Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the market...
Bubble II
Huge IPO. Massive employee benifits. Loads of hype. Money flowing all over the place. Zero profit. Unproven business strategy.
Happy days are here again!
When the next fake boom collapses sometime around 2009 or so, will we all blame President Hillary Clinton for it, the way we blamed Bush for the one in 2000? Will GWB strut around bragging about the "balanced budget" projections at the end of his term which were based on the overly-optimistic economic conditions in 2007? Will the SEC do all kinds of hand-waving, arrest a few dishonest accountants, and try to fool us all into thinking we are richer than we really are once again, while both government and personal debt continue to chronically swell up?
It comes with a DVI-VGA adapter, so if you have a VGA-S adapter lying around, you're golden.
If not, your dream of $499 OS X on the TV set have been dashed, and you will be forced to pony up a whopping $518.
Then again, if the slashbots are to be believed, you need to add 1 GB of memory and cluster it with three more of them just to "make it useful" anyway.
(Hint: When Mac's were shipping with 128 MB, everybody on Slashdot was insisting you "need" at least 256 MB to run OS X at all, and that was not true either. OS X has gotten better about memory use with each.x revision, not worse. You can run it just fine at 128, better at 256, and avoid disk swapping entirely at 512. If you run a lot of memory-pig apps at once, there's a speed advantage to going up to a GB as well, but for the typical lightweight user who only wants to browse the web, listen to MP3 files, do e-mail, etc., the 256 MB base config is plenty.)
What you say here is a quite valid perspective. However, do you quite realize that if everybody just threw in the towel and bought Macs, the situation would never improve?
Yes I do. Please continue to choose less attractive alternatives, so it will drive the one I've chosen to fight for their position.:)
I jumped from Linux to OS X for my web server and will never look back.
Why? Not ease of use... Ease of maintenance!
OS X checks weekly for security patches, and installing them is a matter of a few clicks. It's slick, easy, and fast.
I used to run Red Hat 9, and security updates were a major headache. The first time I tried to run the updater, I had to first update the OS (manually) to support the current updater. Even after that, I often had to do all kinds of sick hacks to keep it working. Then, a few months later, Red Hat dropped support entirely and asked that I migrate to Fedora or buy their "Enterprise" level package. That was the last straw.
Sure, you are about to tell me how much better Debian or SuSE or some other distro is about automated revisions, but I don't trust any of them to not pull the carpet out from under me the same way Red Hat did. After all, if it's a "Free" OS, I have no right to complain if some company providing sercices for it wants to stop spending resources on making my life easy, do I?
There's a huge difference between knowing how to mess with the Linux CLI, and wanting to do so. Administrating a Linux box is a terrific learning experience, but once you've learned what you wanted to know the "fun" of maintaining it wears off quickly, and you just want a server that works with a minimum of farting around.
Yeah, but you have to look at the overhead, too. I can't speak for Mac OSs, but at least windows takes up a goodly chunk of the available power just to run. I assume it's similar for macs.
And what does OS overhead have to do with the fact that the X-Box and PS2 are loaded with video cards which are vastly inferior to the one in the Mac mini?
The mini runs World of Warcraft smoothly at 1080p. If it was released for the console, the X-Box would struggle greatly to even do so at 1080i or 720p, and the PS2 would have to dial all the way down to NTSC resolutions.
I'm certain that the mini would have no trouble at all running a ported version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
If you consider Quake 3 a "terribly old game", then these are not the droids you are looking for.
People who "need" bleeding-edge performance on games which have been released within the last two months are people who already spend more on the two video cards per year that they buy than what an entire Mac mini costs. They are better off buying a G5 tower (assuming they are going to go the Mac route at all.)
but Apple seems to have gone to some lengths to make it especially difficult to crack this sucker open making the likelihood of voiding your warranty that much higher than under normal circumstances
"Cracking this sucker open" is easier and faster than one which is screwed shut. I've done it, you clearly haven't. Stop spreading FUD. Thank you.
Yes, and the stupid, flimsy plastic clips may break even if you are careful, which will void your warranty. Woops!
Goddammit!
Shutup shutup SHUTUP!
I've opened a mini. It's not hard to do, and the clips will not break. They are not "flimsy" or brittle. In fact, they are more like a hard rubber than a light plastic. If you manage to break the clips while opening it, you had to have been going out of your way to do so. Even if you do break a clip somehow (and I would be stunned if you did), that DOES NOT VOID THE WARRANTY.
