People with "minumal" [sic] technical knowledge will not want to use a KVM switch, much less know what one is.
No one wants to use a KVM switch, it's not as if it's entertaining. People want to save a square yard of flat surface.
Pull the cables out of the PC, plug them into the Mac, boom. You're done.
Unless you actually used the Windows machine for anything non trivial, in which case there will be a non trivial period for which you will need to swap back and forth, until you have all your data and replacements for all you applications up and going on the Mac. Switching between platforms is a non-trivial project, cables are the trivial part.
If I had been designing a windows replacement Mac I'd have built in a KVM switch. Plug the mac between the windoze machine and the screen, keyboard and mouse and bang, there you go. Eventually retire the windows machine.
Mind you, I'd have given it a voice modem too to provide one more killer app at more or less zero cost, so what would I know.
The problem with consoles as game platforms is that they have to be priced down where people will buy them.
To play games on a Windows box I just have to pay a small premium over what I was paying to get a web-email-Word platform to get a slightly better graphics card. To play games on a console I have to buy a complete stand-alone box. That means for the same outlay I get far more game-specific hardware by going the PC route, assuming I was going to have a computer anyway.
I just bought a not too exciting mid-range graphics card for my windows box. It cost me more than an xbox or PS-2 would cost me now, but less than what they cost when they were launched. So, more or less the same money, but it has all gone on the graphics hardware where it will make a difference to the game experience, not on the power supply, memory, cpu, case,...
The effect of this squeeze on console hardware can be seen when you play a game designed for consoles and ported to the PC. Most painfully recently Deus-Ex Invisible War with those teeny-tiny little levels and interface clearly designed for a thumb pad (and plot designed for 12 year olds, but that is a slightly diffent type of consolitis).
Of course, the same arguments hold for audio kit, and that didn't stop midi systems and such from eventually taking off as a way of spending more and getting less.
The other 'gotcha' for migration is that apparently the non-standard keyboard & mouse subjects your to Apple markups.
Not really. Keyboards I've bought recently have all been USB and PS2 compatable.
However, I think the choice to not include PS2 sockets for KB and mouse was probably a mistake, since it makes it one step harder for someone with minumal technical knowledge (which is, after all, their core target market) to share a KB and monitor with a cheap KVM switch they could pick up on the highstreet.
I can see a lot of people wanting to add a Mac to the household, without wanting extra desk space, but needing to retain a windows PC -- for instance for the kid playing games.
I wonder which war will take longer to admit defeat in, Terror or Drugs.
Terrorism is a function of modern political and economic circumstances, so there is always the possibility it will go away (or at least fade to a point where it is no longer high profile neough to be useful).
Drugs seem to be a basic feature of how humans choose to live their lives, and so are likely to always be there as a good excuse for doing those with power doing otherwise unacceptable things.
China does this type of stuff to US products in China all the time.
This is not about China blocking sales of US products into China, but about the US blocking sales of a US product (in this case a brand, intangable, but still a product) to China.
Ie it is a case of the US government putting up a non-tarrif barrier against US exports.
You missed a reason for the US not taking China to the WTO -- the US is one of the two top offenders against WTO rules in spirit and in letter, and so from it's glass house can only really afford to throw stones at the EU, who are the other big offender.
A scientific theory is a well-tested mathematical model for describing natural events.
But pVoid explicitly claimed that theories about human effects on global warming could not be tested. Ie he was saying they were not scientific theories, but we needed to act on it now anyway. I was just pointing out the dangers of this line of argument.
BTW, the mathematics part is not necessary. Darwin had no significant maths behind his theories.
BTW2, global warming is a phenomenon, not a theory (so is evolution, strictly speaking, but that is a common shorthand)
It seems no coincidence that grasses are now the dominant lifeform on land and that they are the ones which are particularly good at photosynthesis at relatively low concentrations of CO_2.
Surely, the main reason grasses are so sucessful is that they found a way to adapt to being grazed, creating a symbiosis with grazing animals. It's not lack of CO2 which makes it hard for otehr plants to invade grasslands, but the fact that they get eaten along with the grass, but the grass survives.
