That's dumb. As dirty as coal plants are, they are far cleaner than the equivalent power output from internal combustion engines.
To the best of my knowledge, the amount of mercury emitted by my car's exhaust is zero. Mercury is THE major problem with coal, and it receives far too little attention.
Nah, that's not my main point. The Psystar system is a simple PC to look at, nothing spectacular. But I do expect them to do their homework and produce a system that meets middle-of-the-road expectations. In my book, a motherboard with fan speed control in the BIOS is a must. All of my systems have this -- even my ECS motherboard, for cryin' out loud!
I haven't seen info to say whether the Gigabyte motherboard used in the Pystar has this capability (but it's not configured) or if it's just not there. But as another poster pointed out in this thread above, the point of paying someone for a pre-configured hackintosh is to not have to mess with things. If I buy a system and immediately have to start working on things like fans that sound like a jet, something is wrong from my perspective. I would have built my hackintosh for quiet operation from the get-go were I in the market for one.
Another thing that doesn't sit well with me on this system is how it's shipped (at least as I saw on the C|NET Unboxing video on YouTube). It was packed with the original styrofoam for the case, but no plastic bag over the unit like cases normally ship with. Then the larger box was filled with styrofoam packing peanuts! Probably done this way to avoid having to use the box the case came in, but c'mon, maybe buy a few properly sized cases for the demo units? That's what my company did for its initial product, and it's not THAT crazy expensive when you're trying to create buzz around your product. They could re-use the styrofoam from the case box as they did, and have an identically sized cardboard box with their name on it.
I don't mean to make a mountain out of a molehill here. I'm just saying that there are several places where Psystar could have done themselves a big favor by doing some simple things to improve initial perceptions of their system.
Still, I think my point about the time savings is valid.
Point taken. But for me that's still an unknown, since:
We don't know what (if anything) Apple plans to do about Psystar
Looks like one "service pack" has been released, but that doesn't yet qualify as a track record on update frequency or effectiveness.
If you're going to end up needing to know how to keep the box up to speed with security updates and the like without Psystar's help, going through the install process is probably the best way to learn. It's probably still prudent to have a "wait and see" approach to see how the potential issues above play out.
I gots no problem with Psystar selling a hackintosh. My main nit is calling them clones, which not even Psystar itself is doing. But for $555 (base system plus Leopard), I think the loud system fans are worth taking into consideration, as well as the unknown status of updates going forward. Buying one of these is a gamble many of us would consider taking, as even if Psystar gets slapped down by Apple we'd still have a halfway decent PC that just needed a new OS; could probably trade the copy of Leopard for a copy of XP pretty easily. But personally, if I really wanted a hackintosh, I'd build one myself. Plenty of resources out there to do so if you're willing to invest the time.
I did do one install of Leopard as a test; my existing hardware wasn't well-supported so USB was a no-go. But I'd be hard pressed to make such a system my main workhorse in any case.
This box is NOT a clone, it is a hackintosh. Please refer to it as such, but not a clone. A true clone would have EFI firmware, not EFI emulation. It would require no hacks to install OS X, it would cleanly install and be recognized by the OS.
I believe this would actually be a desirable system if it really were a clone... but with that fan noise problem and all, how many people would really want one?
Some of these software companies seem to believe that it's okay, or even necessary, to add feature on top of feature which to us is just bloat. I refuse to believe that it's inevitable for the pinnacle of software development to be bloated, ineffectual versions of what was originally a reasonable, unobtrusive application or utility.
They've been covered above already... McAfee and Norton, even more worthless than has been described above. RealPlayer, a major attack vector and super annoying installer. Apple apps -- amazing resource hogs on the PC. So very hard to believe that iTunes can be so slow. It was much worse on my (vastly faster) PC compared to my G4 mini.
However, I actually find Acrobat 8 to be an improvement over 7, which was a vast improvement over 6. The installer is hugely annoying, but once past that the application actually works pretty well in both Windows and Linux.
Anyway, I think the big antivirus packages are by far and away the worst examples of the bloat in a type of software that we all need to run under Windows.
You started out so well... summing up your thoughtful post this way:
All this is a very long way of saying that, amortized over time, buying quality is often cheaper (and almost always more pleasurable) than buying the first thing you can afford.
