VPC was never very useful for anything beyond a testbed platform for Mac-using developpers who need to run their apps in Windows. It was simply too slow.
Being able to run Windows apps at native speed on a Mac without changing desktop environments (and without buying additional software) would be huge.
Some people will probably want to dual-boot, at least initially.
But let's go on a brief flight of fancy here.
Suppose Apple were to create a new fork of WINE to run natively in the Aqua environment, and pour a whole bunch of development time into tweaking and improving it (sort of like how they forked the K browser to make Safari.)
Suddenly the Macintosh becomes a box which can run damn near all Windows apps and damn near all Linux apps, without ever leaving OS X.
At that point, there are only three groups of people who would ever have any reason to run something other than OS X: Platform bigots, open-source zealots, and penny-pinchers. Granted, those three groups comprise a significant portion of the market, but think of how many more there are out there.
A conversation which goes on about 20 times a day in big-box computer stores:
"I need a new computer, and my nephew says Macs are good. Do you have them?"
"Yes, we carry a few, but keep in mind that Macs can't run Windows software. If your old computer ran Microsoft Windows, you will need to buy all new software."
"Oh. Well what's good then?"
Suddenly the #1 reason why people who consider Macs go with something else evaporates.
That doesn't address the #2 reason (cost), but I think it will still make a huge difference in future Macintosh market share.
That is assuming that both designs have equal resources pouring into them. In other words, that all variables save design are controled.
The whole point of the argument is that you can never make that assumption. You can pretty much count on the fact that, in the real world, the "dirty" design will have more resources being poured into it, because it's the one with the installed base.
The difference is, IBM owned the BIOS, but not the OS.
The company making the OS for IBM computers (Microsoft) had a direct interest in seeing to it that "IBM Clones" (as they were called back then) worked seamlessly with MS-DOS and Windows.
Apple owns both. They could, if they had to, continually update their OS to:
1. Detect knock-off ROMS and ignore them. 2. Re-flash the ROM periodically... possibly even crippling the "fake" ones. 3. Read motherboard serial numbers and phone home. 4. Any of a number of other options to render unauthorized clones useless.
This will make the task of reverse engineering the Apple ROM monumentally difficult. And what would a company get for doing so? A chance to bite in to a small piece of a very small pie (the Mac market.)
No chance of such a thing happening unless Macintosh market share suddenly baloons deep into double-digits... and even then, not much of a chance.
So long as Apple makes their margins on hardware, they are not going to let it happen.
John C. Dvorak is pretty quick off the blocks with a response to the news that Apple intend to switch to Intel processors.
Of course he was. He wrote his response five years ago... The first time he thought Apple was about to switch to Intel.
(He's still waiting for the chance to publish his "response" to Apple becoming a software-only company.)
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Okay, so now John Dvorak has been right exactly once. That just means that he might be a broken 24-hour clock with a date counter.
Sure, that's fine for two years from now, but who in their right mind - besides collectors - would buy a PPC Mac between then and now?
If I buy a shiny G4 iBook today it had better be at 1/2 the price it was yesterday because I'll have to be running new software through an emulator tomorrow.
The whole advantage of universal binaries is that they run on both platforms. It's not just a means to speed adoption of "Mactel," it's also a way to ensure that G4 and G5 systems will continue to be useful for years to come.
Hey, PowerPC was (and still is, really) a great platform concept.
But people don't buy computers for the concept. The x86 world beat out the PPC world when it comes to consumer chips by simply doing a better job of implementation. While IBM was promising 3 GHz performance that they couldn't deliver, Intel was cranking out a new chip which offers more performance per Watt on laptops than the "insanely great" G4.
x86 didn't look like it had a hell of a lot of potential three years ago, but AMD and Intel kept pounding. A good old "three yards and a cloud of dust" attack won the game.
When the new G5 towers were rolled out two years ago with the promise of hitting 3 GHz within a year, we annoying Mac Zealots practically creamed ourselves. G4 and G5 chips did outperform Intel offerings at the time on a per-clock-cycle basis.
