In corporate doublespeak "resigned to pursue other opportunities" pretty much always means "was fired."
If they were the ones who made the choice to leave, we would have heard a press statement from them about the new company they are moving to or forming, not a statement from Blizzard that they are "resigning."
Yes they do. The word "ain't" is included in most dictionaries, thanks to usage.
My bad.
(See, there's a good example of using slang to make yourself clear, even though it is not grammatically correct. Most people know what is meant by, "my bad.")
Now I just gotta wait two minutes before I can point out that I didn't mean to say that "ain't" is still omitted from dictionaries... Slow down cowboy... Slow down cowboy...
Yes they do. The word "ain't" is not included in most dictionaries, thanks to usage.
You still sound like an illiterate buffoon when you use it outside the context of deliberately speaking with slang for mocking or ironic effect (Ha! I knew I could steer us back to the topic sooner or later!), but it's a common enough part of the way Americans speak that it needs to be included in the dictionary.
The point I'm trying to hammer home is that, if you really wish to speak clearly, you ought to avoid using the word "forte" at all. Say something like "grammar is not really my strength," instead. You will be understood by a wider cross-section of listeners, avoid the quagmire of correct pronunciation of that word entirely, and not come across as a dick.
One should usually only express themselves with foreign words when there is no English equivalent ("schadenfreude"), borrowed sayings which serve for emphases ("je ne se quois"), or words that have been used so often that the average Joe probably thinks they are already English words ("et cetera.")
Is it ironic that you didn't do this in your examples? No. That is hypocrisy.
Actually, since I had it in quotes, it was not part of the structure of the sentence. Had I given an example of correct usage, such as, "borrowing words from other languages is clearly not your forte, my friend," then I would have used italics.
Quoting each other in italics is simply following/. convention, because it's clearer to read than the blockquote tag.
Re:Oh the humanity.......
on
Isn't It Ironic?
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· Score: 3, Informative
It's kind of like the english teachers at my school that would argue all day long that the word "forte" is properly pronounced "fort" in a non-musical context. Technically, they might be right, but if you pronounce it "fort" instead of "for-tay" in conversation with most people, you're going to be the one that ends up looking like an idiot.
No, your English teacher was entirely right. First of all, if you use the word "forte" when speaking of your strengths in casual conversation, you will sound like a pompous asshole. Secondly, when not only say it, but also pronounce it incorrectly, you sound like a poorly-educated pompous asshole.
When "forte" is pronounced "for-tay," it is Italian for "loud."
When "forte" is pronounced "fort" it is French for "strength."
While they are spelled the same, they are two completely different words, from two different languages. Neither is an English word, and it should be put in italics when inserted into a written English sentence.
Since you need an amp in each room, and a controller of some kind in each room, and a set of speakers in each room, it seems to me that a far simpler solution would be to put a cheap computer in each room. (Old used iMacs can run OS X or PPCLinux, are fanless, and consume very little power in sleep mode... or go with one of those small-case PC's if you are one of those people who looks down their nose at Macs... whichever. The point is, get a fanless system with just enough CPU muscle to play audio files yet low-power enough that you don't mind leaving them running.) Then just store the entire MP3 library on an ordinary file server in the closet, and mount the library's drive on all the networked systems.
Playing the files on a local machine off a networked drive would probably give you better sound than snaking analog audio cable across the entire length of your house, too.
Re:Working Hard?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What's wrong with class envy? I want to be rich, don't you?
You have the kind of class envy we need more of. Unfortunately, we have too much of the "I'm not rich, so you should not be permitted to be rich either," variety.
How about if we just take one galaxy at a time. When this one is full we'll worry about how to get to the next one.;)Fine by me, but the discussion is about finding life capable of buying our iPods and Starter jackets. If that only occurs once per 50 galaxies (and I suspect the rate is far, far lower... perhaps even one per all galaxies if the Universe is finite), then it's not likely that mankind will ever reach an extra-terrestrial civilization. Perhaps some clever breed of cockroach that evolves after we are long dead will pull it off, who knows?