Then you follow it up with this diatribe:
Some people can get by just fine with the cheapest piece of crap Dell or Walmart sells. It looks like crap, it's loaded with useless crap, it's made with the cheapest parts that can be had, it's "settling" for the lowest common denominator.
Well, see, that's just so dismissive of everyone else's experience that it really undermines your statement. As has happened over and over again in this thread, and many others -- you went to the opposite extreme, and now "money spent" equals "quality". In my experience, this is far too simplistic a tenet to follow blindly.
I have worked with Dell systems for years, and in my experience they have been on the whole well-built and of very high quality. Yes, this is a generalization, but not overly so based upon the qualitative statistics I've collected.
Case in point on two systems I just worked with; a Dell Dimension 4550 (2.4GHz) and an Apple G4 Powermac (733MHz Digital Audio). They were really quite similar, although to be fair the Powermac was a couple of years older than the Dell. Both had cases that opened easily, were easy to service, and were built with quality parts. The Powermac had MacOS 9 on it and I bumped it up to Panther since I had a fresh legal copy of that; the Dimension was happily running an original copy of XP. I sold the Powermac to a very happy buyer, and put the Dell into service as a replacement for my Dad's aging PC (built by me years ago, but suffered from that bulging capacitor problem). Both perfectly good, usable machines.
Some would say the greater age of the Powermac proves something, but I don't think it does; it was just the Apple box I had worked on most recently. I could have substituted the Precision 220 workstation for the Dimension, and it would have been the same. It's a dual P3 933MHz, was running Win2K until I put XP on it, and it runs just fine, thank you very much. Also easy to open and service, built with similar quality parts as in the Powermac.
Moving up to the present, the Dell systems you can get for around $450 including a decent LCD monitor are not crap. They may not be the class of machine you'd choose to use, but they will run for years and years if you choose not to upgrade -- you or anyone else saying differently not withstanding. Intel chipsets, Intel processors, and similar name-brand hard drives, memory, etc. in both machines. The only difference here is that you get a lower spec machine in that inexpensive Dell, and Apple chooses not to offer that class of machine. That's more a reflection of Apple making a choice not to go for the volume market, but it has little to nothing to do with the build quality of the inexpensive Dell system.
So you're happy with your G5 system; I bet I would have been happy with it too. Personally, I really like my G4 Mini, and my Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop, and my home-built gaming rig. All fine machines that get the job done and are not in actual need of upgrade or replacement, just as yours isn't. But you're planning to replace it just the same, aren't you? I'm not going to claim your machine is crap because of that. If you can't see that's what you were doing in your post, well, I'm here to point out that in essence, you were.
Microsoft currently sells a supposedly quick boot environment for use in multimedia computers. It is of course just a lite flavor of Windows, and from my experience it doesn't boot all THAT much faster.
If they make money from this (one would have to assume they do, no?) then having it displaced by a Linux-based version would likely have some impact. Probably small, but just another ding on top of other challenges faced by Microsoft.
I think this meets your "slightly makes sense" criteria.
The real mechanism at work is capturing credit card data. That's the thing, though... if all they're after is credit card info, why bother with product fulfillment? That's what TFA referred to as one of the parties involved, so there's got to be more to it than just that. And wouldn't credit card companies figure out the statistics pretty quickly if a particular customer of theirs has a really high percentage of credit card numbers that end up being used fraudulently?
That makes me think that those stealing card numbers and/or personal data aren't bothering with product fulfillment, and vice versa.
Who buys crap from spammers? Even my 84-year old father (who has a difficult time remembering the "desktop" I'm talking about isn't the table his keyboard is setting on) knows the difference between a spam email and a legitimate one. We all laugh at the garbage they try to sell, and these days pretty much assume it's more likely a scam or an attempt at identity theft. So who the hell are these people who think it's a good idea to respond to the email from Hector McGillicuddy for Viagra?
Simply put, this may be the first "major" version of Windows that corporations decide to skip en masse. I know of no company here in Silicon Valley that isn't still deploying XP systems, if not outright forbidding Vista systems (mine falls into that latter category, at least currently).
