Why not use a Palm? It's almost throwaway cheap and you could do surveys on it just fine and sync them with whatever application you're running on the back end.
I agree that an Apple tablet will sell like hotcakes, especially if the reason for the delay is Steve Jobs' legendary attention to detail. This is something the tablets I've seen so far lack.
I tried a Toshiba tablet (about $1,700) and thought the user interface and overall design was pretty clunky. Apple, however, has the design talent to make it fun, and the artistic clientele who might make it useful. Imagine, for instance, if you could dual-use it as a Wacom-style tablet you could hook up to a G5 when doing some serious work. Wacom's monitor+tablet combinations are thousands of dollars.
I also wonder about liability problems associated with the Erotic Services and Casual Encounters categories. That seems like the kind of thing a major corporation would be forced to neuter.
Still, it is a minority stake which I daresay gives them no rights at all. I wonder how much they paid for those no rights.
Oh... is Pierre Omidyar in any way involved in eBay anymore? I notice that Craig thanks him in his announcement, and that seems odd. I thought Pierre had long since cut the cord and gone on to charitable stuff.
Their greatest asset is the brand, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to have much equity with the public. When Napster discontinued operations as a free service, it lost most of the brand equity and image it had developed.
The biggest problem is that even the iTunes music store isn't making a significant profit on its own; too big a cut goes to the labels. Apple's making billions on the iPod, so it doesn't care, but to create a company out of the unprofitable half of the iTunes/iPod duo doesn't strike me as a promising idea.
Other companies, with substantially more capital, are trying to do similar things.
One intriguing point is that Napster is a subscription service. Slashdotters in general have a hefty prejudice against subscription services (as do I), but the public may not mind as much as we do. If you can stream all the music you want for $10 a month, that's not really much different from having cable TV, is it? If you don't pay Napster, you don't get to play music from them anymore. This is no different from the cable company, where if you don't pay them, you don't get TV. The average consumer on the street might consider that acceptable, compared to the cost of filling an iPod with 10,000 songs for $10,000.
I think they'll have a tough time competing against Apple, whose system is widely considered far superior by reviewers. But they are trying something different, and I wish them the best of luck in it.
I think his point was that the Apple, whatever its merits as a gaming machine, is a beautifully-made piece of high-end hardware. Others have mentioned that there's nothing particularly special about the Dell other than the standard case being painted blue instead of black. The G5 is precision-made of solid, shiny aluminum, and everything about the designer case is custom.
I was actually going to make a similar point, which is that Alienware and other companies make their machines better. Just to point out the obvious, they use higher-end case designs that were designed especially for gamers. And they sell them at comparable to lower price points to Dell.
Considering Dell's Dull image, I don't see this machine as changing many minds. I can only imagine the catcalls someone would get at a LAN party when they brought the Dell next to all the shiny Alienware systems. I think Dell would have to provide a much higher price/performance ratio to crack this market. A Chevy is still, well, a Chevy.
I wish Steve all the best, but I had to laugh at this line at the end of his letter:
PS: I'm sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook and an Airport Express.
That's our Steve, always promoting his products!
Of course that doesn't mean they're not great, and he doesn't have every right to do so, because they is and he does. But somehow I had to laugh, perhaps at his resiliance more than anything else. Life goes on, right?
I bought one about six months ago, and have used it to print out photographs, web pages, and documents. I've probably printed about 200 8x10s out of it and it has a page count now of a bit over 3,000 pages. The Cyan cartridge is going to run out in about 200 pages, but all the other cartridges are just a shade under half full. I happen to print out a lot of green text, so this is perfectly understandable.
I work for a company that remanufacturers toner cartridges. One major disadvantage of buying a new model printer is that if your company doesn't make cartridges for your printer, it won't be able to give you free ones:-(.
That being said, since remanufacturered toner cartridges are a big help to anyone on a budget, you should bear this in mind when considering what to buy. I'd give the nod to HP because with the highest market share they also have a bigger remanufacturing industry. Lexmark has a lawsuit going that is trying to prevent remanufacturing entirely for copyright issues. As a result, I would strongly recommend going with HP if you want a shot at cheaper cartridges.
