Make her use it for a week. It's easier to use than Windows once you get used to a few minor changes. It's certainly no harder to switch from XP to OS X than it is to switch from XP to Vista. Older people shouldn't act stupid and lazy - it's really annoying. Don't they have pride? I can't believe how some people act about the need to think.
So how's this compare to a dual quad-core 3GHz Xeon system (X5365)? Those are available and already pretty fast. If you can afford $2500 for processors. Sadly only my server gets that kind of treatment. No gaming for me.
Will we ever see a Windows 7? They had so much trouble and so many rewrites to deliver a working copy of Vista and it has been pretty much rejected by the consumer. Will Microsoft be able to recover from this lose of positive spin? Surely, after such setbacks, hardware and software makers must be thinking twice about exclusive plans to support only Windows. Free platforms such as Linux are better than Windows in many ways and constantly improving. OS X already makes Windows look completely pathetic in most ways and it now runs on PC hardware. Virtualization has gotten really good. If Linux or OS X can convince hardware and software developers, especially game developers, to support them then Windows is in big trouble. AMD/ATI has already made it clear that they're going to be more Linux friendly.
My prediction is that Windows 7 will be released much later than predicted and be no bigger a hit than Vista has been and that Linux and OSX use will continue to increase. Most people will still have a copy of Windows but it'll be a pirate copy or an old copy and it'll be ran in virtualization and only used for those not-ported apps. By the time Windows 7 is released virtualization will be so seamless that most users won't even notice Windows running. OS X will dominate the high dollar market while a custom, nice looking, and easy to use Linux distro will dominate the low end market and servers. Quite possibly the low end will be little more than a terminal for running hybrid web-apps.
Maybe making a slide-out touchpad on the right (make it somehow reversible for lefties?) in the place most of us keep our mice? When you didn't want to use it it could slide inside the case to keep it from accidental contact on being in the way. They still never work well though. I can never use it for graphic editing and even for normal use it seems to jump around and skip a lot.
Mail programs need to be reactive. This is easier thanks to the virtual folder concept where mail can be in more than one place at a time. For example your bosses email might show up in just your work folder (assuming everyone uses the same domain or other obvious clumping hint) unless he suddenly sent 10 messages in a short period whereas it'd also show up in his own folder and maybe that folder would rise to the top of your list because the email program would recognize that all the messages are from a single person and not a group of people. Maybe the shit has hit the fan (such as a key server going down) and he's trying to get ahold of you desperately. Obviously the program should be able to see that a given clumping is not being useful to you, either because you never make read or respond to mail in that clump or type of clump. Also the program should let you manually mark clumps as useful or not so you can tell it what to do rather than it guessing. You can sort mail yourself manually or with filters to - auto-filtering is just an extra feature that can help you.
I don't quite agree that a program can't figure these things out for you. Usage patterns can tell a lot about how future messages will be used. Of course you always want to be able to tell the program it's wrong but why not let it help you when it can? It's no different than training a spam filter and I think most of us can agree that spam filtering is helpful even if it's imperfect and requires training.
I think it's probably more useful for the mail client to try to do the right thing and make it easy for you to undo it's decisions and for it to learn from you than to have something like Clippy. Dealing with a Clippy would be pretty annoying whereas it's not such a big deal to mark your bosses auto-filter as unneeded because he is just a crazy guy that likes to send dozens of email forwards a day - although spotting forwards and counting them as less worthy of spawning this filter is pretty easy to do anyway so the rule would probably never be created then.
Mostly my custom mail client is good for mail archiving as I haven't made a lot of effort on the interface for composing mail. GMail or Thunderbird work fine for composing - they just don't handle incoming mail very well. I've thought about making my mail client available for the public but I've never done it. Mostly because I think I don't want to offer support for such a complex program. Just handling all the different types of possible file attachments is a major issue and even after many years of development and millions of attachments tested I still sometimes find attachments done in some weird new way I've never seen before. At least my mail client doesn't lose data like Thunderbird though. It really annoys me that more than a year after advising them that folders that grow to more than 2GB in Linux lose all data that it's still an issue. That alone motivates me not to use it for handling incoming mail! GMail is a pain mostly because of it's 4GB limit per account and their limit on how fast you can pull messages our using POP. I frequently fill my accounts faster than I can empty them and end up with the account locked for 24 hours.
