I mean, with hibernation and standby modes, outside the need to restart for some sort of update--why even shutdown?
It just all seems pointless to me. I don't find ANY OS's boot times slow enough to start tinkering with ways to make it faster. Even Vista on this laptop was well under a minute. And that's to "usable". XP and Linux are maybe a few seconds faster. Is there really some use for it booting in 20 seconds vs. maybe 30?
Ok, I need an explanation. The artists signed a contract to the label to produce a record. The label holds the copyright to the material and the artist is paid for this. Then the record is promoted, and either sells or it doesn't.
If there's a suit for copyright infringement and there's money awarded, why WOULD the artist get any of it? It's the label's copyright that's been infringed. Any damages SHOULD go to them. If I'm hired to write some program for Adobe, it's pirated, and Adobe sues someone--why would I see any money? It's not my program. I wrote it, but it belongs to Adobe. Any lost income is theirs not mine.
It can be argued that these record contracts are pretty lopsided and go against the artist. But they are the ones that signed it. Just because they are in a bad contract doesn't mean they should get money from these suits which are for copyrights they aren't the holders to.
Nintendo has already said they want to go to shorter release cycles. This would put the Wii at four years. I actually expect a new Wii a lot shorter than that.
Although I do expect a WiiHD is going to be a lot harder sell. They had a lot of hype with the Wii and sold--and still selling--based off of it. But a lot of these Wiis are now sitting around collecting dust waiting for decent games. A couple cult following titles and a few lackluster first part titles. They have been been greeted with a lot of hope, and some good reviews from some Nintendo friendly reviewers. But I don't know a lot of people still playing their copies of SMG, MK, or even Brawl. I just think it's going to be a hard sell the next around of systems, where they are going to have to show some major titles with some real lasting appeal are going to come. Does anyone really think the "casual" gamers who got on board with Wii Play and Wii Fit are going to go buy another system for Wii Play 2 and Wii Fit 2 when they bought the first ones and it sat in the corner a couple of weeks after they had it?
When I moved into my last apartment I decided to do the auto bill pay. I'm just lazy with paying things and sometimes I'll forget to pay something.
Well, for those of you that pay a gas bill, you know they bill you an "estimated" rate, and then the actual the next month. Well, for a small apartment who's gas bill was maybe $20 for a month, they decided to take out a $320 "estimated" payment. They had no idea why it was so out of whack with the actual, but it was what it was. Normally you just send in an "estimated" payment as well, they just readjust your bill, and send you the actual the next month. Well, with the automatic payment, the bill said $320, and that's what they took.
It ended up just being that I told them to keep $320, and I just wasn't going to pay my bill for like 18 months. Which was fine with them. But they never actually fixed the estimation. The next bill, I had a $300 credit, following I owed $300, next month I had a $280 credit, etc. etc.
Long story short, you don't know what these people are going to charge you with. They take money first, and then just deal with you later if you don't like it. I'd rather pay a late fee, than deal with a CSR rep on why they took too much money.
+7 score for the higher ranked team every 12 positions they are ahead of the other based on a general ranking(I don't think they give you this information). Overall maybe 10 lines of code. Put Ohio State #1, put Temple #117. The rest of the rankings are an exercise for the reader. You won't pick major upsets, but you're not going to be too far off the mark otherwise.
That's about as close as you're going to get. College football varies too much to get exact scoring. A #1 team has 15 starters leave for graduation of the NFL, and they have nothing but freshman and sophomores starting. Any data on the previous year isn't valid for the next year.
Trademarks help protect corporate and product identity, and Photoshop is one of Adobe's most valuable trademarks. By following the below guidelines, you can help Adobe protect the Photoshop brand name.
The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a common verb or as a noun. The Photoshop trademark should always be capitalized and should never be used in possessive form, or as a slang term. It should be used as an adjective to describe the product, and should never be used in abbreviated form. The following examples illustrate these rules:
Trademarks are not verbs.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software. INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.