I've had many conversations with the guy who runs the factory about what to buy. I said "Gee, used color LaserJet 4500s are getting pretty cheap, maybe I should buy one". He talked me out of it saying there are all sorts of problems with those old printers, and the technology is much better refined in newer models. His opinion is that anything older than the 4600 is not worth getting, and he's not doing that to try to sell cartridges since at the time we made cartridges for the 4500 not the 4600.
I think his advice was sound, since I like the quality of the 3500 quite a bit better than what I've seen of the 4500.
Color lasers do not print as beautiful photographs as inkjets do, and you should be aware of this. At the same time, it might cost you $0.50 a page to saturate a laser-printed image with ink, while it costs about $2 a page (including special $0.50 a page ink) to print your photos on a typical colour inkjet. My actual printing cost has been a hair under $ 0.10 a page including a good mix of text and photographs.
Judging by the listings on eBay, you will get a Color LaserJet 4500 for about $450 or so but it may not include the toner cartridges, or it may include used-up ones. You're still going to have to buy about $400 to fill it up. That seems to imply that you're not spending much more to get a brand new 3500 with brand new full-life toner cartridges. I paid $999 for my 3500N (with the networking). Since the new cartridges are $130 each just about everywhere, that means most of the value is in the cartridges, not the printer!
Looks like my six months of printing has cost me around $54 a month for around 500 pages. Not bad considering how much I've used it.
In conclusion, I've been extremely pleased by my Color LaserJet. The photos aren't perfect, but nobody who has looked at them has complained. And the text printing is, as the C|Net review says, darn near perfect. I can say that printing in colour is downright addictive and I would never want to go back to the spattery inkjet or the boring monochrome LaserJet.
You look at the stuff between the pointy brackets and use it as variable names and then you can do a name/value pair similar to what you get on a HTML form.
It's a lot easier to write and understand programs built that way than the "The account number is between columns 1 and 10 of the card; the customer's first name is between columns 11 and 40,..."
I know because I've done both for EDI exchange and the former went a lot smoother than the latter.
It's $10,047.00 at the Apple store to get a dual 2.5ghz G5 + the card + two 30" displays.
That's not so bad. I remember when a Macintosh II or one of the early PowerBooks cost about that much.
I plan to buy one 30" display and run with that and my existing 23" display (assuming it can be done, but I think it can). I can always upgrade later to the dual setup, but to be honest I'm sure it will be awesome no matter what.
Since you seem to know what you're talking about... does this mean I can drive any DVI monitor with this card, not just the 30"?
I'm curious because I have 23" Cinema HD Display and would like to drive it alongside the 30" when I buy it. Don't want to waste the old technology, don't you know.
Can I do this, assuming that I get a ADC to DVI adapter for the Cinema Display?
It probably doesn't, now. I had a PowerBook G4/400mhz when it was introduced a couple of years back and it it was a tad slow with MacOS X of the day. Menus would sometimes "stick". The extra GPU power was originally introduced to make it work.
By a quirk of fate, I bought a used PowerBook G4/400 about a month ago and it's actually pretty zippy running Panther. So it looks like they've optimized their OS to the point where it will live happily on slower hardware, which definitely wasn't true a few years back.
That being said, it makes sense that you would charge more for different firmware because it has to be split among fewer buyers for the cards. Remember, someone still has to develop the firmware, and that person needs to be paid just like you and me.
I don't mind paying a few extra bucks for Apple-compatible stuff because I appreciate the extra effort that goes into supporting it.
More to the point, I normally would have no need to replace my video card anyway, except I really, really, really want the 30" Cinema Display:-).
Anyone know if the dual DVI can drive a 30" Cinema Display and a 23"? I already have a 23" and would hate to not be able to use it as a second monitor. I know that unfortunately i need the DVI to ADC adapter.
If I were the boss of a marketing guy (or gal), and he was out there showing genuine enthusiasm for the product, I'd be happy as a clam because I know that results in sales.
If you like the guy selling something, you'll buy. That's the foundation of all kinds of sales and it works just the same here.