BTW, c is calculated from the magnetic permeability of the vacuum and the dielectric permittivity of the vacuum, so it is only as constant as the vacuum, which is to say, not quite constant.
You are quite correct, but we are talking about the space between galaxies here, which isn't exactly crowded.
Maybe computer-building life only arises on one out of every 50 galaxies. However, from the Universe's perspective, that is a lot of smart life, for there are billions of galaxies.
Fair enough, but are we likely to reach beyond our own galaxy before our extinction? The space between us and Andromeda is quite daunting when the physical speed limit is "c."
I think it's unlikely that evidence of extraterrestrial life will change too many people's minds. I think most folks who are gonna be convinced, have been.
Really? I have not been convinced, but if you were to take me to a city on a planet orbiting another star, I most certainly would be. Even getting a "shut the fuck up already, we hear your damned signal!" message via the SETI project would get my attention.
Ice on Mars? Meh. Hydrogen and Oxygen are pretty darn common elements, and they form into H20 fairly readily.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most folks who are going to be convinced, in spite of a total lack of evidence, have been. Some of us are holding out for the facts.
There are several instances of rocks that came from Mars having been found on Earth and the reverse is most likely true also, that Earth rocks have traveled to Mars. So if there is life on Mars, there is a chance that it came from Earth - or maybe even life on Earth even originated on Mars.
I'm not ruling out the possibility of rocks going from Earth to Mars, but isn't it a lot less likely than the other way around? Earth is bigger than Mars, so escape velocity is much higher. Also, unlike Mars, we have an atmosphere that burns up the majority of meteors before they impact our surface, so our surface is impacted less often (and even when impact does happen, air friction would slow down debris that might otherwise fly off into space.) You could make the case that fast meteors which happen to skim along our outer atmosphere could pick up a microbe or two en route to a crash on Mars, however.
Your suggestion that simple life began on Mars and was carried to Earth by meteorites millions of years ago is certainly interesting. Wouldn't that be a fantastic discovery?
Speaking as a "doubter," I've always considered the possibility to be open. That's what a doubter is, somebody who does not subscribe to your dogma, yet is not ruling out the possibility that you are right.
Finding evidence life on Mars which shared no genetic similarities with life on Earth would be a major find. However, if it is similar to what we find here, one could make the case that organisms were carried to Mars from Earth, by solar winds, or perhaps even our own unmanned probes.
When one considers the very fragile conditions which life requires to evolve (can't be too close or far to the star; must have a stable orbit and a fast enough rotation on its axis, which must nearly perpendicular to the orbital path; must have massive "shepherd" planets in further-out orbits to protect it from constant bombardment; must have a relatively stable surface; must have an atmosphere relatively free of certain toxins; must have just the right cocktail of "primordial ooze" to form into life in sufficient quantities), and even after all those conditions are meet, whatever the hell happened to form the first living cell on Earth has to happen. We still have yet to figure out what that was, or how unlikely it was to have occurred, but seeing as there are lots of star systems out there which are far older than ours, and we haven't heard from anybody already, it seems extremely unlikely that there's another inhabited star within a hundred thousand light-years of us (which rules out pretty much our entire galaxy.) I could be wrong, in fact I hope I'm wrong, but I think that we are probably, for all practical purposes, alone.
Two of the three applications you mention seem sensible enough, however...
* MP3 jukebox for your car
An iPod may not be as '1337 as building it yourself, but at $300 for a 10 GB iPod that syncs instantly via firewire with your laptop or desktop system, it's a much better way to go. If 10 GB is not enough for you, $500 gets you a 30 GB unit.
Plus, I can tell you from experience that it slips easily into the back pocket of your jeans or the chest pocket of a shirt, so you never need to worry about it being stolen out of your car.
