Holy crap, I just noticed that your E1505 is not even a Core 2 Duo, like what is standard on all current MacBooks, Pro and otherwise.
So, while you are fantasizing that your Inspiron offers the value of a MacBook Pro for less money, it is, in fact, inferior to the bottom-of-the-line regular MacBook.
But hey, you saved $200 by buying a slower laptop with a lower-quality LCD, and it has a keyboard which you (strangely) like better. Good for you.
The closest thing Dell offers to the home market to the MacBook Pro is the "XPS M1710", which they sell for $2,299. Your Inspiron, with it's slower CPU and lack of dedicated GPU memory, is not in the same category as the Pro or the XPS.
Personally, I use the MacBook keyboard for hours on end, and my hands don't hurt at all. I actually type a little faster on my MacBook than I do on the Dell I sometimes use at work. Like I said, it's the nicest keyboard I ever owned. Is there something odd about your typing habits which may have been causing your hands to hurt?
Yea right. Not. It'd be so much easier for photographers to carry a Macbook Pro when they go out to do a shoot.
What does a photographer gain for the $800 premium of the MacBook Pro over the trusty MacBook?
Unless you are doing all your photography at night... then I suppose the light-up keyboard would save you the trouble of holding one of those key-chain flashlights in your teeth while you are typing. If that's worth $800 to you, congratulations. Can I come hang out in one of your many mansions sometime?
Google (ubuntu hardware compatibility) didn't turn up much. Where is this list of laptops that are known to work with, say, Ubuntu?
Unless you live in a cave in the mountains of Montana, there are probably several people in your sphere of influence who already use Linux on laptops. Just ask what they are using.
Besides, we are talking modern laptops here. As long as you are buying from a major manufacturer, how many actual hardware options are there? Everybody has their laptops built in the same two Singapore factories using one of two company's CPUs, one of three company's GPU's, and everything else built to industry standards. It's nothing like the endless variety of the desktop market.
I don't use Linux much myself these days, but I would be surprised if a laptop has come off the line in the last couple years from Dell, Toshiba, Sony, HP, or even Apple which could not run linux and have all the basic built-in hardware (including sound card, Wi-Fi, etc.) work just fine.
but if you have that kind of money to throw around [to buy a high-end laptop computer,] it might be simpler to just have desktop systems installed and waiting at every location you will ever go to.
Like buses or trains?
People who can afford $2000 laptops don't need to ride the bus. Unless you are talking about the private shuttle which takes them from the terminal to their helicopter pad. ^_~
Actually, it's the best laptop keyboard I've ever owned. (A HELL of a lot better than the crappy keyboard on the Dell Latitude D620 I got from my company.) Not only is it nice to type on, it's much easier to keep it clean, since bagel crumbs and hair can't fall under the keys. I also like how the keys recess when I close the lid. It's the first laptop I've ever owned that didn't eventually end up with a silhouette of the keyboard etched on the screen surface.
I still call shenanigans on the original post, however. He's afraid Linux won't work with his current hardware, so he wants to run out and buy a MacBook for OS X??? B.S.
If you like Linux, and are willing to buy new hardware, just buy a Laptop that's known to work with Linux. For that matter, it's free to try out on the hardware you have. Maybe there are no problems to worry about. Either way, problem solved.
I ***love*** OS X, but if you are not interested in certain non-Linux software (such as Apple's Garageband, which kicks all kinds of ass), then Linux is a perfectly fine choice, IMHO.
I still wouldn't recommend Linux to my white-haired aunt, but for anybody who is enough of a geek to be reading DRM arguments on/. it's fine.
That said, if you are buying a laptop, the MacBook offers a lot of ! for the $.
The MacBook Pro is not as good of a value. It's a sensational laptop, but if you have that kind of money to throw around it might be simpler to just have desktop systems installed and waiting at every location you will ever go to.
Re:Cell providers are the problem, not the phone
on
Inside Apple's iPhone
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· Score: 1
I've been saying the same thing ever since these rumors started popping up. I don't give a crap about most of the "features" of modern mobile phones, but I refuse to give up the 80 GB capacity, gapless playback, video support, and playlists of my iPod.
