. If I can plop down $50 for everything, I'd do it (on my Mac, Aspyr). There is "The Sims Mega Deluxe", but that only has 3/7 of the expansion packs.
I don't need a prettier version, I enjoyed the game play of the first one a great deal.
If a citizen never uses VOIP should they pay for your wiretap?
If a successful hit on me is arranged over a VOIP phone, am I considered a VOIP user, even if I've never heard of them? Howabout if a VOIP phone is used to arrange a drug deal that, when it goes south, kills my innocent passerby daughter? I think it's safe to say we're not looking to protect only VOIP endusers here.
In college, I was on what seemed like the world's biggest unswitched subnet. All the dorms could see the ethernet traffic from all the others. Some of us ran packet sniffers to see what interesting stuff we could learn. Eventually came the day when the packet sniffers got easy to use and just started dumping out passwords and logons. That's when the port scans followed by log in attempts got almost continuous.
Fortunately for me, about the same time, windows denial of service attacks and remote crash programs were also in vogue (http://www.rootshell.org , but it no longer seems to have the same focus). So, I made my finger port respond with about a dozen of the most popular remote DOS/BSOD exploits. This worked very well. Remote login attempts stopped.
For grad school, I moved off campus. We got a cable modem with Road Runner. I didn't disable that autoresponse. One of the ambitious admins (hi, Mr. Herrick) decided to do some port scans to verify nobody was running mail servers / IRC servers etc. About the third time he port scanned me (with a windows machine), our cable modem was disabled and I had to have a conversation with the admin about what was happening and why. He seemed to like my explanation, asked me to disable my countermeasures and reactivated my cable modem.
I've now read through some pretty fanatical fanboy responses. People who have no grip on reality. I've read through some people who think Apple is the cause of all evil, and even a few who think that the Apple has fallen from the tree on this one entirely.
Why should Apple care that Real has released a new firmware for the iPod? Because the iPod is so successful for being intimitely intertwined with iTunes. Apple does this because the number of software releases are remarkably few -- and Apple has the rights to the code to hunt down any problems.
But they're not Apple's iPods! I bought my iPod, I should be able to do what I want! That's fantastic, enjoy. I've heard the ucLinux people have had some fun. Nobody will stop you. Real, on the other hand, is parting people (customers) from their money, and giving them a tangible product. They did not secure the rights or any agreement from Apple that they won't break the product. This means that either Apple has to fight Real's concoction or do more regression testing. There be dragons down the latter of the two if more companies than Real start releasing firmware that consumers think they can install. And what if Real and Microsoft both release their own mutually exclusive firmware? Does Apple get the phonecalls from Ma and Pa (realistically, not too many grandmas own iPods, but I know some parents who do) who want support for both file formats? This is a big financial burden for Apple with no income.
But Apple is evil for invoking the DMCA! Fight the law. The best way to do that in the US justice system is to find an example case that demonstrates it being used poorly, break it, and fight the law in the courts. You may want to get the ACLU involved. Apple has to protect their interests, and their lawyers obviously felt the DMCA was the most straightforward way to do so.
Apple reverse engineered lots of stuff! How hypocritical to bust on Real for reverse engineering! When Apple reverse engineers a protocol for communicating with an Exchange server, the protocols are mostly established, and breaking that protocol involves Microsoft breaking their own clients. In this case, Apple either loses their ability to add functionality for fear of breaking third party unendorsed firmware, or Apple has to make it clear to everybody that this is unsupported and will likely break in the future. Will it really? Who knows. I don't expect Apple to go out of their way to break it but the best thing to do is overestimate the probability just in case.
This is horrible! This is the worst thing Apple has ever done! Well, that's what lots of people said when Apple licensed the one click patent. They're not exactly a perfect company.
Seems they are going for his/her ego.
Because hey no coder legit or illicit wants to be thought of as a sloppy coder.
I've written my share of code, professionally and academically. Most of it was sloppy, and I acknowledged that from the day it was written. I'm not a terribly efficient coder, and never pretended to be that. I may not be the best at it, and in fact many of my methodologies are inconsistant with how a pro would do it.