Although I haven't read it, I have been told that Smith's second stint on Green Arrow was better than his first. That might have been the one you read.
The problem with Green Arrow is that he's supposed to be a communist wing-nut. His radical ideology makes him a very interesting supporting character for an ensemble story, such as with JLA (and his appearance in "The Dark Knight Returns" was downright epic,) but he doesn't seem to hold up very well as a central figure.
Crossgen had a title last year called "Glory" which was pretty interesting. They kept it very vague about whether it was about a waitress with multiple personality disorder who struggles with the delusion that she becomes a comic-book goddess, or a super-heroic goddess who inhabits the life of an unwitting waitress. Very "Phillip K. Dick" mindfuck stuff. I didn't see it on that web page (and a search of their Forum page shows no mention of it,) so I guess they dropped it, huh?
It seems like a lot of people have had moments like this, and for most of us it was sometime in the 1990s.
I was big on Marvel comics growing up, and my horizons were suddenly expanded when Alan Moore and Frank Miller came along... but something happened right around the time that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became a children's motion picture.
Suddenly, Marvel and DC were cranking out as many titles as they could with low numbers on them, so would-be collectors would snap them up purely for the speculative value. ("If eXcalibur turns out to be the next X-Men, this first issue could make me rich someday!!!") Dark Horse started licensing every single movie and TV show with even a shred of geek appeal, and Image comics sprang up to light the path of style over substance. Soon, every damned artist on the Marvel staff was trying to draw exactly like Todd McFarlaine, and DC was allowing an untalented and unproven writer to "kill" Superman in the desperate hope of getting any attention paid to any of their titles besides "Batman," which they had already re-packaged a thousand ways.
The last straw for me was when Ben Edlund stopped writing "The Tick" so he could go on to write for TV and movies, and I noticed that there just weren't many comics I cared to read out there anymore.
One or two indie titles come along now and then and spark my interest, but it seems that every time I get interested in one of them, their publisher goes out of business before the story arc really even gets off the ground.
I have now gone from buying about a couple dozen titles a month 20 years ago, to buying none. If I want to read a comic, I buy a trade paperback. The last one was Kevin Smith's first run of "Green Arrow." (It sucked, by the way. If you think his film scripts are sometimes too wordy, run away screaming from his comics!)
Actually, when compared to print comics like Cerebus or Sandman, the story arc of Megatokyo is relatively brief. MT has been running for what, three years now? In that time, Piro is just now talking about putting out a second paperback volume.
It just seems like it's a long story arc because he trickles it out bit by bit, while interrupting it with "dead Piro days," full-page drawings, "stick-figure dom" stories, and various other filler. You could recap the entire arc so far of every major character in Megatokyo on a single, double-spaced page. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I would rather get one page of MT a year than be forced to endure an entire book of User Friendly strips. Quality over quantity for me.
The nice thing about this is, if you are clustering them, you could build a single custom AC source and run little wires for 5V drops to all the nodes, kind of like what guitarists typically do if they use a lot of effects pedals.
Not that you would want to make a cluster of these things, when you could probably buy either a G5 Mac or a top-flight AMD box with the same money, but it has a certain "geek chic" to it.
Computing horsepower is getting so darn cheap, it seems that clustering low-speed computers is getting to be something reserved for mad scientists who salvage 1000 old Pentium 60's from some company's trash and use them for the calculations needed to fire their laser at the moon.
Not that there's anything wrong with that! Being a mad scientist is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice. I'm comfortable enough with my sanity that I don't feel I need to judge those who were born differently.
Slashdot reminds me of the crap found in the old.com businesses. A couple of people with no real business skills or common courtesy create a product, without any real plan, hoping to succeed. For some reason, CmdrTaco did. Not having learned enough leadership lessons, he continues to be his old self, taking Slashdot wherever he wants, instead of where Slashdotters want it to go.
