My out the door price for the Cinema Display HD 30" plus card is US$4,220 which is (today at any rate) AU$5,828. So the premium you're paying for living in Australia is about US$800 or so.
Don't feel too bad. My mortgage on my entry-level house here in Southern California is US$2,750. That's AU$3,798 a month. I'm betting that although I pay less for the Cinema Display than you do, you pay a lot less for entry-level housing (in a nice but not top-drawer neighborhood) than I do.
Finally, realize that the 30" Cinema Display is very much a niche product. Those who will buy it are passionate about it and so you'll hear a lot from them, but unless you're doing heavy animation or running Photoshop on enormous image files, you really don't need this kind of display. If you actually saw it, you might feel that it's a bit large even for you; it would overwhelm all but the most enormous desks.
Most people think the 23" display is enormous enough - and it's half the price. The 30" display is only for serious photographers, animators or egomaniacs like me:-).
He's worth $2.3 billion. Curiously enough, most of this is from Pixar, not Apple. He made relatively little from Apple.
Greed is a powerful motivator, and that's not so bad. Consider the only alternative that has been found: The motivation created by a dictatorship where your head's chopped off if you don't conform. Greed allows people like Steve Jobs to thrive. It lets rebels like Michael Moore thrive. In Cuba, Moore would have been thrown in jail for 20 years. Here he profits from what he does to the extent of a $1.9 mllion Manhattan apartment and the freedom to make whatever movies he wants. Ironically enough, Moore seems to be agitating for a Cuba-like society, which would not serve him well at all.
Now, there are some things created by greed, such as the Windows near-monopoly, that we can probably agree are bad. But what's amazing is how well the system works, because people like Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds have the freedom to act that doesn't exist in dictatorships. It's always possible to challenge the establishment in a capitalist country; in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, it would get your head chopped off.
Too many people support nice folks like Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro simply because they oppose America, the land of greed. Castro puts anyone who disagrees with him publically in jail for from three to thirty years. And don't think Castro doesn't have his fleet of planes, Mercedes and yachts whenever he wants them. He's greedy too, but he's smart enough to put on an act when a rich guy like Oliver Stone comes to visit.
I think the cool thing about Steve Jobs is that he loves to build cool products and create great movies. But realize, this is a major reason he is successful. Enough people agree with him that the iPod is great, that Macs are great, that he can thrive even though his primary product is outside ot the mainstream. And that's another advantage of our society; dictatorships don't allow choices, everything has to be Windows because society wants it.
If the A$6,000 screen is the new 30" display, it's actually US$3,299 plus US$599 for the required video card. So the total's a shade under US$4,000.
However, in the states, sales tax is not included in the price. (I don't know if that's the case in Australia, but I know it is in Europe). When I buy mine, assuming I get it from the retail Apple store, it will cost me a total of US$4,220 including tax.
I think Apple pricing is fair for what you get, but it's certainly not bottom of the barrel cheap. I do wish Apple had a truly affordable tower, because I think I could convince a lot of people to switch if they did. If they had a $699 system that would let people reuse their old monitor, with bottom-end PCs going for $499 I think I could convince people to switch. But with their base systems going for $1,099 and up that's not easy.
By the way, I'd might as well toss out a question for anyone who knows: Can I run the 30" monitor and an Apple Cinema HD Display on the $599 card? I know I can run two 30" monitors, but that's a bit pricey even for me. I'd like to be able to still use the HD Display I already have as a second monitor.
Well, you know, this is really very good news, because their slogan is "Making Search Simple" and surely two pages of results is far simpler than Google's "Results 1-10 of about 111,000,000".
Oh, you want useful results? I thought you wanted simple!:-)
Don't click on any of the links, of course, or you'll be paying those slimeballs.
It seems excessively negative to say that someone's beyond help if he hasn't ensured browser compatibility. When confronted with a potentially company-killing problem, I think he'd be willing to listen.
I actually talked to a customer today who I told should switch from IE, and she was receptive to it because the spyware was driving her bats. There's no question that you can't turn away people using IE, and you must ensure that your software is compatible with IE, but there's no reason in the world not to suggest that using other browsers would fix the problem. People who have the kind of severe spyware problems I've seen are likely to be receptive to that kind of pitch; they don't love IE, they just want to get things done. If that means download something new, I think they'd go for it.