Once the case was open, adding memory was no problem.
Stop talking about shit about which you know absolutely nothing.
What happens when a man a day over legal age has sex with a girl a day under legal age who produced a fake ID? Is the man guilty of statutory rape, or is the girl guilty of fraud?
That would be an issue for twelve rational people like you to work out, based on available evidence. Odds are, neither would be found guilty, thanks to that "reasonable doubt" clause we all love here in America.
So ladies, if you are a day under 16 and wish to have sex with me, please lie about it. I'm sure we would not be convicted.... oh crap... unless this post comes out in the trial.
Another perfect crime foiled!!!
Oh well, I guess this means no sex with women who look like they just might really be deceptive young teenagers. I guess I'll find something else to do with my time this weekend.
No, I don't want revenge. I want people who intend to harm society removed from it. Simple as that. Lock murderers away, and don't let them out anytime soon.
The most successful band of "rock stars" in the world at the moment is U2.
That's a band which has been playing for over 20 years. They may not be suited to everybody's taste, but then neither is Jet. The point is, rockers don't always burn out.
Other old-timers who still rock: Eric Clapton Angus Young Jimmy Page Pete Townsend Neal Peart David Bowie Bob Dylan David Byrne and every last toothless fossil who was ever a member of Yes
You can keep the fuckin' Strokes. I'll stick with the legends I just listed, thanks.
Not every rocker has to self-destruct like Hendrix or Mamma Cass to be legit.
I don't have the exact specs of its graphics hardware on hand, but I'm sure the graphics capabilities of the Xbox and PS2 exceed it
The X-Box is a 700 MHz Celeron with 64 MB of system memory and a slightly-modified GeForce 3 card.
The PS2 has a proprietary 300 MHz CPU with 32 MB of memory and a proprietary video card with vastly inferior specs to the X-Box. (See this page for the specs if you like.)
The Mac mini has a 1.25 (or 1.4) GHz G4 PowerPC with at least 256 MB of memory, and an ATI Raedon 9200 video card. It might not stack up well against a high-end "1337" game PC, but compared to the X-Box and PS2, it's a graphics powerhouse!
You mean like how I bought a mini (ordered on announcement day, arrived before release date), and loaded a GB of memory into myself in under five minutes.
Anybody who says it's hard, dangerous, or delicate to open is a damn liar. The "putty knife" trick works like a charm.
Getting it back together is trickier. You gotta line up this row of flat springs along the back face-plate just right. Even so, it hardly takes any time at all to do the entire operation.
Plus, the "PC2700 DDR 333" 256 MB stick they claimed they put into it turned out to be PC3200 DDR 400, so I was able to slap it right into the Athlon box, making my old Linux server much more attractive when I sell it off.
The drive they chose for it is laptop-sized, but it's just about the best laptop-sized drive Seagate has ever offered to the general consumer. I'm going to get by with it just fine for some time to come... and if I ever need more space (or lower latency), I'll probably go with an external firewire drive.
Small, silent, relatively cheap, and waaaay more expandable than some of the FUD you have heard. No wonder Apple's having so much trouble keeping up with demand on them.
Some of us were there, son. We don't need sources to talk about history we lived through. I remember well the days of Bungie revealing their plans for Halo. It was to be a Mac game for sure, and probably a cross-platform networked game allowing PC's to play on the same network. (When they ported Marathon 2 to Windows, they failed to make it network-compatible with Macs and learned it was a huge mistake. When they released Myth, it was specifically cross-platform compatible.)
Yes, Halo was meant to be the ultimate Mac game, but Microsoft wanted a showcase piece to compliment the X-Box, so they bought Bungie specifically for HALO, which they adapted to be an exclusive X-Box release, later to be ported to Windows and Mac.
See, there's really no difference between a man and wife talking to each other while in line at the grocery store, and a man talking to his wife on the phone while in line at the grocery store, except that you feel entitled to scorn him for being "rude" because you're only allowed to evesdrop on half of the conversation.
People who feel that cell phone conversations (as opposed to regular conversations) are a public nuissance which we need to "deal with" really ought to learn how to live and let live. You will be much happier in the long run.