However, two things happened since then to change all that.
First of all, IBM dropped the ball. Badly. It's been two years, and the G5 is just now hitting 2.7 GHz.
Secondly, Intel came out with a new line of notebook CPUs which kick G4 ass six ways from Sunday, and the G5 is simply to hot and power hungry to consider in a laptop. Powerbooks are absolutely vital to Apple's present and future. They've always been leaders in notebook hardware, and it's simply killing them that they've been losing that edge.
So the choice for Apple is: Stick with G5 and continue to stagnate, or change. Given that they've decided to change, they wisely decided to give their devs a year to ramp up for it.
This has the added bonus of pimping their Xcode and Apple Dev licenses to software houses which have been using Metroworks Codewarrior up until now. Win-win, as far as Apple is concerned.
Apple's software is ready to run on Intel today. Adobe's software is ready to run on Intel today. MS's software will be ready to runon Intel "RSN." A dev of Mathematica ported it to Intel in two hours to show off at the Stevenote.
By the time you find yourself compelled to buy an Intel-based Mac (one and a half to two years from now), all the software you own will probably already be "universal binary" stuff without you even being aware of it. In fact, if you are an OS X user, some of it already is, and you weren't aware of it.
The few remaining apps will run through the Rosetta emulator just fine (such as the old version of Photoshop, which was demo'd on an Intel Mac at the Stevenote.)
For customers, this will be damn near transparent. Relax. Breath. It will be okay.
You have plenty of time. The rumors were only half-true.
Apple is adopting Intel, but is not "ditching" IBM.
New G5 towers will still be around for at least another year, and probably at least two. Intel is probably going to start by replacing the G4 CPUs in Powerbooks and minis.
At the Stevenote, he informed devs that they would be supporting both platforms for a long time to come.
When computers respond correctly to human language, then the "caveman interface" will no longer be needed.
If I had a dollar for every time a technology professional had to stop and think for a while, then check an O'Reilly "nutshell" book or a man page, simply because he couldn't remember an obscure command in DOS or *sh that the situation called for, I would be far richer than Bill Gates.
CLI's are terrific if you've been using them full-time for ten years. For example, I like working in bash, and can get a lot done fairly quickly in that environment. (I still have to look things up every now and again, though.)
For everybody else, they suck, and there's no indication that they will improve much anytime soon. Any interface that sucks for everybody who doesn't spend years learning it... just plain sucks.
Is there something that will come along and be better than the GUI? Damn, I sure hope so. Was it a big step forward? Hell, yeah.
Aren't these the same batteries (ipod) that tend to EXPLODE?
No. To get them explode you must:
1. Get them wet. 2. Jam a screwdriver straight into them.
I have a lot of things around the house which could kill you if misused that badly. How many people are hurt every year because they dropped a hair dryer in the tub? Or tried to fix the fuse box themselves? Or used a table-saw while drinking? Or tried to clear a lawnmower blade without shutting it down?
If that kid had died from spearing his iPod battery, he would have been a Darwin Award candidate.
Anyone know why Apple made the ipod without a replaceable battery?
Wrong question. The question you need to ask first is:
Is the Apple iPod battery replaceable?
And the answer is: Fuck yes!
First of all, there are iPods that are under warrantee. The Apple Warrantee on iPods goes for a year. If you buy the AppleCare extended warrantee on it, it goes for three.
If the battery fails under warrantee, Apple replaces it at zero cost.
If the battery fails after the warrantee has ended, you can replace it yourself very easily. Newer Technology sells batteries for the iPod for $25 - $40 (depending on the model) which actually outlast the originals, and they include a free tool for opening the case and complete instructions.
As long as you follow the directions, the trickiest part is making sure you don't yank the HD ribbon cable in half. It's really no more delicate an operation that installing an AirPort card in that slot under the keyboard of the iBook.