Graft a simple phone to a fully-featured iPod (or PDA which handles music just as well as an iPod) and you've captured my dollars.
Graft a simple MP3 player on a phone, and I wont bother. I'm way better off toting around my iPod and RAZR together.
Where would my own useless mental database of knowledge about Green Lantern and Mobile Suit Gundam be without fanboys?
I think you can stop talking about them in the third person.
Re:Must just be the majors. The indies are thrivin
on
iTunes Sales 'Collapsing'
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Did it ever occur to anyone that many people probably splurged on legal tunes that they already loved and owned to get it onto their iPod (or whatever).
Why would anybody buy a song they already own on CD???
Ripping a song from CD to either AAC or Apple Lossless is faster than downloading via a typical broadband connection.
iTMS is awesome for a very specific purpose: 1-hit wonders.
Anybody who makes an album of consistently good music, I'd rather hunt down a used CD and rip it to a Lossless file, but if I only want one or two songs from a particular artist ever, and I'm not too fussy about hi-fi sound, then $1 per song is a good deal.
Why don't they have the simple technology to simulate the lasers shots and explosions like they have on Star Wars with their on board computers to give the pilot a better 3D spacial reference of the battle with sound effects?
Well, for starters, their ship didn't even have guns...
Since Firefly depicted the vacuum of space as proper silence, the lack of a music soundtrack would have people wondering if the sound cut off on their TV sets. Some music was needed to seamlessly cut from environments with air to those without it.
Relying on external links too heavily for depth would kill Wikipedia's usefulness, because the massive rate of churn on the Internet would pretty much make wiki pages nearly impossible to maintain. In a matter of months, half the reference links would be broken. 15,000 words, while seemingly excessive, takes up very little storage space (in modern terms) and a lot fewer headaches than linking to some external dissertation.
It sounds to me like the point of failure in both cases was the hard drive.
And almost every MP3 player on the market uses either the Samsung or the Toshiba. No matter what you buy, the failure rate of the drive will be about the same.
Instead of buying another player, why not look into dropping a new drive into your current one. It's not hard to do (I just did it with an old, beat-up 3G iPod of my own), and instructions are all over them internets out there.
Consensus. If all the other cars on the road are going 60 and you are going 40, then you are the problem, regardless of what the posted limit is.
If you must drive slower than the flow (say, if you are hauling a trailer which can't be hauled safely above certain speeds, or are having some kind of engine trouble), at least have the good sense to move over to the far-right lane. You might even want to turn your hazard lights on under such circumstances.
If somebody publishes a 15,000-word wiki on the 1970s NBC show "Cliffhangers", it's not like Wikipedia suddenly takes up more space on my bookshelf. Personally, I love that there's so much obscure crap on Wikipedia. Somebody on Fark mentioned some way-out there pop culture reference I never heard of, and Wiki has me up-to-speed in a matter of seconds. How can this possibly be a Bad Thing?
(Unless you are a journalist for a dying media with an axe to grind, that is...)
So, it's the people driving over the speed limit who are causing the differential. If they obeyed the law, then there wouldn't be a problem.
No, it's people who refuse to drive with the flow of traffic who are causing the differential. If everybody else on the road is driving 10 mph over the posted limit, and you are driving right at the limit, then you are the one making the roads less safe.
Every driver should make it their primary goal to never force any other car to change speeds to accommodate them. That's not possible 100% of the time, but if everybody strived towards that ideal, there would be a lot fewer accidents.
Also, I wouldn't have to keep disengaging my cruise control because a handful of dipshits on the highway don't know how to play well with others.
You won't find many 30 year old gamers calling the GameCube or Wii "kiddie".
37, and my half-joking use of the word "kiddie" is what kicked off this discussion in the first place (and also singularly got me down-modded as a troll by reactionaries like you.)
I'm assuming here that you mean that as an insult. If not, move on to my next paragraphs.