You just outlined the reason why the Libertarian Party exists. People become Libertarians (or, at the least, small-l libertarian conservatives) when they make up their mind that the government can barely manage to deliver our mail, and should not really be in charge of anything more than they absolutely must.
The problem is that most of people tend to agree that serial killers and habitual rapists should probably be put down, and while the government is not a very good engine for getting it done, it is preferable in almost every way to lynch mobs.
I'm generally anti-death penalty, but I consider it an issue upon which reasonable people can disagree.
I think it's rather ignorant that you believe people mentally messed up enough to kill or rape will be dissuaded by the death penalty.
The death penalty does not always dissuade psycho-killers from killing, but when used effectively, it's an extremely certain way to make sure they don't kill again.
I've never seen why jails aren't more like boarding school with therapy centers for the/really/ messed up people.
I'll tell you why.
If somebody stabs one of my beloved relatives in a parking ramp, I want the bastard thrown into a dark and dingy hole with nothing to do but regret the miserable course his life has followed, and I don't want him let out any time soon, no matter how much his attitude seems to improve. I don't care who's "fault" it is that they became a total screw-up who can't function in society without hurting people. I just want the thug locked in a cage where he can't stab people I care about.
Now, if you want to discuss not making somebody share a cage with an animal like that just for smoking reefer, I'm more than willing to discuss altertatives.
The Pippin, like the Performa and the Newton, was a product of the Dark Times, between when Jobs had control of the company stolen from him, and when he stole it back.
Let us not speak of the Pippin any further.
If a critical mass of Mac mini systems end up in TV rooms across America, a few game developpers will probably gravitate towards exploiting that market, and Apple may find themselves selling a popular game console entirely by accident.
Slashdot Mirror
I just went to the link you gave me.
g/profit/
Returns no results.
There's this thing called a P/E Ratio.
Look into it, and get back to me.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the market...
Bubble II
Huge IPO.
Massive employee benifits.
Loads of hype.
Money flowing all over the place.
Zero profit.
Unproven business strategy.
Happy days are here again!
When the next fake boom collapses sometime around 2009 or so, will we all blame President Hillary Clinton for it, the way we blamed Bush for the one in 2000? Will GWB strut around bragging about the "balanced budget" projections at the end of his term which were based on the overly-optimistic economic conditions in 2007? Will the SEC do all kinds of hand-waving, arrest a few dishonest accountants, and try to fool us all into thinking we are richer than we really are once again, while both government and personal debt continue to chronically swell up?
Signs point to yes.
It comes with a DVI-VGA adapter, so if you have a VGA-S adapter lying around, you're golden.
.x revision, not worse. You can run it just fine at 128, better at 256, and avoid disk swapping entirely at 512. If you run a lot of memory-pig apps at once, there's a speed advantage to going up to a GB as well, but for the typical lightweight user who only wants to browse the web, listen to MP3 files, do e-mail, etc., the 256 MB base config is plenty.)
If not, your dream of $499 OS X on the TV set have been dashed, and you will be forced to pony up a whopping $518.
Then again, if the slashbots are to be believed, you need to add 1 GB of memory and cluster it with three more of them just to "make it useful" anyway.
(Hint: When Mac's were shipping with 128 MB, everybody on Slashdot was insisting you "need" at least 256 MB to run OS X at all, and that was not true either. OS X has gotten better about memory use with each
What you say here is a quite valid perspective. However, do you quite realize that if everybody just threw in the towel and bought Macs, the situation would never improve?
:)
Yes I do. Please continue to choose less attractive alternatives, so it will drive the one I've chosen to fight for their position.
Filemaker 7... Mind you, I'm not the biggest fan of gui dbs and would rather code my own stuff any day of the week...
PostgreSQL runs on OS X if you want to get your fingernails dirty.
It's not quite Oracle, but then again, it's free.
I jumped from Linux to OS X for my web server and will never look back.
Why? Not ease of use... Ease of maintenance!
OS X checks weekly for security patches, and installing them is a matter of a few clicks. It's slick, easy, and fast.
I used to run Red Hat 9, and security updates were a major headache. The first time I tried to run the updater, I had to first update the OS (manually) to support the current updater. Even after that, I often had to do all kinds of sick hacks to keep it working. Then, a few months later, Red Hat dropped support entirely and asked that I migrate to Fedora or buy their "Enterprise" level package. That was the last straw.