I still remember the particularly nasty spyware program that redirected searches to ZestyFind.com. When you go to google and type in a search phrase. the software automaticlaly pulls up a ZestyFind search window and does your search there.
I couldn't resist trying it out. I visited it using Safari on my Macintosh and typed in a bunch of queries. Needless to say, the results were pathetic. My conclusion was that it was the most useless search engine in the world.
As I remember, the removal instructions for the program were something like ten pages long. I managed to do it but it was horrible.
Mozilla's looking pretty good about now. I managed to outsource that part of my job, thank goodness, but I will be talking to the outsource firm about that when I next see them.
Okay; I went to the web site and clicked on the MacOS X download link, and it would appear that I'm downloading FireFox version 0.9.1.
I don't think most users are sophisticated enough to understand patches, so I would argue that the fix isn't yet available in a form most consumers are going to take. If it's available thorugh the nightly builds, well, that's not where most people are going to look.
Remember, just because you know about it and are active in Mozilla doesn't mean the mainstream world is. The mainstream world just looks at the download link and takes what's there.
I think this is worth emphasizing because the open source world has an excellent opening to take mindshare away from Microsoft, and it would be a pity if it was lost just through a misunderstanding of how mainstream people think.
I'm not defending how they think; I'm just explaining how the world outside our happy little community works. It's not going to change just because we think it should be different.
Worse than that, actually. A Trabant in East Germany was issued after you saved most of your spare money for 10 years.
if you did the same thing in West Germany - an act that would admittedly take tremendous willpower - you could afford a 911, easy. A 911 is only about ten times as fast from 0-60 as a Trabant. Well, a Trabant can't even make it to 60 (it has a top speed of 56mph) but you get the idea.
Not much of a joke if you have to live it, alas:-(.
But it's pretty obvious that people have read my post:-).
D
The Internet improves literacy, at least in theory
on
Americans Read Fewer Books
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
One thing nobody's pointed out yet (at least that I've noticed) is that people do much more writing now than they used to, thanks to the Internet. The fact that your writing actually has a chance to be read, and to influence people, defintely makes you more likely to write. The threat of grammar nazis makes it more likely that you will want to write correctly, too.
I know that I write more than ever, and that's A Good Thing from the standpoint of literacy.
Also, when people go on the Internet, they are almost always reading or writing. And this means literacy is more important than ever, not less.
Perhaps this is something to applaud. If reading stuff on the Internet is displacing TV watching as entertainment, then that's surely a good thing for reading as an activity.
That's no longer true, at least potentially, now that they give subscribers about a ten minute jump on the articles. As a subscriber, I've actually read a few articles and then waited impatiently to be allowed to post.
In this case, it's especially ironic since I've read about five links to this article from other sources already.
Finally,I don't think the free speech ethos of this place is ever going to allow what you suggest to happen -- and rightly so.
Does Apple implement in Safari anything even vaguely similar to Microsoft's Browser Helper Objects?
It seems like that is where the most obnoxious things are coming from nowadays, and if that feature simply did not exist the world would be much better off.
For hackers as a culture, it probably was a Bad Thing. It introduced the world of money and that's been both a blessing and a curse.
For businesspeople and those who wanted to use computers to do real work, I'd say it was a very good thing indeed.
For hackers who want to make money, there's no question that it was.
For hackers who hate the direction in which the computer world has been going - and I suspect that includes you and I - it's probably not.
This is probably going to sound like hearsay around here, but I actually liked the days of the old proprietary systems, with unique and different hardware and software all over the place to try. At least we had people who were trying to make their products different and unique and better than the other guy's.
Now, it's all about standards and commodity hardware. It makes things cheaper, yes, and competition is a great spur, yes, but the loss of uniqueness is a great pity.
The only company that defies that to some extent is Apple, making new computers for those who are discouraged by the blandness and sameness of this world. And at root, I think that's why I spend the big bucks on their hardware and software. There are a lot of rational reasons to like them, but in the end, it's because they're interesting and unique in a commoditized world.
Which, I think, is perhaps the worst thing about the current computing world. It's all about commodities, not about heart. Apple helps, of course, but their market share is shrinking because people have been brainwashed into thinking that what the other guy uses is what they need.
