I wouldn't recommend Dell to anyone either. For some reason I just think "creaky fragile plastic" anytime I hear "Dell". We have been generally pleased with the Lenovo and Toshiba kit we've bought over the years. I wouldn't call Dell a "quality vendor".
Perhaps they aren't hostile to individual consumers. But to organizations like us, it feels like unrelieved hostility. There is a heavy attempt ongoing by IT vendors to deprecate the whole idea of "enterprise management". Once some Shiney wears off, this is going to blow up in their faces but they are going to do a lot of damage in the meantime. Perhaps Apple can get away with it but it loses them us as a customer. And no we don't care if that means they don't want our custom either.
Apple's major OS releases have always caused me some headaches with directory servers and management in general which could be overcome with a bit of cut and try but Lion and the machines it is REQUIRED on have multiple Deal Breakers. If I could just load Snow Leopard on new kit and have everything work until the issues are all fixed in an OS that actually work then I wouldn't feel nearly as dissatisfied with Apple as I do now. As it is, I have no faith whatsoever Snow Lion will fix anything though I'll happily change my mind if it does.
But even if they do give me fixes for my issues, they've still priced themselves out of our reach. We are not and never have been fanbois. We were but are not now satisfied customers. Just because fanbois will lap up their every move, we won't. If we can get can get the sort of pricing and (organizational fleet) usability we've had of them in the past our minds may change about them. But right now we are EXTREMELY unhappy with them and no amount of Apple advocacy will change this. Only (sustained) changes in product and behavior from Apple themselves will do that.
Substandard my ass. Other than a bit of a firmware the only real difference between an iMac and any other x86 machine from a quality vendor is about $300 dollars which is the other thing getting them thrown out of here. We used to be able to buy decent Education Model iMacs for about $750 a pop in bulk. These now cost $995 and they only gave us a $20 dollar break on them in bulk. Also Lion remains a disaster with Active Directory due to Apple's GPL allergy and they also broke the netbooting solution that has worked with every other model of Mac we have around here going back to 2006.
So let's see: hideously expensive, harder to manage and provision, and critical functionality either doesn't work as well as it used to or not at all. By putting even more expense and effort into them we MIGHT be able to work as well as they used to for us.
Being anti-Apple isn't a religion with me. Up till recently, I liked and recommended Macs with some reservations. It is Apple's behavior, pricing, and strategy that has changed this. If Apple turns around some of their customer hostile moves and maintains this turnaround then my opinion can change back. We bought two Late 11 iMacs and I put considerable effort into ameloriating the tech issues. I will continue to do so so you can also cram your charges of "laziness". However, the experience and the sticker shock they've imposed has very much soured me and my boss on them.
BTW. Domatic is a crystallography term I picked at random for a username. It is intended to communicate exactly nothing.
Cookware can either be good at storing heat or a good conductor both at the same time is a bit tricky. Cast iron's ability to store a lot of heat makes it the right tool for many jobs like frying where you want to avoid a large temperature drop when adding food.
That right. Apple didn't invent all that stuff either. iPhone/iPad is just what Apple has always dones. Add a few improvements to the hard core work of others and scream they invented the whole thing with lawyers. And people like you drink that Kool-Aid by the 55 gallon drum barrel.
Incidentally, I notice your name is Macs4all. The last straw in our K12 with iMacs is Apple deliberately gimping hard drives with non standard sensor pins on the SATA connection to force the use of "Apple Branded Parts". If a commodity SATA drive is put in a new iMac, the fans run at Jet Engine. A third party extension can force the OS to use S.M.A.R.T.
So it isn't just self-repair obsessed nerds. Behavior like this now has us eliminating Macs by attrition and we are also going to start resisting any further iDevice purchases.
If they pick a day when the wind is blowing right, they could do an airburst of a 1MT or less weapon. That would flatten most of Tel Aviv and burn the parts that don't flatten and any fallout can blow out into Mediterranean sea.
Of course, there would be massive retaliation from Israel's two Dolphin class subs (at least). But then you can't have everything.