It really only works if lots of people do it all at once. That whole united we stand, divided we fall idea. If just a couple of us stand up for our rights then we get squished. Personally, I'd rather stand up for my rights when the secret police aren't knocking at my door than waiting til they are. I'm surprised more people don't agree.
I'd refuse just out of principal because I don't like bing pushed around by people abusing their power. If you're to busy to have principals then that's up to you. To each their own. Just don't complain when the secret police come and drag you away without explanation.;)
Or that he died broke and alone because people like Edison stole his ideas and robbed him blind. Tesla was a genius and could have done so much more for the world if only things weren't controlled by rich people with no vision further than how much money they can make, right away, off an idea. Tesla's failure is a perfect example of capitalism at work.
As compared to my iMac I'm currently using that is 24" and currently set at 1920x1200. Quite a difference. I'd love to have a even bigger, higher resolution, monitor too. Even this seems to small for me as I often have to shuffle windows around to see everything at the same time. If they sold a 30" iMac, with the cinema displays's 2560x1600 resolution, I'd buy one. I'm tempted to get the cinema display to slap on my Linux server but they switched to the ugly brushed alumnium look which I don't like - will have to see if the classic white display has the same specs.:)
Data is hardly an issue. With Internet access I always have access to my data just as if I were sitting in my office. It's just a network filesystem away. At issue is how small and crappy laptops are. Using a laptop is painful because the monitor is so small and the keyboard and mouse are very cramped and unresponsive. They're fine for writing a simple document, looking at the web, or email but for any serious computing use they're worthless.
I've actually studied my own productivity and on a laptop, or any computer with a small monitor, I'm about 1/6th as productive as I am when using a decent sized monitor. On some tasks the difference is so dramatic that it's literally faster to just wait until I get back to the office.
Of course, in my experience, most users don't really do anything with their computers. Most of em you could plug a keyboard into an etch-a-sketch and they wouldn't notice the difference.;)
It's not that I don't think there couldn't be a portable computer that's work for my needs. I just don't think it could rightly be called a laptop anymore. It'd be more a portable desktop computer. Issues such as size, weight, and having a battery really don't matter at all to me. The only laptop-like issues I really care about is it being a single unit and easily portable which in my experience isn't the case with most laptops anyway. Most people have a huge laptop bag with all sorts of extra crap tucked into it. Why not just make the laptop bigger, include all needed features, and lose the extra crap?
I'm a big guy and my hands are slightly bigger than normal so maybe that's why the Apple mouse works better for me. I haven't actually compared it side-by-side with a normal mouse to see how the size and shape compare though.
When first getting used to using the Mighty Mouse it was a bit weird because of the lack of buttons and you seem to hold your hand a lil differently. Once used to it though it worked great for me.
As long as it's not the hockey puck mouse Apple tried to push on us.:)
Sadly, I don't like rubbing the keyboard nipple either. I've considered getting one of the XPS laptops with removable bluetooth keyboard and mouse. That's a feature I was asking for for years.
I have to say I that I love my Apple mouse. Normal PC mice (I've tried lots) make my hands hurt after an hour or so but I can use my Apple mouse all day. It also looks good, has stood up to much use and abuse, and the trackball as middle button is genius.
For my most powerful needs I have servers that can pretty much stay where they are. I can access them from anywhere with an Internet connection anyway.
For a laptop I'd rather have a huge, powerful, laptop to carry to places I'll need it. It doesn't even need a battery because anything I'd want to use will need to be plugged in. Anywhere I'm likely to use it will let me do that. I've seriously thought about modding my 24" iMac into a jumbo laptop by attaching some sort of flap to cover the screen when it's being moved and to hold a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Stick a handle on top and it's ready to be my laptop.