Are they demanding to switch to Macs or Linux for greater reliabilty, or do they shrug and curse all computers for being unreliable?
I believe that the typical consumer simply believes that computer problems are Acts of God and no computer system is any more or less reliable than another.
This pretty much lets Microsoft and pals off the hool, even though it's completely wrong.
I've noticed that MacOS 10 is much stabler than many people think, as long as you understand what happens when a process runs out of memory, and make sure that does not occur.
The lack of pre-emptive multi-tasking is a bit of a drag, but of course on your hardware it might not be that much of an issue.
(1) You can put a lot more quality components in something that cost half a million than something costing half a thousand. The ethos was "how can we do this?" not "how can we save $ 0.50 a unit?"
(2) Their operating system didn't have to be compatible with an ancient OS created when computers had a lot less power. Like current Macs, Vaxen had an emulation layer that allowed PDP-11 programs to be run, but they didn't run a crudely-updated version of the PDP-11 OS.
By dramatic contrast, Microsoft took DOS and built Windows on top of that rickety foundation. Even though Windows was rewritten to create NT, 2000 and XP, there are still traces of the old, obsolete technology, because the new operating systems have to be compatible with the ancient programs. These interactions are difficult to manage and wind up causing significant reliability problems.
(3) The market didn't demand it. Consumers and business owners want more features, not something intangible like more reliability. They have accepted the reliability levels of Windows(tm), and therefore it is obviously not that important to them.
(4) As I have said before, VMS and Unix are sufficiently simple that they can be understood by mere mortals. The addition of a GUI and complex backward compatibility hacks makes this impossible for more modern operating systems.
All these factors make new operating systems - especially Windows, but not exclusively - far less reliable than the mainframe/minicomputer systems of old.
(1) People without significant training and heavy motivation could not learn how to use computers in the "good old days". We only had a market of maybe 30% of the population capable of using them. For computers to spread throughout society, this was not good enough.
The computer industry wanted to spread, for financial reasons if nothing else, and so they made the changes needed to make computers easier to learn and use for non-experts.
(2) Marketing. People want pretty things. People can be convinced to upgrade to something "better" by giving them more pretty things. Even if the old, cerebral games were more fun, the new, slicker graphical games took over the world because they were pretty, and because many of them took advantage of people's natural desire to shoot other people. (I have never understood this, personally, but it's the truth).
I have thought many times that older computers are better, mainly because they were more reliable, and sufficiently simple that a reasonably normal person could understand how they worked, and how to fix things if they broke. Today, I doubt that any single person understands everything going on in a contemporary operating system.
Few people seriously want to go back to the old days, when 24x80 terminal screens that cost as much as a used car were all the computing even well-connected people could have at their homes. I have to admit that I'm nostalgic enough to try and find a good used MicroPDP-11 on eBay, just to say I have one. That being said, I'm not sure how much use I would make of it, and all the weird programming restrictions would surely be archaic. But it would still be nice to have an example of computing history, when we all feltl like elites who might somehow wind up changing the world.
There's only one upgrade a year, if that. The last upgrade was in late 2003 and the new upgrade is in early to mid 2005.
Six year cycle at one upgrade a year is $774. However, during that time you're likely to buy at least one new Mac, which would eliminate the need for one of the upgrades.
If you're really keeping your computer for six years, that's a solid testimony to the quality of the Mac platform. You really need a new PC for every new major version upgrade since the system requirements change so radically. It's torture running Windows XP on a low-end machine designed for 2000. I bought a used two year old 400mhz PowerBook G4 about a week ago and am very impressed by how well it runs in Panther. It was a slowpoke in the version of MacOS X available at the time, but now it's a more than acceptable performer for most things I need to do with it.
The reality is that the Mac platform's pretty cost-effective if you want to keep your machine running well. The horrors of dealing with Windows virus attacks easily make up for the price difference between Mac and PC.
Nice point. But if it's the only word you use it's not that easy to grasp. And much of the time you don't say it at all, you imply it instead. I think you get the idea about it; if used sparingly it's fine, but if it's all you talk about it gets pretty confusing.
What makes Perl sloppy or cryptic was that it was designed to make it easy to create quick hacks. Remember Larry Wall's Great Programmer Virtues: Lazyness, Impatience and Hubris. Perl was designed to make laziness easy; once Perl was written, you could be very lazy in your programming and things would still work.