Although in all fairness, this interview isn't going to prevent me from buying the card and 30" display anyway:-).
The US is one of the closest countries to Cuba and I daresay it's capitalist, but I'd argue the average American is far better off economically than the average Cuban.
But I think what you're really referring to is crony capitalist/strongman-run countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. That's an entirely different type of economic system from the one we enjoy.
As for not thinking I visited Cuba, I find that pretty funny. Guess those 650-odd pictures I took were just a mirage. I found my trip to Cuba fascinating and eye-opening, and I thought the Cuban people were fantastic - friendly and easy to talk to. That being said, the system they're under is appalling - at least if you're willing to look. If your brother's a Communist Party bureaucrat he may think everything's great and he may be able to persuade you -- but the facts on the ground are different.
I should probably mention, though, that I didn't leave Havana, so it's very possible, indeed likely, that the law enforcement presence is less oppressive outside the capital. I did a lot of walking and very little driving, which made it a lot easier for me to see how things really are.
Oddly enough, to date no Communist country has existed without some form of money, however degraded. As long as there is money, some form of private enterprise does exist, even if it's "Okay, I'll fix your TV for 50 rubles". The theory of Communism is very different from its practice.
Private media was not dismantled. It was destroyed through deliberate actions of the regime.
At the time the newspapers were suppressed, the economy was largely capitalist. His policies focused very clearly on the elimination of dissent through the elimination of private news reporting.
How can you call this "a petty interest in censorship" when it's something every Communist dictatorship has had to do in order to hold on to power? That's not "petty" at all. It's central to the whole system.
Cuba is a fascinating place largely because you can really read into it whatever you want. I saw collapsing buildings and people whose desire to rise in life was stunted by a cruel and clumsy regime. Others see free healthcare, even though it takes connections, bribes or overlong waits to get it.
I spent my entire visit in Havana, and it's quite likely that the police presence diminished significantly outside the capital. That could account for us both visiting Cuba in good faith and seeing very different things.
I really enjoyed my visit to Cuba, actually more than any other trip I'd taken before or since. It was just so fascinating to see Communism at work. Can't say I liked what I saw, but the Cuban people are amazingly friendly and hospitable, and they made my visit a joy. I suspect that's one thing we can agree on:-).
I certainly do not claim that Cuba was a paradise under Batista. It was not. But was it better than the way things are now?
Batista's oppression appears to have been largely confined to genuine military opponents, who he ignored until they became genuine threats. Castro locks up people for 24 years for providing lending libraries for anti-Castro books.
Even during the Revolution, private newspapers published their own opinions. They may have been occasionally censored, but they could still publish. Castro eliminated all private newspapers, replacing them with his dull as dishwater state press.
Because there was a much freeer press pre-Castro, there were significant checks and balances on the regime. If people were unjustly tried and executed, people would know about it, and both sides of the case would be covered. Not true under Castro.
So no, I'm not going to defend Batista as a perfect ruler, or even a good one. But we're comparing a mediocre dictator with a bad one. Mediocrity wins.
I have, Cuba in December 2002. It was a real eye-opener to see armed police on every street corner and people scared to talk to you when you took them out to a restaurant, because they knew the waiters are spies. And I'm not kidding.
To see fear in the eyes of people, because they would be punished with three years in Re-Education Camp if they told you the truth... that eliminates the "our society is screwed" attitude real fast.
I know our society is imperfect. So are people, and so are all societies. But to say that people like living under tyranny because they don't have the power to overthrow it is just plain wrong.
Incidentally, Castro wants Cubans to hate us, because it creates solidarity for his policies within Cuba. But after decades of deprivation compared to how life was pre-Castro, this is wearing more than a little thin. In my experience, it isn't working now. Every Cuban I encountered - and I encountered many - loves America.
It seems like you have to live in a tyranny - or at least know what one's like - to appreciate what we have here.
The Mac is like a designer computer. It looks better and is designed better than PCs. It also has a much higher quality operating system design.
