After all, PB's are all about form and function, and since Intel doesn't make a laptop, all the function in the world won't help if the form sucks.
Or was the PB bit just an attempt to start another war? Afterall, why compare a processor to a complete product...guess I don't get it.
I think I get it.
In the desktop market, Intel and AMD machines have Macintosh machines pretty handilly beat, in terms of raw performance/price. You can easilly find a $600 PC which makes the $1000 eMac look downright sluggish. Apple is forced to add value to their computers in other ways in order to sell them.
The CPU which is Apple's achilies tendon in the desktop market is actually their strength in the laptop market. iBooks and Powerbooks match up pretty well with Intel laptops in terms of performance/price, and also feature much longer battery life, and less heat (which translates into being able to build much tighter designs without down-chipping the CPU.)
If Intel's new chip allows high-speed processing at cooler temperatures and with less power consumption, it means that companies like Sony and Toshiba have a much better chance at making comparable products to the Powerbook line.
IIRC, a company caled Formac once made an expansion card for the old Rev A iMac that included TV input. For any iMac, iBook, or Powerbook after that, your best bet is a TV tuner in an external box connected by USB or Firewire. There are several such creatures out there if you shop around.
The iMac came out a few years after I was out of college, but I couldn't help but notice that, with a TV tuner, it would have been the ultimate dorm room computer, because it could pretty much do the work of every single electronic device in my old dorm (and there were a lot of them) while taking up a tiny fraction of the space.
You know, the "Generation Y" kids have it pretty damned good. They missed the Cold War, they had iMacs and broadband available in college, and they don't need to take the heat from all the Baby Boomers for failing to continue their precious little social revolution, because we Xers took care of that for them.:)
Then why has every person I know that has a Mac order an external floppy drive for $50.
Because you havn't meet me, or any of the Mac users I know.
I have two Macs, along with several PC's. The Macs get more use than any of the PC's do (especially my iBook, which I use for almost everything these days), and I have never once wished I could load a floppy disk into a Mac.
I don't even use them much for my PC's, other than bios updates (and as a boot disk on the really old machine I use as a Linux box.)
I always had the sense that the livable space on board Deep Space Nine was roughly the same amount of space in the Mall of America. It is a credit to the director that the illusionary internal size of DS9 stayed so consistant when it was really just a handful of sets on Paramount's back lot.
I disagree that Sisko and Odo were the only interesting characters. Most of them were pretty interesting. (And the flamingly gay Cardassian spy was, by far, one of the most entertaining and interesting characters on 90's TV.)
I think you mistook subtly for absense in the case of Dr. Crusher's conflicts and dimensions.
She was a character with a shitload of inner conflict. Picard, who she obviously felt some affection for, was also the man who gave the order which resulted in her husband's death. She was a loving mother who had a romantic draw to a man that was uncomfortable around children. McFadden and Stewart did a fantastic job of depicting characters with a lot of issues which they did not wish to confront. Sometimes the best drama is protrayed without dialogue.
If you were bored by her character, I would submit that you didn't really understand what was going on with her on the show.
Re:I Want This For All Apps
on
Tabs for Safari
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For every app that's running in OS X, the dock icon has a menu of each of the windows handled by that app. So switching between different windows in different apps is actually pretty easy, if you know about that feature.
A bitchy character would have been fine, but Pulaski was a total rehash of McCoy, as portrayed by a weaker actor.
Old. Technophobic. Cranky. Cynical. Hates using the transporter. Arguing about humanity with Spock/Data. The list goes on and on. Pulaski was the exact same character as McCoy, with two differences: 1. Female. (Actually, "sexless" would be a better description) 2. Not entertaining.
Crusher, on the other hand, a widow, a single mom, an awkward romantic history with her commanding officer, these were all very new elements to Star Trek, and allowed for stories which were not warmed-over "Bones vs. Spock" arguments.