The Cuban ex-pat lobby has a lot to do with it as well. The Bacardi family in particular spreads around any loot required to keep the embargo in place. The way election politics work these days, that lobby can't be ignored. Florida Congressmen and Presidential candidates who might not care about Cuba otherwise are made to care.
The meme that Apple invented all that is touchscreen and froody needs to die. The reality is Apple is doing what Apple always does: makes some slickly packaged incremental improvements to the innovations of others then screams they invented it all.
John Sladek wrote a hilarious parody of Asimov's take on robots. Tik-Tok is a menial servant bot who is driven to psychosis as he passes from one owner to another and all are venal or neurotic. Tik-Tok eventually winds up a genocidal misanthrope who learned all too well from humanity. He basically becomes a robot version of Alex from Clockwork Orange. He is just as sardonic and devastingly original in his revenge on humanity.
Yep. But that was a one time only thing. I installed Cyanogen while I was at it and put a permanent end to any other foolishness that may have been on the phone. Since it is an HTC, it was beaten Senseless in the process. Because it is running Cyanogen, I don't have to worry about OTA updates de-rooting my phone. And while I'm on the subject, I call "rooting" "restoring ownership".
However, every phone I've had would let me tick a "Install non-market applications" box even without rooting. This leaves out certain applications that require root privileges but you can still do things like download the latest K9Mail client from the sourceforge page and install it rather than waiting for it to show up in the Market. And all through software and interfaces on the phone. No management software required.
I can download apks with my phone's browser and then install them if I like. No dev kit whackery or iTunesery or iCloudery or App Stordery required. Basically, it is much like a real computer.
The first time I saw porn on video was beta tapes. From what I was told, an awful lot of porn on beta was quietly sold and traded nonetheless. Porn was very much borderline legal then. That Sony didn't want porno on their precious widdums really didn't matter worth a fart in a windstorm.
.. VHS was such poor quality that the fact that it won out over Beta always amazed me.
The first killer app for VHS wasn't home rental. It was time shifting TV, especially daytime soaps. VHS could record two hours in SP or even more in the LP and then the SLP modes. Sure it looked like crap but it was "good enough" for catching up on the soaps you had to miss.
Beta recorded about half as much. That it looked a little better was irrelevant for what many of the early adopters were using it for.
You really, really, really, need to read up on Nyquist, Shannon, and Fourier. And the former two were Real Engineers as opposed to the hacks that write for Absolute Sound and Stereophile.
Short answer: neither analog or digital methods will reproduce wave components outside their frequency response envelopes. If you really do have the hearing of a bat or a dog, then you can readily buy 24 bit audio equipment that samples at 96Khz (or higher! in some cases). M-Audio has a well engineered card that will do this to professional standards for a $100 (Audiophile 2496). Their more expensive ones have more inputs, outputs, and some do 196Khz sampling(needed for highly multitracked editing). I guarantee that card will perfectly preserve every bit of crackle, pop, and hiss that would otherwise be rolled off over 20Khz.
Incidentally, vinyl faces very real constraints on it's dynamic range and frequency response. Especially on the inner tracks. Good reel-to-reel tapes and players can approach 30Khz. I'd suggest using that for future gotcha games when arguing against digital.
You'll hate me then. I make mp3s from vinyl. After processing with declicking and dehissing software, I wind up with something I'd rather listen to over most CDs and the original vinyl.
CDs should absolutely incredible compared to 99% of vinyl but the Loudness War has absolutely ruined my trust in any audio I can buy now. New issues of old material get the bejeezus compressed out of them and most tracks you can purchase digitally get the ole brickwall treatment. Technically CD IS superior to vinyl. It has far more usable dynamic range (in practice) and doesn't degrade with use if handled properly. But CDs and digital audio in generally have been gradually ruined over the past twenty years by evil marketdroid driven mastering practices.
Clean infrequently played vinyl on high end equipment MAY have some points over PROPERLY mastered digital audio. But what you have most of the time is vinyl in indifferent condition on mid-range equipment at best. In practice, properly mastered digital audio is going to out-perform it 99% of the time.
And don't get me started on tweaks with half-inch thick oxygen-free solid gold interconnects who regularly receive the gospel from Absolute Sound and Stereophile.........