People who appreciate this tend to be better educated, higher income people, such as artists, writers and programmers. They unite to appreciate a designer computer and laugh at the vulgar boring Windows people.
This is remarkably similar to the behaviour people have who wear designer clothes, expensive cars, or any other hallmark of quality.
I'm not really in touch with my customers, so I don't know. (I do computer system design for the company, so I'm not on the leading edge of customer contact). But I do know she said she would bring it up at their meeting, which probably increases your cynicism tenfold:-).
I think there are a few problems worth noting. First, we tend to sound a bit fanatical about these issues, and most people tend to discount fanatical statements. Imagine what you would say if someone told you your car had a good chance of blowing up. You'd think they were out of their mind until you saw some exploding cars yourself.
Second, people are conditioned to feeling computers don't work right. Even when Windows has no viruses or spyware, it still slows down over time; the spyware just accelerates this. Since computers are getting faster all the time, that hides the affect of malware from view, and people think it's normal, and accept it.
So it's very likely that people don't understand the full impact of the problem. A few have to be injured by these scams and problems, and then others are likely to fall into place if you explain things properly. Understand that most people don't like change and just expect things to work.
If you understand that's how people think, then you're in a better position to try and convince them.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use a Palm? It's almost throwaway cheap and you could do surveys on it just fine and sync them with whatever application you're running on the back end.
I agree that an Apple tablet will sell like hotcakes, especially if the reason for the delay is Steve Jobs' legendary attention to detail. This is something the tablets I've seen so far lack.
I tried a Toshiba tablet (about $1,700) and thought the user interface and overall design was pretty clunky. Apple, however, has the design talent to make it fun, and the artistic clientele who might make it useful. Imagine, for instance, if you could dual-use it as a Wacom-style tablet you could hook up to a G5 when doing some serious work. Wacom's monitor+tablet combinations are thousands of dollars.
D
Craigslist has its quirky charm, and it's free to use.
... is Pierre Omidyar in any way involved in eBay anymore? I notice that Craig thanks him in his announcement, and that seems odd. I thought Pierre had long since cut the cord and gone on to charitable stuff.
I certainly hope neither of those things will change.
It's always had a reputation for being a bit anti-corporate, so seeing a press release written in boilerplate corpspeak is more than a little appalling.
I also wonder about liability problems associated with the Erotic Services and Casual Encounters categories. That seems like the kind of thing a major corporation would be forced to neuter.
Still, it is a minority stake which I daresay gives them no rights at all. I wonder how much they paid for those no rights.
Oh
D
Their greatest asset is the brand, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to have much equity with the public. When Napster discontinued operations as a free service, it lost most of the brand equity and image it had developed.
The biggest problem is that even the iTunes music store isn't making a significant profit on its own; too big a cut goes to the labels. Apple's making billions on the iPod, so it doesn't care, but to create a company out of the unprofitable half of the iTunes/iPod duo doesn't strike me as a promising idea.
Other companies, with substantially more capital, are trying to do similar things.
One intriguing point is that Napster is a subscription service. Slashdotters in general have a hefty prejudice against subscription services (as do I), but the public may not mind as much as we do. If you can stream all the music you want for $10 a month, that's not really much different from having cable TV, is it? If you don't pay Napster, you don't get to play music from them anymore. This is no different from the cable company, where if you don't pay them, you don't get TV. The average consumer on the street might consider that acceptable, compared to the cost of filling an iPod with 10,000 songs for $10,000.
I think they'll have a tough time competing against Apple, whose system is widely considered far superior by reviewers. But they are trying something different, and I wish them the best of luck in it.
D
I think his point was that the Apple, whatever its merits as a gaming machine, is a beautifully-made piece of high-end hardware. Others have mentioned that there's nothing particularly special about the Dell other than the standard case being painted blue instead of black. The G5 is precision-made of solid, shiny aluminum, and everything about the designer case is custom.
I was actually going to make a similar point, which is that Alienware and other companies make their machines better. Just to point out the obvious, they use higher-end case designs that were designed especially for gamers. And they sell them at comparable to lower price points to Dell.