To call her a "Stepford Wife" shows that you have as big of a problem with normal maternal figures as Gene Roddenberry did. Crusher was a military doctor who happened to like being a mom, and liked the idea of being in a relationship. She was actually one of the more interesting characters on the show.
You must be doing a better job than I am at suppressing the memories of Season 7
By the time they got to season 7, I was too wrapped up in DS9 to care. I was getting my good Trek fix every week elsewhere, so the final decline of TNG was of little concern to me.
And don't forget, it was Roddenberry who was working against the tide to bring a cancelled series first back from the dead, then into the movies, and finally back on the air.
He wasn't going against the tide, he was riding it. ST:TMP was the result of seven years of thousands of loud trekkies in "I Grok Spock" t-shirts demanding that the franchise be revived, along with massively successful syndication reruns of the original series.
You know, I hear a lot of Trekkies talk about Gene Roddenberry like he's the patron saint of good sci-fi, and RIck Berman like the's the anti-Gene... But I keep coming back to this simple fact:
Star Trek: The Next Generation got a whole lot better around season 3, when Roddenberry pretty much lost control of the show and let Berman take over. Remember that "Bones with tits" season-2 doctor? That was a direct result of Roddenberry insisting that Dr. Crusher be written out. He made a lot of those kinds of bad decisions, and the show was better off without his input.
When I hear people talk about "the spirit of Gene Roddenberry" in a Star Trek project, I usually think "oh, you mean this one is a heavy-handed and preachy humanist morality play that insults our capacity for reason?" Sadly, the answer to that is usually "yes."
Enterprise and Voyager sucked due to piss-poor writing and a lack of fresh ideas, not because they somehow strayed from the Roddenberry fold.
Of the three post-TNG shows, Deep Space Nine was the farthest from Roddenberry's vision, and it's not only the only watchable show of the three, but it was often better than TNG.
I think the movie failed simply due to horrible timing. The previews had me interested in seeing it, but by the time I had seen The Two Towers three times, I wasn't very interested in hitting the theater for a week or two, and by then Nemisis was out of the theaters. If it came back to a big screen this week, I would probably go out and see it. I'm sure that's true of a lot of geeks. If they had opened this Friday, they just would be going up against the tenth week of TTT and a lot of crap like Darkness Falls and Two Weeks Notice. They would have made piles of money that way. What the fuck were they thinking?
Either you are being a smartass (kind of like the "Rolling Stones, who the fuck are they?" line from "The Committments), or else you are a lot younger than I had guessed. I'll give you the benifit of the doubt and answer.
In the mid-to-late 60's, when the Beatles were entering their trippy "studio" phase, there was a rush to recapture the "Beatlemania" that went on in early 60's America.
NBC studios decided to create a campy TV show, inspired by the Beatles films "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!", and cross-market them as a rock & roll band (selling albums, etc.) They did a talent search, and formed the "band" out of two actors (one of whom had an English accent, the other was a former child star with good comedic chops), and two okay-ish guitar players. Using the best studio session players, they commissioned songs from the biggest hit-makers of the day (Neil Diamond, Boyce and Heart, etc.) and let the "band" do the singing. The half-hour sitcom (which always pimped at least one song, if not two, from the tied-in albums) was a run-away success.
Eventually, the four members of The Monkees began to chafe at all the criticism that they were not real musicians, and so they rehearsed and attempted a concert tour. (They even got Jimi Hendrix to open for them... although he was booed off the stage by the throngs of pre-teen Monkees fans who knew jack about music.)
Later, they recorded an album made up entirely of their own music. It wasn't very good. It debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts for a single week, only to be knocked off the charts by "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and from there it fell into obscurity, followed closely by the Monkees themselves.
As a totally prefabricated pop act, they paved the way for groups like The Villiage People (who didn't even always do their own singing), Menudo (who replaced members once they turned 13), and the "boy bands" of the 90's. Also, the Monkees TV show helped define the "music video" style.
As catchy as "The Last Train To Clarkesville" might have been, the real legacy of The Monkees is that they helped the Media Machine hone its craft to the point that nobody really needs to be particularilly talented (or even entertaining) to sell content anymore.
