The problem of both Linux and Macosx is that Windows is the right tool for the job for 99% of end-user tasks.
Really? I'd stack iMovie, iTunes, the Mac version of Final Cut, etc., against Windows media software any day. For home media, Windows is not the right tool for the job at all.
Also, I would say that GIMP on Linux is a hell of a lot better than Microsoft's paint software. So if you are doing low-end graphic editing, Windows is not the best tool for the job. Oh, and that goes for high-end graphic editing, too. Photoshop is best done on a Mac.
Database work? Hmm... I could use Access, which sucks and doesn't scale well, or I could use MS-SQL, which costs a fortune, or I could use PostgreSQL or MySQL on a Linux box (or Mac) and not pay one cent. MySQL is faster and PostgreSQL is more robust. Once again, Windows is not the best tool for the job.
Oh, are you talking about simple stuff, like web browsing, word processing, e-mail, etc.? Well, any platform would work fine for that kind of stuff, I guess, so Windows is at least a tool that can do the job, if not the tool.
When I said Windows is sometimes the right tool for the job, I meant various specialty niche programs that have not made it to other platforms. AutoCAD, for example. If you want to design a building, you should probably have a computer with Windows running on it. I seem to recall that there's some nice physics-modelling software for hi-fi loudspeaker design out there that's Windows-only, too. Oh, and if you would rather play electronic games at your desk than on your couch with a console, a Windows system is the way to go. Beyond that, Windows is ususally not the right tool for the job. It will sometimes do, in a pinch, if that's all you have, but for most things it's far from the best method.
If you have so many icons on the dock, that probably implies that the UI needs a better way to organize icons.
Not really. Now, if I found myslef losing track of the icons, that would imply the need for better organization, but when you shrink the dock down you can have lots and lots of them without taking up that much space, and you can order them any way you want. (For example, all my media-authoring software is next to each other.)
Now, if it ever gets to the point that I have more frequently-used programs than the dock can handle (which is seldom true for anybody, if you honestly evaluate which apps you actually use frequently), then I would probably clamor for the UI to offer something with more organizational tools... but so far it works great.
No, I was used to the old-school Mac user quirks. I used their older OS's about as much as I used UNIX and Windows, so I was fairly used to them. I'm talking more about the genreal layout of things, the infamous Dock, etc.
For example, I used to think that dock magnification was just about the most horrible thing ever. Now I leave it turned on pretty much always on my laptop, and find it to be kind of handy. It allows me to have a crapload of teeny-tiny icons in the dock, yet still be absolutely certain that I'm selecting (or dragging & dropping to) the correct one. Quite spiffy, even though I dismissed it at first as mere eye-candy.
Windows is and has been ready for the desktop for a long long time. It does EVERYTHING. It may not do it well, and it may crash sometimes, and linux may be more powerful, faster, more stable, or better, at certaint things. But if there is somethign you want your computer to do. And computers are capable of doing it. Then a computer with Windows is capable of doing it.
Run my X11 software? No? How about the best page-layout software? Hmm, mostly need a Mac for that, huh? Okay, well I'm sure Windows will work great with my Firewire-based A/D audio rack... Oh look, all the Windows users on the discussion sites report not having any luck all, and are either giving up on the hardware or buying a Mac for their studios. Hmm... Sounds like there are some things you can't do with Windows after all.
That can't be said for any other operating system.
Asside from AutoCAD and some games, the same can be said for MacOS... and MacOS will do a lot of stuff that Windows won't.
The fact is that Windows is sometimes the right tool for the job, but I would usually reccomend either a Linux or Mac solution for 90% of the stuff people use computers for.
There is one reason, and one reason only, why Windows continues to dominate the desktop market, and that's the vendor lock-in we all suffer from the ever changing ".doc" format of MS-Word. If you do not have a Windows machine with the latest version of MS-Word, you might not be able to read that document your boss sent you on Friday night asking for your response by Monday morning. Sure, you can use StarOffice (or any of a number of other.doc editors) in Linux, and Office for Mac on the Macintosh, but we all know that Microsoft will just release a new version of Word "Any Day Now" which will completely break all compatability with everything else, so FUD demands that everybody keeps a Windows box handy, and most people do not wish to have more than one system.