Considering Dell's Dull image, I don't see this machine as changing many minds. I can only imagine the catcalls someone would get at a LAN party when they brought the Dell next to all the shiny Alienware systems. I think Dell would have to provide a much higher price/performance ratio to crack this market. A Chevy is still, well, a Chevy.
D
What about the weight?
200 pounds of batteries seems like a lot to drag around.
How much lighter can the engine be thanks to the batteries?
D
I have the same problem, sadly.
... I think that would be a hit among present owners.
... those are much more complex problems than they look :-(.
I'm thinking about making something that would position all my cables and such above the floor so Roomba could do its thing.
Unless they make a cable-resistant model
As for your other ideas, I daresay you'll have to wait until 2010 or thereabouts
D
I wish Steve all the best, but I had to laugh at this line at the end of his letter:
PS: I'm sending this from my hospital bed using my 17-inch PowerBook and an Airport Express.
That's our Steve, always promoting his products!
Of course that doesn't mean they're not great, and he doesn't have every right to do so, because they is and he does. But somehow I had to laugh, perhaps at his resiliance more than anything else. Life goes on, right?
D
I bought one about six months ago, and have used it to print out photographs, web pages, and documents. I've probably printed about 200 8x10s out of it and it has a page count now of a bit over 3,000 pages. The Cyan cartridge is going to run out in about 200 pages, but all the other cartridges are just a shade under half full. I happen to print out a lot of green text, so this is perfectly understandable.
:-(.
I work for a company that remanufacturers toner cartridges. One major disadvantage of buying a new model printer is that if your company doesn't make cartridges for your printer, it won't be able to give you free ones
That being said, since remanufacturered toner cartridges are a big help to anyone on a budget, you should bear this in mind when considering what to buy. I'd give the nod to HP because with the highest market share they also have a bigger remanufacturing industry. Lexmark has a lawsuit going that is trying to prevent remanufacturing entirely for copyright issues. As a result, I would strongly recommend going with HP if you want a shot at cheaper cartridges.
I've had many conversations with the guy who runs the factory about what to buy. I said "Gee, used color LaserJet 4500s are getting pretty cheap, maybe I should buy one". He talked me out of it saying there are all sorts of problems with those old printers, and the technology is much better refined in newer models. His opinion is that anything older than the 4600 is not worth getting, and he's not doing that to try to sell cartridges since at the time we made cartridges for the 4500 not the 4600.
I think his advice was sound, since I like the quality of the 3500 quite a bit better than what I've seen of the 4500.
Color lasers do not print as beautiful photographs as inkjets do, and you should be aware of this. At the same time, it might cost you $0.50 a page to saturate a laser-printed image with ink, while it costs about $2 a page (including special $0.50 a page ink) to print your photos on a typical colour inkjet. My actual printing cost has been a hair under $ 0.10 a page including a good mix of text and photographs.
Judging by the listings on eBay, you will get a Color LaserJet 4500 for about $450 or so but it may not include the toner cartridges, or it may include used-up ones. You're still going to have to buy about $400 to fill it up. That seems to imply that you're not spending much more to get a brand new 3500 with brand new full-life toner cartridges. I paid $999 for my 3500N (with the networking). Since the new cartridges are $130 each just about everywhere, that means most of the value is in the cartridges, not the printer!
Looks like my six months of printing has cost me around $54 a month for around 500 pages. Not bad considering how much I've used it.
In conclusion, I've been extremely pleased by my Color LaserJet. The photos aren't perfect, but nobody who has looked at them has complained. And the text printing is, as the C|Net review says, darn near perfect. I can say that printing in colour is downright addictive and I would never want to go back to the spattery inkjet or the boring monochrome LaserJet.
Hope this helps.
D
You look at the stuff between the pointy brackets and use it as variable names and then you can do a name/value pair similar to what you get on a HTML form.
..."
It's a lot easier to write and understand programs built that way than the "The account number is between columns 1 and 10 of the card; the customer's first name is between columns 11 and 40,
I know because I've done both for EDI exchange and the former went a lot smoother than the latter.
D
Honestly, if I were there, I would try to forget the whole mess an do something productive in my life that had nothing to do with fighting.