Do you think people are going to be listening to Avril Lavigne, Ja Rule, and Britney Spears 100, hell even 20 years from now?
Perhaps not, but when I look at the better work from 90's (and early 00's) acts like Barenaked Ladies, Blues Traveler, U2, Dave Matthews Band, No Doubt, Jars of Clay, Seal, Cake, Garbage, The Tragically Hip, etc. I can't help that think that a lot of their stuff will end up on "classic" pop stations 15 years from now. Your children will consider these songs retro-chic.
Even some of the really bad stuff will probably come back into vogue someday. When disco died off in the early 80's, I thought I might never need to hear the fucking Villiage People ever again, but not only did disco start coming back in the mid-90's, but some of it stayed. The other night I was at a pizza place when "Macho Man" came in over the PA.
The retro bounce has always been there, and probably always will, as long as there are radio stations going after the 30-something demo (by playing what they liked as teens), there will be teenagers that pick up on it, and since only the "hits" of past eras get a second life on AOR, the percentage of listenable stuff to crap is usually a lot better than on stations which play new music, creating the illusion that new music is not as good. Somewhere out there is a band that will inspire future musicans the same way the Velvet Underground once did, but we won't know it until we hear the next generation of musicians talk about being "blown away" by them in interviews.
As for the young Ms. Spears, who's craptacular albums started this discussion, is she really any less of a style-over-substance pin-up pretending to be a musician than Madonna was back in the days when she sang "Like a Virgin" while dry-fucking a wedding veil on stage for an MTV video?
I've got some bad news for you. Def Leopard always sucked. If you ever thought "Photograph" was an "awesome, fresh, ass kicking song; one that will stand the test of time," then you were a "fucktard teenager" yourself. Def Leopard was always shitty hair-rock, being marketed and sold to kids who were too clueless to grok what made Led Zeppelin great but too proud to be seen listening to KISS.
Teenage fucktards, as you call them, have been swallowing whatever shit has been crammed down their throats for decades, regardless of the "talent" of the "musicians" in question. Need I remind you of The Monkees?
The RIAA doesn't give a shit about any of this. The RIAA is an organization of lawyers and administrators which was originally formed to standardize shit like the little equalizer that goes into all turntables (the reason why you can't plug most record players into your standard RCA inputs), and to make sure people are not stomping all over copyrights.
Recently, the RIAA's number one purpose has been to serve as a lightning rod, drawing criticism away from the big record labels. As long as all of you were shouting "fuck Hillary Rosen," she was doing her job, which was to keep the actual assholes behind shutting down napster completely faceless. It's worked like a charm. I'm sure everybody will assume Rosen's replacement is a pariah as well, and give the dicks running the big media companies a pass.
I think the parent post has a bit of a point here.
I mean, thousands of slashbot geeks who would never even consider giving an old-skool female folk artist a second look probably became instant fans of her just for visibly being on the white-hat side of the whole MP3 debate.
It's kind of like how we were all willing to forget how much we hated Wesley Crusher when Wil Wheaton turned out to be "one of us." Our objectivity has been skewed a little regarding public figures who turn out to be good eggs.
The HP in question was a Pavillion 5150. At the time I bought it, it ran for about the same price as an iBook, and no, the HP was not faster. It was slower, especially with heavy-lifting like photoshop filters.
Web browsers, for example, are far slower on the Macintosh platorm
Do you mean that piece of shit known as Internet Explorer 5.0 for Mac? Because Safari loads these Slashdot pages in the blink of an eye, while IE was dog slow. Let's see... was that the Mac platform's fault? Or is it just possible that Microsoft wrote a shittier version of their browser when creating the OS X version?
You want to say the latest Pentium desktop machine is faster than Apple's new dual 1.43 G4 tower? I am inclined to believe you, while I have not seen for myself. Intel and AMD desktops have been quite a bit faster than anything in the G4 line for the last couple years. Try telling me that the Pentium based laptops give more ! for $ than Apple laptops and I can't even take you seriously, because I know from experience that Intel laptops are shitty and slow.