If the world really wanted to take down the MS monopoly, step 1 would be to break the near-universal reliance on MS-Word. Until then, Windows will keep coming out on top.
Anyway, personally I think once you get over the big titlebars Windows XP is better than MacOS in terms of themes, the MacOS gui is cool for the first week, then the novelty wears off and it just gets distracting.
That's funny. If ound just the opposite to be true. The first couple weeks I used OS X, I found the gui to be kind of obnoxious and intrusive. Then, once I started using it for serious work I found it to be incredibly functional.
Some stuff is just confusing too. Look at this for instance [ranchero.com].
You are judging an OS by a shitty shareware app? That's like judging windows by the Kazaa interface. Still, if I had to guess, I would say that the fill-bar you are talking about is giving the status for loading the news server that is named next to it. I'm sure this would be much more obvious if you were watching the app in action instead of looking at a screen capture from the moment after the news server was selected, just before it gets very far loading.
I'm sure they will also post poorly-written reviews that only express polar extremes (either "it gave meaning to my life" or "the producer should be gang-raped and murdered"). They will also say "fuck" a lot because they think it makes them "edgy."
Also, look for Harry cameos in the shittiest of shitty low-budget games, followed by Harry ripping the movie in his review to show how much integrity he has.
Oh, and "spoilers" for the more popular game franchises. Now you can be the first to know what the ending cut-scene movie for "Grand Theft Auto 5" is going to look like. Whee!
I'm betting that if you had a oriental history major teacher teaching the class there'd be a lot to learn, things that your friends and a few beers won't teach you.
Too bad that you can bank on nearly every anime class in America being taught either by a pimply TA who is just there to pay off the tuition for the Masters he's working on in English Literature, or else a chubby Film Studies prof who set up the class as a pet project because he's a huge fan of Magic Knight Rayearth. You probably could learn more from your beer buddies, as they have probably read every site that Google could find about Lain or Cowboy Bebop or whatever the hell you are watching, and watched all 27 hours of the bonus features on their DVD boxed sets. Okay, they might not grok the transformation metaphors of their favorite magical girl show and what Sailor Moon has in common with "Hello God, It's Me, Margaret" (quite a lot, actually, but that's a different thread). However, they will probably be able teach you the correct context for using words like "Baka." What more could you ask for?
People who can't explain the difference between Dadaism and Surrealism should not be taking this course.
Nor should anybody who thinks Verdi's operas are Classical music. (They are Romantic, for those of you who failed or didn't take music appreciation.)
Also, an understanding of animation history, with a focus on Walt Disney, as well as a firm grounding of Japanese theater and culture, should both be prerequisites of a class like this. Teaching a class about anime to incoming freshmen is like teaching a class on rock & roll and beginning with Pearl Jam. Not only is it completely unwarranted, but it fails to provide any real context for understanding.
A Liberal Arts education is supposed to be about broadening your experience. That goes beyond telling a Sailor Moon fan to watch Akira. It means turning them on to the entire vast history of art, especially Western art, but also the art of other cultures. It means understanding where all this shit comes from, and I don't mean the "Superfreak" samples in "U Can't Touch This."
See, that's the trick, though. The business model ISN'T working
Ding! Give that man a cheroot!
I was wondering when somebody was going to catch on and reply to what I said with that observations. The Big 5 record companies lost $11 Million in 2002, and $3 Million in 2001. They've pretty much been losing money hand-over-fist ever since the Napster shutdown.
Whether their losses are a result of artistic stagnation by the corporate owners, loss of good will from the whole MP3 rights debacle, or that people are just doing other things with their money (like eating) during this recession, I'll leave up to another debate, but the fact is that the otherwise-profitable owners of the money-losing big labels are getting pretty disgusted. The business model, which has worked so well in the past, is already failing.