I chose my profession, semiconductor design and manufacturing, based on my like of computers, but the inability to take software seriously enough to do so professionally. There are days when I script portions of my job -- it's quick and dirty (and inelegant and sloppy), but the fact that I can do even that puts me on a higher level than many of my peers.
I don't take it personally when someone criticizes my code or even my coding style. They're right. Maintenance aside, it's tough to be too critical of code whose lifetime is certainly finite and whose results are accurate.
An e-mail worm written sloppily may still propagate just as well. I would argue that a worm writer's ego is not harmed by verbal criticism from his/her enemy, but that his/her worth is solely judged by infection rate.
If I go to a website and get a torrent (or if I go to an IRC channel, or even a usenet server) and download a DVD rip / telesync movie, and then I drive down to a theater, pay my $7-10 and never walk through the front door with my ticket, can my subsequent single viewing of the same movie be construed as "fair use"? Can that be the same "time shifting" that's legal for TV?
Say I've got an 8 month old baby girl, and I want to watch movies at home with my wife after our daughter goes to sleep, would the RIAA rather have our movie fare x2 or have us watch stupid sitcoms?
I bought one of the flat panel iMacs the moment it was announced, about 2.5 years ago, and it still works great. The iMac was an incredible value, had an excellent screen, and a fast CPU
I'm glad your purchase made sense to you. Others may not feel the same way.
My former college roommate, and old Mac fiend from "back in the day" recently came to me and asked for my opinion on computers. When he and I met, I told him he could have my CLI when they pried it from my dead, calloused fingers. He saw me play with OS/2, NT 3.5x-4 and Linux. Since then, I've been impressed with Macs in terms of usability. Aforementioned friend is now a school teacher. I know what schoolteachers get paid, but I don't know his salary specifically. I know he can't afford to waste money. Macs have traditionally been strong in education, but his dad was pushing on him to get a $500 x86.
I ended up telling him he could buy a $500 x86, and it would probably last him a good 2 - 2.5 years. That's been my experience with bargain equipment. I encouraged him to think about an eMac, starting at $800 or an iBook, starting at $1100. They might last him 5 or 6 years. Either way, it's basically $200 per year, and he has to look at his budget and OS preferences.
At $200 per year, does it make more sense to spend it all up front, financing if necessary? Or does it make sense to blow half that now, take the risk that it might last longer than 2 years and then replace it then? If money is tight and your budget mandates a shortsighted vision, the Mac's value is incredible, alright, incredibly small. If he's got the money to spend all $1000 now, up front, and babies it, then yes, the Mac will provide a long term value and pay for itself.
Personally, I believe MacOS/X Panther (10.3 for the uninitiated) is worth the extra cash and will end up being a long term value. I have trouble using Windows these days, not because I'm not accustomed to it, but because OS/X does what I want, how I want it. I played OS roulette on countless operating systems, but my ball settled on OS/X for usability, power and stability on the desktop. Rhapsody through 10.2 were decent, but each needed fixing. 10.3, as near as I can tell, only needs work on the networking stack and the network browser.
You get an error in Excel idd, but thats because you made a mistake, not because Excel did
My "mistake" you caught is actually a simplification. Those equations are not what I used in context either. If you generate syntactically correct equations from my pseudocode in OO 1.0.0, 1.0.3 or 1.1.0 (IIRC), export that file into.xls, then open in Excel (97, 2000 or XP), you recieve errors in the last example you cite. If we merely highlight the first cross sheet reference calculation, put the cursor at the end of the line, then press enter, Excel resolves the error to the correct answer that OO calculated just 5 minutes before.
I'm not trying to point out a problem with OO accepting input, nor with Excel accepting input, but rather with the file format that OO exports. Exclamation points are as relevant to this conversation as the soft error rate calculations I was performing.
My previous example included unnecessary text. The Excel problem with the OO format is when Excel must calculate something that references a cell that itself references another sheet.
There are times, like now, when the market is lean. I remember when I was 17, being unable to get a job at McDonalds, Taco Bell or any number of super markets due to insufficient experience. It so happened that all the jobs in entry positions were taken where I was. Merely being an honor student with club activities didn't demonstrate much. Perseverance paid off, and I finally found a job that taught me a variety of skills-- namely cooking, cleaning and running the register.