Yeah, it's true, I don't know of all companies here in the valley. And it's clear the move to DX10 in Vista means gaming companies have moved to that OS and the new tool chain... meaning we're now seeing games come out that won't run on any version of Windows besides Vista. Bound to happen. But that has nothing to do with folks getting their work done, so XP may very well be king until Win7 becomes available.
For an OS that was first introduced in 2001, that's a pretty amazing lifespan. Although I would venture a guess that DOS in its various incarnations may outlast it in the end.
I mean wow, what amazing bits of brainwave energy had found their way into some amazing folds of C code goodness that would become "OH MY GOD, DON'T TOUCH THAT SECTION OF DIVINE WISDOM!!!" that were moments away from being committed... but then I remembered, hey, it's Alan Cox. Silly me! He'll just re-code it tomorrow. Of course, it won't be quite the same bit of code, and the universe will be just a little bit the worse off for the odd different bit of code that is replaced... but still, for cryin' out loud, it's Alan freakin' Cox we're talkin' about here. How random could it all be?
So it should be possible to use it to build lightweight flying robots carrying cameras, microphones or sensors for surveillance missions.
Right... and this is going to do so much better than my lightweight AirHogs remote control plane when the wind is over 5mph. (not) In still air, sure. But how much of that can you count on to be able to depend upon such a craft for surveillance purposes? It's way too much of a maybe.
How many athletes with scholarships can the university afford to lose? 'Cuz we all know, universities don't appear to care more about their sports programs than their academic programs a lot of the time... no, not at all. So how about every athlete making sure to create a profile on Facebook in protest? I seriously doubt the university can stand up to that sort of coordinated protest, considering they may lose some star atheletes.
And for any university officials curious enough to be reading this thread, shame on you! Have you so forgotten your own youth that you think authoritarian measures like this actually TEACH anything to the young minds you're (in theory) trying to train and shape? Other than "money talks" or "extortion works", I mean?
You put the words "grotesque" and "pictures" right next to each other and made them a link... which had predictable results on the responsiveness of the MacFixIt server. That might be some kind of record.
... I just want to know if they're going to finally fix the cutting off of the shutdown sound. As either Gnome or KDE exits, it seems no effort was made to be sure the sound had finished playing before turning off the sound service. Somehow that was never an issue in Knoppix, which always managed to finish that longish "Initiating shutdown sequence" clip during KDE shutdown.
It seems rather ironic that the first example of such a device of this complexity and precision was brought to our attention after having been found on the bottom of the sea on a Roman shipwreck. Mention is made in the Wikipedia article of perhaps similar but less complex objects, but this markedly more complex mechanism was preserved well enough to (probably) discern its function and actually pull 95% of the text off the device. I wonder if there's any chance some trove of such historical artifacts awaiting discovery on dry land, somehow well-preserved. How much of history might they rewrite?
Well, it finally happened... Google took over. But it's one thing to take the planet over, but quite another to provide support for it too. Man, I'd hate to be be at the other end of the support line... wonder if you need to run the standard Google employment gauntlet to be first-tier support?
Whoa, transport me back to when E.L.O.'s "Time" album came out (Yikes! 1981) and the song "Yours Truly 2095":
I met someone who looks a lot like you She does the things you do But she is an IBM.
But I digress (before I was ever on topic)... there won't be any moral dilemma for this crowd. The first sexbots will be programmed for "No Geeks" which will only increase their allure for that very crowd. They'll be hacked to remove that restriction, and while they're at it they'll be programmed to hang out at retirement homes, PTA meetings and church services. That'll pretty much doom them to be recalled, pulled from the market, and there'll be only a few remaining examples in the Smithsonian and certain institutions of higher learning for, ummm, "research".
It was automatically selected; I had to opt-out. I thought that would be the end of it, but there was that bit about getting a rebate/refund by printing out a "Subscription Refund Form" and sending that along with the purchase confirmation that came via email to Ziff-Davis. It left me with the impression that I had somehow been charged for the magazine subscription and this was how I would be able to get the money back. It doesn't seem likely they buried the charge for the magazine in the purchase price of the item I bought, but it just left me with a strange feeling. Maybe the magazine was a freebie after all, but if so it wasn't explained very well.