You are operating from a faulty premise, which is that the record label must recover their production costs from sales.
The truth is that most of the production costs are paid by the artist. With a new artist, the label fronts the money to produce the album, to be paid back out of artist royalties.
One of the big complaints of artists, which several prominent performers have pointed out before, is that they can almost never repay all of these costs from their first album, unless they are one of those rare acts which goes platinum with their debut. Most acts are then pressured to rush a second album, as cheaply as possible, to increase their revenue to pay off the production costs of the first album and get them into the black. (Hence, all those infamous "sophomore slump" albums.)
In other businesses, this practice is called "loan sharking", but it's the way the record industry has worked for decades, and there's no sign of stopping as long as this business model continues to work.
As a 4th grader, we were given the option to write a paper on any science related topic. I found a book in my dad's library called "Relativity for the Layman," and found that I could follow it, so I struggled through another couple reference sources and wrote my paper.
Yes, I'm a huge geek. Far from the biggest, though. Even within my school I knew of a few kids who were demonstratably smarter (and geekier).
It seems that just about every fairly bright kid has a story of the first time they realized that most grade-school teachers are not very bright.
In my case, it was when I wrote a paper and used a double-negative to indicate a positive in contradiction to conventional wisdom (as in "not impossible"). A sloppy practice which a good teacher will advise against, but the sentence got the meaning across.
My teacher "corrected" it by crossing out one negative, changing a badly-written sentence which said what I meant into a clearer sentence which said the opposite of what I meant. No ammount of explaining by a nervous 3th grade kid could get it through to her that the single-negative sentance failed to convey the meaning.
A year later, I wrote a science paper on relativity. The teacher gave me an A-, admitting that she couldn't follow it. That was when I realized that my slow-witted 3rd grade teacher was not so unique.
Later in life, I dated a lot of El-Ed majors in college, and learned that the grade-school teachers of the future were not likely to be much brighter.
Even then, all it would take would be a pair of aligator clips on the posts of your speaker drivers, along with a device to step down the signal to line level (and undo any crossover splitting if it's a multiple-driver system), and you've got yourself an analog dub, ready to create a new, unprotected digital master with.
Forcing analog copying does nothing to stop piracy. Once you make one really good digital copy via analog transfer, you can make a billion lossless digital copies off that new master.
All this does is create a hassle for the consumer who wants to listen to his CD in the car via his iPod car kit.
So when someone tells me that that they like Macs better than PCs, I usually ask them if they mean they like Macs better than Windows because to me, a "PC" is a computer with an x86 cpu. It could be running Winows, Linux, BSD, Solaris x86, Menuet OS, DOS, Unix, or whatever OS runs on an x86.
Don't take this the wrong way, but a little bit of your own lack of knowledge is on display here.
First of all, every post-68k Mac, beginning with the 6100 back in 1995, uses a PowerPC chip. The PowerPC chip does not use 68k instructions, which is why early power Macs included an emulation layer. G3 is the the thrid-generation version of PowerPC, which is what was used in the first iMac (in 1998), but is not currently used in any new Macintosh other than the iBook. So, no. Mac does not mean 68k, and power mac does not mean G3.
Also, a Macintosh can also run several flavors of Linux and BSD, as well as two very different incarnations of the MacOS, sust as an x86 machine can. (This point has become somewhat less relevant now that OS X 10.2 is out, along with kick-ass X11 integration.)
Anyway, now for my main rant, conserning your point that, "to you", PC means x86:
The term "PC", as it is commonly used today, began its life as a marketing idea from Microsoft.
You see, back in the day when there were only a few knock-offs of the IBM computer (Compaq, Olivetti, etc.), and there were a lot of other PC's running other operating systems (from Commodore, Apple, etc.), People tended to use the terms "IBM Compatible" or "IBM Clone" when speaking of systems that ran the same software as an IBM PC.
The folks at Microsoft understood that their future depended on divorcing themselves, and companies like Compaq, from this association with IBM (especially since IBM wanted to move towards OS/2, while Microsoft was writing Windows for all their other customers).