When the market is lean, you don't find the job you want, you find one that will let you dabble in what you like. Maybe you find a mom and pop or a startup that needs something you can do, but don't want to, and also needs something you want to do, but can't afford to pay someone full time to do. In three years, you'll have that part-time experience in the real world, which is better than someone fresh out of college with only what you had three years ago. Of course, if the economy picks up, or otherwise you find a good job before then, you've been able to pay the rent.
Networking also helps, be it through user groups or church or maybe your old college professors. Often a relationship that involves trust, demonstrating how dependable you are, one that prompts conversations that end with, "...[s]he really pulled me through that tough spot" can get you some interviews your resume wouldn't.
Does anyone maintain a list of features OO doesn't support?
I know that the only incompatibility I found was when I had a formula that referred to a calculated value in another tab, and then yet another cell that referred to the first formula, I got an error when I opened the file in Excel. When I opened it in Excel, went to the formula and hit enter, it recalculated and got a non-error.
To example, sheet 1 A1 = 1, sheet 1 A2 = A1 * 2, sheet 2 A1 = sheet 1 A2 * 4, sheet 2 A2 = sheet 2 A1 * 5. In this example, sheet 2 A2 is an error in all versions of Excel I could find, and was good as of all versions of OO I could find last December.
I always got the OO errors about how data may be lost by saving in the non-native file format, but aside from the above case, I never lost any content.
Pretty much any security measure will end up being a compromise between cost to make the device and cost to hack the device. Keep in mind that even integrating everything on one chip is not 100% secure. If you are willing to spend a few million bucks, it's possible to reverse-engineer anything. Of course, eliminating all trivial hacks would pretty much keep most weekend hackers at bay
Your entire argument boils down to this -- and I wholly agree. Basically, the biggest objective in such a situation is to make bypassing the security more expensive and inconvenient than the gains provided in doing so. As long as one needs to buy a $500 FPGA, in order to hijack the memory bus at the right time with the right data, it'll be a tiny niche market at best. Nobody can protect against adversaries who have millions to spend in a fab or with a focused ion beam to change / repair wires.
I take issue, however, with your statement, "Even if it's in hardware, I doubt you could do it without tripling the cost of your CPU." Understand that I won't provide any data to back my point up either, I think tripling the cost is quite an overestimate. If you know the encryption algorithm up front, just missing the PGP keys (or whatever data you need), you can heavily tune -- and pipeline -- the entire process. Please don't misunderstand, I acknowledge there is a cost adder, but tripling is extreme.
It's damn near impossible to lock code out of the CPU. They would have to do something like on-the-fly encryption so you can't just modify memory contents. Not likely with 22GB/s memory bandwidth.
Certainly with modern CPUs, I'd agree with you, but the bandwidth doesn't factor into my opinion. If one wanted, one could immobilize all but the hardest-core hackers by starting things off slowly if need be. Honestly, it shouldn't be that difficult to pipeline a security bus to take 22GB/s 64 bits at a time, which is a measley 340MB/s (or so), or to share other on chip busses less than 1.5GHz by taking it 16 bits at a time. They've got some extra space to work with the data, and all it does is add latency.
If all you ever do is run authenticated code (however they choose to authenticate), hackers can't get in. Even if you only authenticate the first 100KB or so, a hypothetical hacker would need to be able to modify main memory on the fly without the OS noticing in order to run compromised code. It may be damn near impossible to lock code out of a modern CPU, but when you plan to make your money on a custom chip (or price a system below cost), you might toss in some previously unnecessary innovations to make life difficult for the "fair use" user.
Certainly the OSS / hacker community can't be counted out of this yet, there have been some noticable stupid mistakes in the past. But when these huge corporations find it in their best interest to throw their best PhDs at the problem, the competition becomes very interesting.
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I'm a new parent too. I also had these dillusions of grandeur. If you're unemployed but still have $50 for each place you want to monitor, plus enough USB cables to hook them all together, it's possible, but it'll take some time to get it all set up.
All free time from here on out will be spent with your new kid. Or sleeping. Yes, sleeping is now part of "free time", and you will have to balance between getting your full 5 hours of sleep and the other things you want to do. If you're paranoid about a babysitter while you are out on a date with your wife, not even a camera will make you feel better. What's the ideal situation, you are out at a fancy restaraunt and between tender looks you glance at your webcam to find your babysitter beating your kid? You won't get home in time to fix anything, no matter what it will be too late and the damage done. Go the 20/20 route and get a video camera. Nobody in the real world thinks their video can be doctored.
