Collectability helps with resale value, so I think it's quite relavent to the discussion. Where PCs are pretty much a commodity item, Apple has managed, for better or worse, to stay slightly above the commodity market.
Also, the Power PC is a poor comparison because during that time those were commodity machines with ugly names like 5200/75 and Performa 6300. Recall that time was when Sculley allowed the OS to be run on Mac-compatible hardware like the Power Computing machines. Those days are long gone, and the Apple Mystique is one again in full force. People identify with the Mac. Have you priced a G3 Mac lately? How about a Pentium II? Which would you rather have?
Old hardware is going to have a steep depreciation several years out from release. The Macintosh and other non-commodity hardware levels off after a certain point. PC commodity hardware doesn't level off, and continually sinks in value.
If you still don't believe me, then I'll send a self-addressed, stamped shipping crate full of my old PC hardware. Empty it out and put in all of your old Macintosh hardware. Those 286s and 486s should be worth something someday.:)
Even before the G4/G5 processors, Apples have maintained their value simply because they're Apple machines. Take a look at how much a 386/486 machine is selling for nowadays, and then look at how much a Quadra 840AV is fetching. Now look at how much a Sun Roadrunner 386i is fetching. They're obsolete hardware, but the Mac and the Sun will fetch more because they have additional capabilities that the generic 386/486 machines don't have. It's specialty hardware as far as the consumer is concerned, because it has that added ability to run an additional OS (in Apple's case, it's Mac OS). That will keep the Apple from being a commodity machine.
I think you're missing the point, here... It's not that the hardware is almost identical, it's that the Apple hardware will still be able to run Mac OSX. No matter how close the Gateway is in hardware specs, it (without surgery of some form) won't run Mac OSX any time soon. That will most definitely slow any depreciation these new machines will have for some time.
> So I think that Apple stuff may be right in the ballpark of other Intel Duo machines.
Except that when you go to sell that Gateway, you'll take more of a kick in the teeth from the depreciation than the Apple machine. For $100 more, I'll take the Apple every time if it means I'll be able to fetch more when (and if) I decide to sell it.
kuro5hin called... they want their idea back, please.
Seriously, the reason I like this place is because it doesn't have the elitist story submission policies of other sites. It's calmer, and less hectic... and I don't have to sip from the trough of crap out there. I've RSS subscribed to ther news sites, and quite frankly this one stays in my subscription list long after the other ones are gone.
Death by subscription? Please.
on
Demise of C++?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Saying that C++ is dead because C/C++ Users Journal is no more is about as ridiculous as saying that Linux is dead because Linuxworld magazine is dead. I'm sorry, but the two are not interconnected at all. True, there's no real magazine for C and C++ developers in the newsstands, but if magazine popularity has anything to do with it, then the same can be said for Perl, Python, Ruby, and a myriad of other languages that aren't in print. I'd be more inclined to say that the publishing industry for language content is dead as when it was time to renew my subscription to C/C++ UJ, I opted instead to not renew. Why pay $29.95 (or whatever the sliding scale that CMP Media uses to determine what you pay that month) for a bunch of articles that may or may not relate to doing useful work with C/C++ (and admit it... how many pure C++ articles were there? I remember many more articles on D, Java interoperability, and the like than there were C/C++ articles). I found that the one section I did read religiously was the fictional workplace created by Herb Sutter and his co-author (the name escapes me at the moment) which detailed three coders (the master, the apprentice, and the guru) against "Bob". That was about it.
So, I don't think that C++ is going anywhere because the journal is going away... I think instead people who are using C++ will go elsewhere for information about C++.
Well, remember those zombie films where a hapless victim unloads a clip of ammunition into a walking corpse, and the corpse stumbles a bit and falls down, only to rise back up and continue pursuing said hapless victim?
"Some people out there may feel that Firefox Secrets doesn't offer any tips that can't be found on the web. It's a fair assessment that some of the ideas presented in the book should be pretty routine for expert Firefox users."
That portion of the review was tailor made for you.:) By expert, I was referring to people who are open to learning from a book. I understand there's gobs of information waiting to be searched via Google and the like, but having that information in print-form is handy, at least for me.
