Actually, it's the same retail price. It's understandable that you didn't know that, becuase nobody, and I mean nobody, ever pays retail for the Windows version of MS-Office, assuming they pay for it at all. They "borrow" a copy from work and install it on every PC in the house.
1. apparently impossible to swap caps lock and control on an iBook. I use vim as an editor, and make heavy use of control,
Configure vim to use the key you want. Viola! (Otherwise, wait around a few weeks. Dozens of geeks are working on a hack for this issue as we speak.) Still, let's face it, no laptop keyboard is exactly an ergonomic dream, but that's kind of the price you pay for being mobile. When using it at home, your best bet is to plug in a USB keyboard and configure it how you like.
2. Bang for the buck is pretty low relative to similarly priced x86 laptops.
Not in the laptop arena, it ain't! My iBook kicks the ass over every comparably priced PC I have ever seen. Don't let the Intel clock speed ratings fool you, they downchip the shit out of Pentiums when they put them in laptops, to avoid giving the user second degree burns and spending the battery in a half hour or so. The iBook G3 chip (made by IBM rather than Motorola, IIRC) is plenty fast compared to what's out there in the PC laptop world.
2. The dock is an atrocious monstrosity, though I understand that it can be shrunk, which would help a lot. It can be resized quite dramatically (I have friends who prefer teeny-tiny docks on they desktops). It can also be auto-hidden, like most docks and bars out there (Gnome, Windows, etc.)
First of all, for some people their "existing PC" already is a Mac.
I had an HP laptop a little more than two years ago and ran Linux on it. It took me a lot of sifting through newsgroups to track down the actual correct driver for the LCD (the one that most documentation recomended was incorrect), and I never actually got my Lucent 802.11b card to work on it.
My new iBook, on the other hand, which I am writing this from, was simplicity itself. It shipped with 10.1, but Apple packaged 10.2 CD's (including the developper tools) in with it. Installation was effortless. Now I've got my *nix shell and gnu tools, my Mac-only apps and programming tools, MS-Office, VPC for running windows programs, a DVD player for watchin movies on the plane, and every single app I use, all on a $1499 laptop. (A mere $100 dollars more than the HP cost my company... and the wireless card was $75 more & had to be removed when traveling because the antenna stuck out precariously from the side.)
You want to talk about no-brainer decisions? If you use UNIX apps on the road at all, the iBook kicks ass over every other available option. Anybody who tells you otherwise probably hasn't used one.
English is a germanic language, but it borrows a lot of French words because England and France conqured each other so many times over the centuries.
Speaking French words is considered kind of snobbish in most English-speaking contries, becuase in England it was only the wealthy who spoke it. This is why many of the English words for farm animals come from the germanic roots (pig, cow), but the words for the food derives from the French (pork, beef). The lower classes only raised meat, while the upper class ate it.
This attitude is less prevalant in Canada, because Quebec is not a particularilly rich provence.
Interesting bit of trivia: The English language originally never used the soft "zhe" sounding "g", like in "corsage." All "English" words that use that sound (like the way most of the English-speaking world says "garage"), were, or were derived from, French words.
Anyway, back on topic. Yea, French sucks for writing Haiku just as much as English. I'm guessing that the Japanese find western attempts at Haiku almost as irritating as we find J-pop.
Almost.
One of the only examples you will see here.
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
These posts leave me cold Most of them are not Haiku No seasonal lines
They figured duct-taping in the DDR would fool everyone into thinking the machines had gotten a speed boost, when the only boost is the addition of the 1.25GHz unit.
No, they also gain the boost to AGP performance that DDR brings. Even if the chip is not ready for it, putting in DDR was a good move. Or perhaps you would have preferred they stayed with PC133?
So.. you're saying these new systems ARE faster? Like, if I had the old dual 1GHz system and the new DDR dual 1GHz system the DDR system completes tasks faster? Because if it doesn't that means they're the SAME. It doesn't matter how much fancier the insides are, if I can't get my frame rendering done any faster with them then there's no difference.
The difference is this:
1. Everything except the tasks that are limited by CPU throughput will probably be slightly faster.
2. When new CPU's come out, you will probably be able to slap them in and gain full benifit from them.
But if you really think there's no difference, buy a previous-generation G4 from somebody on eBay and you will get a great price for a machine you believe to be just as good.