So, to recap: Under warrantee == Free battery replacement installed for you Out of warrantee == Cheap battery replacement you can easily do at home.
About thirty bucks is not cost-effective enough for you!?
Fuck, you even end up with a better battery than the original.
This is yet another frivolous lawsuit where the corporation took the settlement because making it go away was more important to them than winning. Expect the next round of iPod price cuts to be delayed while Apple tries to make that money back. Fucking scumwad lawyers.
Another interesting fact is that at heart Steve isn't really a computer user.
It took somebody who was capable of using a CLI yet still hated it to deliver something better to the masses. Sure, Xerox PARC thought of the GUI, but Jobs was the one who realized that it really was the future.
I don't think I would ever want have that jerk over for dinner, but last year when Steve Jobs had pancriatic cancer the first thought to enter my mind was, "ah fuck... If Jobs dies, all computers will gradually start to completely suck again."
Just look at what happened to Apple when Jobs was not there. But at least then, he was still part of the game, as the CEO of Next.
Now imagine when he's no longer a part of the computer industry at all. We will desperately need a new tyrant/hippie/poser/flim-flam artist/asshole to come along and push the envelope again, and from the time he retires or dies to the time another freak like that steps up, the whole industry is probably doomed to stagnate and will probably even regress.
Now where's that barrel of Kool-ade?
Re:Ooooooohhhhhh yeeeeaaah!!!! / Duffman
on
Photoshop for DNA
·
· Score: 1
I see no possible way how this could lead to trouble. Michael Chrichton will get three or four books outta this one!
Two or three of which will be made into crappy blockbusters which will make the person sitting next to you at the coffee shop foolishly consider themselves well-informed on the topic.
The thing is though, addiction is considered a disease.
Only by those in the business of selling "treatments."
If Heroin addiction is a disease, it's hard to cure, but a very easy one to manage pharmaceutically: Simply take a daily intravenous dose of heroin. Raise dosage and frequency as needed.
Their study of 4,012 adults in the twenty largest U.S. cities found that 41% of respondents start the day by checking their email. On the average, respondents admitted to checking their email five times a day.
I bet a survey in 1970 would show that well over 60% of people would have said that they started the day by reading the newspaper. Were they addicted to newspapers?
Well, yes. That's why they call the accused "the accused", because somebody's accusing them of doing something wrong.
If there is evidence of wrongdoing, an investigation is the right thing to have happen, and partisan action from the other party should come as a surprise to nobody. A lot of people who are full of vitrol over Democratic partisanship right now were equally nasty during the months leading up to Clinton's impeachment.
The thing about law-makers is, most of them are lawyers. They have the notion of being blindly loyal advocates for "their side" pretty much woven into the fabric of their being.
It's up to us, as voters, to apply our own sense of reason to their arguments, and not get swept up in this us-vs-them bandwagon (which I like to call the "sports fan" mentality in politics.)
This whole conversation reminds me a lot of when Ken Starr was accused of being part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" in spite of the fact that he was the investigator who brought down Republican Senator Bob Packwood just a few years earlier.
Attacking the accuser is an old game, and both sides love to play it.
Regarding the current investigation into DeLay. I don't think there's much there. Certainly less damning than the campaign contributions which Al Gore was alledged to have raised from donors in Communist China back in the 1990s. This will ammount to a tempest in a teapot.
DeLay will stay in office, Howard Dean will manage to raise a few extra bucks for future campaigns by beating the drum over DeLay's alleged "corruption", and life will go on. Can we get back to talking about NASA?
(I made a little Applescript Droplet and placed it on the Dock so I that I can just drop a directory containing a ripped DVD on it, and it plays. It can't get much simpler.)
Tip: It can get a little simpler. There's a nifty shareware app out there called "Matinee" which is a VIDEO_TS folder launcher for OS X. It looks nice, and since it's all push-button controlled, you can program the Keyspan Remote to work with it.