I'm an experienced programmer who's done relatively little Perl, although its use is increasing significantly in my work. Like you, I deliberately avoid use of $_ because I find it a very confusing concept, and I think it encourages the creation of confusing code. And even though you and I avoid it, the beginning Perl books are full of it and that makes it almost inevitable that most will use it.
For some reason, I always, always hated that $ you have to put in front of variable names. I know it makes all sorts of interesting things possible, but for some reason I've always found it hard to read.
Still, it's tough not to love associative arrays built into the language. It really makes a lot of normally tough things a snap, and I'm sure their coding of it is a lot faster than anything I would have done.
His vehicle appears to be exclusively solar powered, however, which none of the alternatives you found are. If it works, it looks like he could have something patentable.
I'm a little suspicious about whether it actually works well enough to be usable. 25kph (maybe 13mph?) isn't very fast, but it is an interesting start indeed.
You know, if you had only (quite reasonably) wrapped that in HTML containing a link back to the poetry contest and the name, you would have almost certainly won thanks to the link from Slashdot and its likely impact on PageRank:-).
For anyone who doesn't figure it out on their own, the poem is a BMP file and so at least on the Mac it doesn't display in a browser. Find it as a downloaded file. Weird.
I have to say that I don't think UML poetry is going to catch on, based on the few examples I've seen. Even with yours being the best:-).
I suppose it depends on your definition of "expensive". The press release notes that compatible head units start at around $230. Add $100 for the interface and that really doesn't look out of line unless you're comparing it with total junk.
I was able to configure a system with a subwoofer for about $1,100 plus $100 for the iPod interface, and although that's somewhat expensive it doesn't strike me as outrageous, especially considering the cost of cars today - or, for that matter, the price of an iPod.
Slashdot Mirror
My out the door price for the Cinema Display HD 30" plus card is US$4,220 which is (today at any rate) AU$5,828. So the premium you're paying for living in Australia is about US$800 or so.
:-).
Don't feel too bad. My mortgage on my entry-level house here in Southern California is US$2,750. That's AU$3,798 a month. I'm betting that although I pay less for the Cinema Display than you do, you pay a lot less for entry-level housing (in a nice but not top-drawer neighborhood) than I do.
Finally, realize that the 30" Cinema Display is very much a niche product. Those who will buy it are passionate about it and so you'll hear a lot from them, but unless you're doing heavy animation or running Photoshop on enormous image files, you really don't need this kind of display. If you actually saw it, you might feel that it's a bit large even for you; it would overwhelm all but the most enormous desks.
Most people think the 23" display is enormous enough - and it's half the price. The 30" display is only for serious photographers, animators or egomaniacs like me
D
He's worth $2.3 billion. Curiously enough, most of this is from Pixar, not Apple. He made relatively little from Apple.
Greed is a powerful motivator, and that's not so bad. Consider the only alternative that has been found: The motivation created by a dictatorship where your head's chopped off if you don't conform. Greed allows people like Steve Jobs to thrive. It lets rebels like Michael Moore thrive. In Cuba, Moore would have been thrown in jail for 20 years. Here he profits from what he does to the extent of a $1.9 mllion Manhattan apartment and the freedom to make whatever movies he wants. Ironically enough, Moore seems to be agitating for a Cuba-like society, which would not serve him well at all.
Now, there are some things created by greed, such as the Windows near-monopoly, that we can probably agree are bad. But what's amazing is how well the system works, because people like Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds have the freedom to act that doesn't exist in dictatorships. It's always possible to challenge the establishment in a capitalist country; in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, it would get your head chopped off.
Too many people support nice folks like Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro simply because they oppose America, the land of greed. Castro puts anyone who disagrees with him publically in jail for from three to thirty years. And don't think Castro doesn't have his fleet of planes, Mercedes and yachts whenever he wants them. He's greedy too, but he's smart enough to put on an act when a rich guy like Oliver Stone comes to visit.
I think the cool thing about Steve Jobs is that he loves to build cool products and create great movies. But realize, this is a major reason he is successful. Enough people agree with him that the iPod is great, that Macs are great, that he can thrive even though his primary product is outside ot the mainstream. And that's another advantage of our society; dictatorships don't allow choices, everything has to be Windows because society wants it.