Trademarks are not nouns.
CORRECT: The image pokes fun at the Senator. INCORRECT: The photoshop pokes fun at the Senator.
Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software. INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped. INCORRECT: The image was Photoshopped. INCORRECT: The image was Adobe® Photoshopped.
Trademarks must never be used as slang terms.
CORRECT: Those who use Adobe® Photoshop® software to manipulate images as a hobby see their work as an art form. INCORRECT: A photoshopper sees his hobby as an art form. INCORRECT: My hobby is photoshopping.
Trademarks must never be used in possessive form.
CORRECT: The new features in Adobe® Photoshop® software are impressive. INCORRECT: Photoshop's features are impressive.
Trademarks are proper adjectives and should be followed by the generic terms they describe.
CORRECT: The image was manipulated using Adobe® Photoshop® software. INCORRECT: The image was manipulated using Photoshop.
Trademarks must never be abbreviated.
CORRECT: Take a look at the new features in Adobe® Photoshop® software. INCORRECT: Take a look at the new features in PS.
The trademark owner should be identified whenever possible.
Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.
For more information on the proper use of Adobe's trademarks, please refer to the general trademark guidelines.
And through alsa, you can just use dmix, which will let you do the software mixing--play sound through any number of applications.
Flash will get routed through dmix by default. But if you use Pulseaudio, it locks the soundcard, and you get the issue of no sound in Flash. It's why there is all this libflashsupport nonsense. I have sound through Flash, totem, and anything else that wants sound. ESD also sits nicely on top of dmix so I have system sounds as well.
There's various bug reports about this with regards to Pulseaudio and Flash--as well as numerous othat applications--in all major distributions that have packaged Pulseaudio by default. I'm not going to link all the bug reports in a slashdot comment, but you can search for them yourself.
The story and summary seems to be calling out Adobe on this issue, when it's not really their fault. If PA didn't have as many compatibility issues with alsa applications as it has, Flash would work fine.
It's unfair to call out Adobe on this issue. It expects a working alsa implementation, and when it has to use Pluseaudio's version of the virtual device, it crashes. Adobe doesn't have any control over the faultily implementation. So if there's a story that's about Flash crashing fine, but let's put the blame where it belongs here.
You'll have Pulseaudio tell you different, but if you use a pure Alsa for your sound, you'll find Flash--and everything else that uses sound--runs MUCH better.
I have no idea why Pulseaudio has been thrust into various distributions, it's cumbersome at best, outright broken at worst. There's nothing Pulseaudio brings to the table that's needed. Application volume sliders? Anything that outputs volume already has a volume slider, why do I need another one? Sound over the network? Is this REALLY a feature people want at the expense of a huge majority of programs not working? And what's wrong with ESD for this?
So do yourself a favor, and remove all the Pulseaudio stuff from your distro.
The fact that binary drivers are horrible, unstable, and possibly will get your sister pregnant has grown to FUD levels Microsoft would be proud of. OSS drivers aren't inherently better than binary drivers. The vast majority of Linux users would prefer working binary drivers to non-working open source versions. Although it would be a wonderful situation if every vendor opened up everything about their hardware, that's not--and probably will never--be the case.
This is holding Linux back more than anything else. And it goes far from just some fanatical users. It goes from the development of the kernel making it harder than it has to be to have a binary module. Yes, when you have an Nvidia card and forget to recompile the stub that goes with it and X won't start, blame Linux. Kernel devs want to say to companies "screw you and your closed source crap". And they do it at the expense of users. There's no technical reason why one kernel module couldn't work with all 2.6 kernels. It's a philosophical one.
Various distributions are also a hit or miss with binary drivers and closed source programs. Some just make it a lot more difficult than it has to be. This is one of the reasons why Ubuntu has gotten as popular as it has. Someone has a piece of hardware who's only support is a binary driver and it still "just works". People like it when their hardware works.