Really, you won't be going out dating, you'll be too tired for that. Work extra hard (not checking the video feed) so you can get home earlier. If there's someone at home while you're at work, go on ahead and set up an honest webcam and ask the nanny or whatever to show you the kid at specific times. If you need to have evidence to punish a babysitter (get a new babysitter or don't leave the house until your situation changes!), get several video cameras and be clever with placement.
Let the kid have a life now. Realize you can't be there 100% of the time. Your main purpose is to provide guidance and help clean up when the kid screws up.
Earlier this year I retired a Thinkpad 750. 486/33 laptop. Bought a very long time ago (1993???), and has long since been fully depreciated. It ran Debian very well, although dselects were taking a long time to load.
Please compare Apples to comparable quality PCs. As Mac fans we are very quick to point out that Apples are priced to compete against comparable quality and performance x86, yet we bash the x86 world's quality citing the bottom on the line Dells and eMachines. Apples have their strengths, and as far as hardware goes they're in-line with similarly priced x86s. Software, in my opinion, is where the Apple lines earn their value.
Remember when Yahoo was a search engine? And one day they started using other search engines under contract because Yahoo couldn't keep up any more? Yahoo does a good job rebranding other people's work (news.yahoo.com...) and presenting it in an integrated location. iTunes Music Store will continue to fluorish. They're popular right now and they know it. If iTMS wanes in the slightest, I bet they start licensing all over. They already have a referral program.
What if the parents are trying to watch the TV in the same room? In a long plane / car ride? Several college students in a lecture hall? The deaf get to play these games cooperatively too!
There are many instances when short distance text chat would be useful to me. Being in noisy or quiet situations are an example. Your comment seems to imply that every DS gathering will be LAN-party-esque. Surely, yelling at teammates and competitors is fun, but not every game-playing environment is conducive to that.
My mom knows that I enjoyed Star Wars and even bought a great number of the Lego sets a few years ago. I think my wife and I may have singlehandedly kept Vermont Toy and Hobby open for a while...
My mom heard on the TV a long time ago that the Star Wars DVDs were coming out. Last time I talked with her, she excitedly told me that the release date was coming up, and of course I knew about it, but was it marked on my calendar? I tried to fend off this Christmas gift in the making becase I recognized that excited tone in her voice.
Most of us have a decent ability to explain pet peeves and flaws in our obsessions to others with similar backgrounds or obsessions. My mother has nothing in her universe that can compare with enjoying Star Wars. She sees bad acting and a story line reminiscant of the Lone Ranger and his predescessors, so she thinks that even better special effects and additional scenes can only make it better, can't they?! I tried explaining the cantina scene to her. She remembers vaguely that there was some violence, but she remembers Han Solo (Harrison Ford) being involved. I explained that Lucas changed his mind on who shot first and the repercussions involved to me.
I'm not sure I actually got through. The difference between Han Solo defending himself and shooting first (under the table no less) is a world of character development to me, and my mother seemed to understand what that meant in terms of defining who the characters were. I told her that we had just inherited the laser disc version of the original triology so that one of these years we'd just have to transfer that to a better version. Of course, we could save ourselves the work and just find a torrent since we have all the source material bought, paid for and licensed just not yet ripped to DVD / MPEG.
Of course, maybe she was just listening to the sound of my voice. I probably should expect the DVDs under the Christmas tree this year. I have to ready a look of absolute childish joy on my face because she cares enough to remember my insterests.
I have no new products to pitch, yet I assure you that I am interesting. In order to make myself more desirable and neutral, I'm involved in a project at work that I cannot mention to people I don't know personally and certainly not to the press. Let me assure you, in 3 years time you will have wished to know my story now!
I will have nothing to discuss aside from my perspective on world politics (on which I do not claim to be educated, only opinionated), my opinion on recent and near-future computer architecture / semiconductor fabrication, and my 10 month old daughter (who is walking now).
Mine says 02K6550. SAFE!
Just because you don't agree with my argument, doesn't mean it's flawed.