I hope this has made you think a bit.
D
If the A$6,000 screen is the new 30" display, it's actually US$3,299 plus US$599 for the required video card. So the total's a shade under US$4,000.
However, in the states, sales tax is not included in the price. (I don't know if that's the case in Australia, but I know it is in Europe). When I buy mine, assuming I get it from the retail Apple store, it will cost me a total of US$4,220 including tax.
I think Apple pricing is fair for what you get, but it's certainly not bottom of the barrel cheap. I do wish Apple had a truly affordable tower, because I think I could convince a lot of people to switch if they did. If they had a $699 system that would let people reuse their old monitor, with bottom-end PCs going for $499 I think I could convince people to switch. But with their base systems going for $1,099 and up that's not easy.
By the way, I'd might as well toss out a question for anyone who knows: Can I run the 30" monitor and an Apple Cinema HD Display on the $599 card? I know I can run two 30" monitors, but that's a bit pricey even for me. I'd like to be able to still use the HD Display I already have as a second monitor.
is it possible?
D
Well, you know, this is really very good news, because their slogan is "Making Search Simple" and surely two pages of results is far simpler than Google's "Results 1-10 of about 111,000,000".
:-)
Oh, you want useful results? I thought you wanted simple!
Don't click on any of the links, of course, or you'll be paying those slimeballs.
D
It seems excessively negative to say that someone's beyond help if he hasn't ensured browser compatibility. When confronted with a potentially company-killing problem, I think he'd be willing to listen.
I actually talked to a customer today who I told should switch from IE, and she was receptive to it because the spyware was driving her bats. There's no question that you can't turn away people using IE, and you must ensure that your software is compatible with IE, but there's no reason in the world not to suggest that using other browsers would fix the problem. People who have the kind of severe spyware problems I've seen are likely to be receptive to that kind of pitch; they don't love IE, they just want to get things done. If that means download something new, I think they'd go for it.
D
I still remember the particularly nasty spyware program that redirected searches to ZestyFind.com. When you go to google and type in a search phrase. the software automaticlaly pulls up a ZestyFind search window and does your search there.
I couldn't resist trying it out. I visited it using Safari on my Macintosh and typed in a bunch of queries. Needless to say, the results were pathetic. My conclusion was that it was the most useless search engine in the world.
As I remember, the removal instructions for the program were something like ten pages long. I managed to do it but it was horrible.
Mozilla's looking pretty good about now. I managed to outsource that part of my job, thank goodness, but I will be talking to the outsource firm about that when I next see them.
D
Okay; I went to the web site and clicked on the MacOS X download link, and it would appear that I'm downloading FireFox version 0.9.1.
I don't think most users are sophisticated enough to understand patches, so I would argue that the fix isn't yet available in a form most consumers are going to take. If it's available thorugh the nightly builds, well, that's not where most people are going to look.
Remember, just because you know about it and are active in Mozilla doesn't mean the mainstream world is. The mainstream world just looks at the download link and takes what's there.
I think this is worth emphasizing because the open source world has an excellent opening to take mindshare away from Microsoft, and it would be a pity if it was lost just through a misunderstanding of how mainstream people think.
I'm not defending how they think; I'm just explaining how the world outside our happy little community works. It's not going to change just because we think it should be different.
D
Worse than that, actually. A Trabant in East Germany was issued after you saved most of your spare money for 10 years.
:-(.
if you did the same thing in West Germany - an act that would admittedly take tremendous willpower - you could afford a 911, easy. A 911 is only about ten times as fast from 0-60 as a Trabant. Well, a Trabant can't even make it to 60 (it has a top speed of 56mph) but you get the idea.
Not much of a joke if you have to live it, alas
D
Only if you download the nightly builds, though.
Most mainstream people would wait for an "official" release, just like IE.
I wouldn't count the problem as "fixed" until it's "officially fixed" and available for mainstream people who don't want to beta-test software.
D
You are right, probably because I don't have one.
:-).
But it's pretty obvious that people have read my post
D
One thing nobody's pointed out yet (at least that I've noticed) is that people do much more writing now than they used to, thanks to the Internet. The fact that your writing actually has a chance to be read, and to influence people, defintely makes you more likely to write. The threat of grammar nazis makes it more likely that you will want to write correctly, too.