Except the total number of G3's didn't really go down by the death of cloning. In spite of the claims to the contrary in Power Computing ads, the clone market utterly failed to grow the Mac OS market.
Besides, how many G3's would MOTO have sold if Apple went bankrupt? If cloning had continued, they would be gone by now.
The director of Amilie storyboarded almost every single shot, before production even started, so he knew exactly what he would and wouldn't use to make a standard-length movie. That's a little more extreme than most directors. Apparantly, he does all his films that way.
I agree. It's kind of the IT grunt's answer to Dennis Miller.
Don't get me wrong, Dennis Miller can, on occation, be funny... but the majority of his jokes are supposed to get this reaction:
"He just made a nasty asside comment about the Secretary General of the UN's hairstyle! I didn't realize anybody else in America even knew who he was, let alone what his hair looks like! My god, he's really smart... just like me! Ahhh-hahahaha!"
UF is kind of like that, only you don't need to be as worldly to catch the inside references in UF, because they are all super-obvious observations to anybody who ever worked a low-level job in IT.
I second your call for making driving while phoning illegal. You need to make a cell-phone call? Pull off to the side of the road and talk. When you're ready to dedicate your attention to driving, come back and join the rest of us on the roads!
I'm right there with you, right after it becomes illegal to have an in-dash stereo, because that poses at least as much of a risk, not to mention all the "drive-by" violations of noise ordinances.
Want to hear music? Then pull off to the side of the road and listen to it. When you're ready to dedicate your attention to driving, come back and join the rest of us on the roads!
Think I'm being reactionary to want to ban the car stereo? Then lay off phone users, many of whom are very careful and attentive drivers.
Some directors, like the guy who made "Amilie", carefully story-board and prep before filming, and end up getting a film that is almost exactly the length that they want.
Most directors don't do it that way, though. They film lots and lots of extra footage, even some scenes that have overlapping dialogue and plot exposition. That way, when they get to post-production, they can chose to the clips that came out the best, and dump scenes where the director doesn't like the final product without losing the narrative.
If you watch the deleted scenes in a lot of DVD's, this process becomes a little more obvious.
The Jabba scene that Lucas put back into Star Wars for the "special edition" is a classic example. The conversation is almost word-for-word the same as the one that Han had with Greedo. When it was originally filmed, Jabba was played by a fat guy in a fir coat, and Lucas didn't care for it, so he chose the Greedo showdown instead to reveal the Han Solo subplot (owes money to gangsters for dumping his contraband on a recent job). Personally, I think Lucas never should have put it back in; but having done so, he should have cut the Greedo scene. Instead, he kept both scenes, which slowed down the movie, and ruined the Greedo scene by adding a first shot by Greedo before Han killed him, convincing Star Wars fans everywhere that George Lucas's mind has finally broken.
You raise a good point. Wheadon is quoting himself in the story, so it's the reaction that he remembers having.
If Rick Berman had a blog (yea, right), who knows what his version of the story would be...
So, when I gave him the bad news, he just went ballistic. "What!?" he shouted into the phone, "don't you know who the fuck I am? I'm Wesley Fucking Crusher, the only reason anybody watched your lame-ass fucking show! I will destroy you, Berman, along with everyone and everything you have ever loved! That's right, I'm on my way over right now to go all "Wolf 359" on your ass! I'm bigger than Star Trek! I'm bigger than all you pricks! You will rue the day when... Oh, wait... I gotta go. I think I just ran over some lady who was out walking her kid."
Of course, I think they need to be very careful not to ruin Enterprise, which I think is easily the most entertaining, unique and mature Trek since TOS.
No, that would be DS9. The best I can say for Enterprise is "it doesn't suck as much as Voyager did."
"Grunge" was not a new musical genre. It was just Seattle kids who played regular rock & roll while looking a little bit like Niel Young. Nirvana didn't do anything with their sound that wasn't already done by the mid-70's.
The "cylcle" you are referring to is an illusioin created by the fact that the media attention shifts its focus between styles of music that are always being listened to. There were lots of hip-hop and r&b records coming out during the peak of the "grunge" era, but the folks who read Entertainment Weekly for all their information didn't notice that dance music still existed until Britney Spears and J. Lo started getting hyped.