The more I look at the mini, the more sure I am that Apple really believed that the #1 buyer for this thing would be PC users who wanted to keep their Windows (or Linux) box and plug the mini into a KVM.
While I'm sure they are happy that the things are selling like hotcakes to people who want to use it as their main desktop system, as a media console, as a "second mac", as a car-mounted computer, etc., but I think they might have done a few things slightly differently if they thought that was the case.
My "wish list" for a v.2 Mac mini (excluding the usual performance hikes which one would expect down the road), would be: optical digital audio out, mic and/or line in audio, and the option to buy a slightly cheaper & smaller one with some of the built-in peripherals removed (modem, Ethernet card, CD/DVD drive, etc.)
Only because people like you politicize it. Anybody who is capable of math and looks closely at it knows that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
which is false
Even the most optimistic and pie-in-the-sky Social Security cheerleaders insist that it will take massive tax hikes and/or draconian cuts to keep Social Security in the black beyond 2040, and God help us all if there's even one more recession during that 35-year interval.
and uses an argument from the Bush administration's bag.
Nice ad hominem. "Look, a polarizing political leader is saying the same thing! It must be extremist dogma!!!"
Rational people on both sides have been pointing out the gaping maw of the coming Social Security collapse for decades now. Hell, half the justification for Clinton's largest tax hike was to "save social security for another 20 years."
I say castration is in order.
I can understand if you don't want to bring kids into the world. It would be nice to know for sure that your bitter rage to die with you... but they can do vascectomies these days. No need to go to such extremes.
I expect you to support a comment like that, with a WWW.GNAA.US link under your username
I don't know what GNAA is, but this sounds like another worthless ad hominem. Do you happen to have any evidence to support your point (such as it is)?
Slashdot Mirror
VPC was never very useful for anything beyond a testbed platform for Mac-using developpers who need to run their apps in Windows. It was simply too slow.
Being able to run Windows apps at native speed on a Mac without changing desktop environments (and without buying additional software) would be huge.
Some people will probably want to dual-boot, at least initially.
But let's go on a brief flight of fancy here.
Suppose Apple were to create a new fork of WINE to run natively in the Aqua environment, and pour a whole bunch of development time into tweaking and improving it (sort of like how they forked the K browser to make Safari.)
Suddenly the Macintosh becomes a box which can run damn near all Windows apps and damn near all Linux apps, without ever leaving OS X.
At that point, there are only three groups of people who would ever have any reason to run something other than OS X: Platform bigots, open-source zealots, and penny-pinchers. Granted, those three groups comprise a significant portion of the market, but think of how many more there are out there.
A conversation which goes on about 20 times a day in big-box computer stores:
"I need a new computer, and my nephew says Macs are good. Do you have them?"
"Yes, we carry a few, but keep in mind that Macs can't run Windows software. If your old computer ran Microsoft Windows, you will need to buy all new software."
"Oh. Well what's good then?"
Suddenly the #1 reason why people who consider Macs go with something else evaporates.
That doesn't address the #2 reason (cost), but I think it will still make a huge difference in future Macintosh market share.
Bah!
The only reason this is a "top spot" is because, unlike many of the top media and technology companies, they are traded on NYSE instead of NASDAQ.
If they were a NASDAQ company, would anybody think that "Google stock now worth slightly more than Time/Warner stock" counts as news?
Sorry kids, they are still a smaller company than the eeeeeeevil one over in Redmond that manufactures full-screen error messages.
That is assuming that both designs have equal resources pouring into them. In other words, that all variables save design are controled.
The whole point of the argument is that you can never make that assumption. You can pretty much count on the fact that, in the real world, the "dirty" design will have more resources being poured into it, because it's the one with the installed base.
Is it a better initial design? No.
Will it evolve faster? As it turns out, yes.
The difference is, IBM owned the BIOS, but not the OS.
The company making the OS for IBM computers (Microsoft) had a direct interest in seeing to it that "IBM Clones" (as they were called back then) worked seamlessly with MS-DOS and Windows.