Slashdot Mirror
To the best of my knowledge, the amount of mercury emitted by my car's exhaust is zero. Mercury is THE major problem with coal, and it receives far too little attention.
Nah, that's not my main point. The Psystar system is a simple PC to look at, nothing spectacular. But I do expect them to do their homework and produce a system that meets middle-of-the-road expectations. In my book, a motherboard with fan speed control in the BIOS is a must. All of my systems have this -- even my ECS motherboard, for cryin' out loud!
I haven't seen info to say whether the Gigabyte motherboard used in the Pystar has this capability (but it's not configured) or if it's just not there. But as another poster pointed out in this thread above, the point of paying someone for a pre-configured hackintosh is to not have to mess with things. If I buy a system and immediately have to start working on things like fans that sound like a jet, something is wrong from my perspective. I would have built my hackintosh for quiet operation from the get-go were I in the market for one.
Another thing that doesn't sit well with me on this system is how it's shipped (at least as I saw on the C|NET Unboxing video on YouTube). It was packed with the original styrofoam for the case, but no plastic bag over the unit like cases normally ship with. Then the larger box was filled with styrofoam packing peanuts! Probably done this way to avoid having to use the box the case came in, but c'mon, maybe buy a few properly sized cases for the demo units? That's what my company did for its initial product, and it's not THAT crazy expensive when you're trying to create buzz around your product. They could re-use the styrofoam from the case box as they did, and have an identically sized cardboard box with their name on it.
I don't mean to make a mountain out of a molehill here. I'm just saying that there are several places where Psystar could have done themselves a big favor by doing some simple things to improve initial perceptions of their system.
Point taken. But for me that's still an unknown, since:
If you're going to end up needing to know how to keep the box up to speed with security updates and the like without Psystar's help, going through the install process is probably the best way to learn. It's probably still prudent to have a "wait and see" approach to see how the potential issues above play out.
I gots no problem with Psystar selling a hackintosh. My main nit is calling them clones, which not even Psystar itself is doing. But for $555 (base system plus Leopard), I think the loud system fans are worth taking into consideration, as well as the unknown status of updates going forward. Buying one of these is a gamble many of us would consider taking, as even if Psystar gets slapped down by Apple we'd still have a halfway decent PC that just needed a new OS; could probably trade the copy of Leopard for a copy of XP pretty easily. But personally, if I really wanted a hackintosh, I'd build one myself. Plenty of resources out there to do so if you're willing to invest the time.
I did do one install of Leopard as a test; my existing hardware wasn't well-supported so USB was a no-go. But I'd be hard pressed to make such a system my main workhorse in any case.
One of the Slashdot articles recently had a post from someone who said he had purchased one. Couldn't find that post again, tho.
This box is NOT a clone, it is a hackintosh . Please refer to it as such, but not a clone. A true clone would have EFI firmware, not EFI emulation. It would require no hacks to install OS X, it would cleanly install and be recognized by the OS.
I believe this would actually be a desirable system if it really were a clone... but with that fan noise problem and all, how many people would really want one?
Some of these software companies seem to believe that it's okay, or even necessary, to add feature on top of feature which to us is just bloat. I refuse to believe that it's inevitable for the pinnacle of software development to be bloated, ineffectual versions of what was originally a reasonable, unobtrusive application or utility.
They've been covered above already... McAfee and Norton, even more worthless than has been described above. RealPlayer, a major attack vector and super annoying installer. Apple apps -- amazing resource hogs on the PC. So very hard to believe that iTunes can be so slow. It was much worse on my (vastly faster) PC compared to my G4 mini.
However, I actually find Acrobat 8 to be an improvement over 7, which was a vast improvement over 6. The installer is hugely annoying, but once past that the application actually works pretty well in both Windows and Linux.
Anyway, I think the big antivirus packages are by far and away the worst examples of the bloat in a type of software that we all need to run under Windows.