My wife's iMac was purchased in 2000 for $1250 and is still chugging along. My father has equivalent aged PC hardware for equvalent price still chugging along. You do the math. Please refer to my original question, "Will I hang onto it for 5+ years". If the answer is yes, then the $200 per year value question holds. You point out a way to get a similar linear cost by adding resale, allowing one to bail out in the middle. I'm not saying it's 100% accurate, but it's not more than 30% off if you'd either enjoy the machine for that time period or sell it. If you're a consumer who would toss it in the landfill after a year, regardless of quality merely because it was no longer shiney and new, then thse figures do not apply. I know Macs and PCs that have stood the test of time. Heck, this year I retired a 486/66 Thinkpad that had been my personal web/mail/name server for 3 years -- which was after it had been retired from a long productive life as a laptop -- this is lifetime nobody could have expected and ended up beating the $200 / year, hard to do for a portable.
Why? How can anybody decide between the two lines if they cannot compare them? If you can't compare them, how does someone decide they want a Camary instead of a Corolla or vice versa? You're 100% right that you can't take out features when talking about features, but you'd be stupid to assume that everybody who buys a G5 iMac will use all the features it comes with. Those are wasted features and hence don't belong in a comparison when talking about value. If you're going to use all the features, then by all means, it's a valid comparison. I don't know the difference between the Camary and Corolla, so I'd have to compare the two (including price) and do my own cost/benefit analysis to see which I'd prefer.
Please don't misconstrue my statements to imply I do not believe the iMac G5 to be a bad value. I maintain it's no exceptionally good hardware value for most people (because it has lots of features most consumers won't use and it has competitors that do not charge for those features). HOWEVER, it's an excellent package when you compare the software as well. Nobody will use 100% of the hardware and software of this machine, but this machine includes a hardware/software combination that presents a good value to the consumer. Few will do more than tinker with Garageband, but someone is bound to find an application to enjoy between iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, Quicken and Garageband. If you're some abnormal poweruser who only wants the consumer machine, and will use every single hardware feature and bit of software, then the iMac G5 is an exceptionally good value, likley unparalleled.
My intention was do discuss interesting and amusing semantics. But, if you insist.
The consumer market basically charges $200 per year on machine + monitor. Printers are priced seperately due to usage conditions. Allow me to explain my $200 per year reason. One can buy an e-Machine for $200, and it will last roughly a year. If yours has lasted longer, that's fantastic, but that has not been my experience. You can pick up a nicer machine for $400-$600, and it will last you 2-3 years. Of the Apple hardware I've seen and used, 5-7 years is a reasonable lifetime. This suggests that, if you omit the time value of money and are willing to operate a machine that is 5-7 years old worth of slowness, the iMac G5 is within the acceptable value range. Professional machines are significantly more than $200 per year, but the comparisons are similar with the G5 and higher end x86 boxen.
A real consumer value proposition would be an iMac G5 that was similar in spirit to the Bondi iMac -- take out the DVD RAM (make it CD or CD-R), take it down to a single firewire, a single USB and a single ethernet. Let marketing argue about the analog modem port and the cost of keeping the Airport adapter slot. Base the memory at 512MB and make it only a single slot so such a consumer isn't paying for slots they'll never fill. I'm betting that would cut $300+ out of the cost, and this would mean great things to the total cost of ownership for Joe Sixpack.
If you want to draw me out into the open and compare Apples to Dells and Compaqs and IBMs, feel free. When you add all the hardware together, yes, the Apple is cheaper -- but the more plain machines don't have the high initial cost of entry. You can purchase a cheaper machine without a DVD writer. Honestly, I only need a CD-R, and I could get by with a CD 95% of the time. I have no use for an external VGA, wireless network for my desktop, etc. It's like how the Japanese automakers started to eat into the American market-- they had very few options, and the base cars had standard what many American cars had optional. The Japanese car lines were simpler because there were fewer decision trees, fewer steps, fewer stops, etc., so the end car ended up being equivalent for less -- if you wanted all the options to begin with, and most of us do.