The monied and powerful would just hang abusive contracts on everything. You'd need to sign a multipage contract in very small print just to walk into a grocery store or buy gasoline. By the time they got done, anybody who isn't rich and powerful will have had to sign most their ability to seek recourse away just to go about everyday life.
think one of the first things they do is make an image of your hard drive, preserving the data, no matter what you do to it.
There are ways of mitigating that but at the cost of the safety of the data. The encryption suite could use methods similar to software activation. Take an inventory of the authorized machine including any Mac addresses or serial numbers that can be queried. Hell, stick a GPS in the thing and require it to be an authorized location. The really paranoid could stick a UPS inside the case rigged to a dead-man switch if the case is opened or power not restored in an alloted time and of course the GPS monitor will trash the data once the machine is moved.
An image on unauthorized hardware in the wrong place won't help them assuming a good image could be gotten.
The thought of giant CO2 scrubbing plastic trees seems like hyperbole to me. Seems we could plant real trees that work about as well for that. But an obvious application jumped out at me. Undersea vehicles, labs, manned spacecraft, and any other artificially maintained environment that humans have to work in need to remove CO2 because it can be poisonous in sufficiently high concentrations even if there is enough to breathe.
So would this material make good scrubbers for sealed environments people have to work in? If there is a way to vent the waste gases, being able to drive the CO2 off with a bit of heat and using again seems a great feature too.
If they manage to get any OEMs then I don't see why not. There are Netflix clients in all sorts of closed Linux based hardware. These are going to mostly be ARM binaries and no doubt have some extra DRM in them so they'll only run on that hardware. What Netflix pointedly doesn't do is make that available for x86 desktops.
I think Ubuntu is being a bit wishful here but this doesn't seem to be targeted at the home user who throws MythTV or XBMC on a desktop machine and hooks it to the TV.
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I wouldn't recommend Dell to anyone either. For some reason I just think "creaky fragile plastic" anytime I hear "Dell". We have been generally pleased with the Lenovo and Toshiba kit we've bought over the years. I wouldn't call Dell a "quality vendor".
Perhaps they aren't hostile to individual consumers. But to organizations like us, it feels like unrelieved hostility. There is a heavy attempt ongoing by IT vendors to deprecate the whole idea of "enterprise management". Once some Shiney wears off, this is going to blow up in their faces but they are going to do a lot of damage in the meantime. Perhaps Apple can get away with it but it loses them us as a customer. And no we don't care if that means they don't want our custom either.
Apple's major OS releases have always caused me some headaches with directory servers and management in general which could be overcome with a bit of cut and try but Lion and the machines it is REQUIRED on have multiple Deal Breakers. If I could just load Snow Leopard on new kit and have everything work until the issues are all fixed in an OS that actually work then I wouldn't feel nearly as dissatisfied with Apple as I do now. As it is, I have no faith whatsoever Snow Lion will fix anything though I'll happily change my mind if it does.
But even if they do give me fixes for my issues, they've still priced themselves out of our reach. We are not and never have been fanbois. We were but are not now satisfied customers. Just because fanbois will lap up their every move, we won't. If we can get can get the sort of pricing and (organizational fleet) usability we've had of them in the past our minds may change about them. But right now we are EXTREMELY unhappy with them and no amount of Apple advocacy will change this. Only (sustained) changes in product and behavior from Apple themselves will do that.
Substandard my ass. Other than a bit of a firmware the only real difference between an iMac and any other x86 machine from a quality vendor is about $300 dollars which is the other thing getting them thrown out of here. We used to be able to buy decent Education Model iMacs for about $750 a pop in bulk. These now cost $995 and they only gave us a $20 dollar break on them in bulk. Also Lion remains a disaster with Active Directory due to Apple's GPL allergy and they also broke the netbooting solution that has worked with every other model of Mac we have around here going back to 2006.
So let's see: hideously expensive, harder to manage and provision, and critical functionality either doesn't work as well as it used to or not at all.
By putting even more expense and effort into them we MIGHT be able to work as well as they used to for us.
