They paid writers to write about it? Isn't that like... their job?
They pretty much bribed writers to write favorable reviews. Thats why people started flocking to the internet rather than print for all their gaming reviews because just about all the paper magazines were written to have a favorable bias on some truly terrible games. No one wants to be ripped off when they buy a game, and some publications were even owned by the company that made games (such as Nintendo Power) that even went as far as to put in propaganda through the years of the evils of GameSharks and Game Genies, the evils of old ROMs and why you should always make sure that all of your games had a Seal of "Quality" on them.
Even Orwell got this right with "War of the Worlds". It is just that a lot of people tuned in too late for the notice.
Um, War of the Worlds was written by H.G. Wells, and the radio announcer for the famous broadcast was Orson Welles... George Orwell had nothing to do with it.
Lets see here, either I have the choice of being screwed with a telephone company and paying out my butt for minutes. Or I can pay for some Skype minutes and save money. Which would you do?
Well, for one thing they are important but they aren't confidential. Stuff like various pieces of source code, schoolwork, would all be pretty annoying to reproduce if my HDD crashed and other backup methods failed, but hardly life-damaging if stolen.
If you have needs for large files why wouldn't someone just stick it on a server, plug in the box to the server and download the file over a local network? Yeah, it might be slower but it sure would be cheaper (anything above 16 GB in a USB flash drive is -expensive- ) and would work on any OS.
And if you were plugging into a different machine, why wouldn't you make your flash drive be FAT32? Lets see here the choices are FAT32, basic but everything can read it. HTFS+ But Macs can't read it, NTFS which I think has some problems with OS X, or EXT3 or another obscure Linux system that may be superior tech wise, it simply won't work on any non-Linux system.
I just use FAT32 because the main point of my USB drive is to transfer data between computers and provide a backup of my most important documents. To be perfectly honest I don't know why anyone would need permissions on a USB drive. Most programs on Linux are easy enough that with your.whatever directory in your home folder simply just copy that to your drive and paste it on the new machine. With APT and such most software is easily accessible (making portable binaries like on Windows needless). So why would you even need it?
Surely you are joking right? The Asus Ebook reader isn't E-ink which means two things, one is shorter battery life and the other is more eye strain. Plus the Asus Ebook reader isn't cheap. Yeah, its cheaper than some with E-ink displays but it is by no means a game changer.
The PC I'm typing this on has never gotten a virus. It's really not THAT hard if you pay even a little bit of attention.
You are a geek. You know something about computers. Most people don't. Just because -you- can keep your Windows install virus free doesn't mean that Joe Sixpack is going to be able to.
No, you get random kernel panics. About as often as I get a "random" bluescreen. (Last time it happened was a poorly-seated daughterboard; switching to a newer case fixed that problem, and it's been rock solid ever since.)
Yeah, but Windows still bluescreens from problems that you won't have with a Mac due to all hardware having Apple's drivers (no graphics cards drivers to mess with, etc). Both are improving though.
There's something magical about the Apple HARDWARE that makes you more productive? Really? Last I saw, it was still a monitor, mouse, and keyboard -- everything else comes down to software & drive layout, and last I heard powermacs weren't used for render farms.
The multitouch trackpad is pretty useful. I didn't think that I would use it much, but it really does make it easier. Plus, things are generally speced to be fast, yes this means you won't find any $300 Macs new, but it also means that you won't get the experience you got with Vista (underspeced machines that should have been running XP running Vista and being terribly slow).
The main differences are the point of the websites. People are more likely to go to Microsoft's site for support, not to buy and compare things. People are more apt to go to Apple's site who are curious about its site and purchase something. While Apple does have good support on its website, it only has a few product lines, not a ton of products like MS.
Yeah, I'm sure all your friends want to see "Bob Smith to Joe User DFKSDJFKSDJFKDSJFDSuupoi23423po4i32423op4JLKEJFEFIJEIJFEIOFJEJFEI" all through their newsfeed....
Why pay a thousand extra dollars for a MAC just because it has an "Apple" logo on the side.
Because its hard to get a virus? Because its not going to randomly bluescreen? Because its hardware lets you do more things faster? In general, Macs last longer than a PC in the same hands. For example, despite my warnings to get a Mac a friend of mine (who isn't particularly computer literate and tends to break or virus computers like crazy) decided to get a cheap computer. It worked "fine" (it was terribly slow due to it being a first-gen Vista machine that should have shipped with XP and he didn't want to upgrade the RAM...) And then the BIOS randomly got courrupted so he bought another computer and has spent with those two computers plus various repair bills (power cord broke, tray-loading CD drive broke, etc) he could have bought a Mac that would have lasted him.
On a side note, the price cut is only "innovative" for all of the idiots that paid that much for a device like this in the first place; common sense for the rest of us.