Actually, I meant it as a throw-away cheap shot that had nothing to do with my main point, but Wii fanboys are hypersensitive enough that you all seemed to zero in on it.
If so, it's a pretty weak one. I don't know what one would describe as a kiddie game, but I hope you don't define it as silly graphics and no blood.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth so you can knock down a straw man, ass.
Otherwise Chess, Poker, Go, Tetris, Pac-Man, etc., etc., etc., would all be considered kiddie by you even though they are some of the most popular games ever.
Here it goes. I observe that many of Nintendo's biggest hits look like digitized Fisher Price toys with nursery-rhyme-sounding music tracks and a level of simplicity which is CLEARLY targeted at 9-year olds, and therefore I must be a teenager who craves blood and gore in all things and thinks Poker and Go are "kiddie" games. How arrogant are you???
Not to mention that Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness aren't what I would call suitable for kiddies.
Wait... I thought we considered games like that the sort of thing which has no redeeming value, and games where plumers jump over barrels and throw mushrooms at really cute monsters is what REALLY appeals to adults. Which is it?
But then you probably think Wind Waker is kiddie because it has cartoony graphics, rather than base it on its gameplay.
Never played it, so I couldn't say. I googled it. Apparantly it's yet another Zelda game, but this time looking like the animation from the really crappy post-"Lion King" Disney movies. Maybe I'll try it out after I snap up a Gamecube for $20 while all the fanboys are spending two weeks of lunch money on their precious Wii.
If a game is fun (I assume that you think kiddie games are not fun)
Again... never said anything of the sort.
for you for any other reason than gameplay, then you're not much of a reliable source for game information.
If you think that current controllers are simple, you haven't tried to teach a middle-aged woman to play a modern video game.
First of all, I know lots of middle-aged women who play console games. Thanks for the chauvinism, jerk.
Secondly, if you think a middle-aged woman (or anyone else) who is confused by a D-pad is even going to pick up and attempt a Wii-mote, you are seriously deluded. The Wii will sell... to the same Mario-kart addicts that bought the Game Cube the last time around.
The idea that non-gamers are suddenly going to be throwing cartoon mushrooms around because of a quirky new controller is pure fantasy.
Buying and using a game machine does not make one a gamer
Actually, that's exactly what it does.
A "gamer" is a person who plays games. A person who spends more than the price of an expensive lunch on game-playing is clearly somebody who fits that definition. There are millions of people out there who do not.
Of the 100,000,000+ consoles that are sold in the world the vast majority of them are sold to casual gamers and "non-gamers."
That's the most ridiculous statement I've heard all month.
Anybody who spends hundreds of dollars on a machine for the sole purpose of playing games is, by definition, a gamer.
Non-gamers do not buy game machines. They might play a simple game on their phone or PC, but they are not going to spend money to hook up a special box to their TV set, then spend $50 a pop beyond that for games, and learn how to drive a Mario Kart with a pair of sticks. They just won't. You've been suckered by Nintendo marketing and astroturfing if you honestly think they will.
Notice how most of those buyers don't have much of a bid history?
You are not looking at what the consoles are selling for. You are looking at what scam artists trying to create a market are making it look like they are selling for.
The top bidder has only existed since May, and is "no longer a registered user."
The #2 and #3 purchases are from the same person. Are you telling me there's somebody out there who wants to spend almost $20,000 on two $600 game consoles? Do you think anybody actually believes that's what's going on here?
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Functionally, it's no different than had he donated the notebook to the EFF directly for them to auction off.
Functionally, donating the proceeds gained from selling it is very different from giving it away to somebody.
For one thing, it's a tax write-off. For another, it's outside the scope of the agreement he made when he accepted it.
It wasn't a legally binding agreement, but it's still a dishonest thing to do. Resale is resale, regardless of what you're doing with the money.
Holy crap, I just noticed that your E1505 is not even a Core 2 Duo, like what is standard on all current MacBooks, Pro and otherwise.
So, while you are fantasizing that your Inspiron offers the value of a MacBook Pro for less money, it is, in fact, inferior to the bottom-of-the-line regular MacBook.