Sure, you are about to tell me how much better Debian or SuSE or some other distro is about automated revisions, but I don't trust any of them to not pull the carpet out from under me the same way Red Hat did. After all, if it's a "Free" OS, I have no right to complain if some company providing sercices for it wants to stop spending resources on making my life easy, do I?
There's a huge difference between knowing how to mess with the Linux CLI, and wanting to do so. Administrating a Linux box is a terrific learning experience, but once you've learned what you wanted to know the "fun" of maintaining it wears off quickly, and you just want a server that works with a minimum of farting around.
That, my friend, is the time to move to OS X.
Yeah, but you have to look at the overhead, too. I can't speak for Mac OSs, but at least windows takes up a goodly chunk of the available power just to run. I assume it's similar for macs.
And what does OS overhead have to do with the fact that the X-Box and PS2 are loaded with video cards which are vastly inferior to the one in the Mac mini?
The mini runs World of Warcraft smoothly at 1080p. If it was released for the console, the X-Box would struggle greatly to even do so at 1080i or 720p, and the PS2 would have to dial all the way down to NTSC resolutions.
I'm certain that the mini would have no trouble at all running a ported version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
If you consider Quake 3 a "terribly old game", then these are not the droids you are looking for.
People who "need" bleeding-edge performance on games which have been released within the last two months are people who already spend more on the two video cards per year that they buy than what an entire Mac mini costs. They are better off buying a G5 tower (assuming they are going to go the Mac route at all.)
but Apple seems to have gone to some lengths to make it especially difficult to crack this sucker open making the likelihood of voiding your warranty that much higher than under normal circumstances
"Cracking this sucker open" is easier and faster than one which is screwed shut. I've done it, you clearly haven't. Stop spreading FUD. Thank you.
Yes, and if you want to purchase their memory upgrade, it must be performed by them.
If you wish to perform your own memory upgrade, it does not indicate that doing so voids the warranty.
Stop spreading FUD.
Yes, and the stupid, flimsy plastic clips may break even if you are careful, which will void your warranty. Woops!
Goddammit!
Shutup shutup SHUTUP!
I've opened a mini. It's not hard to do, and the clips will not break. They are not "flimsy" or brittle. In fact, they are more like a hard rubber than a light plastic. If you manage to break the clips while opening it, you had to have been going out of your way to do so. Even if you do break a clip somehow (and I would be stunned if you did), that DOES NOT VOID THE WARRANTY.
Once the case was open, adding memory was no problem.
Stop talking about shit about which you know absolutely nothing.
Since you are talking about Solitaire, can we presume that "all the sex" that came with it is the reason why the game can be played with one hand?
What happens when a man a day over legal age has sex with a girl a day under legal age who produced a fake ID? Is the man guilty of statutory rape, or is the girl guilty of fraud?
... oh crap... unless this post comes out in the trial.
That would be an issue for twelve rational people like you to work out, based on available evidence. Odds are, neither would be found guilty, thanks to that "reasonable doubt" clause we all love here in America.
So ladies, if you are a day under 16 and wish to have sex with me, please lie about it. I'm sure we would not be convicted.
Another perfect crime foiled!!!
Oh well, I guess this means no sex with women who look like they just might really be deceptive young teenagers. I guess I'll find something else to do with my time this weekend.
No, I don't want revenge. I want people who intend to harm society removed from it. Simple as that. Lock murderers away, and don't let them out anytime soon.
The most successful band of "rock stars" in the world at the moment is U2.
That's a band which has been playing for over 20 years. They may not be suited to everybody's taste, but then neither is Jet. The point is, rockers don't always burn out.
Other old-timers who still rock:
Eric Clapton
Angus Young
Jimmy Page
Pete Townsend
Neal Peart
David Bowie
Bob Dylan
David Byrne
and every last toothless fossil who was ever a member of Yes
You can keep the fuckin' Strokes. I'll stick with the legends I just listed, thanks.
Not every rocker has to self-destruct like Hendrix or Mamma Cass to be legit.
I don't have the exact specs of its graphics hardware on hand, but I'm sure the graphics capabilities of the Xbox and PS2 exceed it
The X-Box is a 700 MHz Celeron with 64 MB of system memory and a slightly-modified GeForce 3 card.
The PS2 has a proprietary 300 MHz CPU with 32 MB of memory and a proprietary video card with vastly inferior specs to the X-Box. (See this page for the specs if you like.)