Being anti-Apple isn't a religion with me. Up till recently, I liked and recommended Macs with some reservations. It is Apple's behavior, pricing, and strategy that has changed this. If Apple turns around some of their customer hostile moves and maintains this turnaround then my opinion can change back. We bought two Late 11 iMacs and I put considerable effort into ameloriating the tech issues. I will continue to do so so you can also cram your charges of "laziness". However, the experience and the sticker shock they've imposed has very much soured me and my boss on them.
BTW. Domatic is a crystallography term I picked at random for a username. It is intended to communicate exactly nothing.
Cookware can either be good at storing heat or a good conductor both at the same time is a bit tricky. Cast iron's ability to store a lot of heat makes it the right tool for many jobs like frying where you want to avoid a large temperature drop when adding food.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_
That right. Apple didn't invent all that stuff either. iPhone/iPad is just what Apple has always dones. Add a few improvements to the hard core work of others and scream they invented the whole thing with lawyers. And people like you drink that Kool-Aid by the 55 gallon drum barrel.
Incidentally, I notice your name is Macs4all. The last straw in our K12 with iMacs is Apple deliberately gimping hard drives with non standard sensor pins on the SATA connection to force the use of "Apple Branded Parts". If a commodity SATA drive is put in a new iMac, the fans run at Jet Engine. A third party extension can force the OS to use S.M.A.R.T.
http://blog.macsales.com/10146-apple-further-restricts-upgrade-options-on-new-imacs
So it isn't just self-repair obsessed nerds. Behavior like this now has us eliminating Macs by attrition and we are also going to start resisting any further iDevice purchases.
You owe me for a new keyboard and monitor.
If they pick a day when the wind is blowing right, they could do an airburst of a 1MT or less weapon. That would flatten most of Tel Aviv and burn the parts that don't flatten and any fallout can blow out into Mediterranean sea.
Of course, there would be massive retaliation from Israel's two Dolphin class subs (at least). But then you can't have everything.
The Cuban ex-pat lobby has a lot to do with it as well. The Bacardi family in particular spreads around any loot required to keep the embargo in place. The way election politics work these days, that lobby can't be ignored. Florida Congressmen and Presidential candidates who might not care about Cuba otherwise are made to care.
There are native Linux binaries for RtCW. You don't have to run that one in Wine.
http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_
The meme that Apple invented all that is touchscreen and froody needs to die. The reality is Apple is doing what Apple always does: makes some slickly packaged incremental improvements to the innovations of others then screams they invented it all.
John Sladek wrote a hilarious parody of Asimov's take on robots. Tik-Tok is a menial servant bot who is driven to psychosis as he passes from one owner to another and all are venal or neurotic. Tik-Tok eventually winds up a genocidal misanthrope who learned all too well from humanity. He basically becomes a robot version of Alex from Clockwork Orange. He is just as sardonic and devastingly original in his revenge on humanity.
http://www.amazon.com/Tik-Tok-John-Sladek/dp/0575072350
Yep. But that was a one time only thing. I installed Cyanogen while I was at it and put a permanent end to any other foolishness that may have been on the phone. Since it is an HTC, it was beaten Senseless in the process. Because it is running Cyanogen, I don't have to worry about OTA updates de-rooting my phone. And while I'm on the subject, I call "rooting" "restoring ownership".
However, every phone I've had would let me tick a "Install non-market applications" box even without rooting. This leaves out certain applications that require root privileges but you can still do things like download the latest K9Mail client from the sourceforge page and install it rather than waiting for it to show up in the Market. And all through software and interfaces on the phone. No management software required.
I can download apks with my phone's browser and then install them if I like. No dev kit whackery or iTunesery or iCloudery or App Stordery required. Basically, it is much like a real computer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzRBtToSarE
muffed a mod. posting to cancel....
The first time I saw porn on video was beta tapes. From what I was told, an awful lot of porn on beta was quietly sold and traded nonetheless. Porn was very much borderline legal then. That Sony didn't want porno on their precious widdums really didn't matter worth a fart in a windstorm.
The first killer app for VHS wasn't home rental. It was time shifting TV, especially daytime soaps. VHS could record two hours in SP or even more in the LP and then the SLP modes. Sure it looked like crap but it was "good enough" for catching up on the soaps you had to miss.