Riiiight, because we all know that when the iPod Touch and iPhone came into existence there was plenty of cheap devices with multitouch screens with wi-fi and a decent browser. I forgot about all those. Oh wait, there weren't really any of them. If you needed one, you bought an iPhone (or iPod Touch) or went without it.
Exactly, or texting, or IMing, etc. The point of Facebook is for you to share to -the world- your thoughts. If you want to share your thoughts with one or two other people, there are better ways.
What about the textbook made in 2000 that says we have never had a non-white male president? That today is wrong but it wasn't wrong when it was printed.
Nobody is demanding resale rights to iTunes music.
Because in general music is timeless. It gets popular, goes underground, gets revived, becomes retro, etc. A song you heard 15 years ago will still be as good of a song today as it was when you first heard it. On the other hand, textbooks get obsolete. The textbook you read 15 years ago in most subjects will be wrong, not antique, not timeless but simply -wrong-. Secondly, who re-reads textbooks? I listen to some of my old CDs regularly that I bought 10 or more years ago, I re-read some of my old fiction books and some old non-fiction books, however once you get out of college you don't even touch your old textbooks unless by some stroke of fate your going back to school.
We could simply defer manned space exploration until such time as it becomes less expensive (due to development of superior material and construction technologies), we as a society have more resources which may be devoted to its pursuit
The only reason why we even -got- a space program was because of the cold war. Basically we were building and testing ICBMs as fast as we could and figure "we could send one to space!", Soviet Russia got the same idea and so the space race was begun. Without ICBMs I doubt spaceflight would have progressed.
building infrastructure like decent roads and water supplies in sub-Saharan Africa (and enabling basic economic development and human welfare)
The problem isn't money or lack of interest, its that the governments are so corrupt that any economic development would be used to fund more wars and water supplies would be monopolized by warlords for more control.
or replacing high-pressure sodium streetlamps with LEDs (decreasing inner-city suicide risks, saving power, reducing emissions associated with that power)
Because those annoying lights are going to drive me to kill myself! Secondly, saving power is a long term benefit, and at the moment we need short term gains and then you invest. After all if you are 3 months behind on your rent you shouldn't spend $1,000 investing for your retirement.
but I also think there is a large, unjustified bias against good old black & white LCD
Colors are good for many things. For one, any modern video is going to look like crap on a black and white LCD. For another most people see black and white LCDs as cheap, most people play their MP3 players in their car, at home, at work all indoors. And you can find a large amount of black and white LCD players if you get cheaper off brand ones. Sure, they won't be the greatest quality, but most customers don't want black and white LCDs because they are inferior.
E ink doesn't give you the strain on your eyes that normal LCDs do. Us geeks might be relatively unaffected by it because of how often we use them. But after a while your eyes hurt. E-ink doesn't have to refresh as often so it reads a lot more like paper.
Yeah, and have fun copying a ~600 page book by hand (you can't exactly cut and manually feed in the pages on a library book), especially with most libraries costing tons of money per copy.
Sometimes, the easiest of means can defeat an entire army of complex configurations. I was at a conference at a university in a classroom a year or so ago and when we took a break for lunch we all got out our laptops only to see that the wireless required a student ID/Password and so did the wired connection. A friend of mine ran out to his car and got a cheap Linksys wireless router, plugged it in and there was internet for all, no configuration, nothing, just plug it in and we all had wireless.
Google is dealing with a ton of books as fast as they can. Theres no doubt that not everything is perfect, but the books are scanned and available. With time things will improve, but as of now, they are simply in the scanning things and getting them out there mode, not the "make everything perfect" mode.
However, a Dell Linux system is about $50 cheaper than a non-Linux system (see http://www.techspot.com/news/25432-linux-discount-on-dell-machines-about-50.html). While you could argue that there are more low-end and therefore cheaper Windows systems out there, (hard to beat a $300 Toshiba 15 inch laptop, new, even with Vista installed), but aside from third-parties taking systems from OEMs, rebranding them and installing Linux (undoubtedly more expensive due to the middleman) OEMs offering Linux are generally cheaper than the same systems with Windows.
There are -many- systems that don't ship with Windows. Most netbooks offer Linux as an option and due to no Windows tax they are usually either cheaper or make up with it with better hardware than their Windows counterparts. While its still difficult to find a good Linux computer in a big-box retailer, they aren't exactly uncommon if you shop online.
Windows is also bundled with most new computer systems.. the cost is built-in... Even if you want Linux, BSD, or FreeDOS, you pay the windows tax.
There are many computer retailers who discount the price so you don't pay the windows tax if you get a Linux or other system (Dell does this, and other OEMs do too).
And to be perfectly honest saying you can get it for free with giveaways and such is like saying that PS3s are free because you can win them in a contest.
Most people can't take advantage of them
which still doesn't mean that its really any more free.
Slashdot Mirror
They paid writers to write about it? Isn't that like... their job?