I know that I write more than ever, and that's A Good Thing from the standpoint of literacy.
Also, when people go on the Internet, they are almost always reading or writing. And this means literacy is more important than ever, not less.
Perhaps this is something to applaud. If reading stuff on the Internet is displacing TV watching as entertainment, then that's surely a good thing for reading as an activity.
D
That's no longer true, at least potentially, now that they give subscribers about a ten minute jump on the articles. As a subscriber, I've actually read a few articles and then waited impatiently to be allowed to post.
In this case, it's especially ironic since I've read about five links to this article from other sources already.
Finally,I don't think the free speech ethos of this place is ever going to allow what you suggest to happen -- and rightly so.
D
Does Apple implement in Safari anything even vaguely similar to Microsoft's Browser Helper Objects?
It seems like that is where the most obnoxious things are coming from nowadays, and if that feature simply did not exist the world would be much better off.
D
For hackers as a culture, it probably was a Bad Thing. It introduced the world of money and that's been both a blessing and a curse.
For businesspeople and those who wanted to use computers to do real work, I'd say it was a very good thing indeed.
For hackers who want to make money, there's no question that it was.
For hackers who hate the direction in which the computer world has been going - and I suspect that includes you and I - it's probably not.
This is probably going to sound like hearsay around here, but I actually liked the days of the old proprietary systems, with unique and different hardware and software all over the place to try. At least we had people who were trying to make their products different and unique and better than the other guy's.
Now, it's all about standards and commodity hardware. It makes things cheaper, yes, and competition is a great spur, yes, but the loss of uniqueness is a great pity.
The only company that defies that to some extent is Apple, making new computers for those who are discouraged by the blandness and sameness of this world. And at root, I think that's why I spend the big bucks on their hardware and software. There are a lot of rational reasons to like them, but in the end, it's because they're interesting and unique in a commoditized world.
Which, I think, is perhaps the worst thing about the current computing world. It's all about commodities, not about heart. Apple helps, of course, but their market share is shrinking because people have been brainwashed into thinking that what the other guy uses is what they need.
A darn shame.
D
Are they demanding to switch to Macs or Linux for greater reliabilty, or do they shrug and curse all computers for being unreliable?
I believe that the typical consumer simply believes that computer problems are Acts of God and no computer system is any more or less reliable than another.
This pretty much lets Microsoft and pals off the hool, even though it's completely wrong.
D
I've noticed that MacOS 10 is much stabler than many people think, as long as you understand what happens when a process runs out of memory, and make sure that does not occur.
The lack of pre-emptive multi-tasking is a bit of a drag, but of course on your hardware it might not be that much of an issue.
Have you tried MacOS X yet?
D
(1) You can put a lot more quality components in something that cost half a million than something costing half a thousand. The ethos was "how can we do this?" not "how can we save $ 0.50 a unit?"
(2) Their operating system didn't have to be compatible with an ancient OS created when computers had a lot less power. Like current Macs, Vaxen had an emulation layer that allowed PDP-11 programs to be run, but they didn't run a crudely-updated version of the PDP-11 OS.
By dramatic contrast, Microsoft took DOS and built Windows on top of that rickety foundation. Even though Windows was rewritten to create NT, 2000 and XP, there are still traces of the old, obsolete technology, because the new operating systems have to be compatible with the ancient programs. These interactions are difficult to manage and wind up causing significant reliability problems.
(3) The market didn't demand it. Consumers and business owners want more features, not something intangible like more reliability. They have accepted the reliability levels of Windows(tm), and therefore it is obviously not that important to them.
(4) As I have said before, VMS and Unix are sufficiently simple that they can be understood by mere mortals. The addition of a GUI and complex backward compatibility hacks makes this impossible for more modern operating systems.
All these factors make new operating systems - especially Windows, but not exclusively - far less reliable than the mainframe/minicomputer systems of old.
Hope that helps.
D
A few answers:
(1) People without significant training and heavy motivation could not learn how to use computers in the "good old days". We only had a market of maybe 30% of the population capable of using them. For computers to spread throughout society, this was not good enough.
The computer industry wanted to spread, for financial reasons if nothing else, and so they made the changes needed to make computers easier to learn and use for non-experts.