Apple owns both. They could, if they had to, continually update their OS to:
1. Detect knock-off ROMS and ignore them.
2. Re-flash the ROM periodically... possibly even crippling the "fake" ones.
3. Read motherboard serial numbers and phone home.
4. Any of a number of other options to render unauthorized clones useless.
This will make the task of reverse engineering the Apple ROM monumentally difficult. And what would a company get for doing so? A chance to bite in to a small piece of a very small pie (the Mac market.)
No chance of such a thing happening unless Macintosh market share suddenly baloons deep into double-digits... and even then, not much of a chance.
So long as Apple makes their margins on hardware, they are not going to let it happen.
... or as my brother likes to say it, "even a blind squirrel can find his nuts."
John C. Dvorak is pretty quick off the blocks with a response to the news that Apple intend to switch to Intel processors.
Of course he was. He wrote his response five years ago... The first time he thought Apple was about to switch to Intel.
(He's still waiting for the chance to publish his "response" to Apple becoming a software-only company.)
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Okay, so now John Dvorak has been right exactly once. That just means that he might be a broken 24-hour clock with a date counter.
Sure, that's fine for two years from now, but who in their right mind - besides collectors - would buy a PPC Mac between then and now?
If I buy a shiny G4 iBook today it had better be at 1/2 the price it was yesterday because I'll have to be running new software through an emulator tomorrow.
The whole advantage of universal binaries is that they run on both platforms. It's not just a means to speed adoption of "Mactel," it's also a way to ensure that G4 and G5 systems will continue to be useful for years to come.
Hey, PowerPC was (and still is, really) a great platform concept.
But people don't buy computers for the concept. The x86 world beat out the PPC world when it comes to consumer chips by simply doing a better job of implementation. While IBM was promising 3 GHz performance that they couldn't deliver, Intel was cranking out a new chip which offers more performance per Watt on laptops than the "insanely great" G4.
x86 didn't look like it had a hell of a lot of potential three years ago, but AMD and Intel kept pounding. A good old "three yards and a cloud of dust" attack won the game.
When the new G5 towers were rolled out two years ago with the promise of hitting 3 GHz within a year, we annoying Mac Zealots practically creamed ourselves. G4 and G5 chips did outperform Intel offerings at the time on a per-clock-cycle basis.
However, two things happened since then to change all that.
First of all, IBM dropped the ball. Badly. It's been two years, and the G5 is just now hitting 2.7 GHz.
Secondly, Intel came out with a new line of notebook CPUs which kick G4 ass six ways from Sunday, and the G5 is simply to hot and power hungry to consider in a laptop. Powerbooks are absolutely vital to Apple's present and future. They've always been leaders in notebook hardware, and it's simply killing them that they've been losing that edge.
So the choice for Apple is: Stick with G5 and continue to stagnate, or change. Given that they've decided to change, they wisely decided to give their devs a year to ramp up for it.
This has the added bonus of pimping their Xcode and Apple Dev licenses to software houses which have been using Metroworks Codewarrior up until now. Win-win, as far as Apple is concerned.
Apple's software is ready to run on Intel today.
Adobe's software is ready to run on Intel today.
MS's software will be ready to runon Intel "RSN."
A dev of Mathematica ported it to Intel in two hours to show off at the Stevenote.
By the time you find yourself compelled to buy an Intel-based Mac (one and a half to two years from now), all the software you own will probably already be "universal binary" stuff without you even being aware of it. In fact, if you are an OS X user, some of it already is, and you weren't aware of it.
The few remaining apps will run through the Rosetta emulator just fine (such as the old version of Photoshop, which was demo'd on an Intel Mac at the Stevenote.)
For customers, this will be damn near transparent. Relax. Breath. It will be okay.
You have plenty of time. The rumors were only half-true.
Apple is adopting Intel, but is not "ditching" IBM.
New G5 towers will still be around for at least another year, and probably at least two. Intel is probably going to start by replacing the G4 CPUs in Powerbooks and minis.