I think the difference between Maxtor drives and Western Digital drives is that Maxtor drives will let you know in advance they are going to fail (sounds, etc). Western Digital drives just fail with no warning.
I hope this merger will keep the high quality I've come to expect from both Seagate and Maxtor.
The CD isn't dead, the CD industry is dead. The business model is fatally flawed, and I for one stand with shovel in hand, ready to throw dirt on it's rotting corpse. (And I stand with sharpened stake in hand to ensure it's going to get the dirt nap if it has the indecency to try to get back up).
I'm sorry, but I've stopped purchasing RIAA encumbered music. There's plenty out there, and I don't need to support greedy corporations who don't understand their customer wants or needs. It only took a few years, but I finally caught that the RIAA is not interested in making sure that I remain a customer, and I've complied by taking my business elsewhere. Magnatune, Positron Records, Metropolis Records... they all get it. Soon other companies will understand that the problem isn't their customers (who want to support them), but the marginalized trade group cartels that are holding them back. Until this happens, my cash goes elsewhere.
Has there ever been a segment that you wish had been shown, but didn't make the cut? Conversely, was there a segment that did make the final show that you wish had not been shown?
Not to inflate the egos here, but this kind of article is the reason I come back to Slashdot. There's little ego in the editorializing, and no "We're better than (insert site here) that many other news aggregation sites may have. Sure, the news may be a bit slow, and sure I've had my fair share of articles dropped that later showed up as news. I don't mind. The discussions here are great, and the topics are interesting. Digg offers a little more in the programming arena, but I find that I enjoy the commentary here more than the actual article.
Kudos, Slashdot... You've built quite a community here.
I've been recommending people get the Linksys routers specifically for the Linux firmware. Guess I'll have to recommend another brand. Any suggestions?
Sid has left companies before, and I'm sure if things get too far out of control, he'll drop off, regroup, and start over. I wouldn't worry too much. The worst that will happen will be some crap games in the interim.
Y'know, I think this is right in line with the push in America to get people to stop thinking altogether. What kind of nation have we become where the only ideas out there will be the ones that are bought and paid for with large sums of money and licensing fees?
Abolish the USPTO now. It has swayed too far from it's charter.
It's pretty simple: Lowest common denominator. Creating special character sets creates incompatibilities with other machines out there. That's why ASCII was such a boon, and why character sets like PETASCII, ATASCII, and others fell by the wayside. (And if you really want some character set fun, try EBCDIC sometime).
So, what happens when the readership of blogs is 1/3 of newspapers? 1/2? Do they somehow get legitimized because of readership? How many news outlets now quote blogs as a new source? When is there a tipping point where an anonymous blogger gets the same protections as a journalist?
I don't have the answers, so I'm interested in your opinion on this.
I'm tired of the industry bitching and moaning that only by locking down devices will they provide content. There's a long history of products that didn't quite manage to understand that the customer is king, and letting the customer decide how to use the device and the content only encourages new and exciting ways (read: innovative) to use the content. If the movie industry in the VCR era had its way, there would be no video market. If the recording industry in the piano roll era had it's way, there would be no records and compact discs today. If the software industry of the pre-personal computing era had it's way, we wouldn't have had the personal computing revolution. Innovation only comes by allowing people the freedom to innovate. DRM and the DMCA restrict how that content is used. Imagine if a digital device restricted your ability to record your wedding reception because it detected a watermark from the music from the DJ that restricts replication? We're already watching devices like the TiVo being marginalized because of unrealistic DRM. The industry might want to stop putting up fences if theu want customer to keep coming around. It only takes a few shots out of the windows of the industrys house before people stop coming.
Slashdot Mirror
Collectability helps with resale value, so I think it's quite relavent to the discussion. Where PCs are pretty much a commodity item, Apple has managed, for better or worse, to stay slightly above the commodity market.
:)
Also, the Power PC is a poor comparison because during that time those were commodity machines with ugly names like 5200/75 and Performa 6300. Recall that time was when Sculley allowed the OS to be run on Mac-compatible hardware like the Power Computing machines. Those days are long gone, and the Apple Mystique is one again in full force. People identify with the Mac. Have you priced a G3 Mac lately? How about a Pentium II? Which would you rather have?