(2) Marketing. People want pretty things. People can be convinced to upgrade to something "better" by giving them more pretty things. Even if the old, cerebral games were more fun, the new, slicker graphical games took over the world because they were pretty, and because many of them took advantage of people's natural desire to shoot other people. (I have never understood this, personally, but it's the truth).
I have thought many times that older computers are better, mainly because they were more reliable, and sufficiently simple that a reasonably normal person could understand how they worked, and how to fix things if they broke. Today, I doubt that any single person understands everything going on in a contemporary operating system.
Few people seriously want to go back to the old days, when 24x80 terminal screens that cost as much as a used car were all the computing even well-connected people could have at their homes. I have to admit that I'm nostalgic enough to try and find a good used MicroPDP-11 on eBay, just to say I have one. That being said, I'm not sure how much use I would make of it, and all the weird programming restrictions would surely be archaic. But it would still be nice to have an example of computing history, when we all feltl like elites who might somehow wind up changing the world.
D
There's only one upgrade a year, if that. The last upgrade was in late 2003 and the new upgrade is in early to mid 2005.
Six year cycle at one upgrade a year is $774. However, during that time you're likely to buy at least one new Mac, which would eliminate the need for one of the upgrades.
If you're really keeping your computer for six years, that's a solid testimony to the quality of the Mac platform. You really need a new PC for every new major version upgrade since the system requirements change so radically. It's torture running Windows XP on a low-end machine designed for 2000. I bought a used two year old 400mhz PowerBook G4 about a week ago and am very impressed by how well it runs in Panther. It was a slowpoke in the version of MacOS X available at the time, but now it's a more than acceptable performer for most things I need to do with it.
The reality is that the Mac platform's pretty cost-effective if you want to keep your machine running well. The horrors of dealing with Windows virus attacks easily make up for the price difference between Mac and PC.
D
Nice point. But if it's the only word you use it's not that easy to grasp. And much of the time you don't say it at all, you imply it instead. I think you get the idea about it; if used sparingly it's fine, but if it's all you talk about it gets pretty confusing.
:-).
Hope it helps
D
What makes Perl sloppy or cryptic was that it was designed to make it easy to create quick hacks. Remember Larry Wall's Great Programmer Virtues: Lazyness, Impatience and Hubris. Perl was designed to make laziness easy; once Perl was written, you could be very lazy in your programming and things would still work.
I'm an experienced programmer who's done relatively little Perl, although its use is increasing significantly in my work. Like you, I deliberately avoid use of $_ because I find it a very confusing concept, and I think it encourages the creation of confusing code. And even though you and I avoid it, the beginning Perl books are full of it and that makes it almost inevitable that most will use it.
For some reason, I always, always hated that $ you have to put in front of variable names. I know it makes all sorts of interesting things possible, but for some reason I've always found it hard to read.
Still, it's tough not to love associative arrays built into the language. It really makes a lot of normally tough things a snap, and I'm sure their coding of it is a lot faster than anything I would have done.
D
His vehicle appears to be exclusively solar powered, however, which none of the alternatives you found are. If it works, it looks like he could have something patentable.
I'm a little suspicious about whether it actually works well enough to be usable. 25kph (maybe 13mph?) isn't very fast, but it is an interesting start indeed.
D
You know, if you had only (quite reasonably) wrapped that in HTML containing a link back to the poetry contest and the name, you would have almost certainly won thanks to the link from Slashdot and its likely impact on PageRank :-).
:-).
For anyone who doesn't figure it out on their own, the poem is a BMP file and so at least on the Mac it doesn't display in a browser. Find it as a downloaded file. Weird.
I have to say that I don't think UML poetry is going to catch on, based on the few examples I've seen. Even with yours being the best
D
I suppose it depends on your definition of "expensive". The press release notes that compatible head units start at around $230. Add $100 for the interface and that really doesn't look out of line unless you're comparing it with total junk.
I was able to configure a system with a subwoofer for about $1,100 plus $100 for the iPod interface, and although that's somewhat expensive it doesn't strike me as outrageous, especially considering the cost of cars today - or, for that matter, the price of an iPod.
D
The first one's not her, but the natural look and lack of cut-up clothing are similar. (The second is much less close).
:-).
I ran through the pictures, and although it's a little hard to tell with the bad lighting and what-not, I don't think any of them are of her.
Maybe next year
D