This will let you block all those types of cookies, and as well give you MUCH better cookie management in Firefox. It lets you just deny cookies globally and just enable them for sites you want, without being a total pain in the ass
Combine that with Adblock Plus, with the tracking filters, and you can get past all this tracking stuff without having to use no-script, which considering how javascript heavy most sites are today, is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer
Like was mentioned in a previous reply, it's not JUST learning COBOL, there is also other stuff like CICS, that you have to know as well.
But you take something else like C. I can get gcc, and start writing code. Same thing if I want to do some web 2.0 project. It's almost trivial to get a LAMP setup up and running.
There's nothing that can simulate a working z/OS environment. There's no compilers to download. There's an emulator out there called Hercules for various IBM mainframes, but you can't get the OS to run on top of it. It's near impossible to go grab "COBOL for Dummies", and start firing up code. COBOL is also rarely taught in university anymore. So the only place you COULD get some exposure to the system, you aren't going to get it. Even if you COULD download the OS, setting it up is very nontrivial. And it's NOTHING like you've seen before.
And these systems aren't just 100% COBOL either. There's a host of mainframe type things like Natural for an ADABAS Database that you're NEVER have experience doing unless you already have a job doing it. You got to the point to where you wrote that program in COBOL, now do you know the JCL to set it up to run? Ok it ran, know what a SOC-7 error is? BTW, it's an uninitialized numeric to save you from typing it into Google.
All these things mean the vast majority of people out there now just don't have ANY experience in dealing with these things. It's hard enough to find people that can step into a team to support a major project. Add in those legacy requirements, and it's probably nil. Anyone qualified to do it, is probably 3 years from retirement from where they are at, and would probably have to offer 7 figures a year to make it worth their while to screw up their retirement options.
I think before we talk about other places, we should probably get the kinks out of everything by putting something on our own moon. A lot of science could be done on a moon base, as well as learning just HOW to put something on another large rock. Lots of reasons why the moon is reasonable:
1) We can already get to the moon. We've been there already. So there's not real jump in tech needed to get there.
2) We can get OFF the moon. The big gotcha with any other landing. Go to Mars? Yeah, could probably get there and land now. Getting off is the hard part. Don't have that problem with the moon.
3) It's speedy to get there. No months of travel. Need to swap people out or something goes horribly wrong--can get there pretty quickly.
Landing on Mars, or floating cities on Venus sound nice. But I'd like to see something a bit more practical in my lifetime of a moon base. It's possible, but there haven't been any major plans to do it.
Actually, doesn't some of the secondary software on the shuttle and space station run Windows 2k? I thought I remember a story about Microsoft giving them a special "SP5" that fixed some of the issues they had that were specific to them.
My experience in selling stuff on Craigslist is posting a price, then having some jackass email me they will pay 1/2 the price but IN CASH. Like I'm accepting 3rd party out of state checks. Or I'd assume they are going to try and lowball and jack up the price, in which case I get no emails. There's a bit of haggling that's true to what Craigslist is for--but if I post something for $350, I hate offers for "$150 CASH".
I listed it once on Ebay, started at $300, with a "buy it now" at $400. It didn't even get a bid.
The numbers were the numbers. My last laptop was an Apple. So I looked into getting another. But in general I'm pretty platform agnostic, so if I'm running Windows, OSX, or Linux--it doesn't really matter to me for the most part. If the MBP was actually closer to the Dell in cost, I probably would have bought it.
There is the resale value. True in theory, but in practice, selling an old laptop is a lot more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. I couldn't even get $300 for my old iBook. That was also including a legal OSX license for Leopard, a bag, and a bluetooth Mighty Mouse. Ended up just giving it away to someone that needed a cheap laptop. Resale values for any laptop are pretty non-existant, considering you may feel it's WORTH some amount, finding someone to pay that without it being a total pain in the ass is near impossible.
