Someone who doesn't want a built-in screen and keyboard?
If someone like me, who doesn't want a built-in screen, and who was still upgrading his old G3 (Originally G3/233, finally G4/533 with 768MB and a Radeon 9200/128K) right up to the month before the mini came out because he didn't want an iMac, is asking "who's going to buy it for that price"... maybe that's not such a good answer any more?
The Mac Mini is for the 'I can't afford a laptop' market, and this is growing steadily smaller.
And there's nothing for the 'I want a regular desktop' market. Which is most of the market, in the part of the market where there's actual competition. Nobody buys all-in-one PC, which is why the so-called "iMac killers" don't sell... the only reason the iMac sells as well as it does is because if you want OS X and reasonable performance for a reasonable price... well, there's no alternative.
The Mac desktop market has been left behind because Apple hasn't had a decent desktop since, oh, 1997 or so. The Mac mini is at best a quarter-hearted bone tossed to the market to avoid being completely left out.
If they sell a laptop for $800, as rumored, then who's going to buy a Mac mini for $600+?
Of course, they could probably sell the mini for $400 and still make 40% profit. It's basically a laptop with the most expensive part of a laptop (the screen) left out.
There is no such thing as a digital physical item. Nature is analog.
You're being pointlessly pedantic here. The same objections hold true for the copy of the file on your hard disk, in memory, downloaded from the iTunes store, it's all digital not because it's made of some magical digital element, but because the operations performed on it are quantized, ignoring the relative levels and timing of the signal outside the limits of that process.
If you write an audio CD and immediately read it back again, and you don't get a bit-for-bit copy of the audio stream you wrote, either something is wrong with your CD drive or you need to quit buying those cheap no-name vinyl blanks.
Burning the CD converts those bits into an analogue waveform
No, it doesn't. Compact discs are digital. The result of capturing the digital audio stream (using a tool like Audio Hijack) and ripping a burned CD should be equivalent. Neither operation is the same as somehow stripping the DRM from the original compressed stream without decompressing it, but that isn't what the OP was suggesting.
There's been plenty of people who've sued Walmart, and won, even over smaller issues than beelyuns of imaginary dollars.
And Walmart's reactions AFTER the lawsuit are often completely disproportionate. Apparently, Walmart employees can get disciplined for working during their breaks now, because someone who had to work through their lunch break a bunch of times sued over it, and won. If you ask a Walmart employee for help and they say they're on break, and they can't, they really mean it.
If they allow burning to audio CD, you don't even have to do that. Just follow Apple's advice and "Mix, Burn, Rip" the DRM out of it. You'll end up with the same "bits" on disc.
I think we'll discover that the universe really is a mess of hacks and spaghetti code, personally.
By that time we'll be Greg Egan cyberheroes and we'll rewrite the universe as a universal turing machine, and live as strings of code in the quantum foam.
I'd just like to point out that there are several successful wireless input devices.
"Tui stadia mutandis", as they say in Armorica. I expect computers to be able to adapt to what I want to do with them, that's the whole point of having a general purpose computer instead of a gaming console. Saving a couple of cables on my desk isn't worth the hassle of keeping track of even more accessories.
The whole "wireless desktop" thing seems like the kind of faddish style-over-substance nonsense normally associated with Macbook Air and Grey Poupon.
Long story short, if you have battery issues with your wireless input devices, you aren't spending enough money on them.
My Logitech diNovo set cost more than my CPU and motherboard combined. If that's not enough, I'll leave wireless keyboards and mice for the Grey Poupon crowd.
What has been described in the press so far doesn't sound anything like Second Life, except at the most superficial level. These systems are targeting things like IMVU and Puzzle Pirates. There are more similarities between Slashdot and Livejournal than there are between Second Life and Sony Home.
Instead of a single large mirror (liquid or not), one may instead use an array of smaller mirrors. It is trivially easy to make a lot of small optically flat mirror of perhaps 30 cm in diameter, as opposed to a curved mirror of a much larger size. I'll let the optical/astronomy/math geeks run with this one to figure out an appropriate size array of "flat" mirrors would be within tolerances for truly enormous curved mirror.