At the Stevenote, he informed devs that they would be supporting both platforms for a long time to come.
When computers respond correctly to human language, then the "caveman interface" will no longer be needed.
If I had a dollar for every time a technology professional had to stop and think for a while, then check an O'Reilly "nutshell" book or a man page, simply because he couldn't remember an obscure command in DOS or *sh that the situation called for, I would be far richer than Bill Gates.
CLI's are terrific if you've been using them full-time for ten years. For example, I like working in bash, and can get a lot done fairly quickly in that environment. (I still have to look things up every now and again, though.)
For everybody else, they suck, and there's no indication that they will improve much anytime soon. Any interface that sucks for everybody who doesn't spend years learning it... just plain sucks.
Is there something that will come along and be better than the GUI? Damn, I sure hope so. Was it a big step forward? Hell, yeah.
Aren't these the same batteries (ipod) that tend to EXPLODE?
No. To get them explode you must:
1. Get them wet.
2. Jam a screwdriver straight into them.
I have a lot of things around the house which could kill you if misused that badly. How many people are hurt every year because they dropped a hair dryer in the tub? Or tried to fix the fuse box themselves? Or used a table-saw while drinking? Or tried to clear a lawnmower blade without shutting it down?
If that kid had died from spearing his iPod battery, he would have been a Darwin Award candidate.
Anyone know why Apple made the ipod without a replaceable battery?
Wrong question. The question you need to ask first is:
Is the Apple iPod battery replaceable?
And the answer is: Fuck yes!
First of all, there are iPods that are under warrantee. The Apple Warrantee on iPods goes for a year. If you buy the AppleCare extended warrantee on it, it goes for three.
If the battery fails under warrantee, Apple replaces it at zero cost.
If the battery fails after the warrantee has ended, you can replace it yourself very easily. Newer Technology sells batteries for the iPod for $25 - $40 (depending on the model) which actually outlast the originals, and they include a free tool for opening the case and complete instructions.
As long as you follow the directions, the trickiest part is making sure you don't yank the HD ribbon cable in half. It's really no more delicate an operation that installing an AirPort card in that slot under the keyboard of the iBook.
So, to recap:
Under warrantee == Free battery replacement installed for you
Out of warrantee == Cheap battery replacement you can easily do at home.
Any other questions?
the rest of the issue is the inability to replace the battery (at least cost-effectively).
Ahem
About thirty bucks is not cost-effective enough for you!?
Fuck, you even end up with a better battery than the original.
This is yet another frivolous lawsuit where the corporation took the settlement because making it go away was more important to them than winning. Expect the next round of iPod price cuts to be delayed while Apple tries to make that money back. Fucking scumwad lawyers.
Another interesting fact is that at heart Steve isn't really a computer user.
It took somebody who was capable of using a CLI yet still hated it to deliver something better to the masses. Sure, Xerox PARC thought of the GUI, but Jobs was the one who realized that it really was the future.
I don't think I would ever want have that jerk over for dinner, but last year when Steve Jobs had pancriatic cancer the first thought to enter my mind was, "ah fuck... If Jobs dies, all computers will gradually start to completely suck again."
Just look at what happened to Apple when Jobs was not there. But at least then, he was still part of the game, as the CEO of Next.
Now imagine when he's no longer a part of the computer industry at all. We will desperately need a new tyrant/hippie/poser/flim-flam artist/asshole to come along and push the envelope again, and from the time he retires or dies to the time another freak like that steps up, the whole industry is probably doomed to stagnate and will probably even regress.
Now where's that barrel of Kool-ade?
I see no possible way how this could lead to trouble. Michael Chrichton will get three or four books outta this one!
Two or three of which will be made into crappy blockbusters which will make the person sitting next to you at the coffee shop foolishly consider themselves well-informed on the topic.
The thing is though, addiction is considered a disease.
Only by those in the business of selling "treatments."