They pretty much bribed writers to write favorable reviews. Thats why people started flocking to the internet rather than print for all their gaming reviews because just about all the paper magazines were written to have a favorable bias on some truly terrible games. No one wants to be ripped off when they buy a game, and some publications were even owned by the company that made games (such as Nintendo Power) that even went as far as to put in propaganda through the years of the evils of GameSharks and Game Genies, the evils of old ROMs and why you should always make sure that all of your games had a Seal of "Quality" on them.
Even Orwell got this right with "War of the Worlds". It is just that a lot of people tuned in too late for the notice.
Um, War of the Worlds was written by H.G. Wells, and the radio announcer for the famous broadcast was Orson Welles... George Orwell had nothing to do with it.
Lets see here, either I have the choice of being screwed with a telephone company and paying out my butt for minutes. Or I can pay for some Skype minutes and save money. Which would you do?
Its easy to say you are sorry for something that you didn't do and weren't accused of doing.
Well, for one thing they are important but they aren't confidential. Stuff like various pieces of source code, schoolwork, would all be pretty annoying to reproduce if my HDD crashed and other backup methods failed, but hardly life-damaging if stolen.
If you have needs for large files why wouldn't someone just stick it on a server, plug in the box to the server and download the file over a local network? Yeah, it might be slower but it sure would be cheaper (anything above 16 GB in a USB flash drive is -expensive- ) and would work on any OS.
And if you were plugging into a different machine, why wouldn't you make your flash drive be FAT32? Lets see here the choices are FAT32, basic but everything can read it. HTFS+ But Macs can't read it, NTFS which I think has some problems with OS X, or EXT3 or another obscure Linux system that may be superior tech wise, it simply won't work on any non-Linux system.
I just use FAT32 because the main point of my USB drive is to transfer data between computers and provide a backup of my most important documents. To be perfectly honest I don't know why anyone would need permissions on a USB drive. Most programs on Linux are easy enough that with your .whatever directory in your home folder simply just copy that to your drive and paste it on the new machine. With APT and such most software is easily accessible (making portable binaries like on Windows needless). So why would you even need it?
Surely you are joking right? The Asus Ebook reader isn't E-ink which means two things, one is shorter battery life and the other is more eye strain. Plus the Asus Ebook reader isn't cheap. Yeah, its cheaper than some with E-ink displays but it is by no means a game changer.
The PC I'm typing this on has never gotten a virus. It's really not THAT hard if you pay even a little bit of attention.
You are a geek. You know something about computers. Most people don't. Just because -you- can keep your Windows install virus free doesn't mean that Joe Sixpack is going to be able to.
No, you get random kernel panics. About as often as I get a "random" bluescreen. (Last time it happened was a poorly-seated daughterboard; switching to a newer case fixed that problem, and it's been rock solid ever since.)
Yeah, but Windows still bluescreens from problems that you won't have with a Mac due to all hardware having Apple's drivers (no graphics cards drivers to mess with, etc). Both are improving though.
There's something magical about the Apple HARDWARE that makes you more productive? Really? Last I saw, it was still a monitor, mouse, and keyboard -- everything else comes down to software & drive layout, and last I heard powermacs weren't used for render farms.
The multitouch trackpad is pretty useful. I didn't think that I would use it much, but it really does make it easier. Plus, things are generally speced to be fast, yes this means you won't find any $300 Macs new, but it also means that you won't get the experience you got with Vista (underspeced machines that should have been running XP running Vista and being terribly slow).
The main differences are the point of the websites. People are more likely to go to Microsoft's site for support, not to buy and compare things. People are more apt to go to Apple's site who are curious about its site and purchase something. While Apple does have good support on its website, it only has a few product lines, not a ton of products like MS.
Yeah, I'm sure all your friends want to see "Bob Smith to Joe User DFKSDJFKSDJFKDSJFDSuupoi23423po4i32423op4JLKEJFEFIJEIJFEIOFJEJFEI" all through their newsfeed....
Why pay a thousand extra dollars for a MAC just because it has an "Apple" logo on the side.
Because its hard to get a virus? Because its not going to randomly bluescreen? Because its hardware lets you do more things faster? In general, Macs last longer than a PC in the same hands. For example, despite my warnings to get a Mac a friend of mine (who isn't particularly computer literate and tends to break or virus computers like crazy) decided to get a cheap computer. It worked "fine" (it was terribly slow due to it being a first-gen Vista machine that should have shipped with XP and he didn't want to upgrade the RAM...) And then the BIOS randomly got courrupted so he bought another computer and has spent with those two computers plus various repair bills (power cord broke, tray-loading CD drive broke, etc) he could have bought a Mac that would have lasted him.
On a side note, the price cut is only "innovative" for all of the idiots that paid that much for a device like this in the first place; common sense for the rest of us.