(In the end, I was able to squeeze a little more performance out of that HP by dumping Windows ME in favor of Linux, but it still slower than the iBook, with a crappier screen, a smaller HD, and less battery life. Now that I've switched to using an Apple laptop, I don't intend to go back until the PC world figures out how to make a fast CPU run full-throttle while staying cool and using way less power, which doesn't look to be happening anytime soon.)
Re:XML is NOT just text!
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 1
The whole point of XML is that it is NOT just a string of text.
Actually, the whole point of XML is that it is just a string of text.
If XML parsers used a file format that wasn't human-readable text, there would be little point in using it, and we would all just stick with object-model databases.
Re:You lost me on the incredible leap of logic...
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As XML is just another text format, it follows that Perl will be just as good at processing XML documents.
Since my pasta maker is good at making pasta, and ice cream and pasta are both foods, it follows my pasta maker will be just as good at making ice cream.
That only correlates if ice cream is a type of pasta, because XML is a text format.
This is a lot more like saying "since my pasta maker is good at making Ziti, Rigate, Macaroni, etc., all pastas really, and Spaghetti is a type of pasta, my pasta maker should be good at making Spaghetti.
Sorry, but the iBook "feels" slow. Even $699 Wintel notebook blowout specials "feel" fast.
And I give a fuck about your feelings... why?
The Apple notebook computers, even my "slow" iBook (which is now about a generation old) are plenty fast. Most pentium-based laptops nerf the shit out of the CPU in order to avoid chronic heat and battery life problems. (And yet, the Apple laptops still run cooler and longer while chugging away at full speed.) On my HP Pavillion, I couldn't even watch one DVD movie on a full battery charge, yet it ran no faster than my iBook, on which I can easilly watch two in a row if I'm on a long flight. Yet the iBook performs most tasks as fast or faster than the HP did, and both cost the same price at the time.
The 500 MHz iBook felt slow, eh? Well, that's because your iBook uses a 4500 RPM HD, a slower graphics card, and unlike the 800 MHz iMac, it has no AltiVec processor. It also uses slower memory.
I have a G3 tower which I installed a 500 MHz G4 chip into, and it is faster in almost every way than my 700 MHz iBook.
Comparing an iBook to a pentium desktop machine, like the parent poster did, is just silly. I will gladly stand the iBook up against anything in the PC notebook world, though. IMHO, in terms of the total picture of performance, features, battery life and cost, Apple's iBooks and Powerbooks are the best damned laptops out there, and there isn't even a close second.
Slashdot Mirror
"Homer's Enemy"
That was the episode which introduced the funniest one-off character in Simpsons history: Frank Grimes.
"I live in a one-room apartment that's above a bowling alley and below another bowling alley."
In terms of huge laughs, I would put "Homer's Enemy" ahead of several of the episodes that made EW's top 25.
On the other side of the spectrum, the season one episdoe, "Bart the Genius" is an enduring classic which got shafted by this list.
Or was the PB bit just an attempt to start another war? Afterall, why compare a processor to a complete product...guess I don't get it.
I think I get it.
In the desktop market, Intel and AMD machines have Macintosh machines pretty handilly beat, in terms of raw performance/price. You can easilly find a $600 PC which makes the $1000 eMac look downright sluggish. Apple is forced to add value to their computers in other ways in order to sell them.
The CPU which is Apple's achilies tendon in the desktop market is actually their strength in the laptop market. iBooks and Powerbooks match up pretty well with Intel laptops in terms of performance/price, and also feature much longer battery life, and less heat (which translates into being able to build much tighter designs without down-chipping the CPU.)
If Intel's new chip allows high-speed processing at cooler temperatures and with less power consumption, it means that companies like Sony and Toshiba have a much better chance at making comparable products to the Powerbook line.