Therefore MS, Compaq, and everybody else in the clone market (which was quickly getting bigger than IBM) insisted to anybody listeneing that "IBM Compatable" was an incorrect term. The correct term for an Intel-based computer running DOS or Windows was "PC".
In spite of a few cantankerous Amiga and Apple users out there insisting that "PC" was a term that already had a meaning, it caught on.
A Macintosh is a personal computer, but in this age of Microsoft, a Macintosh is not a Personal Computer.
Downright Orwellian, when you think about it.
Oh, and by the way, "PC" never meant "x86 computer". There are plenty systems, servers and other devices with x86 CPU's which are not called PC's. If it can't run Windows, it's not a PC. If it was built for use as a server, even if it can run Windows, it's not a PC.
For a while, people were starting to get away from this asinine use of "PC" by saying "Wintel"... but then AMD started to gain signifigant market share, and Linux began to catch on, so that term was ruined.
I think it's about time we change the term PC to mean "personal computers which can run some form of UNIX or Linux."
Windows can only run on x86-based machines (so far), and Mac OS X can only run on PowerPC-based machines with the Apple ROMs installed (yes, it will run on a pre-G3 CPU, as long as you use a "blessed" video card and do a little hacking.) However both architectures can run Linux (and OS X is arguably every bit as UNIXy as Linux), therefore both architectures are *nix-capable PC platforms. Let's call them PC's, shall we?
'Entering" their website and using their boards is more akin to walking into the store, taking their paper, using their markers, making a sign, and protesting inside the store.
Only if they are giving away paper and markers to everybody who comes in to allow us to post on the wall testemonials about how good their product is. Once they do that, they really should not be allowed to sue for somebody writing that they suck.
Yes, there is a contract, at least an implied contract, conceived by our founders. It is this:
The government exists for the sole purpose of serving the best interests of the people. To the extent that they choose not to do so, the people have the right to revolt.
Selling to people who happen to live in those states is not "doing business" in those states. They are doing business in the state where they are located, and costumers from various states go to them, albeit electronically. It should be no different than if I drive to New Hampshire to buy something.
The really dumb thing about this move is that the reason why most people who buy online choose to buy online is the lack of sales tax. As soon as I must pay both shipping costs and sales taxes, the advantage of buying on-line evaporates, and I stop buying that way, leading to otherwise successful Internet sellers going under. We have already seen the horrific result on the economy when the shitty e-businesses went bankrupt in the dot-com bust... imagine the negative impact if the good ones go down!
A very good question. Let me endeavor to give you a good answer.
The purpose of state sales taxes is to provide services to the people and businesses of your state. If I own a business outside of that state, it's not really fair to ask me to pay for services that I am not able to utilize, even if I am selling an item to somebody who lives in your state.
Now, you could point out that a sales tax almost always is passed directly to the consumer, so it's really my customers who are paying the tax, but it's still being collected from my business, which means it's my accounting headache.
Furthermore, as a consumer, I don't mind paying state and local sales taxes on items I buy in brick-and-mortar stores. It's logical... that money goes to pave the road so I can get to the store, and to pay the cops to keep the store from being ripped off, and to pay the fire department to keep it from burning to the ground, it even pays for public education so they can hire minimum-wage 20 year-olds who have an outside chance of getting my change correct. Since state and local infrastructure makes our transaction possible, it seems reasonable to me that we, as buyer and seller, help fund that infrastructure. In the case of something I buy from Amazon.com or EBay, how does the state justify its claim to a slice of the pie? It didn't do anything to facillitate the trade. [Flamebait Warning] Collecting a compulsory percentage without offering anything in return is called racketeering. [Flame off]
Actually, you are incorrect in your assumption that most rural votes went to Bush.
It kind of looks like that on the state electoral map, because the "urban" states voted for Gore, while most of flyover land went to Bush.
However, break it down by voting districts, and a very different pattern emerges. Gore won big majorities out in the sticks and in poor urban areas, but almost always lost by huge margins in suburban beltways and proserous cities.