But hey, you saved $200 by buying a slower laptop with a lower-quality LCD, and it has a keyboard which you (strangely) like better. Good for you.
The closest thing Dell offers to the home market to the MacBook Pro is the "XPS M1710", which they sell for $2,299. Your Inspiron, with it's slower CPU and lack of dedicated GPU memory, is not in the same category as the Pro or the XPS.
Personally, I use the MacBook keyboard for hours on end, and my hands don't hurt at all. I actually type a little faster on my MacBook than I do on the Dell I sometimes use at work. Like I said, it's the nicest keyboard I ever owned. Is there something odd about your typing habits which may have been causing your hands to hurt?
My Inspiron cost (after some phone haggling) $850 or so. An equivalent PowerB--er, sorry, MacBook Pro--would be about $2000.
"Equivalent" MacBook Pro!? What are you smoking?
The E1505 looks a lot like a MacBook, with a few missing features.
Also, Dell lists it at $1219. You must have bought a used or refurb model off eBay or something. Froogle reported one available on eBay for $899
He's not giving it away, he's selling it. What he does with the money doesn't change that.
If a blogger wants to write a savage review of Vista, that's awesome. I hate Microsoft, and enjoy seeing them fail.
If a blogger wants to donate his own money to the EFF, that's also awesome. The EFF rocks, and deserves our support.
If a blogger wants to sell something which he accepted on the condition that he would "return, give away, or keep", that's dishonest.
Yea right. Not. It'd be so much easier for photographers to carry a Macbook Pro when they go out to do a shoot.
What does a photographer gain for the $800 premium of the MacBook Pro over the trusty MacBook?
Unless you are doing all your photography at night... then I suppose the light-up keyboard would save you the trouble of holding one of those key-chain flashlights in your teeth while you are typing. If that's worth $800 to you, congratulations. Can I come hang out in one of your many mansions sometime?
Unless you live in a cave in the mountains of Montana, there are probably several people in your sphere of influence who already use Linux on laptops. Just ask what they are using.
Besides, we are talking modern laptops here. As long as you are buying from a major manufacturer, how many actual hardware options are there? Everybody has their laptops built in the same two Singapore factories using one of two company's CPUs, one of three company's GPU's, and everything else built to industry standards. It's nothing like the endless variety of the desktop market.
I don't use Linux much myself these days, but I would be surprised if a laptop has come off the line in the last couple years from Dell, Toshiba, Sony, HP, or even Apple which could not run linux and have all the basic built-in hardware (including sound card, Wi-Fi, etc.) work just fine.
Like buses or trains?
People who can afford $2000 laptops don't need to ride the bus. Unless you are talking about the private shuttle which takes them from the terminal to their helicopter pad. ^_~
Actually, it's the best laptop keyboard I've ever owned. (A HELL of a lot better than the crappy keyboard on the Dell Latitude D620 I got from my company.) Not only is it nice to type on, it's much easier to keep it clean, since bagel crumbs and hair can't fall under the keys. I also like how the keys recess when I close the lid. It's the first laptop I've ever owned that didn't eventually end up with a silhouette of the keyboard etched on the screen surface.
/. it's fine.
I still call shenanigans on the original post, however. He's afraid Linux won't work with his current hardware, so he wants to run out and buy a MacBook for OS X??? B.S.
If you like Linux, and are willing to buy new hardware, just buy a Laptop that's known to work with Linux. For that matter, it's free to try out on the hardware you have. Maybe there are no problems to worry about. Either way, problem solved.
I ***love*** OS X, but if you are not interested in certain non-Linux software (such as Apple's Garageband, which kicks all kinds of ass), then Linux is a perfectly fine choice, IMHO.
I still wouldn't recommend Linux to my white-haired aunt, but for anybody who is enough of a geek to be reading DRM arguments on
That said, if you are buying a laptop, the MacBook offers a lot of ! for the $.