And yet, the site boasts over 8 million registered users and continues to be one of the busiest geek sites on the net, while sites like Kur5hin continue to sit nearly idle, in spite of their claims to have gotten so much right which Slashdot gets wrong.
Slashdot is was it is. Visit it, or don't visit it. If you are so sure that you know how to do better, start a better site and take away all that sweet, sweet ad revenue. Otherwise, shut the hell up.
Back on topic: I don't see much that is all that special or newsworthy of these Northtec computers. Yea, they're nice if you want a small desktop PC, I guess... But are we living in Japan or something? Is real estate so massively important that we all need teency-weency desktop computers? I mean, if you are out to save space, a laptop saves even more space, by replacing the mouse with a touchpad, and adding a hinged, built-in LCD. Otherwise, just put your tower under the desk like everybody else.
Encrypted swapfiles: You might have got me there. It's nothing I've ever needed, so I don't know if a solution for it is available for OS X or not.
Interface "natively" with SGI and IBM disks: Huh. I thought OS X could do that.
Seamless clustering: No problem. OS X has solutions for clustering either via Ethernet or Firewire, your choice, and they are pretty darn easy to get running.
Run on more than one platform: x86 Linux can't run on PPC. PPCLinux can't run on x86. Even if you recompile from source to avoid the endian problem, you still won't have much luck. Yes, Linux has versions for more platforms than OS X, but weren't we talking about tasks that you would run on a specific server? Moving the OS to another platform is not something you are likely to attempt.
Based on what I saw from the Stevenote today, and also based on my most recent miserable experiences with trying to download Red Hat images off one of the official mirrors via my DSL line (for all the talk of Linux being free-as-in-beer, it's a pain in the ass to get the latest distro any way other than by buying a cardboard box full of disks from your local retailer for about $50... sometimes more), I'm not so sure either assumption will turn out to be true over the long haul.
(coming from someone who sold mac's and pc's during the.com boom.) hardly anyone spends more than $1500 on a computer these days
You must not be much of a salesman.
Joe Consumer prefers $600 HP boxen from Circuit City, which will have critical failures on at least some of the parts two or three times in the first year.
Joe Geek builds his PC out of parts from his favorite budget component vendor (either local or mail-order)
But there are many, many more people who don't want a shoddy budget PC, and dont want a '1337 beer-cooled hobbyist-built system. They want something that allows them to easilly manage digital video, pictures and audio files while doing all the usual mundane tasks (e-mail with spam protection, web browsing with pop-up blocking), and they don't want to fuck around with driver, config, and library files every damn time they try to do something new. For a computer that makes all that possible, they don't mind spending a little more money. These are the people that Apple is selling to, and it's working. IIRC, Apple has made a profit in all but two quarters all the way through the.com bust of the past three years, something which no other personal computer maker can claim. If I told you 5 years ago that Apple would still be chugging along in 2003, while Compaq would be bought out and liquidated over the same period, you probably would not have believed me, but here they are, still selling computers that are "too expensive" by the truckloads, to consumers who obviously perceive that they have more value than their Windows-based counterparts.
P.S. Yes, the "beer-cooled" thing was a Megatokyo reference. If you didn't get it, quit bothering with/. threads and go read the MT archives... you will get a lot more laughs out of that than anything here.
Slashdot Mirror
More commonly, it's a euphemism for "we forced them to resign and they probably have nothing else lined up yet."
If they were the ones who made the choice to leave, we would have heard a press statement from them about the new company they are moving to or forming, not a statement from Blizzard that they are "resigning."
Yes they do. The word "ain't" is included in most dictionaries, thanks to usage.
My bad.
(See, there's a good example of using slang to make yourself clear, even though it is not grammatically correct. Most people know what is meant by, "my bad.")
Now I just gotta wait two minutes before I can point out that I didn't mean to say that "ain't" is still omitted from dictionaries... Slow down cowboy... Slow down cowboy...