Old hardware is going to have a steep depreciation several years out from release. The Macintosh and other non-commodity hardware levels off after a certain point. PC commodity hardware doesn't level off, and continually sinks in value.
If you still don't believe me, then I'll send a self-addressed, stamped shipping crate full of my old PC hardware. Empty it out and put in all of your old Macintosh hardware. Those 286s and 486s should be worth something someday.
Even before the G4/G5 processors, Apples have maintained their value simply because they're Apple machines. Take a look at how much a 386/486 machine is selling for nowadays, and then look at how much a Quadra 840AV is fetching. Now look at how much a Sun Roadrunner 386i is fetching. They're obsolete hardware, but the Mac and the Sun will fetch more because they have additional capabilities that the generic 386/486 machines don't have. It's specialty hardware as far as the consumer is concerned, because it has that added ability to run an additional OS (in Apple's case, it's Mac OS). That will keep the Apple from being a commodity machine.
I think you're missing the point, here... It's not that the hardware is almost identical, it's that the Apple hardware will still be able to run Mac OSX. No matter how close the Gateway is in hardware specs, it (without surgery of some form) won't run Mac OSX any time soon. That will most definitely slow any depreciation these new machines will have for some time.
> So I think that Apple stuff may be right in the ballpark of other Intel Duo machines.
Except that when you go to sell that Gateway, you'll take more of a kick in the teeth from the depreciation than the Apple machine. For $100 more, I'll take the Apple every time if it means I'll be able to fetch more when (and if) I decide to sell it.
kuro5hin called... they want their idea back, please.
Seriously, the reason I like this place is because it doesn't have the elitist story submission policies of other sites. It's calmer, and less hectic... and I don't have to sip from the trough of crap out there. I've RSS subscribed to ther news sites, and quite frankly this one stays in my subscription list long after the other ones are gone.
Saying that C++ is dead because C/C++ Users Journal is no more is about as ridiculous as saying that Linux is dead because Linuxworld magazine is dead. I'm sorry, but the two are not interconnected at all. True, there's no real magazine for C and C++ developers in the newsstands, but if magazine popularity has anything to do with it, then the same can be said for Perl, Python, Ruby, and a myriad of other languages that aren't in print. I'd be more inclined to say that the publishing industry for language content is dead as when it was time to renew my subscription to C/C++ UJ, I opted instead to not renew. Why pay $29.95 (or whatever the sliding scale that CMP Media uses to determine what you pay that month) for a bunch of articles that may or may not relate to doing useful work with C/C++ (and admit it... how many pure C++ articles were there? I remember many more articles on D, Java interoperability, and the like than there were C/C++ articles). I found that the one section I did read religiously was the fictional workplace created by Herb Sutter and his co-author (the name escapes me at the moment) which detailed three coders (the master, the apprentice, and the guru) against "Bob". That was about it.
:)
So, I don't think that C++ is going anywhere because the journal is going away... I think instead people who are using C++ will go elsewhere for information about C++.
No story here... move along.
I was just about to post that. Best. quote. ever. :)
Well, remember those zombie films where a hapless victim unloads a clip of ammunition into a walking corpse, and the corpse stumbles a bit and falls down, only to rise back up and continue pursuing said hapless victim?
Reload.
"Some people out there may feel that Firefox Secrets doesn't offer any tips that can't be found on the web. It's a fair assessment that some of the ideas presented in the book should be pretty routine for expert Firefox users."
:) By expert, I was referring to people who are open to learning from a book. I understand there's gobs of information waiting to be searched via Google and the like, but having that information in print-form is handy, at least for me.
That portion of the review was tailor made for you.
Completely anecdotal evidence follows:
I think the difference between Maxtor drives and Western Digital drives is that Maxtor drives will let you know in advance they are going to fail (sounds, etc). Western Digital drives just fail with no warning.
I hope this merger will keep the high quality I've come to expect from both Seagate and Maxtor.
The CD isn't dead, the CD industry is dead. The business model is fatally flawed, and I for one stand with shovel in hand, ready to throw dirt on it's rotting corpse. (And I stand with sharpened stake in hand to ensure it's going to get the dirt nap if it has the indecency to try to get back up).