The MacBook Pro is not as good of a value. It's a sensational laptop, but if you have that kind of money to throw around it might be simpler to just have desktop systems installed and waiting at every location you will ever go to.
I've been saying the same thing ever since these rumors started popping up. I don't give a crap about most of the "features" of modern mobile phones, but I refuse to give up the 80 GB capacity, gapless playback, video support, and playlists of my iPod.
Graft a simple phone to a fully-featured iPod (or PDA which handles music just as well as an iPod) and you've captured my dollars.
Graft a simple MP3 player on a phone, and I wont bother. I'm way better off toting around my iPod and RAZR together.
Where would my own useless mental database of knowledge about Green Lantern and Mobile Suit Gundam be without fanboys?
I think you can stop talking about them in the third person.
Did it ever occur to anyone that many people probably splurged on legal tunes that they already loved and owned to get it onto their iPod (or whatever).
Why would anybody buy a song they already own on CD???
Ripping a song from CD to either AAC or Apple Lossless is faster than downloading via a typical broadband connection.
iTMS is awesome for a very specific purpose: 1-hit wonders.
Anybody who makes an album of consistently good music, I'd rather hunt down a used CD and rip it to a Lossless file, but if I only want one or two songs from a particular artist ever, and I'm not too fussy about hi-fi sound, then $1 per song is a good deal.
Why don't they have the simple technology to simulate the lasers shots and explosions like they have on Star Wars with their on board computers to give the pilot a better 3D spacial reference of the battle with sound effects?
Well, for starters, their ship didn't even have guns...
Since Firefly depicted the vacuum of space as proper silence, the lack of a music soundtrack would have people wondering if the sound cut off on their TV sets. Some music was needed to seamlessly cut from environments with air to those without it.
Relying on external links too heavily for depth would kill Wikipedia's usefulness, because the massive rate of churn on the Internet would pretty much make wiki pages nearly impossible to maintain. In a matter of months, half the reference links would be broken. 15,000 words, while seemingly excessive, takes up very little storage space (in modern terms) and a lot fewer headaches than linking to some external dissertation.
It sounds to me like the point of failure in both cases was the hard drive.
And almost every MP3 player on the market uses either the Samsung or the Toshiba. No matter what you buy, the failure rate of the drive will be about the same.
Instead of buying another player, why not look into dropping a new drive into your current one. It's not hard to do (I just did it with an old, beat-up 3G iPod of my own), and instructions are all over them internets out there.
Who gets to decide that, though?
Consensus. If all the other cars on the road are going 60 and you are going 40, then you are the problem, regardless of what the posted limit is.
If you must drive slower than the flow (say, if you are hauling a trailer which can't be hauled safely above certain speeds, or are having some kind of engine trouble), at least have the good sense to move over to the far-right lane. You might even want to turn your hazard lights on under such circumstances.
The real question here is:
Why is cruft a problem???
If somebody publishes a 15,000-word wiki on the 1970s NBC show "Cliffhangers", it's not like Wikipedia suddenly takes up more space on my bookshelf. Personally, I love that there's so much obscure crap on Wikipedia. Somebody on Fark mentioned some way-out there pop culture reference I never heard of, and Wiki has me up-to-speed in a matter of seconds. How can this possibly be a Bad Thing?
(Unless you are a journalist for a dying media with an axe to grind, that is...)
Differentials in speed cause accidents.
So, it's the people driving over the speed limit who are causing the differential. If they obeyed the law, then there wouldn't be a problem.
No, it's people who refuse to drive with the flow of traffic who are causing the differential. If everybody else on the road is driving 10 mph over the posted limit, and you are driving right at the limit, then you are the one making the roads less safe.
Every driver should make it their primary goal to never force any other car to change speeds to accommodate them. That's not possible 100% of the time, but if everybody strived towards that ideal, there would be a lot fewer accidents.
Also, I wouldn't have to keep disengaging my cruise control because a handful of dipshits on the highway don't know how to play well with others.
Perhaps because "M" is the roman numeral for 1000, and a million is a thousand thousands.
:)
That's just a guess.