There is a general scientific consensus that human activity is increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that a runaway greenhouse effect will result from too much CO2 in the atmosphere.
While both halves of that are technically true, no one sane would assert that the human effects would result in a run away scenario and Earth turning into Venus. Rather the effect of human activity, if any, will be to push the climate into another relatively stable state.
If nothing else, remember that the carbon we are shoveing into the atmosphere all came from the atmosphere to start with, and a lot more is locked up in carbon rich sedimentary rocks such as limestone and chalk. We're just putting back it back. If we weren't in a run-away situation before life started making mass amounts of cacium carbonate, we aren't going to be after we just put back the relatively small amount of carbon locked up in fossil fuels.
Here we are faced with a situation where every single shread of evidence points to the fact that there is global warming, and still you are being skeptical about it.
Er, the comment you replied to more or less took global warming as a given.
Since we do not have the luxury to stop everything and see if things are going to get better, we have *no other option* but to take these theories as true.
I theorise that you personally are the cause of global warming, and you should be shot. We don't have the option of temporarilly removing you from the universe to test this theory, so we have *no other option* but to take this theory as true and shoot you.
Murder is clearly a legal issue, it is defined in law and the state retains the right to give certain people exemptions -- eg a soldier is allowed to kill people even when he has none of the usual excuses.
Killing people is a moral issue. Whether killing someone in some circumstance is right or wrong is completely independent of any legal definition of murder which exists in whatever locality you happen to occupy. This, of course, is true of and pair of legal and parallel moral issues.
Because Sony are the Microsoft of the hardware world. They adopted NIH syndrome as a policy and it has served them well. They will always make their first try with a bizzarely idiosyncratic design in the hope that they can trade on their name to get initial sales and lock potential competitors out. Stage two is `embrace and extend'. Watch out for MP3 players from Sony with an enhanced `MP3+' format.
BTW, The Economist this week has an interesting article about Samsung's redesigning themselves from a name associated with cheap microwaves and TVs to a brand able to compete with big names like Philips and Motorola and snap at Sony's heels.
They claim they don't make money off region coding cartridges, why are they doing it?
The phone company doesn't make money from laying cables. (well, I'm sure some somewhere have abusiness laying other people's cables for them, but you know what I mean). Once you have the cables then other activities become possible and they make you money.
It's not bullshit, it's a smokescreen, a true statement made in the hope people will missunderstand it.
A year is hardly `lengthy'. And, of course, if the network went belly up to the point where there was no service, there would be no company to have a contract with, so you'd be free.
Suspension of disbelief is hard work in some SG-1 episodes.
But SG1, fundamentally, doesn't take itself too seriously, and that lets it get away with a great deal. Teal'C raising an eyebrow or O'Neill making a sarcastic comment buys them out of most problems. Once you've seen any of the baddies in action, you don't expect to be watching anything to think too deeply about.
Star Trek has always laboured under the weight of taking itself seriously, remember all that school level politics in TOS. Some of TNG managed to carry that weight, and it had some actual ideas, after that it was almost all just embarassing.
In any case, I'll never forgive them for the Borg queen.
What if it involved going back in time and assasinating the writers and producers before they started work in the hope that someone with some talent and brain cells would be hired?
A woman who flashes her breasts on the street is doing that because she thinks that showing breasts is an inherently dirty action to do and she wants to feel sexy and kinky. I would guess that a woman like that would be more inclined to have casual sex than the average woman
Maybe true in the sense that almost everyone has more than the average number of legs. Any woman who doesn't occasionally want to feel sexy or kinky is probably terribly repressed and they will be pulling the average down.
Sorry, what I meant to say was I have heard that the U.S. has the second-largest expatriate Muslim population (Muslims not living in a Muslim-majority country.)
China has over 100 million, India has several hundred million. I'm sure, due to geography, that Russia must have way more than the US.
The US policy is that the state cannot endorse any religion;
The French government's argument, of course, is that to have conspicuous religiosity in state schools would by implication be an endorsement. If you have a friend's children around to stay and allow them to take drugs, might you not be said to be endorsing drug use?
Consider the extreme case where 99.99% of the kids are dressing in a conspicupusly, say, catholic manner. What would be the effect on the one Jewish kid?