I still insist that the last genuinely new style of pop was the stuff that came out during the punk/new wave era. The late 80's, the entire 90's, and the 00's so far have relied almost entirely on nostalgia music. Or are you going to try to tell me that the White Stripes (pop-rock's latest would-be saviors) are breaking new ground?
All dance music, including 90's party rap and 00's rave tunes, is just a retread of disco, which was just a watered-down retread of funk. Nothing new has happened to dance music since the invention of the sequencer.
The rest of pop music is not much better, though. You've punk from the late 70's, the New Wave of the early 80's, and then... nobody ever breaks any new ground ever again.
Euro pop is even worse! Sure Kylie Minogue is nice eye candy, but her songs are utterly soulless.
So, I kind of agree that it has been a so-so time for music, except I think that pop music has been kind of so-so for at least 20 years.
You implied that all white people in the US owned slaves, and that no other people did.
At no point did I imply any such thing. Did you even read my post? Perhaps you are confusing it with stuff others have said in this thread. Read it again.
I made three points, and three points only:
1. Slavery was brutal and evil.
2. A lot of revisionists would have us believe otherwise.
This is not about all OEM's. This is about a specific deal that Dell signed with Microsoft in order to get significant discounts on licenses. If Dell wanted to pay full OEM price they wouldn't have to deal with any of this.
Except that Dell is currently the biggest OEM out there, so , all other companies who want to be competive with Dell will need to apply for a similar "discount" from MS, resulting in the same effect: If you want to be able to sell PC's without an OS, you will be forced to pay more for Windows OEM licenses.
It's kind of like the way gas stations in the 80's used to insist that they did not charge for using a credit card, but gave you a "discount for cash", even though their big sign out front had the cash-only price advertised.
Alignment problems happen with ordinary tapes, too. It is a shortcoming of your cheap-assed tape player, not the adapter. If your player properly loaded the adapter properly and securely, you would not have these problems.
I have a friend who insists on going with an AM/FM/Cassette system, and uses an adapter with an iPod. Why? Because nobody breaks into cars for cassette decks anymore, and the iPod fits in his jacket pocket, unlike a lot of those removable face-plates that CD players rely on, or a freakin' pull-out. By the way, the sound in his car with that set-up is excellent. Better than some CD car systems I've heard.
Put it in your car, turn on the radio and the timeshift cassette. Let it go for like 5 min, and just listen without commercials.
Sorry to be negative, but if your commute is 10 minutes, you need to drive the first half in silence in order to take advantage of that feature. With TiVo et al, there are times when you don't want it playing (getting a beer, taking a leek, etc.) which give the cache a chance to fill up for commercial skippage. Not so much when you are driving... Unless you live in a cold part of the country and are one of those people who idles the car for several minutes while the cab space warms up before driving to work.
I know you are just going for the whole reduce-to-absurdity thing, but here's a thought: a VCR-Cassette-sized digital PVR. Then you could digitally record a show off the air, and watch it in the El Cheapo VCR at the lake cabin.
Okay, that's still kind of lame... but like George Carlin once said, "if you nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you!"
As much as I like the Mac, in practice the final performance of a 2.4 GHz Xeon is significantly better than a 1 GHz G4 (even for SSE vs. Altivec)
I agree. And it seems that Apple agrees with you too, because they are now selling all their high-end boxen with two chips and an OS that does MP really well. After all, A 2.x GHz (whatever the current latest and greatest is) chip from AMD or Intel might be considerably faster than a 1 GHz G4, but how does it stack up against two of them?
Excuse me, did I say the US started the slave business? Don't put words in my mouth. All I was saying is that apologists for the Old South keep making bullshit statements about how wonderful blacks had it back then, and it is both inaccurate and offensive.
The fact that it went on in Africa (and South America, and pretty much everywhere that colonial Empires reached) does not excuse the fact that we in America were one of the last countries to abolish the practice, because the cash-crop economy of the South relied on forced labor too much to ever accept the fact that it was an evil practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's the same retail price. It's understandable that you didn't know that, becuase nobody, and I mean nobody, ever pays retail for the Windows version of MS-Office, assuming they pay for it at all. They "borrow" a copy from work and install it on every PC in the house.
Configure vim to use the key you want. Viola! (Otherwise, wait around a few weeks. Dozens of geeks are working on a hack for this issue as we speak.) Still, let's face it, no laptop keyboard is exactly an ergonomic dream, but that's kind of the price you pay for being mobile. When using it at home, your best bet is to plug in a USB keyboard and configure it how you like.