They also overcharge for their laptops as well. Now, someone is going to go to Apple.com, spec out a laptop, go to dell.com spec out a laptop and go LOOK! SEE! APPLE IS CHEAPER!!
Yeah, until you actually go to BUY the laptops, and I drop that $500 coupon code in there they give out every month, and take advantage of every other deal Dell runs.
I bought this laptop a year ago, it's a Dell E1705, that's speced to what their XPS laptops are, it just doesn't have the goofy lights. Including warranty and everything, final cost was $2,100. If I'd have bought a MBP with the same specs and warranty, the price shot up over $3,400. Also, even with $3,400 it lacked in a couple areas like the video card. The warranty was also the best they offered. I called about a failed HD at 6PM one day, and had a new HD via DHL 10AM the next day. Motherboard dies, someone comes HERE to fix it. If I had bought that MBP and the HD died, would have been a week to get it fixed through Applecare.
The fact is, you want OSX, you're still going to pay a premium for it. That cost is fine for some, for others like myself--it wasn't worth the extra $1,300.
I personally love the new Office. Most people saw the new "ribbon" interface and just dismissed it. I did as well until I started to use it. I'm not an Office power user, so I never knew what options were under three deep menus, a popup box, and an advanced tab. It puts most of the options right in front of me. You can do similar with older versions of Office or Open Office--if you want to have a bunch of confusing toolbars on the top. Office 2007 simplified all of that.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but I'll give them credit where credit is due. Office 2007 is a pretty nice piece of software.
Because their next set of software updates will require it.
Their major applications now require Tiger, so the next ones will require Leopard. You're pretty much forced into OSX upgrades if you like them or not.
People put up a HUGE stink when DirectX 10 was Vista only. But this is par for the course with OSX releases and libraries. So people will have to upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, with hibernation and standby modes, outside the need to restart for some sort of update--why even shutdown?
It just all seems pointless to me. I don't find ANY OS's boot times slow enough to start tinkering with ways to make it faster. Even Vista on this laptop was well under a minute. And that's to "usable". XP and Linux are maybe a few seconds faster. Is there really some use for it booting in 20 seconds vs. maybe 30?
Ok, I need an explanation. The artists signed a contract to the label to produce a record. The label holds the copyright to the material and the artist is paid for this. Then the record is promoted, and either sells or it doesn't.
If there's a suit for copyright infringement and there's money awarded, why WOULD the artist get any of it? It's the label's copyright that's been infringed. Any damages SHOULD go to them. If I'm hired to write some program for Adobe, it's pirated, and Adobe sues someone--why would I see any money? It's not my program. I wrote it, but it belongs to Adobe. Any lost income is theirs not mine.
It can be argued that these record contracts are pretty lopsided and go against the artist. But they are the ones that signed it. Just because they are in a bad contract doesn't mean they should get money from these suits which are for copyrights they aren't the holders to.
Nintendo has already said they want to go to shorter release cycles. This would put the Wii at four years. I actually expect a new Wii a lot shorter than that.
Although I do expect a WiiHD is going to be a lot harder sell. They had a lot of hype with the Wii and sold--and still selling--based off of it. But a lot of these Wiis are now sitting around collecting dust waiting for decent games. A couple cult following titles and a few lackluster first part titles. They have been been greeted with a lot of hope, and some good reviews from some Nintendo friendly reviewers. But I don't know a lot of people still playing their copies of SMG, MK, or even Brawl. I just think it's going to be a hard sell the next around of systems, where they are going to have to show some major titles with some real lasting appeal are going to come. Does anyone really think the "casual" gamers who got on board with Wii Play and Wii Fit are going to go buy another system for Wii Play 2 and Wii Fit 2 when they bought the first ones and it sat in the corner a couple of weeks after they had it?
here are tons of fake Nikes coming from Asia that are honestly way worse in quality, durability, and comfort.
Not to be confused with the REAL Nikes coming from Asia that are bad in quality, durability, and comfort.