Then I like to have a slightly bigger than palm sized laptop for carrying around and making notes and checking email. Probably the stuff most people would try to do on their dinky phone. The XO (OLPC) is a pretty good size for me but I'd like it to be a little more powerful and to just run a normal Linux distro. If it could double as a phone, mp3 player, camera, video game, etc then great but my primary needs are Internet access and note taking. So bigger than a phone or PDA but smaller than a laptop.
Must be a Ubuntu thing or something to do with your hardware. Linux was the first OS I used multiple monitors on and that was about a decade ago. It worked fine then. Of course back then I had to custom compile XWindow to make it work. I doubt you have to do that now.
There's a line down the middle of your vision. Ewww!
I'd rather just have a big single screen although I'd be tempted to go with tri-screens if I could get 30" Apple Cinema HD flatpanels. A couple dinky 19" monitors though is almost as frustrating to work from as a single 19" monitor.
Of course my eyesight sucks so maybe normal people can see a 19" monitor or two just fine.:)
Everything we send online should be encrypted. It's only laziness that has kept us from making such a switch. Maybe it's time to shake ourselves awake and get it done before it's to late.
The working solution to IP woes isn't technical. The solution is just to make the content available in the format users want, when users want it, and at a reasonable price. Until content providers do that thir content is going to be passed around, for free, by the people that want it. Personally I'm sure I'll keep downloading such content until they'll sell me high quality, DRM free, standard format (mpg, mp3, etc) content and for my needs they'd need to have some sort of plan by which purchasing large amounts of content get increasingly cheaper. I don't just download my favortie song from a band - I download all their songs. I don't just download my favorite episodes of tv shows I like - I download the entire series. They need to take that kind of thing into account when setting pricing. In most cases I think $5 for an individual song/show/whatever is probably fair but if downloading the entire discography/series/whatever I probably wouldn't spend more than $20. I often will download movies before they've been offically released. I'd gladly buy a copy as I leave the theatre after seeing the movie on the big screen but they don't sell them. Make copies available right away to people that have a ticket stub and you'll encourage me both to go see it on the big screen and get me to pay for it instead of downloading it. I don't like all the stupid extra features anyway, and if I wanted them would be willing to buy a fancier copy of the movie later, so don't worry about them - just sell me the DVD of the movie.
The roads here in the US do that - that's what gave me the idea to make them say things. When I first noticed this road feature many years ago it reminded me of a record player.
It's not okay to steal but it's not okay for the rich to keep their wealth. It is okay to be constantly regenerating wealth but hoarding and greed is bad. In the case of the wealthy not constantly using their wealth to the public benefit it's the job of the government to redistribute the wealth for them. Just the same as it's the government's job to keep people from stealing from the rich.
Once you've taken care of your needs, and your families needs, to live and are making at least the median income then you start to have a responsibility to society that outweighs societies responsibility to you. The greater your wealth the greater your responsiiblity. That certainly doesn't mean you can't still profit from your IP but it does mean that the benefit of society of use of your IP outweighs any benefit to you in deciding it's use.
Of course she doesn't deserve to make more money. She has the right to make more money but that doesn't mean she could or should. It's up to her to make it happen.
From a purely social point of view - once the individuals needs are taken care of they begin to have a responsibility to take care of society as a whole. The richer you are the more responsibility for society you have. The trade off of benefiting from civilization is that it's not every man (or woman) for himself. Money only has value because society says it does. People refrain from theft and brutal tactics to take what they need and want because it's the civilized thing to do. You can't reap the benefits of civilization without doing your share or the system ceases to make sense and eventually crumbles. So for the wealthy, the needs of society come before their making more money so I really have to say that JK doesn't "deserve" to make more money.
They didn't send me a check either. I read all seven books on their release days and what appreciation do they show me? Nuthin! Those cheapskate rat bastards! At least they could have sent me a free copy of the prequel.
What's worse is accidental use of the stupid touch pad. You're typing along and zoom your cursor goes flying somewhere crazy and you've just deleted something important or done something equally as horrible. Touch pads are horrible devices.
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Make her use it for a week. It's easier to use than Windows once you get used to a few minor changes. It's certainly no harder to switch from XP to OS X than it is to switch from XP to Vista. Older people shouldn't act stupid and lazy - it's really annoying. Don't they have pride? I can't believe how some people act about the need to think.