You started out so well... summing up your thoughtful post this way:
All this is a very long way of saying that, amortized over time, buying quality is often cheaper (and almost always more pleasurable) than buying the first thing you can afford.Then you follow it up with this diatribe:
Some people can get by just fine with the cheapest piece of crap Dell or Walmart sells. It looks like crap, it's loaded with useless crap, it's made with the cheapest parts that can be had, it's "settling" for the lowest common denominator.Well, see, that's just so dismissive of everyone else's experience that it really undermines your statement. As has happened over and over again in this thread, and many others -- you went to the opposite extreme, and now "money spent" equals "quality". In my experience, this is far too simplistic a tenet to follow blindly.
I have worked with Dell systems for years, and in my experience they have been on the whole well-built and of very high quality. Yes, this is a generalization, but not overly so based upon the qualitative statistics I've collected.
Case in point on two systems I just worked with; a Dell Dimension 4550 (2.4GHz) and an Apple G4 Powermac (733MHz Digital Audio). They were really quite similar, although to be fair the Powermac was a couple of years older than the Dell. Both had cases that opened easily, were easy to service, and were built with quality parts. The Powermac had MacOS 9 on it and I bumped it up to Panther since I had a fresh legal copy of that; the Dimension was happily running an original copy of XP. I sold the Powermac to a very happy buyer, and put the Dell into service as a replacement for my Dad's aging PC (built by me years ago, but suffered from that bulging capacitor problem). Both perfectly good, usable machines.
Some would say the greater age of the Powermac proves something, but I don't think it does; it was just the Apple box I had worked on most recently. I could have substituted the Precision 220 workstation for the Dimension, and it would have been the same. It's a dual P3 933MHz, was running Win2K until I put XP on it, and it runs just fine, thank you very much. Also easy to open and service, built with similar quality parts as in the Powermac.
Moving up to the present, the Dell systems you can get for around $450 including a decent LCD monitor are not crap. They may not be the class of machine you'd choose to use, but they will run for years and years if you choose not to upgrade -- you or anyone else saying differently not withstanding. Intel chipsets, Intel processors, and similar name-brand hard drives, memory, etc. in both machines. The only difference here is that you get a lower spec machine in that inexpensive Dell, and Apple chooses not to offer that class of machine. That's more a reflection of Apple making a choice not to go for the volume market, but it has little to nothing to do with the build quality of the inexpensive Dell system.
So you're happy with your G5 system; I bet I would have been happy with it too. Personally, I really like my G4 Mini, and my Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop, and my home-built gaming rig. All fine machines that get the job done and are not in actual need of upgrade or replacement, just as yours isn't. But you're planning to replace it just the same, aren't you? I'm not going to claim your machine is crap because of that. If you can't see that's what you were doing in your post, well, I'm here to point out that in essence, you were.
Microsoft currently sells a supposedly quick boot environment for use in multimedia computers. It is of course just a lite flavor of Windows, and from my experience it doesn't boot all THAT much faster.
If they make money from this (one would have to assume they do, no?) then having it displaced by a Linux-based version would likely have some impact. Probably small, but just another ding on top of other challenges faced by Microsoft.
I think this meets your "slightly makes sense" criteria.
That makes me think that those stealing card numbers and/or personal data aren't bothering with product fulfillment, and vice versa.
Who buys crap from spammers? Even my 84-year old father (who has a difficult time remembering the "desktop" I'm talking about isn't the table his keyboard is setting on) knows the difference between a spam email and a legitimate one. We all laugh at the garbage they try to sell, and these days pretty much assume it's more likely a scam or an attempt at identity theft. So who the hell are these people who think it's a good idea to respond to the email from Hector McGillicuddy for Viagra?
Simply put, this may be the first "major" version of Windows that corporations decide to skip en masse. I know of no company here in Silicon Valley that isn't still deploying XP systems, if not outright forbidding Vista systems (mine falls into that latter category, at least currently).
Yeah, it's true, I don't know of all companies here in the valley. And it's clear the move to DX10 in Vista means gaming companies have moved to that OS and the new tool chain... meaning we're now seeing games come out that won't run on any version of Windows besides Vista. Bound to happen. But that has nothing to do with folks getting their work done, so XP may very well be king until Win7 becomes available.
For an OS that was first introduced in 2001, that's a pretty amazing lifespan. Although I would venture a guess that DOS in its various incarnations may outlast it in the end.