I'm sorry, but I've stopped purchasing RIAA encumbered music. There's plenty out there, and I don't need to support greedy corporations who don't understand their customer wants or needs. It only took a few years, but I finally caught that the RIAA is not interested in making sure that I remain a customer, and I've complied by taking my business elsewhere. Magnatune, Positron Records, Metropolis Records... they all get it. Soon other companies will understand that the problem isn't their customers (who want to support them), but the marginalized trade group cartels that are holding them back. Until this happens, my cash goes elsewhere.
Sorry, RIAA... you had your chance.
Ink for this thing doesn't appear to be unreasonable:
HP 13 Black Ink Cartridge C4814A $24.99
Ink volume: 28 ml
HP 10 Black Inkjet Cartridge C4844A $33.99 (looks like a promo price)
Ink volume: 69 ml
Does anyone know what the page rating for 69ml cartridges is?
Unfortunately unless you need a color printer on the cheap, the cheap laser printers have an adequate duty cycle, and cost less in supplies.
My God, and perhaps the paper, pen and pencil will be used for fuel to power e-mail!
There will be a niche for peer-reviewed communication in science, and the smart journals will adapt. End of story.
Hi Guys,
Has there ever been a segment that you wish had been shown, but didn't make the cut? Conversely, was there a segment that did make the final show that you wish had not been shown?
I've been asked that when asking for a plain coffee. Unfortunately I used to ask for "Black Coffee", but that tended to get me stared at even worse.
Not to inflate the egos here, but this kind of article is the reason I come back to Slashdot. There's little ego in the editorializing, and no "We're better than (insert site here) that many other news aggregation sites may have. Sure, the news may be a bit slow, and sure I've had my fair share of articles dropped that later showed up as news. I don't mind. The discussions here are great, and the topics are interesting. Digg offers a little more in the programming arena, but I find that I enjoy the commentary here more than the actual article.
Kudos, Slashdot... You've built quite a community here.
I've been recommending people get the Linksys routers specifically for the Linux firmware. Guess I'll have to recommend another brand. Any suggestions?
Sid has left companies before, and I'm sure if things get too far out of control, he'll drop off, regroup, and start over. I wouldn't worry too much. The worst that will happen will be some crap games in the interim.
Y'know, I think this is right in line with the push in America to get people to stop thinking altogether. What kind of nation have we become where the only ideas out there will be the ones that are bought and paid for with large sums of money and licensing fees?
Abolish the USPTO now. It has swayed too far from it's charter.
For those of you who don't want to read the original text of the letter, we now present the abridged version below:
Affiliates: Wah!
This has been a special presentation. We now return you to your busy work schedule.
It's pretty simple: Lowest common denominator. Creating special character sets creates incompatibilities with other machines out there. That's why ASCII was such a boon, and why character sets like PETASCII, ATASCII, and others fell by the wayside. (And if you really want some character set fun, try EBCDIC sometime).
So, what happens when the readership of blogs is 1/3 of newspapers? 1/2? Do they somehow get legitimized because of readership? How many news outlets now quote blogs as a new source? When is there a tipping point where an anonymous blogger gets the same protections as a journalist?
I don't have the answers, so I'm interested in your opinion on this.
I'm tired of the industry bitching and moaning that only by locking down devices will they provide content. There's a long history of products that didn't quite manage to understand that the customer is king, and letting the customer decide how to use the device and the content only encourages new and exciting ways (read: innovative) to use the content. If the movie industry in the VCR era had its way, there would be no video market. If the recording industry in the piano roll era had it's way, there would be no records and compact discs today. If the software industry of the pre-personal computing era had it's way, we wouldn't have had the personal computing revolution. Innovation only comes by allowing people the freedom to innovate. DRM and the DMCA restrict how that content is used. Imagine if a digital device restricted your ability to record your wedding reception because it detected a watermark from the music from the DJ that restricts replication? We're already watching devices like the TiVo being marginalized because of unrealistic DRM. The industry might want to stop putting up fences if theu want customer to keep coming around. It only takes a few shots out of the windows of the industrys house before people stop coming.
I think you're mistaken, as Dream Theater's label is a Warner Bros. label.
:)
And yes, Magnatune deserves major kudos for their sharing policy.