So how's this compare to a dual quad-core 3GHz Xeon system (X5365)? Those are available and already pretty fast. If you can afford $2500 for processors. Sadly only my server gets that kind of treatment. No gaming for me.
Will we ever see a Windows 7? They had so much trouble and so many rewrites to deliver a working copy of Vista and it has been pretty much rejected by the consumer. Will Microsoft be able to recover from this lose of positive spin? Surely, after such setbacks, hardware and software makers must be thinking twice about exclusive plans to support only Windows. Free platforms such as Linux are better than Windows in many ways and constantly improving. OS X already makes Windows look completely pathetic in most ways and it now runs on PC hardware. Virtualization has gotten really good. If Linux or OS X can convince hardware and software developers, especially game developers, to support them then Windows is in big trouble. AMD/ATI has already made it clear that they're going to be more Linux friendly.
My prediction is that Windows 7 will be released much later than predicted and be no bigger a hit than Vista has been and that Linux and OSX use will continue to increase. Most people will still have a copy of Windows but it'll be a pirate copy or an old copy and it'll be ran in virtualization and only used for those not-ported apps. By the time Windows 7 is released virtualization will be so seamless that most users won't even notice Windows running. OS X will dominate the high dollar market while a custom, nice looking, and easy to use Linux distro will dominate the low end market and servers. Quite possibly the low end will be little more than a terminal for running hybrid web-apps.
Maybe making a slide-out touchpad on the right (make it somehow reversible for lefties?) in the place most of us keep our mice? When you didn't want to use it it could slide inside the case to keep it from accidental contact on being in the way. They still never work well though. I can never use it for graphic editing and even for normal use it seems to jump around and skip a lot.
Mail programs need to be reactive. This is easier thanks to the virtual folder concept where mail can be in more than one place at a time. For example your bosses email might show up in just your work folder (assuming everyone uses the same domain or other obvious clumping hint) unless he suddenly sent 10 messages in a short period whereas it'd also show up in his own folder and maybe that folder would rise to the top of your list because the email program would recognize that all the messages are from a single person and not a group of people. Maybe the shit has hit the fan (such as a key server going down) and he's trying to get ahold of you desperately. Obviously the program should be able to see that a given clumping is not being useful to you, either because you never make read or respond to mail in that clump or type of clump. Also the program should let you manually mark clumps as useful or not so you can tell it what to do rather than it guessing. You can sort mail yourself manually or with filters to - auto-filtering is just an extra feature that can help you.
I don't quite agree that a program can't figure these things out for you. Usage patterns can tell a lot about how future messages will be used. Of course you always want to be able to tell the program it's wrong but why not let it help you when it can? It's no different than training a spam filter and I think most of us can agree that spam filtering is helpful even if it's imperfect and requires training.
I think it's probably more useful for the mail client to try to do the right thing and make it easy for you to undo it's decisions and for it to learn from you than to have something like Clippy. Dealing with a Clippy would be pretty annoying whereas it's not such a big deal to mark your bosses auto-filter as unneeded because he is just a crazy guy that likes to send dozens of email forwards a day - although spotting forwards and counting them as less worthy of spawning this filter is pretty easy to do anyway so the rule would probably never be created then.
Mostly my custom mail client is good for mail archiving as I haven't made a lot of effort on the interface for composing mail. GMail or Thunderbird work fine for composing - they just don't handle incoming mail very well. I've thought about making my mail client available for the public but I've never done it. Mostly because I think I don't want to offer support for such a complex program. Just handling all the different types of possible file attachments is a major issue and even after many years of development and millions of attachments tested I still sometimes find attachments done in some weird new way I've never seen before. At least my mail client doesn't lose data like Thunderbird though. It really annoys me that more than a year after advising them that folders that grow to more than 2GB in Linux lose all data that it's still an issue. That alone motivates me not to use it for handling incoming mail! GMail is a pain mostly because of it's 4GB limit per account and their limit on how fast you can pull messages our using POP. I frequently fill my accounts faster than I can empty them and end up with the account locked for 24 hours.