The iMac came out a few years after I was out of college, but I couldn't help but notice that, with a TV tuner, it would have been the ultimate dorm room computer, because it could pretty much do the work of every single electronic device in my old dorm (and there were a lot of them) while taking up a tiny fraction of the space.
You know, the "Generation Y" kids have it pretty damned good. They missed the Cold War, they had iMacs and broadband available in college, and they don't need to take the heat from all the Baby Boomers for failing to continue their precious little social revolution, because we Xers took care of that for them. :)
Because you havn't meet me, or any of the Mac users I know.
I have two Macs, along with several PC's. The Macs get more use than any of the PC's do (especially my iBook, which I use for almost everything these days), and I have never once wished I could load a floppy disk into a Mac.
I don't even use them much for my PC's, other than bios updates (and as a boot disk on the really old machine I use as a Linux box.)
Just to be clear, I didn't say "bones with tits." I said "Bones with tits," as in Bones, the nickname for Dr McCoy from TOS.
I can see how some Generation Y little whippersnapper could miss that reference.
I disagree that Sisko and Odo were the only interesting characters. Most of them were pretty interesting. (And the flamingly gay Cardassian spy was, by far, one of the most entertaining and interesting characters on 90's TV.)
Pretty much tells you everything you need to know about why the movie tanked, doesn't it?
She was a character with a shitload of inner conflict. Picard, who she obviously felt some affection for, was also the man who gave the order which resulted in her husband's death. She was a loving mother who had a romantic draw to a man that was uncomfortable around children. McFadden and Stewart did a fantastic job of depicting characters with a lot of issues which they did not wish to confront. Sometimes the best drama is protrayed without dialogue.
If you were bored by her character, I would submit that you didn't really understand what was going on with her on the show.
For every app that's running in OS X, the dock icon has a menu of each of the windows handled by that app. So switching between different windows in different apps is actually pretty easy, if you know about that feature.
Old. Technophobic. Cranky. Cynical. Hates using the transporter. Arguing about humanity with Spock/Data. The list goes on and on. Pulaski was the exact same character as McCoy, with two differences: 1. Female. (Actually, "sexless" would be a better description) 2. Not entertaining.
Crusher, on the other hand, a widow, a single mom, an awkward romantic history with her commanding officer, these were all very new elements to Star Trek, and allowed for stories which were not warmed-over "Bones vs. Spock" arguments.
To call her a "Stepford Wife" shows that you have as big of a problem with normal maternal figures as Gene Roddenberry did. Crusher was a military doctor who happened to like being a mom, and liked the idea of being in a relationship. She was actually one of the more interesting characters on the show.
By the time they got to season 7, I was too wrapped up in DS9 to care. I was getting my good Trek fix every week elsewhere, so the final decline of TNG was of little concern to me.
And don't forget, it was Roddenberry who was working against the tide to bring a cancelled series first back from the dead, then into the movies, and finally back on the air.
He wasn't going against the tide, he was riding it. ST:TMP was the result of seven years of thousands of loud trekkies in "I Grok Spock" t-shirts demanding that the franchise be revived, along with massively successful syndication reruns of the original series.
The strongest compliment I can give to Enterprise is "it doesn't suck as much as Voyager."
When the most compelling episode of your show focusses entirely on three vulcans talking to each other, your show is in real trouble.
Star Trek: The Next Generation got a whole lot better around season 3, when Roddenberry pretty much lost control of the show and let Berman take over. Remember that "Bones with tits" season-2 doctor? That was a direct result of Roddenberry insisting that Dr. Crusher be written out. He made a lot of those kinds of bad decisions, and the show was better off without his input.
When I hear people talk about "the spirit of Gene Roddenberry" in a Star Trek project, I usually think "oh, you mean this one is a heavy-handed and preachy humanist morality play that insults our capacity for reason?" Sadly, the answer to that is usually "yes."
Enterprise and Voyager sucked due to piss-poor writing and a lack of fresh ideas, not because they somehow strayed from the Roddenberry fold.