When I moved into my last apartment I decided to do the auto bill pay. I'm just lazy with paying things and sometimes I'll forget to pay something.
Well, for those of you that pay a gas bill, you know they bill you an "estimated" rate, and then the actual the next month. Well, for a small apartment who's gas bill was maybe $20 for a month, they decided to take out a $320 "estimated" payment. They had no idea why it was so out of whack with the actual, but it was what it was. Normally you just send in an "estimated" payment as well, they just readjust your bill, and send you the actual the next month. Well, with the automatic payment, the bill said $320, and that's what they took.
It ended up just being that I told them to keep $320, and I just wasn't going to pay my bill for like 18 months. Which was fine with them. But they never actually fixed the estimation. The next bill, I had a $300 credit, following I owed $300, next month I had a $280 credit, etc. etc.
Long story short, you don't know what these people are going to charge you with. They take money first, and then just deal with you later if you don't like it. I'd rather pay a late fee, than deal with a CSR rep on why they took too much money.
Start with Home team 21 Away team 17:
+7 score for the higher ranked team every 12 positions they are ahead of the other based on a general ranking(I don't think they give you this information). Overall maybe 10 lines of code. Put Ohio State #1, put Temple #117. The rest of the rankings are an exercise for the reader. You won't pick major upsets, but you're not going to be too far off the mark otherwise.
That's about as close as you're going to get. College football varies too much to get exact scoring. A #1 team has 15 starters leave for graduation of the NFL, and they have nothing but freshman and sophomores starting. Any data on the previous year isn't valid for the next year.
Their wedding bands are going to be made of unobtanium.
Proper use of the Photoshop trademark
Trademarks help protect corporate and product identity, and Photoshop is one of Adobe's most valuable trademarks. By following the below guidelines, you can help Adobe protect the Photoshop brand name.
The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a common verb or as a noun. The Photoshop trademark should always be capitalized and should never be used in possessive form, or as a slang term. It should be used as an adjective to describe the product, and should never be used in abbreviated form. The following examples illustrate these rules:
Trademarks are not verbs.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.
Trademarks are not nouns.
CORRECT: The image pokes fun at the Senator.
INCORRECT: The photoshop pokes fun at the Senator.
Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.
INCORRECT: The image was Photoshopped.
INCORRECT: The image was Adobe® Photoshopped.
Trademarks must never be used as slang terms.
CORRECT: Those who use Adobe® Photoshop® software to manipulate images as a hobby see their work as an art form.
INCORRECT: A photoshopper sees his hobby as an art form. INCORRECT: My hobby is photoshopping.
Trademarks must never be used in possessive form.
CORRECT: The new features in Adobe® Photoshop® software are impressive.
INCORRECT: Photoshop's features are impressive.
Trademarks are proper adjectives and should be followed by the generic terms they describe.
CORRECT: The image was manipulated using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was manipulated using Photoshop.
Trademarks must never be abbreviated.
CORRECT: Take a look at the new features in Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: Take a look at the new features in PS.
The trademark owner should be identified whenever possible.
Adobe and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.
For more information on the proper use of Adobe's trademarks, please refer to the general trademark guidelines.
And through alsa, you can just use dmix, which will let you do the software mixing--play sound through any number of applications.
Flash will get routed through dmix by default. But if you use Pulseaudio, it locks the soundcard, and you get the issue of no sound in Flash. It's why there is all this libflashsupport nonsense. I have sound through Flash, totem, and anything else that wants sound. ESD also sits nicely on top of dmix so I have system sounds as well.
Pulseaudio is a solution without a problem.
There's various bug reports about this with regards to Pulseaudio and Flash--as well as numerous othat applications--in all major distributions that have packaged Pulseaudio by default. I'm not going to link all the bug reports in a slashdot comment, but you can search for them yourself.
The story and summary seems to be calling out Adobe on this issue, when it's not really their fault. If PA didn't have as many compatibility issues with alsa applications as it has, Flash would work fine.