It really only works if lots of people do it all at once. That whole united we stand, divided we fall idea. If just a couple of us stand up for our rights then we get squished. Personally, I'd rather stand up for my rights when the secret police aren't knocking at my door than waiting til they are. I'm surprised more people don't agree.
I'd refuse just out of principal because I don't like bing pushed around by people abusing their power. If you're to busy to have principals then that's up to you. To each their own. Just don't complain when the secret police come and drag you away without explanation. ;)
Most likely they convert from AC to DC internally just like the majority of other consumer electronics.
Or that he died broke and alone because people like Edison stole his ideas and robbed him blind. Tesla was a genius and could have done so much more for the world if only things weren't controlled by rich people with no vision further than how much money they can make, right away, off an idea. Tesla's failure is a perfect example of capitalism at work.
As compared to my iMac I'm currently using that is 24" and currently set at 1920x1200. Quite a difference. I'd love to have a even bigger, higher resolution, monitor too. Even this seems to small for me as I often have to shuffle windows around to see everything at the same time. If they sold a 30" iMac, with the cinema displays's 2560x1600 resolution, I'd buy one. I'm tempted to get the cinema display to slap on my Linux server but they switched to the ugly brushed alumnium look which I don't like - will have to see if the classic white display has the same specs. :)
Data is hardly an issue. With Internet access I always have access to my data just as if I were sitting in my office. It's just a network filesystem away. At issue is how small and crappy laptops are. Using a laptop is painful because the monitor is so small and the keyboard and mouse are very cramped and unresponsive. They're fine for writing a simple document, looking at the web, or email but for any serious computing use they're worthless.
;)
I've actually studied my own productivity and on a laptop, or any computer with a small monitor, I'm about 1/6th as productive as I am when using a decent sized monitor. On some tasks the difference is so dramatic that it's literally faster to just wait until I get back to the office.
Of course, in my experience, most users don't really do anything with their computers. Most of em you could plug a keyboard into an etch-a-sketch and they wouldn't notice the difference.
It's not that I don't think there couldn't be a portable computer that's work for my needs. I just don't think it could rightly be called a laptop anymore. It'd be more a portable desktop computer. Issues such as size, weight, and having a battery really don't matter at all to me. The only laptop-like issues I really care about is it being a single unit and easily portable which in my experience isn't the case with most laptops anyway. Most people have a huge laptop bag with all sorts of extra crap tucked into it. Why not just make the laptop bigger, include all needed features, and lose the extra crap?
I'm a big guy and my hands are slightly bigger than normal so maybe that's why the Apple mouse works better for me. I haven't actually compared it side-by-side with a normal mouse to see how the size and shape compare though.
:)
When first getting used to using the Mighty Mouse it was a bit weird because of the lack of buttons and you seem to hold your hand a lil differently. Once used to it though it worked great for me.
As long as it's not the hockey puck mouse Apple tried to push on us.
Sadly, I don't like rubbing the keyboard nipple either. I've considered getting one of the XPS laptops with removable bluetooth keyboard and mouse. That's a feature I was asking for for years.
I have to say I that I love my Apple mouse. Normal PC mice (I've tried lots) make my hands hurt after an hour or so but I can use my Apple mouse all day. It also looks good, has stood up to much use and abuse, and the trackball as middle button is genius.
For my most powerful needs I have servers that can pretty much stay where they are. I can access them from anywhere with an Internet connection anyway.
For a laptop I'd rather have a huge, powerful, laptop to carry to places I'll need it. It doesn't even need a battery because anything I'd want to use will need to be plugged in. Anywhere I'm likely to use it will let me do that. I've seriously thought about modding my 24" iMac into a jumbo laptop by attaching some sort of flap to cover the screen when it's being moved and to hold a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Stick a handle on top and it's ready to be my laptop.