Of the three post-TNG shows, Deep Space Nine was the farthest from Roddenberry's vision, and it's not only the only watchable show of the three, but it was often better than TNG.
I think the movie failed simply due to horrible timing. The previews had me interested in seeing it, but by the time I had seen The Two Towers three times, I wasn't very interested in hitting the theater for a week or two, and by then Nemisis was out of the theaters. If it came back to a big screen this week, I would probably go out and see it. I'm sure that's true of a lot of geeks. If they had opened this Friday, they just would be going up against the tenth week of TTT and a lot of crap like Darkness Falls and Two Weeks Notice. They would have made piles of money that way. What the fuck were they thinking?
Either you are being a smartass (kind of like the "Rolling Stones, who the fuck are they?" line from "The Committments), or else you are a lot younger than I had guessed. I'll give you the benifit of the doubt and answer.
In the mid-to-late 60's, when the Beatles were entering their trippy "studio" phase, there was a rush to recapture the "Beatlemania" that went on in early 60's America.
NBC studios decided to create a campy TV show, inspired by the Beatles films "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!", and cross-market them as a rock & roll band (selling albums, etc.) They did a talent search, and formed the "band" out of two actors (one of whom had an English accent, the other was a former child star with good comedic chops), and two okay-ish guitar players. Using the best studio session players, they commissioned songs from the biggest hit-makers of the day (Neil Diamond, Boyce and Heart, etc.) and let the "band" do the singing. The half-hour sitcom (which always pimped at least one song, if not two, from the tied-in albums) was a run-away success.
Eventually, the four members of The Monkees began to chafe at all the criticism that they were not real musicians, and so they rehearsed and attempted a concert tour. (They even got Jimi Hendrix to open for them... although he was booed off the stage by the throngs of pre-teen Monkees fans who knew jack about music.)
Later, they recorded an album made up entirely of their own music. It wasn't very good. It debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts for a single week, only to be knocked off the charts by "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and from there it fell into obscurity, followed closely by the Monkees themselves.
As a totally prefabricated pop act, they paved the way for groups like The Villiage People (who didn't even always do their own singing), Menudo (who replaced members once they turned 13), and the "boy bands" of the 90's. Also, the Monkees TV show helped define the "music video" style.
As catchy as "The Last Train To Clarkesville" might have been, the real legacy of The Monkees is that they helped the Media Machine hone its craft to the point that nobody really needs to be particularilly talented (or even entertaining) to sell content anymore.
Perhaps not, but when I look at the better work from 90's (and early 00's) acts like Barenaked Ladies, Blues Traveler, U2, Dave Matthews Band, No Doubt, Jars of Clay, Seal, Cake, Garbage, The Tragically Hip, etc. I can't help that think that a lot of their stuff will end up on "classic" pop stations 15 years from now. Your children will consider these songs retro-chic.
Even some of the really bad stuff will probably come back into vogue someday. When disco died off in the early 80's, I thought I might never need to hear the fucking Villiage People ever again, but not only did disco start coming back in the mid-90's, but some of it stayed. The other night I was at a pizza place when "Macho Man" came in over the PA.
The retro bounce has always been there, and probably always will, as long as there are radio stations going after the 30-something demo (by playing what they liked as teens), there will be teenagers that pick up on it, and since only the "hits" of past eras get a second life on AOR, the percentage of listenable stuff to crap is usually a lot better than on stations which play new music, creating the illusion that new music is not as good. Somewhere out there is a band that will inspire future musicans the same way the Velvet Underground once did, but we won't know it until we hear the next generation of musicians talk about being "blown away" by them in interviews.
As for the young Ms. Spears, who's craptacular albums started this discussion, is she really any less of a style-over-substance pin-up pretending to be a musician than Madonna was back in the days when she sang "Like a Virgin" while dry-fucking a wedding veil on stage for an MTV video?
Teenage fucktards, as you call them, have been swallowing whatever shit has been crammed down their throats for decades, regardless of the "talent" of the "musicians" in question. Need I remind you of The Monkees?