Yes they do. The word "ain't" is not included in most dictionaries, thanks to usage.
You still sound like an illiterate buffoon when you use it outside the context of deliberately speaking with slang for mocking or ironic effect (Ha! I knew I could steer us back to the topic sooner or later!), but it's a common enough part of the way Americans speak that it needs to be included in the dictionary.
The point I'm trying to hammer home is that, if you really wish to speak clearly, you ought to avoid using the word "forte" at all. Say something like "grammar is not really my strength," instead. You will be understood by a wider cross-section of listeners, avoid the quagmire of correct pronunciation of that word entirely, and not come across as a dick.
One should usually only express themselves with foreign words when there is no English equivalent ("schadenfreude"), borrowed sayings which serve for emphases ("je ne se quois"), or words that have been used so often that the average Joe probably thinks they are already English words ("et cetera.")
No. That is hypocrisy.
Actually, since I had it in quotes, it was not part of the structure of the sentence. Had I given an example of correct usage, such as, "borrowing words from other languages is clearly not your forte, my friend," then I would have used italics.
Quoting each other in italics is simply following /. convention, because it's clearer to read than the blockquote tag.
No, your English teacher was entirely right. First of all, if you use the word "forte" when speaking of your strengths in casual conversation, you will sound like a pompous asshole. Secondly, when not only say it, but also pronounce it incorrectly, you sound like a poorly-educated pompous asshole.
When "forte" is pronounced "for-tay," it is Italian for "loud."
When "forte" is pronounced "fort" it is French for "strength."
While they are spelled the same, they are two completely different words, from two different languages. Neither is an English word, and it should be put in italics when inserted into a written English sentence.
Playing the files on a local machine off a networked drive would probably give you better sound than snaking analog audio cable across the entire length of your house, too.
You have the kind of class envy we need more of. Unfortunately, we have too much of the "I'm not rich, so you should not be permitted to be rich either," variety.
How about if we just take one galaxy at a time. When this one is full we'll worry about how to get to the next one. ;)Fine by me, but the discussion is about finding life capable of buying our iPods and Starter jackets. If that only occurs once per 50 galaxies (and I suspect the rate is far, far lower... perhaps even one per all galaxies if the Universe is finite), then it's not likely that mankind will ever reach an extra-terrestrial civilization. Perhaps some clever breed of cockroach that evolves after we are long dead will pull it off, who knows?
You are quite correct, but we are talking about the space between galaxies here, which isn't exactly crowded.
Fair enough, but are we likely to reach beyond our own galaxy before our extinction? The space between us and Andromeda is quite daunting when the physical speed limit is "c."
Really? I have not been convinced, but if you were to take me to a city on a planet orbiting another star, I most certainly would be. Even getting a "shut the fuck up already, we hear your damned signal!" message via the SETI project would get my attention.
Ice on Mars? Meh. Hydrogen and Oxygen are pretty darn common elements, and they form into H20 fairly readily.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most folks who are going to be convinced, in spite of a total lack of evidence, have been. Some of us are holding out for the facts.
I'm not ruling out the possibility of rocks going from Earth to Mars, but isn't it a lot less likely than the other way around? Earth is bigger than Mars, so escape velocity is much higher. Also, unlike Mars, we have an atmosphere that burns up the majority of meteors before they impact our surface, so our surface is impacted less often (and even when impact does happen, air friction would slow down debris that might otherwise fly off into space.) You could make the case that fast meteors which happen to skim along our outer atmosphere could pick up a microbe or two en route to a crash on Mars, however.
Your suggestion that simple life began on Mars and was carried to Earth by meteorites millions of years ago is certainly interesting. Wouldn't that be a fantastic discovery?
Finding evidence life on Mars which shared no genetic similarities with life on Earth would be a major find. However, if it is similar to what we find here, one could make the case that organisms were carried to Mars from Earth, by solar winds, or perhaps even our own unmanned probes.