Then I like to have a slightly bigger than palm sized laptop for carrying around and making notes and checking email. Probably the stuff most people would try to do on their dinky phone. The XO (OLPC) is a pretty good size for me but I'd like it to be a little more powerful and to just run a normal Linux distro. If it could double as a phone, mp3 player, camera, video game, etc then great but my primary needs are Internet access and note taking. So bigger than a phone or PDA but smaller than a laptop.
Must be a Ubuntu thing or something to do with your hardware. Linux was the first OS I used multiple monitors on and that was about a decade ago. It worked fine then. Of course back then I had to custom compile XWindow to make it work. I doubt you have to do that now.
There's a line down the middle of your vision. Ewww!
:)
I'd rather just have a big single screen although I'd be tempted to go with tri-screens if I could get 30" Apple Cinema HD flatpanels. A couple dinky 19" monitors though is almost as frustrating to work from as a single 19" monitor.
Of course my eyesight sucks so maybe normal people can see a 19" monitor or two just fine.
Everything we send online should be encrypted. It's only laziness that has kept us from making such a switch. Maybe it's time to shake ourselves awake and get it done before it's to late.
The working solution to IP woes isn't technical. The solution is just to make the content available in the format users want, when users want it, and at a reasonable price. Until content providers do that thir content is going to be passed around, for free, by the people that want it. Personally I'm sure I'll keep downloading such content until they'll sell me high quality, DRM free, standard format (mpg, mp3, etc) content and for my needs they'd need to have some sort of plan by which purchasing large amounts of content get increasingly cheaper. I don't just download my favortie song from a band - I download all their songs. I don't just download my favorite episodes of tv shows I like - I download the entire series. They need to take that kind of thing into account when setting pricing. In most cases I think $5 for an individual song/show/whatever is probably fair but if downloading the entire discography/series/whatever I probably wouldn't spend more than $20. I often will download movies before they've been offically released. I'd gladly buy a copy as I leave the theatre after seeing the movie on the big screen but they don't sell them. Make copies available right away to people that have a ticket stub and you'll encourage me both to go see it on the big screen and get me to pay for it instead of downloading it. I don't like all the stupid extra features anyway, and if I wanted them would be willing to buy a fancier copy of the movie later, so don't worry about them - just sell me the DVD of the movie.
I've never been either so I guess I just suck. I've always been in my own alternate universe.
The roads here in the US do that - that's what gave me the idea to make them say things. When I first noticed this road feature many years ago it reminded me of a record player.
Dual screens are flakey. I want my 30" iBook. I've considered hacking my 24" iMac into a laptop before. - that'd be about the right size for me.
It's not okay to steal but it's not okay for the rich to keep their wealth. It is okay to be constantly regenerating wealth but hoarding and greed is bad. In the case of the wealthy not constantly using their wealth to the public benefit it's the job of the government to redistribute the wealth for them. Just the same as it's the government's job to keep people from stealing from the rich.
Once you've taken care of your needs, and your families needs, to live and are making at least the median income then you start to have a responsibility to society that outweighs societies responsibility to you. The greater your wealth the greater your responsiiblity. That certainly doesn't mean you can't still profit from your IP but it does mean that the benefit of society of use of your IP outweighs any benefit to you in deciding it's use.
Of course she doesn't deserve to make more money. She has the right to make more money but that doesn't mean she could or should. It's up to her to make it happen.
From a purely social point of view - once the individuals needs are taken care of they begin to have a responsibility to take care of society as a whole. The richer you are the more responsibility for society you have. The trade off of benefiting from civilization is that it's not every man (or woman) for himself. Money only has value because society says it does. People refrain from theft and brutal tactics to take what they need and want because it's the civilized thing to do. You can't reap the benefits of civilization without doing your share or the system ceases to make sense and eventually crumbles. So for the wealthy, the needs of society come before their making more money so I really have to say that JK doesn't "deserve" to make more money.
They didn't send me a check either. I read all seven books on their release days and what appreciation do they show me? Nuthin! Those cheapskate rat bastards! At least they could have sent me a free copy of the prequel.
What's worse is accidental use of the stupid touch pad. You're typing along and zoom your cursor goes flying somewhere crazy and you've just deleted something important or done something equally as horrible. Touch pads are horrible devices.