The RIAA doesn't give a shit about any of this. The RIAA is an organization of lawyers and administrators which was originally formed to standardize shit like the little equalizer that goes into all turntables (the reason why you can't plug most record players into your standard RCA inputs), and to make sure people are not stomping all over copyrights.
Recently, the RIAA's number one purpose has been to serve as a lightning rod, drawing criticism away from the big record labels. As long as all of you were shouting "fuck Hillary Rosen," she was doing her job, which was to keep the actual assholes behind shutting down napster completely faceless. It's worked like a charm. I'm sure everybody will assume Rosen's replacement is a pariah as well, and give the dicks running the big media companies a pass.
"regression" is probably a good word for a Janis Ian fan who starts listening to Britney Spears. :)
I mean, thousands of slashbot geeks who would never even consider giving an old-skool female folk artist a second look probably became instant fans of her just for visibly being on the white-hat side of the whole MP3 debate.
It's kind of like how we were all willing to forget how much we hated Wesley Crusher when Wil Wheaton turned out to be "one of us." Our objectivity has been skewed a little regarding public figures who turn out to be good eggs.
Web browsers, for example, are far slower on the Macintosh platorm
Do you mean that piece of shit known as Internet Explorer 5.0 for Mac? Because Safari loads these Slashdot pages in the blink of an eye, while IE was dog slow. Let's see... was that the Mac platform's fault? Or is it just possible that Microsoft wrote a shittier version of their browser when creating the OS X version?
You want to say the latest Pentium desktop machine is faster than Apple's new dual 1.43 G4 tower? I am inclined to believe you, while I have not seen for myself. Intel and AMD desktops have been quite a bit faster than anything in the G4 line for the last couple years. Try telling me that the Pentium based laptops give more ! for $ than Apple laptops and I can't even take you seriously, because I know from experience that Intel laptops are shitty and slow.
(In the end, I was able to squeeze a little more performance out of that HP by dumping Windows ME in favor of Linux, but it still slower than the iBook, with a crappier screen, a smaller HD, and less battery life. Now that I've switched to using an Apple laptop, I don't intend to go back until the PC world figures out how to make a fast CPU run full-throttle while staying cool and using way less power, which doesn't look to be happening anytime soon.)
Actually, the whole point of XML is that it is just a string of text.
If XML parsers used a file format that wasn't human-readable text, there would be little point in using it, and we would all just stick with object-model databases.
Since my pasta maker is good at making pasta, and ice cream and pasta are both foods, it follows my pasta maker will be just as good at making ice cream.
That only correlates if ice cream is a type of pasta, because XML is a text format.
This is a lot more like saying "since my pasta maker is good at making Ziti, Rigate, Macaroni, etc., all pastas really, and Spaghetti is a type of pasta, my pasta maker should be good at making Spaghetti.
And I give a fuck about your feelings... why?
The Apple notebook computers, even my "slow" iBook (which is now about a generation old) are plenty fast. Most pentium-based laptops nerf the shit out of the CPU in order to avoid chronic heat and battery life problems. (And yet, the Apple laptops still run cooler and longer while chugging away at full speed.) On my HP Pavillion, I couldn't even watch one DVD movie on a full battery charge, yet it ran no faster than my iBook, on which I can easilly watch two in a row if I'm on a long flight. Yet the iBook performs most tasks as fast or faster than the HP did, and both cost the same price at the time.
Q: Why don't the British make PC's?
A: They couldn't figure out how to make one leak oil.
I have a G3 tower which I installed a 500 MHz G4 chip into, and it is faster in almost every way than my 700 MHz iBook.
Comparing an iBook to a pentium desktop machine, like the parent poster did, is just silly. I will gladly stand the iBook up against anything in the PC notebook world, though. IMHO, in terms of the total picture of performance, features, battery life and cost, Apple's iBooks and Powerbooks are the best damned laptops out there, and there isn't even a close second.