Ah... Wiki to the rescue:
Hey, lookie there! I was right.
You won't find many 30 year old gamers calling the GameCube or Wii "kiddie".
37, and my half-joking use of the word "kiddie" is what kicked off this discussion in the first place (and also singularly got me down-modded as a troll by reactionaries like you.)
I'm assuming here that you mean that as an insult. If not, move on to my next paragraphs.
Actually, I meant it as a throw-away cheap shot that had nothing to do with my main point, but Wii fanboys are hypersensitive enough that you all seemed to zero in on it.
If so, it's a pretty weak one. I don't know what one would describe as a kiddie game, but I hope you don't define it as silly graphics and no blood.
Thanks for putting words in my mouth so you can knock down a straw man, ass.
Otherwise Chess, Poker, Go, Tetris, Pac-Man, etc., etc., etc., would all be considered kiddie by you even though they are some of the most popular games ever.
Here it goes. I observe that many of Nintendo's biggest hits look like digitized Fisher Price toys with nursery-rhyme-sounding music tracks and a level of simplicity which is CLEARLY targeted at 9-year olds, and therefore I must be a teenager who craves blood and gore in all things and thinks Poker and Go are "kiddie" games. How arrogant are you???
Not to mention that Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness aren't what I would call suitable for kiddies.
Wait... I thought we considered games like that the sort of thing which has no redeeming value, and games where plumers jump over barrels and throw mushrooms at really cute monsters is what REALLY appeals to adults. Which is it?
But then you probably think Wind Waker is kiddie because it has cartoony graphics, rather than base it on its gameplay.
Never played it, so I couldn't say. I googled it. Apparantly it's yet another Zelda game, but this time looking like the animation from the really crappy post-"Lion King" Disney movies. Maybe I'll try it out after I snap up a Gamecube for $20 while all the fanboys are spending two weeks of lunch money on their precious Wii.
If a game is fun (I assume that you think kiddie games are not fun)
Again... never said anything of the sort.
for you for any other reason than gameplay, then you're not much of a reliable source for game information.
Nor are knee-jerk fanboys.
If you think that current controllers are simple, you haven't tried to teach a middle-aged woman to play a modern video game.
First of all, I know lots of middle-aged women who play console games. Thanks for the chauvinism, jerk.
Secondly, if you think a middle-aged woman (or anyone else) who is confused by a D-pad is even going to pick up and attempt a Wii-mote, you are seriously deluded. The Wii will sell... to the same Mario-kart addicts that bought the Game Cube the last time around.
The idea that non-gamers are suddenly going to be throwing cartoon mushrooms around because of a quirky new controller is pure fantasy.
Buying and using a game machine does not make one a gamer
Actually, that's exactly what it does.
A "gamer" is a person who plays games. A person who spends more than the price of an expensive lunch on game-playing is clearly somebody who fits that definition. There are millions of people out there who do not.
Of the 100,000,000+ consoles that are sold in the world the vast majority of them are sold to casual gamers and "non-gamers."
That's the most ridiculous statement I've heard all month.
Anybody who spends hundreds of dollars on a machine for the sole purpose of playing games is, by definition, a gamer.
Non-gamers do not buy game machines. They might play a simple game on their phone or PC, but they are not going to spend money to hook up a special box to their TV set, then spend $50 a pop beyond that for games, and learn how to drive a Mario Kart with a pair of sticks. They just won't. You've been suckered by Nintendo marketing and astroturfing if you honestly think they will.
Oops. I stand corrected. The fake bids are in the tens of Millions, not tens of thousands.
Yeah, I'm sure that's fooling everybody. *rolls eyes*
Notice how most of those buyers don't have much of a bid history?
You are not looking at what the consoles are selling for. You are looking at what scam artists trying to create a market are making it look like they are selling for.
The top bidder has only existed since May, and is "no longer a registered user."
The #2 and #3 purchases are from the same person. Are you telling me there's somebody out there who wants to spend almost $20,000 on two $600 game consoles? Do you think anybody actually believes that's what's going on here?