That's what everyone else should be doing, too.
This is a decade-long war! Live with things as they are, people. It's not worth trying to change things.
D
More. The most expensive PowerBook is $2,799 and the most expensive PowerMac is $2,999.
Out the door, the display + video card upgrade is almost $4k plus tax.
D
It's $10,047.00 at the Apple store to get a dual 2.5ghz G5 + the card + two 30" displays.
That's not so bad. I remember when a Macintosh II or one of the early PowerBooks cost about that much.
I plan to buy one 30" display and run with that and my existing 23" display (assuming it can be done, but I think it can). I can always upgrade later to the dual setup, but to be honest I'm sure it will be awesome no matter what.
D
Since you seem to know what you're talking about ... does this mean I can drive any DVI monitor with this card, not just the 30"?
I'm curious because I have 23" Cinema HD Display and would like to drive it alongside the 30" when I buy it. Don't want to waste the old technology, don't you know.
Can I do this, assuming that I get a ADC to DVI adapter for the Cinema Display?
Thanks!
D
It probably doesn't, now. I had a PowerBook G4/400mhz when it was introduced a couple of years back and it it was a tad slow with MacOS X of the day. Menus would sometimes "stick". The extra GPU power was originally introduced to make it work.
By a quirk of fate, I bought a used PowerBook G4/400 about a month ago and it's actually pretty zippy running Panther. So it looks like they've optimized their OS to the point where it will live happily on slower hardware, which definitely wasn't true a few years back.
D
I'm a Mac user myself.
:-).
That being said, it makes sense that you would charge more for different firmware because it has to be split among fewer buyers for the cards. Remember, someone still has to develop the firmware, and that person needs to be paid just like you and me.
I don't mind paying a few extra bucks for Apple-compatible stuff because I appreciate the extra effort that goes into supporting it.
More to the point, I normally would have no need to replace my video card anyway, except I really, really, really want the 30" Cinema Display
Anyone know if the dual DVI can drive a 30" Cinema Display and a 23"? I already have a 23" and would hate to not be able to use it as a second monitor. I know that unfortunately i need the DVI to ADC adapter.
D
Stop with the suicide bombing and I might be able to spare a smidgen of sympathy for your cause.
How 'bout elections in Palestine instead of having the same old corrupt people run the place?
Until your leaders stop advocating suicide bombing and terrorism, I'm going to stick with supporting Israel, thanks.
D
Is that really so?
:-).
If I were the boss of a marketing guy (or gal), and he was out there showing genuine enthusiasm for the product, I'd be happy as a clam because I know that results in sales.
If you like the guy selling something, you'll buy. That's the foundation of all kinds of sales and it works just the same here.
Although in all fairness, this interview isn't going to prevent me from buying the card and 30" display anyway
D
The US is one of the closest countries to Cuba and I daresay it's capitalist, but I'd argue the average American is far better off economically than the average Cuban.
But I think what you're really referring to is crony capitalist/strongman-run countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. That's an entirely different type of economic system from the one we enjoy.
As for not thinking I visited Cuba, I find that pretty funny. Guess those 650-odd pictures I took were just a mirage. I found my trip to Cuba fascinating and eye-opening, and I thought the Cuban people were fantastic - friendly and easy to talk to. That being said, the system they're under is appalling - at least if you're willing to look. If your brother's a Communist Party bureaucrat he may think everything's great and he may be able to persuade you -- but the facts on the ground are different.
I should probably mention, though, that I didn't leave Havana, so it's very possible, indeed likely, that the law enforcement presence is less oppressive outside the capital. I did a lot of walking and very little driving, which made it a lot easier for me to see how things really are.
D
Oddly enough, to date no Communist country has existed without some form of money, however degraded. As long as there is money, some form of private enterprise does exist, even if it's "Okay, I'll fix your TV for 50 rubles". The theory of Communism is very different from its practice.
Private media was not dismantled. It was destroyed through deliberate actions of the regime.
At the time the newspapers were suppressed, the economy was largely capitalist. His policies focused very clearly on the elimination of dissent through the elimination of private news reporting.