Beta recorded about half as much. That it looked a little better was irrelevant for what many of the early adopters were using it for.
You really, really, really, need to read up on Nyquist, Shannon, and Fourier. And the former two were Real Engineers as opposed to the hacks that write for Absolute Sound and Stereophile.
Short answer: neither analog or digital methods will reproduce wave components outside their frequency response envelopes. If you really do have the hearing of a bat or a dog, then you can readily buy 24 bit audio equipment that samples at 96Khz (or higher! in some cases). M-Audio has a well engineered card that will do this to professional standards for a $100 (Audiophile 2496). Their more expensive ones have more inputs, outputs, and some do 196Khz sampling(needed for highly multitracked editing). I guarantee that card will perfectly preserve every bit of crackle, pop, and hiss that would otherwise be rolled off over 20Khz.
Incidentally, vinyl faces very real constraints on it's dynamic range and frequency response. Especially on the inner tracks. Good reel-to-reel tapes and players can approach 30Khz. I'd suggest using that for future gotcha games when arguing against digital.
In an ideal world, what you say is true. But thanks to the Loudness War, old vinyl is often more pleasant to listen to if it is in good shape.
You'll hate me then. I make mp3s from vinyl. After processing with declicking and dehissing software, I wind up with something I'd rather listen to over most CDs and the original vinyl.
CDs should absolutely incredible compared to 99% of vinyl but the Loudness War has absolutely ruined my trust in any audio I can buy now. New issues of old material get the bejeezus compressed out of them and most tracks you can purchase digitally get the ole brickwall treatment. Technically CD IS superior to vinyl. It has far more usable dynamic range (in practice) and doesn't degrade with use if handled properly. But CDs and digital audio in generally have been gradually ruined over the past twenty years by evil marketdroid driven mastering practices.
Clean infrequently played vinyl on high end equipment MAY have some points over PROPERLY mastered digital audio. But what you have most of the time is vinyl in indifferent condition on mid-range equipment at best. In practice, properly mastered digital audio is going to out-perform it 99% of the time.
And don't get me started on tweaks with half-inch thick oxygen-free solid gold interconnects who regularly receive the gospel from Absolute Sound and Stereophile.........
The monied and powerful would just hang abusive contracts on everything. You'd need to sign a multipage contract in very small print just to walk into a grocery store or buy gasoline. By the time they got done, anybody who isn't rich and powerful will have had to sign most their ability to seek recourse away just to go about everyday life.
You don't even need shellack. Mythbusters did an episode on turd polishing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI
think one of the first things they do is make an image of your hard drive, preserving the data, no matter what you do to it.
There are ways of mitigating that but at the cost of the safety of the data. The encryption suite could use methods similar to software activation. Take an inventory of the authorized machine including any Mac addresses or serial numbers that can be queried. Hell, stick a GPS in the thing and require it to be an authorized location. The really paranoid could stick a UPS inside the case rigged to a dead-man switch if the case is opened or power not restored in an alloted time and of course the GPS monitor will trash the data once the machine is moved.
An image on unauthorized hardware in the wrong place won't help them assuming a good image could be gotten.
I didn't say any of this was a good idea.
I think the wheels just fell off the bus.
The thought of giant CO2 scrubbing plastic trees seems like hyperbole to me. Seems we could plant real trees that work about as well for that. But an obvious application jumped out at me. Undersea vehicles, labs, manned spacecraft, and any other artificially maintained environment that humans have to work in need to remove CO2 because it can be poisonous in sufficiently high concentrations even if there is enough to breathe.
So would this material make good scrubbers for sealed environments people have to work in? If there is a way to vent the waste gases, being able to drive the CO2 off with a bit of heat and using again seems a great feature too.
If they manage to get any OEMs then I don't see why not. There are Netflix clients in all sorts of closed Linux based hardware. These are going to mostly be ARM binaries and no doubt have some extra DRM in them so they'll only run on that hardware. What Netflix pointedly doesn't do is make that available for x86 desktops.
I think Ubuntu is being a bit wishful here but this doesn't seem to be targeted at the home user who throws MythTV or XBMC on a desktop machine and hooks it to the TV.