If Heroin addiction is a disease, it's hard to cure, but a very easy one to manage pharmaceutically: Simply take a daily intravenous dose of heroin. Raise dosage and frequency as needed.
Their study of 4,012 adults in the twenty largest U.S. cities found that 41% of respondents start the day by checking their email. On the average, respondents admitted to checking their email five times a day.
I bet a survey in 1970 would show that well over 60% of people would have said that they started the day by reading the newspaper. Were they addicted to newspapers?
What a bullshit non-story. Sheesh.
Attacking the accused is an even older game.
Well, yes. That's why they call the accused "the accused", because somebody's accusing them of doing something wrong.
If there is evidence of wrongdoing, an investigation is the right thing to have happen, and partisan action from the other party should come as a surprise to nobody. A lot of people who are full of vitrol over Democratic partisanship right now were equally nasty during the months leading up to Clinton's impeachment.
The thing about law-makers is, most of them are lawyers. They have the notion of being blindly loyal advocates for "their side" pretty much woven into the fabric of their being.
It's up to us, as voters, to apply our own sense of reason to their arguments, and not get swept up in this us-vs-them bandwagon (which I like to call the "sports fan" mentality in politics.)
This whole conversation reminds me a lot of when Ken Starr was accused of being part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" in spite of the fact that he was the investigator who brought down Republican Senator Bob Packwood just a few years earlier.
Attacking the accuser is an old game, and both sides love to play it.
Regarding the current investigation into DeLay. I don't think there's much there. Certainly less damning than the campaign contributions which Al Gore was alledged to have raised from donors in Communist China back in the 1990s. This will ammount to a tempest in a teapot.
DeLay will stay in office, Howard Dean will manage to raise a few extra bucks for future campaigns by beating the drum over DeLay's alleged "corruption", and life will go on. Can we get back to talking about NASA?
(I made a little Applescript Droplet and placed it on the Dock so I that I can just drop a directory containing a ripped DVD on it, and it plays. It can't get much simpler.)
Tip: It can get a little simpler. There's a nifty shareware app out there called "Matinee" which is a VIDEO_TS folder launcher for OS X. It looks nice, and since it's all push-button controlled, you can program the Keyspan Remote to work with it.
The more I look at the mini, the more sure I am that Apple really believed that the #1 buyer for this thing would be PC users who wanted to keep their Windows (or Linux) box and plug the mini into a KVM.
While I'm sure they are happy that the things are selling like hotcakes to people who want to use it as their main desktop system, as a media console, as a "second mac", as a car-mounted computer, etc., but I think they might have done a few things slightly differently if they thought that was the case.
My "wish list" for a v.2 Mac mini (excluding the usual performance hikes which one would expect down the road), would be: optical digital audio out, mic and/or line in audio, and the option to buy a slightly cheaper & smaller one with some of the built-in peripherals removed (modem, Ethernet card, CD/DVD drive, etc.)
Totally political post
Only because people like you politicize it. Anybody who is capable of math and looks closely at it knows that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
which is false
Even the most optimistic and pie-in-the-sky Social Security cheerleaders insist that it will take massive tax hikes and/or draconian cuts to keep Social Security in the black beyond 2040, and God help us all if there's even one more recession during that 35-year interval.
and uses an argument from the Bush administration's bag.
Nice ad hominem. "Look, a polarizing political leader is saying the same thing! It must be extremist dogma!!!"
Rational people on both sides have been pointing out the gaping maw of the coming Social Security collapse for decades now. Hell, half the justification for Clinton's largest tax hike was to "save social security for another 20 years."
I say castration is in order.
I can understand if you don't want to bring kids into the world. It would be nice to know for sure that your bitter rage to die with you... but they can do vascectomies these days. No need to go to such extremes.
I expect you to support a comment like that, with a WWW.GNAA.US link under your username
I don't know what GNAA is, but this sounds like another worthless ad hominem. Do you happen to have any evidence to support your point (such as it is)?