2. Bang for the buck is pretty low relative to similarly priced x86 laptops.
Not in the laptop arena, it ain't! My iBook kicks the ass over every comparably priced PC I have ever seen. Don't let the Intel clock speed ratings fool you, they downchip the shit out of Pentiums when they put them in laptops, to avoid giving the user second degree burns and spending the battery in a half hour or so. The iBook G3 chip (made by IBM rather than Motorola, IIRC) is plenty fast compared to what's out there in the PC laptop world.
2. The dock is an atrocious monstrosity, though I understand that it can be shrunk, which would help a lot. It can be resized quite dramatically (I have friends who prefer teeny-tiny docks on they desktops). It can also be auto-hidden, like most docks and bars out there (Gnome, Windows, etc.)
First of all, for some people their "existing PC" already is a Mac.
I had an HP laptop a little more than two years ago and ran Linux on it. It took me a lot of sifting through newsgroups to track down the actual correct driver for the LCD (the one that most documentation recomended was incorrect), and I never actually got my Lucent 802.11b card to work on it.
My new iBook, on the other hand, which I am writing this from, was simplicity itself. It shipped with 10.1, but Apple packaged 10.2 CD's (including the developper tools) in with it. Installation was effortless. Now I've got my *nix shell and gnu tools, my Mac-only apps and programming tools, MS-Office, VPC for running windows programs, a DVD player for watchin movies on the plane, and every single app I use, all on a $1499 laptop. (A mere $100 dollars more than the HP cost my company... and the wireless card was $75 more & had to be removed when traveling because the antenna stuck out precariously from the side.)
You want to talk about no-brainer decisions? If you use UNIX apps on the road at all, the iBook kicks ass over every other available option. Anybody who tells you otherwise probably hasn't used one.
Speaking French words is considered kind of snobbish in most English-speaking contries, becuase in England it was only the wealthy who spoke it. This is why many of the English words for farm animals come from the germanic roots (pig, cow), but the words for the food derives from the French (pork, beef). The lower classes only raised meat, while the upper class ate it.
This attitude is less prevalant in Canada, because Quebec is not a particularilly rich provence.
Interesting bit of trivia: The English language originally never used the soft "zhe" sounding "g", like in "corsage." All "English" words that use that sound (like the way most of the English-speaking world says "garage"), were, or were derived from, French words.
Anyway, back on topic. Yea, French sucks for writing Haiku just as much as English. I'm guessing that the Japanese find western attempts at Haiku almost as irritating as we find J-pop.
Almost.
These posts leave me cold
Most of them are not Haiku
No seasonal lines
No, they also gain the boost to AGP performance that DDR brings. Even if the chip is not ready for it, putting in DDR was a good move. Or perhaps you would have preferred they stayed with PC133?
The difference is this:
1. Everything except the tasks that are limited by CPU throughput will probably be slightly faster.
2. When new CPU's come out, you will probably be able to slap them in and gain full benifit from them.
But if you really think there's no difference, buy a previous-generation G4 from somebody on eBay and you will get a great price for a machine you believe to be just as good.
Besides, how many G3's would MOTO have sold if Apple went bankrupt? If cloning had continued, they would be gone by now.
The director of Amilie storyboarded almost every single shot, before production even started, so he knew exactly what he would and wouldn't use to make a standard-length movie. That's a little more extreme than most directors. Apparantly, he does all his films that way.
Don't get me wrong, Dennis Miller can, on occation, be funny... but the majority of his jokes are supposed to get this reaction:
"He just made a nasty asside comment about the Secretary General of the UN's hairstyle! I didn't realize anybody else in America even knew who he was, let alone what his hair looks like! My god, he's really smart... just like me! Ahhh-hahahaha!"
UF is kind of like that, only you don't need to be as worldly to catch the inside references in UF, because they are all super-obvious observations to anybody who ever worked a low-level job in IT.
So does conversation.
I'm right there with you, right after it becomes illegal to have an in-dash stereo, because that poses at least as much of a risk, not to mention all the "drive-by" violations of noise ordinances.
Want to hear music? Then pull off to the side of the road and listen to it. When you're ready to dedicate your attention to driving, come back and join the rest of us on the roads!