I'm an Apple fanatic. More precisely, I'm on the record as being fanatical about PowerPC and siding with Apple as the bringer of PPC to the home market. Since OSX, I've learned to love Apple itself. If you want to talk about the new iMac G5 being a good value for the hardware, that depends on a great number of things. "Do I want all these options?" "Will I hang onto it for 5+ years" If you want to actually discuss Apple's strengths, OS integration, the OSX experience, UI, stuff like that, then you get to the real value question, "Will I get more enjoyment out of this machine than a cheaper Wintel box?"
Value is different to different people.
Also, for the record, I've got Debian running on a 7600 with a 500MHz G3, and a 1GHz AlPB15" at home, but this is posted on a 700MHz P3 Thinkpad at work.
It's as inexpensive as a IBM clone and worth more in value.
Your comment is out of date. What does "IBM clone" mean today? Someone who copies the Thinkpad or Aptiva? Who cares about those? These iMacs have IBM processors in them, so from a certain perspective, these Macs are not only not IBM clones because they don't run x86, but they're not IBM clones because they are IBM.
I hope that thing is heated to body temperature. If not, that's not a facial expression of love...
I played The Sims when it first came out. First, I loved it. Then, I ended up realizing that I was neglecting my real life chores in order to make sure that I played the game and got my Sims to do their chores.
I'd like to play The Sims I some more, but what I want is a way to get the base game + all the expansions in one easy box. I don't want to buy a $30 game plus 5 or 6 expansion packs at $20 a piece. If I can plop down $50 for everything, I'd do it (on my Mac, Aspyr). There is "The Sims Mega Deluxe", but that only has 3/7 of the expansion packs.
I don't need a prettier version, I enjoyed the game play of the first one a great deal.
If a successful hit on me is arranged over a VOIP phone, am I considered a VOIP user, even if I've never heard of them? Howabout if a VOIP phone is used to arrange a drug deal that, when it goes south, kills my innocent passerby daughter? I think it's safe to say we're not looking to protect only VOIP endusers here.
If you cite your sources. If I may cite your parent post:
In college, I was on what seemed like the world's biggest unswitched subnet. All the dorms could see the ethernet traffic from all the others. Some of us ran packet sniffers to see what interesting stuff we could learn. Eventually came the day when the packet sniffers got easy to use and just started dumping out passwords and logons. That's when the port scans followed by log in attempts got almost continuous.
Fortunately for me, about the same time, windows denial of service attacks and remote crash programs were also in vogue (http://www.rootshell.org , but it no longer seems to have the same focus). So, I made my finger port respond with about a dozen of the most popular remote DOS/BSOD exploits. This worked very well. Remote login attempts stopped.
For grad school, I moved off campus. We got a cable modem with Road Runner. I didn't disable that autoresponse. One of the ambitious admins (hi, Mr. Herrick) decided to do some port scans to verify nobody was running mail servers / IRC servers etc. About the third time he port scanned me (with a windows machine), our cable modem was disabled and I had to have a conversation with the admin about what was happening and why. He seemed to like my explanation, asked me to disable my countermeasures and reactivated my cable modem.
Not in CT you don't.
I've now read through some pretty fanatical fanboy responses. People who have no grip on reality. I've read through some people who think Apple is the cause of all evil, and even a few who think that the Apple has fallen from the tree on this one entirely.
Why should Apple care that Real has released a new firmware for the iPod? Because the iPod is so successful for being intimitely intertwined with iTunes. Apple does this because the number of software releases are remarkably few -- and Apple has the rights to the code to hunt down any problems.
But they're not Apple's iPods! I bought my iPod, I should be able to do what I want! That's fantastic, enjoy. I've heard the ucLinux people have had some fun. Nobody will stop you. Real, on the other hand, is parting people (customers) from their money, and giving them a tangible product. They did not secure the rights or any agreement from Apple that they won't break the product. This means that either Apple has to fight Real's concoction or do more regression testing. There be dragons down the latter of the two if more companies than Real start releasing firmware that consumers think they can install. And what if Real and Microsoft both release their own mutually exclusive firmware? Does Apple get the phonecalls from Ma and Pa (realistically, not too many grandmas own iPods, but I know some parents who do) who want support for both file formats? This is a big financial burden for Apple with no income.
But Apple is evil for invoking the DMCA! Fight the law. The best way to do that in the US justice system is to find an example case that demonstrates it being used poorly, break it, and fight the law in the courts. You may want to get the ACLU involved. Apple has to protect their interests, and their lawyers obviously felt the DMCA was the most straightforward way to do so.