It's unfair to call out Adobe on this issue. It expects a working alsa implementation, and when it has to use Pluseaudio's version of the virtual device, it crashes. Adobe doesn't have any control over the faultily implementation. So if there's a story that's about Flash crashing fine, but let's put the blame where it belongs here.
You'll have Pulseaudio tell you different, but if you use a pure Alsa for your sound, you'll find Flash--and everything else that uses sound--runs MUCH better.
I have no idea why Pulseaudio has been thrust into various distributions, it's cumbersome at best, outright broken at worst. There's nothing Pulseaudio brings to the table that's needed. Application volume sliders? Anything that outputs volume already has a volume slider, why do I need another one? Sound over the network? Is this REALLY a feature people want at the expense of a huge majority of programs not working? And what's wrong with ESD for this?
So do yourself a favor, and remove all the Pulseaudio stuff from your distro.
The fact that binary drivers are horrible, unstable, and possibly will get your sister pregnant has grown to FUD levels Microsoft would be proud of. OSS drivers aren't inherently better than binary drivers. The vast majority of Linux users would prefer working binary drivers to non-working open source versions. Although it would be a wonderful situation if every vendor opened up everything about their hardware, that's not--and probably will never--be the case.
This is holding Linux back more than anything else. And it goes far from just some fanatical users. It goes from the development of the kernel making it harder than it has to be to have a binary module. Yes, when you have an Nvidia card and forget to recompile the stub that goes with it and X won't start, blame Linux. Kernel devs want to say to companies "screw you and your closed source crap". And they do it at the expense of users. There's no technical reason why one kernel module couldn't work with all 2.6 kernels. It's a philosophical one.
Various distributions are also a hit or miss with binary drivers and closed source programs. Some just make it a lot more difficult than it has to be. This is one of the reasons why Ubuntu has gotten as popular as it has. Someone has a piece of hardware who's only support is a binary driver and it still "just works". People like it when their hardware works.
Don't mess around with a directional Michigan, or you'll get beat.
CS Lite
This will let you block all those types of cookies, and as well give you MUCH better cookie management in Firefox. It lets you just deny cookies globally and just enable them for sites you want, without being a total pain in the ass
Combine that with Adblock Plus, with the tracking filters, and you can get past all this tracking stuff without having to use no-script, which considering how javascript heavy most sites are today, is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer
Like was mentioned in a previous reply, it's not JUST learning COBOL, there is also other stuff like CICS, that you have to know as well.
But you take something else like C. I can get gcc, and start writing code. Same thing if I want to do some web 2.0 project. It's almost trivial to get a LAMP setup up and running.
There's nothing that can simulate a working z/OS environment. There's no compilers to download. There's an emulator out there called Hercules for various IBM mainframes, but you can't get the OS to run on top of it. It's near impossible to go grab "COBOL for Dummies", and start firing up code. COBOL is also rarely taught in university anymore. So the only place you COULD get some exposure to the system, you aren't going to get it. Even if you COULD download the OS, setting it up is very nontrivial. And it's NOTHING like you've seen before.
And these systems aren't just 100% COBOL either. There's a host of mainframe type things like Natural for an ADABAS Database that you're NEVER have experience doing unless you already have a job doing it. You got to the point to where you wrote that program in COBOL, now do you know the JCL to set it up to run? Ok it ran, know what a SOC-7 error is? BTW, it's an uninitialized numeric to save you from typing it into Google.
All these things mean the vast majority of people out there now just don't have ANY experience in dealing with these things. It's hard enough to find people that can step into a team to support a major project. Add in those legacy requirements, and it's probably nil. Anyone qualified to do it, is probably 3 years from retirement from where they are at, and would probably have to offer 7 figures a year to make it worth their while to screw up their retirement options.
You shouldn't cross the beams.
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
I think before we talk about other places, we should probably get the kinks out of everything by putting something on our own moon. A lot of science could be done on a moon base, as well as learning just HOW to put something on another large rock. Lots of reasons why the moon is reasonable:
1) We can already get to the moon. We've been there already. So there's not real jump in tech needed to get there.