Riiiight, because we all know that when the iPod Touch and iPhone came into existence there was plenty of cheap devices with multitouch screens with wi-fi and a decent browser. I forgot about all those. Oh wait, there weren't really any of them. If you needed one, you bought an iPhone (or iPod Touch) or went without it.
Exactly, or texting, or IMing, etc. The point of Facebook is for you to share to -the world- your thoughts. If you want to share your thoughts with one or two other people, there are better ways.
What about the textbook made in 2000 that says we have never had a non-white male president? That today is wrong but it wasn't wrong when it was printed.
Nobody is demanding resale rights to iTunes music.
Because in general music is timeless. It gets popular, goes underground, gets revived, becomes retro, etc. A song you heard 15 years ago will still be as good of a song today as it was when you first heard it. On the other hand, textbooks get obsolete. The textbook you read 15 years ago in most subjects will be wrong, not antique, not timeless but simply -wrong-. Secondly, who re-reads textbooks? I listen to some of my old CDs regularly that I bought 10 or more years ago, I re-read some of my old fiction books and some old non-fiction books, however once you get out of college you don't even touch your old textbooks unless by some stroke of fate your going back to school.
We could simply defer manned space exploration until such time as it becomes less expensive (due to development of superior material and construction technologies), we as a society have more resources which may be devoted to its pursuit
The only reason why we even -got- a space program was because of the cold war. Basically we were building and testing ICBMs as fast as we could and figure "we could send one to space!", Soviet Russia got the same idea and so the space race was begun. Without ICBMs I doubt spaceflight would have progressed.
building infrastructure like decent roads and water supplies in sub-Saharan Africa (and enabling basic economic development and human welfare)
The problem isn't money or lack of interest, its that the governments are so corrupt that any economic development would be used to fund more wars and water supplies would be monopolized by warlords for more control.
or replacing high-pressure sodium streetlamps with LEDs (decreasing inner-city suicide risks, saving power, reducing emissions associated with that power)
Because those annoying lights are going to drive me to kill myself! Secondly, saving power is a long term benefit, and at the moment we need short term gains and then you invest. After all if you are 3 months behind on your rent you shouldn't spend $1,000 investing for your retirement.
but I also think there is a large, unjustified bias against good old black & white LCD
Colors are good for many things. For one, any modern video is going to look like crap on a black and white LCD. For another most people see black and white LCDs as cheap, most people play their MP3 players in their car, at home, at work all indoors. And you can find a large amount of black and white LCD players if you get cheaper off brand ones. Sure, they won't be the greatest quality, but most customers don't want black and white LCDs because they are inferior.
E ink doesn't give you the strain on your eyes that normal LCDs do. Us geeks might be relatively unaffected by it because of how often we use them. But after a while your eyes hurt. E-ink doesn't have to refresh as often so it reads a lot more like paper.
Yeah, and have fun copying a ~600 page book by hand (you can't exactly cut and manually feed in the pages on a library book), especially with most libraries costing tons of money per copy.
Sometimes, the easiest of means can defeat an entire army of complex configurations. I was at a conference at a university in a classroom a year or so ago and when we took a break for lunch we all got out our laptops only to see that the wireless required a student ID/Password and so did the wired connection. A friend of mine ran out to his car and got a cheap Linksys wireless router, plugged it in and there was internet for all, no configuration, nothing, just plug it in and we all had wireless.
Google is dealing with a ton of books as fast as they can. Theres no doubt that not everything is perfect, but the books are scanned and available. With time things will improve, but as of now, they are simply in the scanning things and getting them out there mode, not the "make everything perfect" mode.
However, a Dell Linux system is about $50 cheaper than a non-Linux system (see http://www.techspot.com/news/25432-linux-discount-on-dell-machines-about-50.html). While you could argue that there are more low-end and therefore cheaper Windows systems out there, (hard to beat a $300 Toshiba 15 inch laptop, new, even with Vista installed), but aside from third-parties taking systems from OEMs, rebranding them and installing Linux (undoubtedly more expensive due to the middleman) OEMs offering Linux are generally cheaper than the same systems with Windows.
There are -many- systems that don't ship with Windows. Most netbooks offer Linux as an option and due to no Windows tax they are usually either cheaper or make up with it with better hardware than their Windows counterparts. While its still difficult to find a good Linux computer in a big-box retailer, they aren't exactly uncommon if you shop online.
Windows is also bundled with most new computer systems.. the cost is built-in... Even if you want Linux, BSD, or FreeDOS, you pay the windows tax.
There are many computer retailers who discount the price so you don't pay the windows tax if you get a Linux or other system (Dell does this, and other OEMs do too).
And to be perfectly honest saying you can get it for free with giveaways and such is like saying that PS3s are free because you can win them in a contest.
Most people can't take advantage of them
which still doesn't mean that its really any more free.