How can you call this "a petty interest in censorship" when it's something every Communist dictatorship has had to do in order to hold on to power? That's not "petty" at all. It's central to the whole system.
D
Cuba is a fascinating place largely because you can really read into it whatever you want. I saw collapsing buildings and people whose desire to rise in life was stunted by a cruel and clumsy regime. Others see free healthcare, even though it takes connections, bribes or overlong waits to get it.
:-).
I spent my entire visit in Havana, and it's quite likely that the police presence diminished significantly outside the capital. That could account for us both visiting Cuba in good faith and seeing very different things.
I really enjoyed my visit to Cuba, actually more than any other trip I'd taken before or since. It was just so fascinating to see Communism at work. Can't say I liked what I saw, but the Cuban people are amazingly friendly and hospitable, and they made my visit a joy. I suspect that's one thing we can agree on
D
I certainly do not claim that Cuba was a paradise under Batista. It was not. But was it better than the way things are now?
Batista's oppression appears to have been largely confined to genuine military opponents, who he ignored until they became genuine threats. Castro locks up people for 24 years for providing lending libraries for anti-Castro books.
Even during the Revolution, private newspapers published their own opinions. They may have been occasionally censored, but they could still publish. Castro eliminated all private newspapers, replacing them with his dull as dishwater state press.
Because there was a much freeer press pre-Castro, there were significant checks and balances on the regime. If people were unjustly tried and executed, people would know about it, and both sides of the case would be covered. Not true under Castro.
So no, I'm not going to defend Batista as a perfect ruler, or even a good one. But we're comparing a mediocre dictator with a bad one. Mediocrity wins.
D
Better for everyone to think they're living the good life, than for everyone to KNOW they're living the bad one.
Better to be exploited and get something out of it, than to be exploited and reduced to eating roots and berries.
D
Have you ever visited a Communist country?
... that eliminates the "our society is screwed" attitude real fast.
I have, Cuba in December 2002. It was a real eye-opener to see armed police on every street corner and people scared to talk to you when you took them out to a restaurant, because they knew the waiters are spies. And I'm not kidding.
To see fear in the eyes of people, because they would be punished with three years in Re-Education Camp if they told you the truth
I know our society is imperfect. So are people, and so are all societies. But to say that people like living under tyranny because they don't have the power to overthrow it is just plain wrong.
Incidentally, Castro wants Cubans to hate us, because it creates solidarity for his policies within Cuba. But after decades of deprivation compared to how life was pre-Castro, this is wearing more than a little thin. In my experience, it isn't working now. Every Cuban I encountered - and I encountered many - loves America.
It seems like you have to live in a tyranny - or at least know what one's like - to appreciate what we have here.
D
The Mac is like a designer computer. It looks better and is designed better than PCs. It also has a much higher quality operating system design.
People who appreciate this tend to be better educated, higher income people, such as artists, writers and programmers. They unite to appreciate a designer computer and laugh at the vulgar boring Windows people.
This is remarkably similar to the behaviour people have who wear designer clothes, expensive cars, or any other hallmark of quality.
D
I'm not really in touch with my customers, so I don't know. (I do computer system design for the company, so I'm not on the leading edge of customer contact). But I do know she said she would bring it up at their meeting, which probably increases your cynicism tenfold :-).
I think there are a few problems worth noting. First, we tend to sound a bit fanatical about these issues, and most people tend to discount fanatical statements. Imagine what you would say if someone told you your car had a good chance of blowing up. You'd think they were out of their mind until you saw some exploding cars yourself.
Second, people are conditioned to feeling computers don't work right. Even when Windows has no viruses or spyware, it still slows down over time; the spyware just accelerates this. Since computers are getting faster all the time, that hides the affect of malware from view, and people think it's normal, and accept it.
So it's very likely that people don't understand the full impact of the problem. A few have to be injured by these scams and problems, and then others are likely to fall into place if you explain things properly. Understand that most people don't like change and just expect things to work.
If you understand that's how people think, then you're in a better position to try and convince them.
Hope that helps.
D