The Mac mini has a 1.25 (or 1.4) GHz G4 PowerPC with at least 256 MB of memory, and an ATI Raedon 9200 video card. It might not stack up well against a high-end "1337" game PC, but compared to the X-Box and PS2, it's a graphics powerhouse!
You mean like how I bought a mini (ordered on announcement day, arrived before release date), and loaded a GB of memory into myself in under five minutes.
Anybody who says it's hard, dangerous, or delicate to open is a damn liar. The "putty knife" trick works like a charm.
Getting it back together is trickier. You gotta line up this row of flat springs along the back face-plate just right. Even so, it hardly takes any time at all to do the entire operation.
Plus, the "PC2700 DDR 333" 256 MB stick they claimed they put into it turned out to be PC3200 DDR 400, so I was able to slap it right into the Athlon box, making my old Linux server much more attractive when I sell it off.
The drive they chose for it is laptop-sized, but it's just about the best laptop-sized drive Seagate has ever offered to the general consumer. I'm going to get by with it just fine for some time to come... and if I ever need more space (or lower latency), I'll probably go with an external firewire drive.
Small, silent, relatively cheap, and waaaay more expandable than some of the FUD you have heard. No wonder Apple's having so much trouble keeping up with demand on them.
Some of us were there, son. We don't need sources to talk about history we lived through. I remember well the days of Bungie revealing their plans for Halo. It was to be a Mac game for sure, and probably a cross-platform networked game allowing PC's to play on the same network. (When they ported Marathon 2 to Windows, they failed to make it network-compatible with Macs and learned it was a huge mistake. When they released Myth, it was specifically cross-platform compatible.)
Yes, Halo was meant to be the ultimate Mac game, but Microsoft wanted a showcase piece to compliment the X-Box, so they bought Bungie specifically for HALO, which they adapted to be an exclusive X-Box release, later to be ported to Windows and Mac.
See, there's really no difference between a man and wife talking to each other while in line at the grocery store, and a man talking to his wife on the phone while in line at the grocery store, except that you feel entitled to scorn him for being "rude" because you're only allowed to evesdrop on half of the conversation.
People who feel that cell phone conversations (as opposed to regular conversations) are a public nuissance which we need to "deal with" really ought to learn how to live and let live. You will be much happier in the long run.
Interesting concept. Total de-criminalization of marijuana, but only on the condition that you don't bogart your stash.
Sounds a bit utopian, but probably no worse then our current system.
Suicide is only attempted by those who are mentally ill.
I'm not convinced that this is true, but anybody who strongly feels otherwise is probably not in a good position to debate their case before us.
You just outlined the reason why the Libertarian Party exists. People become Libertarians (or, at the least, small-l libertarian conservatives) when they make up their mind that the government can barely manage to deliver our mail, and should not really be in charge of anything more than they absolutely must.
The problem is that most of people tend to agree that serial killers and habitual rapists should probably be put down, and while the government is not a very good engine for getting it done, it is preferable in almost every way to lynch mobs.
I'm generally anti-death penalty, but I consider it an issue upon which reasonable people can disagree.
I think it's rather ignorant that you believe people mentally messed up enough to kill or rape will be dissuaded by the death penalty.
The death penalty does not always dissuade psycho-killers from killing, but when used effectively, it's an extremely certain way to make sure they don't kill again.
I've never seen why jails aren't more like boarding school with therapy centers for the /really/ messed up people.
I'll tell you why.
If somebody stabs one of my beloved relatives in a parking ramp, I want the bastard thrown into a dark and dingy hole with nothing to do but regret the miserable course his life has followed, and I don't want him let out any time soon, no matter how much his attitude seems to improve. I don't care who's "fault" it is that they became a total screw-up who can't function in society without hurting people. I just want the thug locked in a cage where he can't stab people I care about.
Now, if you want to discuss not making somebody share a cage with an animal like that just for smoking reefer, I'm more than willing to discuss altertatives.
The Pippin, like the Performa and the Newton, was a product of the Dark Times, between when Jobs had control of the company stolen from him, and when he stole it back.
Let us not speak of the Pippin any further.
If a critical mass of Mac mini systems end up in TV rooms across America, a few game developpers will probably gravitate towards exploiting that market, and Apple may find themselves selling a popular game console entirely by accident.