Think I'm being reactionary to want to ban the car stereo? Then lay off phone users, many of whom are very careful and attentive drivers.
Most directors don't do it that way, though. They film lots and lots of extra footage, even some scenes that have overlapping dialogue and plot exposition. That way, when they get to post-production, they can chose to the clips that came out the best, and dump scenes where the director doesn't like the final product without losing the narrative.
If you watch the deleted scenes in a lot of DVD's, this process becomes a little more obvious.
The Jabba scene that Lucas put back into Star Wars for the "special edition" is a classic example. The conversation is almost word-for-word the same as the one that Han had with Greedo. When it was originally filmed, Jabba was played by a fat guy in a fir coat, and Lucas didn't care for it, so he chose the Greedo showdown instead to reveal the Han Solo subplot (owes money to gangsters for dumping his contraband on a recent job). Personally, I think Lucas never should have put it back in; but having done so, he should have cut the Greedo scene. Instead, he kept both scenes, which slowed down the movie, and ruined the Greedo scene by adding a first shot by Greedo before Han killed him, convincing Star Wars fans everywhere that George Lucas's mind has finally broken.
If Rick Berman had a blog (yea, right), who knows what his version of the story would be...
No, that would be DS9. The best I can say for Enterprise is "it doesn't suck as much as Voyager did."
Trekkies.
Nobody else cares.
The "cylcle" you are referring to is an illusioin created by the fact that the media attention shifts its focus between styles of music that are always being listened to. There were lots of hip-hop and r&b records coming out during the peak of the "grunge" era, but the folks who read Entertainment Weekly for all their information didn't notice that dance music still existed until Britney Spears and J. Lo started getting hyped.
I still insist that the last genuinely new style of pop was the stuff that came out during the punk/new wave era. The late 80's, the entire 90's, and the 00's so far have relied almost entirely on nostalgia music. Or are you going to try to tell me that the White Stripes (pop-rock's latest would-be saviors) are breaking new ground?
The rest of pop music is not much better, though. You've punk from the late 70's, the New Wave of the early 80's, and then... nobody ever breaks any new ground ever again.
Euro pop is even worse! Sure Kylie Minogue is nice eye candy, but her songs are utterly soulless.
So, I kind of agree that it has been a so-so time for music, except I think that pop music has been kind of so-so for at least 20 years.
At no point did I imply any such thing. Did you even read my post? Perhaps you are confusing it with stuff others have said in this thread. Read it again.
I made three points, and three points only:
1. Slavery was brutal and evil.
2. A lot of revisionists would have us believe otherwise.
3. Those people are full of shit.
Except that Dell is currently the biggest OEM out there, so , all other companies who want to be competive with Dell will need to apply for a similar "discount" from MS, resulting in the same effect: If you want to be able to sell PC's without an OS, you will be forced to pay more for Windows OEM licenses.
It's kind of like the way gas stations in the 80's used to insist that they did not charge for using a credit card, but gave you a "discount for cash", even though their big sign out front had the cash-only price advertised.
I have a friend who insists on going with an AM/FM/Cassette system, and uses an adapter with an iPod. Why? Because nobody breaks into cars for cassette decks anymore, and the iPod fits in his jacket pocket, unlike a lot of those removable face-plates that CD players rely on, or a freakin' pull-out. By the way, the sound in his car with that set-up is excellent. Better than some CD car systems I've heard.
Sorry to be negative, but if your commute is 10 minutes, you need to drive the first half in silence in order to take advantage of that feature. With TiVo et al, there are times when you don't want it playing (getting a beer, taking a leek, etc.) which give the cache a chance to fill up for commercial skippage. Not so much when you are driving... Unless you live in a cold part of the country and are one of those people who idles the car for several minutes while the cab space warms up before driving to work.
Okay, that's still kind of lame... but like George Carlin once said, "if you nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you!"
I agree. And it seems that Apple agrees with you too, because they are now selling all their high-end boxen with two chips and an OS that does MP really well. After all, A 2.x GHz (whatever the current latest and greatest is) chip from AMD or Intel might be considerably faster than a 1 GHz G4, but how does it stack up against two of them?
The fact that it went on in Africa (and South America, and pretty much everywhere that colonial Empires reached) does not excuse the fact that we in America were one of the last countries to abolish the practice, because the cash-crop economy of the South relied on forced labor too much to ever accept the fact that it was an evil practice.