When one considers the very fragile conditions which life requires to evolve (can't be too close or far to the star; must have a stable orbit and a fast enough rotation on its axis, which must nearly perpendicular to the orbital path; must have massive "shepherd" planets in further-out orbits to protect it from constant bombardment; must have a relatively stable surface; must have an atmosphere relatively free of certain toxins; must have just the right cocktail of "primordial ooze" to form into life in sufficient quantities), and even after all those conditions are meet, whatever the hell happened to form the first living cell on Earth has to happen. We still have yet to figure out what that was, or how unlikely it was to have occurred, but seeing as there are lots of star systems out there which are far older than ours, and we haven't heard from anybody already, it seems extremely unlikely that there's another inhabited star within a hundred thousand light-years of us (which rules out pretty much our entire galaxy.) I could be wrong, in fact I hope I'm wrong, but I think that we are probably, for all practical purposes, alone.
* MP3 jukebox for your car
An iPod may not be as '1337 as building it yourself, but at $300 for a 10 GB iPod that syncs instantly via firewire with your laptop or desktop system, it's a much better way to go. If 10 GB is not enough for you, $500 gets you a 30 GB unit.
Plus, I can tell you from experience that it slips easily into the back pocket of your jeans or the chest pocket of a shirt, so you never need to worry about it being stolen out of your car.
The problem with Green Arrow is that he's supposed to be a communist wing-nut. His radical ideology makes him a very interesting supporting character for an ensemble story, such as with JLA (and his appearance in "The Dark Knight Returns" was downright epic,) but he doesn't seem to hold up very well as a central figure.
Crossgen had a title last year called "Glory" which was pretty interesting. They kept it very vague about whether it was about a waitress with multiple personality disorder who struggles with the delusion that she becomes a comic-book goddess, or a super-heroic goddess who inhabits the life of an unwitting waitress. Very "Phillip K. Dick" mindfuck stuff. I didn't see it on that web page (and a search of their Forum page shows no mention of it,) so I guess they dropped it, huh?
I was big on Marvel comics growing up, and my horizons were suddenly expanded when Alan Moore and Frank Miller came along... but something happened right around the time that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became a children's motion picture.
Suddenly, Marvel and DC were cranking out as many titles as they could with low numbers on them, so would-be collectors would snap them up purely for the speculative value. ("If eXcalibur turns out to be the next X-Men, this first issue could make me rich someday!!!") Dark Horse started licensing every single movie and TV show with even a shred of geek appeal, and Image comics sprang up to light the path of style over substance. Soon, every damned artist on the Marvel staff was trying to draw exactly like Todd McFarlaine, and DC was allowing an untalented and unproven writer to "kill" Superman in the desperate hope of getting any attention paid to any of their titles besides "Batman," which they had already re-packaged a thousand ways.
The last straw for me was when Ben Edlund stopped writing "The Tick" so he could go on to write for TV and movies, and I noticed that there just weren't many comics I cared to read out there anymore.
One or two indie titles come along now and then and spark my interest, but it seems that every time I get interested in one of them, their publisher goes out of business before the story arc really even gets off the ground.
I have now gone from buying about a couple dozen titles a month 20 years ago, to buying none. If I want to read a comic, I buy a trade paperback. The last one was Kevin Smith's first run of "Green Arrow." (It sucked, by the way. If you think his film scripts are sometimes too wordy, run away screaming from his comics!)
It just seems like it's a long story arc because he trickles it out bit by bit, while interrupting it with "dead Piro days," full-page drawings, "stick-figure dom" stories, and various other filler. You could recap the entire arc so far of every major character in Megatokyo on a single, double-spaced page. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I would rather get one page of MT a year than be forced to endure an entire book of User Friendly strips. Quality over quantity for me.
Not that you would want to make a cluster of these things, when you could probably buy either a G5 Mac or a top-flight AMD box with the same money, but it has a certain "geek chic" to it.