P.J. O'Rourke described it thus: everyplace that had indoor plumming and was not covered in grafiti voted for Bush.
That is no longer true. Road money is no longer tied to federal speed guidelines (specifically, 55 MPH maximum). That was a "temprorary" measure implemented in the 70's that just kept getting rubber-stamped for renewal.
Once that federal law was repealed, many states raised the speed limit to 65 or 70. Montana went with "safe and reasonable" for a while, but too many jackasses thought 145 MPH was safe and reasonable, so now it's 85 or 90 on most of their rural roads, which IIRC is still the fastest in the US.
If you live in the D.C. metro area, we should get together and jam!
Alas, I live in the frozen tundra of the Twin Cities. However, if you are ever up in the land of blonde hair and blue ears, I also play a descent bass guitar, and my studio also sports an upright piano & drum kit.
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Really? I'd stack iMovie, iTunes, the Mac version of Final Cut, etc., against Windows media software any day. For home media, Windows is not the right tool for the job at all.
Also, I would say that GIMP on Linux is a hell of a lot better than Microsoft's paint software. So if you are doing low-end graphic editing, Windows is not the best tool for the job. Oh, and that goes for high-end graphic editing, too. Photoshop is best done on a Mac.
Database work? Hmm... I could use Access, which sucks and doesn't scale well, or I could use MS-SQL, which costs a fortune, or I could use PostgreSQL or MySQL on a Linux box (or Mac) and not pay one cent. MySQL is faster and PostgreSQL is more robust. Once again, Windows is not the best tool for the job.
Oh, are you talking about simple stuff, like web browsing, word processing, e-mail, etc.? Well, any platform would work fine for that kind of stuff, I guess, so Windows is at least a tool that can do the job, if not the tool.
When I said Windows is sometimes the right tool for the job, I meant various specialty niche programs that have not made it to other platforms. AutoCAD, for example. If you want to design a building, you should probably have a computer with Windows running on it. I seem to recall that there's some nice physics-modelling software for hi-fi loudspeaker design out there that's Windows-only, too. Oh, and if you would rather play electronic games at your desk than on your couch with a console, a Windows system is the way to go. Beyond that, Windows is ususally not the right tool for the job. It will sometimes do, in a pinch, if that's all you have, but for most things it's far from the best method.
Not really. Now, if I found myslef losing track of the icons, that would imply the need for better organization, but when you shrink the dock down you can have lots and lots of them without taking up that much space, and you can order them any way you want. (For example, all my media-authoring software is next to each other.)
Now, if it ever gets to the point that I have more frequently-used programs than the dock can handle (which is seldom true for anybody, if you honestly evaluate which apps you actually use frequently), then I would probably clamor for the UI to offer something with more organizational tools... but so far it works great.
For example, I used to think that dock magnification was just about the most horrible thing ever. Now I leave it turned on pretty much always on my laptop, and find it to be kind of handy. It allows me to have a crapload of teeny-tiny icons in the dock, yet still be absolutely certain that I'm selecting (or dragging & dropping to) the correct one. Quite spiffy, even though I dismissed it at first as mere eye-candy.
Run my X11 software? No? How about the best page-layout software? Hmm, mostly need a Mac for that, huh? Okay, well I'm sure Windows will work great with my Firewire-based A/D audio rack... Oh look, all the Windows users on the discussion sites report not having any luck all, and are either giving up on the hardware or buying a Mac for their studios. Hmm... Sounds like there are some things you can't do with Windows after all.
That can't be said for any other operating system.
Asside from AutoCAD and some games, the same can be said for MacOS... and MacOS will do a lot of stuff that Windows won't.
The fact is that Windows is sometimes the right tool for the job, but I would usually reccomend either a Linux or Mac solution for 90% of the stuff people use computers for.