I mean wow, what amazing bits of brainwave energy had found their way into some amazing folds of C code goodness that would become "OH MY GOD, DON'T TOUCH THAT SECTION OF DIVINE WISDOM!!!" that were moments away from being committed... but then I remembered, hey, it's Alan Cox. Silly me! He'll just re-code it tomorrow. Of course, it won't be quite the same bit of code, and the universe will be just a little bit the worse off for the odd different bit of code that is replaced... but still, for cryin' out loud, it's Alan freakin' Cox we're talkin' about here. How random could it all be?
"BOGL"
It's perfect.
You're thinking of the Digiscents iSmell:
0 .html
http://www.howstuffworks.com/internet-odor1.htm
Folded in April 2001:
http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,23654,0
So it should be possible to use it to build lightweight flying robots carrying cameras, microphones or sensors for surveillance missions.
Right... and this is going to do so much better than my lightweight AirHogs remote control plane when the wind is over 5mph. (not) In still air, sure. But how much of that can you count on to be able to depend upon such a craft for surveillance purposes? It's way too much of a maybe.
How many athletes with scholarships can the university afford to lose? 'Cuz we all know, universities don't appear to care more about their sports programs than their academic programs a lot of the time... no, not at all. So how about every athlete making sure to create a profile on Facebook in protest? I seriously doubt the university can stand up to that sort of coordinated protest, considering they may lose some star atheletes.
And for any university officials curious enough to be reading this thread, shame on you! Have you so forgotten your own youth that you think authoritarian measures like this actually TEACH anything to the young minds you're (in theory) trying to train and shape? Other than "money talks" or "extortion works", I mean?
You put the words "grotesque" and "pictures" right next to each other and made them a link... which had predictable results on the responsiveness of the MacFixIt server. That might be some kind of record.
... I just want to know if they're going to finally fix the cutting off of the shutdown sound. As either Gnome or KDE exits, it seems no effort was made to be sure the sound had finished playing before turning off the sound service. Somehow that was never an issue in Knoppix, which always managed to finish that longish "Initiating shutdown sequence" clip during KDE shutdown.
Such a minor thing, but so noticeable.
It seems rather ironic that the first example of such a device of this complexity and precision was brought to our attention after having been found on the bottom of the sea on a Roman shipwreck. Mention is made in the Wikipedia article of perhaps similar but less complex objects, but this markedly more complex mechanism was preserved well enough to (probably) discern its function and actually pull 95% of the text off the device. I wonder if there's any chance some trove of such historical artifacts awaiting discovery on dry land, somehow well-preserved. How much of history might they rewrite?
Please see the Earth support site
Well, it finally happened... Google took over. But it's one thing to take the planet over, but quite another to provide support for it too. Man, I'd hate to be be at the other end of the support line... wonder if you need to run the standard Google employment gauntlet to be first-tier support?
Whoa, transport me back to when E.L.O.'s "Time" album came out (Yikes! 1981) and the song "Yours Truly 2095":
But I digress (before I was ever on topic)... there won't be any moral dilemma for this crowd. The first sexbots will be programmed for "No Geeks" which will only increase their allure for that very crowd. They'll be hacked to remove that restriction, and while they're at it they'll be programmed to hang out at retirement homes, PTA meetings and church services. That'll pretty much doom them to be recalled, pulled from the market, and there'll be only a few remaining examples in the Smithsonian and certain institutions of higher learning for, ummm, "research".
Remember, you read it here first.
Damn you... I was going to post something about DNF. You insensitive clod!
If I had a daughter, I'd want the SMART ones to procreate with her.
And what if she ended up with a script kiddie instead?
It was automatically selected; I had to opt-out. I thought that would be the end of it, but there was that bit about getting a rebate/refund by printing out a "Subscription Refund Form" and sending that along with the purchase confirmation that came via email to Ziff-Davis. It left me with the impression that I had somehow been charged for the magazine subscription and this was how I would be able to get the money back. It doesn't seem likely they buried the charge for the magazine in the purchase price of the item I bought, but it just left me with a strange feeling. Maybe the magazine was a freebie after all, but if so it wasn't explained very well.