Computing horsepower is getting so darn cheap, it seems that clustering low-speed computers is getting to be something reserved for mad scientists who salvage 1000 old Pentium 60's from some company's trash and use them for the calculations needed to fire their laser at the moon.
Not that there's anything wrong with that! Being a mad scientist is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice. I'm comfortable enough with my sanity that I don't feel I need to judge those who were born differently.
And yet, the site boasts over 8 million registered users and continues to be one of the busiest geek sites on the net, while sites like Kur5hin continue to sit nearly idle, in spite of their claims to have gotten so much right which Slashdot gets wrong.
Slashdot is was it is. Visit it, or don't visit it. If you are so sure that you know how to do better, start a better site and take away all that sweet, sweet ad revenue. Otherwise, shut the hell up.
Back on topic: I don't see much that is all that special or newsworthy of these Northtec computers. Yea, they're nice if you want a small desktop PC, I guess... But are we living in Japan or something? Is real estate so massively important that we all need teency-weency desktop computers? I mean, if you are out to save space, a laptop saves even more space, by replacing the mouse with a touchpad, and adding a hinged, built-in LCD. Otherwise, just put your tower under the desk like everybody else.
A Mac is a Personal Computer, too. Many companies build Personal Computers.
The fact that MS zealots once tried to redefine "PC" to mean "Computers that run Windows" doesn't mean that it's true.
I currently have 5 PC's in my house. Two of them are Macs. Only one is running Windows.
A Mac is both a computer and a platform. BIG difference.
This discussion was all about whether Apple's hardware is proprietary. It's not.
Interface "natively" with SGI and IBM disks: Huh. I thought OS X could do that.
Seamless clustering: No problem. OS X has solutions for clustering either via Ethernet or Firewire, your choice, and they are pretty darn easy to get running.
Run on more than one platform: x86 Linux can't run on PPC. PPCLinux can't run on x86. Even if you recompile from source to avoid the endian problem, you still won't have much luck. Yes, Linux has versions for more platforms than OS X, but weren't we talking about tasks that you would run on a specific server? Moving the OS to another platform is not something you are likely to attempt.
1. Linux market share will grow.
2. Apple market share will not.
Based on what I saw from the Stevenote today, and also based on my most recent miserable experiences with trying to download Red Hat images off one of the official mirrors via my DSL line (for all the talk of Linux being free-as-in-beer, it's a pain in the ass to get the latest distro any way other than by buying a cardboard box full of disks from your local retailer for about $50... sometimes more), I'm not so sure either assumption will turn out to be true over the long haul.
You must not be much of a salesman.
Joe Consumer prefers $600 HP boxen from Circuit City, which will have critical failures on at least some of the parts two or three times in the first year.
Joe Geek builds his PC out of parts from his favorite budget component vendor (either local or mail-order)
But there are many, many more people who don't want a shoddy budget PC, and dont want a '1337 beer-cooled hobbyist-built system. They want something that allows them to easilly manage digital video, pictures and audio files while doing all the usual mundane tasks (e-mail with spam protection, web browsing with pop-up blocking), and they don't want to fuck around with driver, config, and library files every damn time they try to do something new. For a computer that makes all that possible, they don't mind spending a little more money. These are the people that Apple is selling to, and it's working. IIRC, Apple has made a profit in all but two quarters all the way through the .com bust of the past three years, something which no other personal computer maker can claim. If I told you 5 years ago that Apple would still be chugging along in 2003, while Compaq would be bought out and liquidated over the same period, you probably would not have believed me, but here they are, still selling computers that are "too expensive" by the truckloads, to consumers who obviously perceive that they have more value than their Windows-based counterparts.
P.S. Yes, the "beer-cooled" thing was a Megatokyo reference. If you didn't get it, quit bothering with /. threads and go read the MT archives... you will get a lot more laughs out of that than anything here.