There is one reason, and one reason only, why Windows continues to dominate the desktop market, and that's the vendor lock-in we all suffer from the ever changing ".doc" format of MS-Word. If you do not have a Windows machine with the latest version of MS-Word, you might not be able to read that document your boss sent you on Friday night asking for your response by Monday morning. Sure, you can use StarOffice (or any of a number of other .doc editors) in Linux, and Office for Mac on the Macintosh, but we all know that Microsoft will just release a new version of Word "Any Day Now" which will completely break all compatability with everything else, so FUD demands that everybody keeps a Windows box handy, and most people do not wish to have more than one system.
If the world really wanted to take down the MS monopoly, step 1 would be to break the near-universal reliance on MS-Word. Until then, Windows will keep coming out on top.
That's funny. If ound just the opposite to be true. The first couple weeks I used OS X, I found the gui to be kind of obnoxious and intrusive. Then, once I started using it for serious work I found it to be incredibly functional.
Some stuff is just confusing too. Look at this for instance [ranchero.com].
You are judging an OS by a shitty shareware app? That's like judging windows by the Kazaa interface. Still, if I had to guess, I would say that the fill-bar you are talking about is giving the status for loading the news server that is named next to it. I'm sure this would be much more obvious if you were watching the app in action instead of looking at a screen capture from the moment after the news server was selected, just before it gets very far loading.
I'm sure they will also post poorly-written reviews that only express polar extremes (either "it gave meaning to my life" or "the producer should be gang-raped and murdered"). They will also say "fuck" a lot because they think it makes them "edgy."
Also, look for Harry cameos in the shittiest of shitty low-budget games, followed by Harry ripping the movie in his review to show how much integrity he has.
Oh, and "spoilers" for the more popular game franchises. Now you can be the first to know what the ending cut-scene movie for "Grand Theft Auto 5" is going to look like. Whee!
Too bad that you can bank on nearly every anime class in America being taught either by a pimply TA who is just there to pay off the tuition for the Masters he's working on in English Literature, or else a chubby Film Studies prof who set up the class as a pet project because he's a huge fan of Magic Knight Rayearth. You probably could learn more from your beer buddies, as they have probably read every site that Google could find about Lain or Cowboy Bebop or whatever the hell you are watching, and watched all 27 hours of the bonus features on their DVD boxed sets. Okay, they might not grok the transformation metaphors of their favorite magical girl show and what Sailor Moon has in common with "Hello God, It's Me, Margaret" (quite a lot, actually, but that's a different thread). However, they will probably be able teach you the correct context for using words like "Baka." What more could you ask for?
People who can't explain the difference between Dadaism and Surrealism should not be taking this course.
Nor should anybody who thinks Verdi's operas are Classical music. (They are Romantic, for those of you who failed or didn't take music appreciation.)
Also, an understanding of animation history, with a focus on Walt Disney, as well as a firm grounding of Japanese theater and culture, should both be prerequisites of a class like this. Teaching a class about anime to incoming freshmen is like teaching a class on rock & roll and beginning with Pearl Jam. Not only is it completely unwarranted, but it fails to provide any real context for understanding.
A Liberal Arts education is supposed to be about broadening your experience. That goes beyond telling a Sailor Moon fan to watch Akira. It means turning them on to the entire vast history of art, especially Western art, but also the art of other cultures. It means understanding where all this shit comes from, and I don't mean the "Superfreak" samples in "U Can't Touch This."
Ding! Give that man a cheroot!
I was wondering when somebody was going to catch on and reply to what I said with that observations. The Big 5 record companies lost $11 Million in 2002, and $3 Million in 2001. They've pretty much been losing money hand-over-fist ever since the Napster shutdown.
Whether their losses are a result of artistic stagnation by the corporate owners, loss of good will from the whole MP3 rights debacle, or that people are just doing other things with their money (like eating) during this recession, I'll leave up to another debate, but the fact is that the otherwise-profitable owners of the money-losing big labels are getting pretty disgusted. The business model, which has worked so well in the past, is already failing.
Viva la resistance!
The truth is that most of the production costs are paid by the artist. With a new artist, the label fronts the money to produce the album, to be paid back out of artist royalties.