Apple reverse engineered lots of stuff! How hypocritical to bust on Real for reverse engineering! When Apple reverse engineers a protocol for communicating with an Exchange server, the protocols are mostly established, and breaking that protocol involves Microsoft breaking their own clients. In this case, Apple either loses their ability to add functionality for fear of breaking third party unendorsed firmware, or Apple has to make it clear to everybody that this is unsupported and will likely break in the future. Will it really? Who knows. I don't expect Apple to go out of their way to break it but the best thing to do is overestimate the probability just in case.
This is horrible! This is the worst thing Apple has ever done! Well, that's what lots of people said when Apple licensed the one click patent. They're not exactly a perfect company.
I've written my share of code, professionally and academically. Most of it was sloppy, and I acknowledged that from the day it was written. I'm not a terribly efficient coder, and never pretended to be that. I may not be the best at it, and in fact many of my methodologies are inconsistant with how a pro would do it.
I chose my profession, semiconductor design and manufacturing, based on my like of computers, but the inability to take software seriously enough to do so professionally. There are days when I script portions of my job -- it's quick and dirty (and inelegant and sloppy), but the fact that I can do even that puts me on a higher level than many of my peers.
I don't take it personally when someone criticizes my code or even my coding style. They're right. Maintenance aside, it's tough to be too critical of code whose lifetime is certainly finite and whose results are accurate.
An e-mail worm written sloppily may still propagate just as well. I would argue that a worm writer's ego is not harmed by verbal criticism from his/her enemy, but that his/her worth is solely judged by infection rate.
If I go to a website and get a torrent (or if I go to an IRC channel, or even a usenet server) and download a DVD rip / telesync movie, and then I drive down to a theater, pay my $7-10 and never walk through the front door with my ticket, can my subsequent single viewing of the same movie be construed as "fair use"? Can that be the same "time shifting" that's legal for TV?
Say I've got an 8 month old baby girl, and I want to watch movies at home with my wife after our daughter goes to sleep, would the RIAA rather have our movie fare x2 or have us watch stupid sitcoms?
I'm glad your purchase made sense to you. Others may not feel the same way.
My former college roommate, and old Mac fiend from "back in the day" recently came to me and asked for my opinion on computers. When he and I met, I told him he could have my CLI when they pried it from my dead, calloused fingers. He saw me play with OS/2, NT 3.5x-4 and Linux. Since then, I've been impressed with Macs in terms of usability. Aforementioned friend is now a school teacher. I know what schoolteachers get paid, but I don't know his salary specifically. I know he can't afford to waste money. Macs have traditionally been strong in education, but his dad was pushing on him to get a $500 x86.
I ended up telling him he could buy a $500 x86, and it would probably last him a good 2 - 2.5 years. That's been my experience with bargain equipment. I encouraged him to think about an eMac, starting at $800 or an iBook, starting at $1100. They might last him 5 or 6 years. Either way, it's basically $200 per year, and he has to look at his budget and OS preferences.
At $200 per year, does it make more sense to spend it all up front, financing if necessary? Or does it make sense to blow half that now, take the risk that it might last longer than 2 years and then replace it then? If money is tight and your budget mandates a shortsighted vision, the Mac's value is incredible, alright, incredibly small. If he's got the money to spend all $1000 now, up front, and babies it, then yes, the Mac will provide a long term value and pay for itself.
Personally, I believe MacOS/X Panther (10.3 for the uninitiated) is worth the extra cash and will end up being a long term value. I have trouble using Windows these days, not because I'm not accustomed to it, but because OS/X does what I want, how I want it. I played OS roulette on countless operating systems, but my ball settled on OS/X for usability, power and stability on the desktop. Rhapsody through 10.2 were decent, but each needed fixing. 10.3, as near as I can tell, only needs work on the networking stack and the network browser.
My "mistake" you caught is actually a simplification. Those equations are not what I used in context either. If you generate syntactically correct equations from my pseudocode in OO 1.0.0, 1.0.3 or 1.1.0 (IIRC), export that file into .xls, then open in Excel (97, 2000 or XP), you recieve errors in the last example you cite. If we merely highlight the first cross sheet reference calculation, put the cursor at the end of the line, then press enter, Excel resolves the error to the correct answer that OO calculated just 5 minutes before.