I think they are wrong, but it's not fundamentally different from what used to be the US principle, rather an interpretation of that principle.
As it happens, the fact that this sudden assertion of state secularism coincides with a rise in anti-muslim politics in France makes me suspect the government was not as pure in motive as they pretended.
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No one wants to use a KVM switch, it's not as if it's entertaining. People want to save a square yard of flat surface.
Pull the cables out of the PC, plug them into the Mac, boom. You're done.
Unless you actually used the Windows machine for anything non trivial, in which case there will be a non trivial period for which you will need to swap back and forth, until you have all your data and replacements for all you applications up and going on the Mac. Switching between platforms is a non-trivial project, cables are the trivial part.
If I had been designing a windows replacement Mac I'd have built in a KVM switch. Plug the mac between the windoze machine and the screen, keyboard and mouse and bang, there you go. Eventually retire the windows machine.
Mind you, I'd have given it a voice modem too to provide one more killer app at more or less zero cost, so what would I know.
To play games on a Windows box I just have to pay a small premium over what I was paying to get a web-email-Word platform to get a slightly better graphics card. To play games on a console I have to buy a complete stand-alone box. That means for the same outlay I get far more game-specific hardware by going the PC route, assuming I was going to have a computer anyway.
I just bought a not too exciting mid-range graphics card for my windows box. It cost me more than an xbox or PS-2 would cost me now, but less than what they cost when they were launched. So, more or less the same money, but it has all gone on the graphics hardware where it will make a difference to the game experience, not on the power supply, memory, cpu, case, ...
The effect of this squeeze on console hardware can be seen when you play a game designed for consoles and ported to the PC. Most painfully recently Deus-Ex Invisible War with those teeny-tiny little levels and interface clearly designed for a thumb pad (and plot designed for 12 year olds, but that is a slightly diffent type of consolitis).
Of course, the same arguments hold for audio kit, and that didn't stop midi systems and such from eventually taking off as a way of spending more and getting less.
Not really. Keyboards I've bought recently have all been USB and PS2 compatable.
However, I think the choice to not include PS2 sockets for KB and mouse was probably a mistake, since it makes it one step harder for someone with minumal technical knowledge (which is, after all, their core target market) to share a KB and monitor with a cheap KVM switch they could pick up on the highstreet.
I can see a lot of people wanting to add a Mac to the household, without wanting extra desk space, but needing to retain a windows PC -- for instance for the kid playing games.
That's all well and good, but what are we going to do about it.
That would imply that if I buy a PC with OEM windows on it I can't add a second disk drive. I doubt such a licecne would hold water.
If you just mean the hardware bought with it has to be in use, then buy a power cable splitter or something and put that in your PC and all is well.
Terrorism is a function of modern political and economic circumstances, so there is always the possibility it will go away (or at least fade to a point where it is no longer high profile neough to be useful).
Drugs seem to be a basic feature of how humans choose to live their lives, and so are likely to always be there as a good excuse for doing those with power doing otherwise unacceptable things.
This is not about China blocking sales of US products into China, but about the US blocking sales of a US product (in this case a brand, intangable, but still a product) to China.
Ie it is a case of the US government putting up a non-tarrif barrier against US exports.
You missed a reason for the US not taking China to the WTO -- the US is one of the two top offenders against WTO rules in spirit and in letter, and so from it's glass house can only really afford to throw stones at the EU, who are the other big offender.
But pVoid explicitly claimed that theories about human effects on global warming could not be tested. Ie he was saying they were not scientific theories, but we needed to act on it now anyway. I was just pointing out the dangers of this line of argument.
BTW, the mathematics part is not necessary. Darwin had no significant maths behind his theories.
BTW2, global warming is a phenomenon, not a theory (so is evolution, strictly speaking, but that is a common shorthand)
Surely, the main reason grasses are so sucessful is that they found a way to adapt to being grazed, creating a symbiosis with grazing animals. It's not lack of CO2 which makes it hard for otehr plants to invade grasslands, but the fact that they get eaten along with the grass, but the grass survives.
You reallise what incredably bad news that would be if true, don't you?