One of the big complaints of artists, which several prominent performers have pointed out before, is that they can almost never repay all of these costs from their first album, unless they are one of those rare acts which goes platinum with their debut. Most acts are then pressured to rush a second album, as cheaply as possible, to increase their revenue to pay off the production costs of the first album and get them into the black. (Hence, all those infamous "sophomore slump" albums.)
In other businesses, this practice is called "loan sharking", but it's the way the record industry has worked for decades, and there's no sign of stopping as long as this business model continues to work.
Yes, I'm a huge geek. Far from the biggest, though. Even within my school I knew of a few kids who were demonstratably smarter (and geekier).
In my case, it was when I wrote a paper and used a double-negative to indicate a positive in contradiction to conventional wisdom (as in "not impossible"). A sloppy practice which a good teacher will advise against, but the sentence got the meaning across.
My teacher "corrected" it by crossing out one negative, changing a badly-written sentence which said what I meant into a clearer sentence which said the opposite of what I meant. No ammount of explaining by a nervous 3th grade kid could get it through to her that the single-negative sentance failed to convey the meaning.
A year later, I wrote a science paper on relativity. The teacher gave me an A-, admitting that she couldn't follow it. That was when I realized that my slow-witted 3rd grade teacher was not so unique.
Later in life, I dated a lot of El-Ed majors in college, and learned that the grade-school teachers of the future were not likely to be much brighter.
Your clarification of platforms Windows runs on strengthens my main point, that the current use of "PC" ought to be abandoned.
Even then, all it would take would be a pair of aligator clips on the posts of your speaker drivers, along with a device to step down the signal to line level (and undo any crossover splitting if it's a multiple-driver system), and you've got yourself an analog dub, ready to create a new, unprotected digital master with.
All this does is create a hassle for the consumer who wants to listen to his CD in the car via his iPod car kit.
Also now on display is my absent-mindedness when it comes to closing italics tags. Sorry 'bout dat.
So when someone tells me that that they like Macs better than PCs, I usually ask them if they mean they like Macs better than Windows because to me, a "PC" is a computer with an x86 cpu. It could be running Winows, Linux, BSD, Solaris x86, Menuet OS, DOS, Unix, or whatever OS runs on an x86.
Don't take this the wrong way, but a little bit of your own lack of knowledge is on display here.
First of all, every post-68k Mac, beginning with the 6100 back in 1995, uses a PowerPC chip. The PowerPC chip does not use 68k instructions, which is why early power Macs included an emulation layer. G3 is the the thrid-generation version of PowerPC, which is what was used in the first iMac (in 1998), but is not currently used in any new Macintosh other than the iBook. So, no. Mac does not mean 68k, and power mac does not mean G3.
Also, a Macintosh can also run several flavors of Linux and BSD, as well as two very different incarnations of the MacOS, sust as an x86 machine can. (This point has become somewhat less relevant now that OS X 10.2 is out, along with kick-ass X11 integration.)
Anyway, now for my main rant, conserning your point that, "to you", PC means x86:
The term "PC", as it is commonly used today, began its life as a marketing idea from Microsoft.
You see, back in the day when there were only a few knock-offs of the IBM computer (Compaq, Olivetti, etc.), and there were a lot of other PC's running other operating systems (from Commodore, Apple, etc.), People tended to use the terms "IBM Compatible" or "IBM Clone" when speaking of systems that ran the same software as an IBM PC.
The folks at Microsoft understood that their future depended on divorcing themselves, and companies like Compaq, from this association with IBM (especially since IBM wanted to move towards OS/2, while Microsoft was writing Windows for all their other customers).
Therefore MS, Compaq, and everybody else in the clone market (which was quickly getting bigger than IBM) insisted to anybody listeneing that "IBM Compatable" was an incorrect term. The correct term for an Intel-based computer running DOS or Windows was "PC".
In spite of a few cantankerous Amiga and Apple users out there insisting that "PC" was a term that already had a meaning, it caught on.