I'm not trying to point out a problem with OO accepting input, nor with Excel accepting input, but rather with the file format that OO exports. Exclamation points are as relevant to this conversation as the soft error rate calculations I was performing.
My previous example included unnecessary text. The Excel problem with the OO format is when Excel must calculate something that references a cell that itself references another sheet.
sheet 2 A2 = A1 * 5 is sufficient.
There are times, like now, when the market is lean. I remember when I was 17, being unable to get a job at McDonalds, Taco Bell or any number of super markets due to insufficient experience. It so happened that all the jobs in entry positions were taken where I was. Merely being an honor student with club activities didn't demonstrate much. Perseverance paid off, and I finally found a job that taught me a variety of skills-- namely cooking, cleaning and running the register.
When the market is lean, you don't find the job you want, you find one that will let you dabble in what you like. Maybe you find a mom and pop or a startup that needs something you can do, but don't want to, and also needs something you want to do, but can't afford to pay someone full time to do. In three years, you'll have that part-time experience in the real world, which is better than someone fresh out of college with only what you had three years ago. Of course, if the economy picks up, or otherwise you find a good job before then, you've been able to pay the rent.
Networking also helps, be it through user groups or church or maybe your old college professors. Often a relationship that involves trust, demonstrating how dependable you are, one that prompts conversations that end with, "...[s]he really pulled me through that tough spot" can get you some interviews your resume wouldn't.
Does anyone maintain a list of features OO doesn't support?
I know that the only incompatibility I found was when I had a formula that referred to a calculated value in another tab, and then yet another cell that referred to the first formula, I got an error when I opened the file in Excel. When I opened it in Excel, went to the formula and hit enter, it recalculated and got a non-error.
To example, sheet 1 A1 = 1, sheet 1 A2 = A1 * 2, sheet 2 A1 = sheet 1 A2 * 4, sheet 2 A2 = sheet 2 A1 * 5. In this example, sheet 2 A2 is an error in all versions of Excel I could find, and was good as of all versions of OO I could find last December.
I always got the OO errors about how data may be lost by saving in the non-native file format, but aside from the above case, I never lost any content.
Your entire argument boils down to this -- and I wholly agree. Basically, the biggest objective in such a situation is to make bypassing the security more expensive and inconvenient than the gains provided in doing so. As long as one needs to buy a $500 FPGA, in order to hijack the memory bus at the right time with the right data, it'll be a tiny niche market at best. Nobody can protect against adversaries who have millions to spend in a fab or with a focused ion beam to change / repair wires.
I take issue, however, with your statement, "Even if it's in hardware, I doubt you could do it without tripling the cost of your CPU." Understand that I won't provide any data to back my point up either, I think tripling the cost is quite an overestimate. If you know the encryption algorithm up front, just missing the PGP keys (or whatever data you need), you can heavily tune -- and pipeline -- the entire process. Please don't misunderstand, I acknowledge there is a cost adder, but tripling is extreme.
Certainly with modern CPUs, I'd agree with you, but the bandwidth doesn't factor into my opinion. If one wanted, one could immobilize all but the hardest-core hackers by starting things off slowly if need be. Honestly, it shouldn't be that difficult to pipeline a security bus to take 22GB/s 64 bits at a time, which is a measley 340MB/s (or so), or to share other on chip busses less than 1.5GHz by taking it 16 bits at a time. They've got some extra space to work with the data, and all it does is add latency.
If all you ever do is run authenticated code (however they choose to authenticate), hackers can't get in. Even if you only authenticate the first 100KB or so, a hypothetical hacker would need to be able to modify main memory on the fly without the OS noticing in order to run compromised code. It may be damn near impossible to lock code out of a modern CPU, but when you plan to make your money on a custom chip (or price a system below cost), you might toss in some previously unnecessary innovations to make life difficult for the "fair use" user.
Certainly the OSS / hacker community can't be counted out of this yet, there have been some noticable stupid mistakes in the past. But when these huge corporations find it in their best interest to throw their best PhDs at the problem, the competition becomes very interesting.