2) We can get OFF the moon. The big gotcha with any other landing. Go to Mars? Yeah, could probably get there and land now. Getting off is the hard part. Don't have that problem with the moon.
3) It's speedy to get there. No months of travel. Need to swap people out or something goes horribly wrong--can get there pretty quickly.
Landing on Mars, or floating cities on Venus sound nice. But I'd like to see something a bit more practical in my lifetime of a moon base. It's possible, but there haven't been any major plans to do it.
Just think of the limericks!
There once was a man on Venus..
If you don't have access to the list, how are you supposed to know who not to call?
Actually, doesn't some of the secondary software on the shuttle and space station run Windows 2k? I thought I remember a story about Microsoft giving them a special "SP5" that fixed some of the issues they had that were specific to them.
Craigslist and eBay.
My experience in selling stuff on Craigslist is posting a price, then having some jackass email me they will pay 1/2 the price but IN CASH. Like I'm accepting 3rd party out of state checks. Or I'd assume they are going to try and lowball and jack up the price, in which case I get no emails. There's a bit of haggling that's true to what Craigslist is for--but if I post something for $350, I hate offers for "$150 CASH".
I listed it once on Ebay, started at $300, with a "buy it now" at $400. It didn't even get a bid.
The numbers were the numbers. My last laptop was an Apple. So I looked into getting another. But in general I'm pretty platform agnostic, so if I'm running Windows, OSX, or Linux--it doesn't really matter to me for the most part. If the MBP was actually closer to the Dell in cost, I probably would have bought it.
There is the resale value. True in theory, but in practice, selling an old laptop is a lot more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. I couldn't even get $300 for my old iBook. That was also including a legal OSX license for Leopard, a bag, and a bluetooth Mighty Mouse. Ended up just giving it away to someone that needed a cheap laptop. Resale values for any laptop are pretty non-existant, considering you may feel it's WORTH some amount, finding someone to pay that without it being a total pain in the ass is near impossible.
They also overcharge for their laptops as well. Now, someone is going to go to Apple.com, spec out a laptop, go to dell.com spec out a laptop and go LOOK! SEE! APPLE IS CHEAPER!!
Yeah, until you actually go to BUY the laptops, and I drop that $500 coupon code in there they give out every month, and take advantage of every other deal Dell runs.
I bought this laptop a year ago, it's a Dell E1705, that's speced to what their XPS laptops are, it just doesn't have the goofy lights. Including warranty and everything, final cost was $2,100. If I'd have bought a MBP with the same specs and warranty, the price shot up over $3,400. Also, even with $3,400 it lacked in a couple areas like the video card. The warranty was also the best they offered. I called about a failed HD at 6PM one day, and had a new HD via DHL 10AM the next day. Motherboard dies, someone comes HERE to fix it. If I had bought that MBP and the HD died, would have been a week to get it fixed through Applecare.
The fact is, you want OSX, you're still going to pay a premium for it. That cost is fine for some, for others like myself--it wasn't worth the extra $1,300.
They did reinvent Office with 2007.
I personally love the new Office. Most people saw the new "ribbon" interface and just dismissed it. I did as well until I started to use it. I'm not an Office power user, so I never knew what options were under three deep menus, a popup box, and an advanced tab. It puts most of the options right in front of me. You can do similar with older versions of Office or Open Office--if you want to have a bunch of confusing toolbars on the top. Office 2007 simplified all of that.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but I'll give them credit where credit is due. Office 2007 is a pretty nice piece of software.
Because their next set of software updates will require it.
Their major applications now require Tiger, so the next ones will require Leopard. You're pretty much forced into OSX upgrades if you like them or not.
People put up a HUGE stink when DirectX 10 was Vista only. But this is par for the course with OSX releases and libraries. So people will have to upgrade.