A Macintosh is a personal computer, but in this age of Microsoft, a Macintosh is not a Personal Computer.
Downright Orwellian, when you think about it.
Oh, and by the way, "PC" never meant "x86 computer". There are plenty systems, servers and other devices with x86 CPU's which are not called PC's. If it can't run Windows, it's not a PC. If it was built for use as a server, even if it can run Windows, it's not a PC.
For a while, people were starting to get away from this asinine use of "PC" by saying "Wintel"... but then AMD started to gain signifigant market share, and Linux began to catch on, so that term was ruined.
I think it's about time we change the term PC to mean "personal computers which can run some form of UNIX or Linux."
Windows can only run on x86-based machines (so far), and Mac OS X can only run on PowerPC-based machines with the Apple ROMs installed (yes, it will run on a pre-G3 CPU, as long as you use a "blessed" video card and do a little hacking.) However both architectures can run Linux (and OS X is arguably every bit as UNIXy as Linux), therefore both architectures are *nix-capable PC platforms. Let's call them PC's, shall we?
Only if they are giving away paper and markers to everybody who comes in to allow us to post on the wall testemonials about how good their product is. Once they do that, they really should not be allowed to sue for somebody writing that they suck.
Especially if they do, in fact, suck.
The government exists for the sole purpose of serving the best interests of the people. To the extent that they choose not to do so, the people have the right to revolt.
Selling to people who happen to live in those states is not "doing business" in those states. They are doing business in the state where they are located, and costumers from various states go to them, albeit electronically. It should be no different than if I drive to New Hampshire to buy something.
The really dumb thing about this move is that the reason why most people who buy online choose to buy online is the lack of sales tax. As soon as I must pay both shipping costs and sales taxes, the advantage of buying on-line evaporates, and I stop buying that way, leading to otherwise successful Internet sellers going under. We have already seen the horrific result on the economy when the shitty e-businesses went bankrupt in the dot-com bust... imagine the negative impact if the good ones go down!
A very good question. Let me endeavor to give you a good answer.
The purpose of state sales taxes is to provide services to the people and businesses of your state. If I own a business outside of that state, it's not really fair to ask me to pay for services that I am not able to utilize, even if I am selling an item to somebody who lives in your state.
Now, you could point out that a sales tax almost always is passed directly to the consumer, so it's really my customers who are paying the tax, but it's still being collected from my business, which means it's my accounting headache.
Furthermore, as a consumer, I don't mind paying state and local sales taxes on items I buy in brick-and-mortar stores. It's logical... that money goes to pave the road so I can get to the store, and to pay the cops to keep the store from being ripped off, and to pay the fire department to keep it from burning to the ground, it even pays for public education so they can hire minimum-wage 20 year-olds who have an outside chance of getting my change correct. Since state and local infrastructure makes our transaction possible, it seems reasonable to me that we, as buyer and seller, help fund that infrastructure. In the case of something I buy from Amazon.com or EBay, how does the state justify its claim to a slice of the pie? It didn't do anything to facillitate the trade. [Flamebait Warning] Collecting a compulsory percentage without offering anything in return is called racketeering. [Flame off]
It kind of looks like that on the state electoral map, because the "urban" states voted for Gore, while most of flyover land went to Bush.
However, break it down by voting districts, and a very different pattern emerges. Gore won big majorities out in the sticks and in poor urban areas, but almost always lost by huge margins in suburban beltways and proserous cities.
P.J. O'Rourke described it thus: everyplace that had indoor plumming and was not covered in grafiti voted for Bush.
Once that federal law was repealed, many states raised the speed limit to 65 or 70. Montana went with "safe and reasonable" for a while, but too many jackasses thought 145 MPH was safe and reasonable, so now it's 85 or 90 on most of their rural roads, which IIRC is still the fastest in the US.
Alas, I live in the frozen tundra of the Twin Cities. However, if you are ever up in the land of blonde hair and blue ears, I also play a descent bass guitar, and my studio also sports an upright piano & drum kit.