Personally, I'm praying for proof of a link with human activity. The other option is a several-changes-of-underwear job.
While both halves of that are technically true, no one sane would assert that the human effects would result in a run away scenario and Earth turning into Venus. Rather the effect of human activity, if any, will be to push the climate into another relatively stable state.
If nothing else, remember that the carbon we are shoveing into the atmosphere all came from the atmosphere to start with, and a lot more is locked up in carbon rich sedimentary rocks such as limestone and chalk. We're just putting back it back. If we weren't in a run-away situation before life started making mass amounts of cacium carbonate, we aren't going to be after we just put back the relatively small amount of carbon locked up in fossil fuels.
Er, the comment you replied to more or less took global warming as a given.
Since we do not have the luxury to stop everything and see if things are going to get better, we have *no other option* but to take these theories as true.
I theorise that you personally are the cause of global warming, and you should be shot. We don't have the option of temporarilly removing you from the universe to test this theory, so we have *no other option* but to take this theory as true and shoot you.
Murder is clearly a legal issue, it is defined in law and the state retains the right to give certain people exemptions -- eg a soldier is allowed to kill people even when he has none of the usual excuses.
Killing people is a moral issue. Whether killing someone in some circumstance is right or wrong is completely independent of any legal definition of murder which exists in whatever locality you happen to occupy. This, of course, is true of and pair of legal and parallel moral issues.
Because Sony are the Microsoft of the hardware world. They adopted NIH syndrome as a policy and it has served them well. They will always make their first try with a bizzarely idiosyncratic design in the hope that they can trade on their name to get initial sales and lock potential competitors out. Stage two is `embrace and extend'. Watch out for MP3 players from Sony with an enhanced `MP3+' format.
BTW, The Economist this week has an interesting article about Samsung's redesigning themselves from a name associated with cheap microwaves and TVs to a brand able to compete with big names like Philips and Motorola and snap at Sony's heels.
The phone company doesn't make money from laying cables. (well, I'm sure some somewhere have abusiness laying other people's cables for them, but you know what I mean). Once you have the cables then other activities become possible and they make you money.
It's not bullshit, it's a smokescreen, a true statement made in the hope people will missunderstand it.
A year is hardly `lengthy'. And, of course, if the network went belly up to the point where there was no service, there would be no company to have a contract with, so you'd be free.
But SG1, fundamentally, doesn't take itself too seriously, and that lets it get away with a great deal. Teal'C raising an eyebrow or O'Neill making a sarcastic comment buys them out of most problems. Once you've seen any of the baddies in action, you don't expect to be watching anything to think too deeply about.
Star Trek has always laboured under the weight of taking itself seriously, remember all that school level politics in TOS. Some of TNG managed to carry that weight, and it had some actual ideas, after that it was almost all just embarassing.
In any case, I'll never forgive them for the Borg queen.
What if it involved going back in time and assasinating the writers and producers before they started work in the hope that someone with some talent and brain cells would be hired?
I think he's calling you a spicy meatball. Must be a term of affection.
Which makes it a pretty silly thing to say to someone you pick at random in an international forum, doesn't it...
Maybe true in the sense that almost everyone has more than the average number of legs. Any woman who doesn't occasionally want to feel sexy or kinky is probably terribly repressed and they will be pulling the average down.
I was just pointing out that it's not illegal. Talking in class may be against school rules, but you don't get a visit from the police about it.
Another source I just found has those numbers proportionally smaller. However, all still way beyond the US number.
China has over 100 million, India has several hundred million. I'm sure, due to geography, that Russia must have way more than the US.
The French government's argument, of course, is that to have conspicuous religiosity in state schools would by implication be an endorsement. If you have a friend's children around to stay and allow them to take drugs, might you not be said to be endorsing drug use?
Consider the extreme case where 99.99% of the kids are dressing in a conspicupusly, say, catholic manner. What would be the effect on the one Jewish kid?
I think they are wrong, but it's not fundamentally different from what used to be the US principle, rather an interpretation of that principle.
As it happens, the fact that this sudden assertion of state secularism coincides with a rise in anti-muslim politics in France makes me suspect the government was not as pure in motive as they pretended.