OK, what was the science fiction story some years back about this? By Lee Correy? All I can google about it is someone else asking the same question... someone with a pile of Analogs in their attic want to take a look?
It's always kind of creeped me out that Flash even gives applets access to the microphone and webcam, and I never enable those capabilities in the program.
Yes, I understand the point of it, I just think it's creepy.
There are certainly things you can do with bluetooth that you can't do with IRDA. I wouldn't want an IRDA headset, and I wouldn't use it over a distance, but BT gets used for all kinds of things that USB (yes, real wires) Wifi, and IRDA are better for.
Printers? Stick them on a network, don't wire them to a computer. If you want wireless access to a printer, use Wifi and Zeroconf/Rendezvous/Bonjour.
Headsets? Perfect application for Bluetooth.
Sharing files, PDA to PDA? You *want* short range and directionality. IR is ideal.
Mice and keyboards? Been there, done that, got the dead batteries and incomplete mess
There should be some kind of accountability for quoting random numbers...
Unless you can provide a statistical analysis showing that the algorithm that producted those numbers was reliable, you really shouldn't sully the good name of "random numbers" with such back-of-the-haynes estimates.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone who doesn't want a built-in screen and keyboard?
If someone like me, who doesn't want a built-in screen, and who was still upgrading his old G3 (Originally G3/233, finally G4/533 with 768MB and a Radeon 9200/128K) right up to the month before the mini came out because he didn't want an iMac, is asking "who's going to buy it for that price"... maybe that's not such a good answer any more?
The Mac Mini is for the 'I can't afford a laptop' market, and this is growing steadily smaller.
And there's nothing for the 'I want a regular desktop' market. Which is most of the market, in the part of the market where there's actual competition. Nobody buys all-in-one PC, which is why the so-called "iMac killers" don't sell... the only reason the iMac sells as well as it does is because if you want OS X and reasonable performance for a reasonable price... well, there's no alternative.
The Mac desktop market has been left behind because Apple hasn't had a decent desktop since, oh, 1997 or so. The Mac mini is at best a quarter-hearted bone tossed to the market to avoid being completely left out.
I wish I had your discretionary toy budget.
If they sell a laptop for $800, as rumored, then who's going to buy a Mac mini for $600+?
Of course, they could probably sell the mini for $400 and still make 40% profit. It's basically a laptop with the most expensive part of a laptop (the screen) left out.
That person could help you, if walmart was willing to pay them, they aren't.
Walmart can't pay employees to work through breaks except in emergencies. They're not allowed to.
This has nothing to do with overtime, it's a health-and-safety issue.
There is no such thing as a digital physical item. Nature is analog.
You're being pointlessly pedantic here. The same objections hold true for the copy of the file on your hard disk, in memory, downloaded from the iTunes store, it's all digital not because it's made of some magical digital element, but because the operations performed on it are quantized, ignoring the relative levels and timing of the signal outside the limits of that process.
If you write an audio CD and immediately read it back again, and you don't get a bit-for-bit copy of the audio stream you wrote, either something is wrong with your CD drive or you need to quit buying those cheap no-name vinyl blanks.
Burning the CD converts those bits into an analogue waveform
No, it doesn't. Compact discs are digital. The result of capturing the digital audio stream (using a tool like Audio Hijack) and ripping a burned CD should be equivalent. Neither operation is the same as somehow stripping the DRM from the original compressed stream without decompressing it, but that isn't what the OP was suggesting.
There's been plenty of people who've sued Walmart, and won, even over smaller issues than beelyuns of imaginary dollars.
And Walmart's reactions AFTER the lawsuit are often completely disproportionate. Apparently, Walmart employees can get disciplined for working during their breaks now, because someone who had to work through their lunch break a bunch of times sued over it, and won. If you ask a Walmart employee for help and they say they're on break, and they can't, they really mean it.
If they allow burning to audio CD, you don't even have to do that. Just follow Apple's advice and "Mix, Burn, Rip" the DRM out of it. You'll end up with the same "bits" on disc.
Seriously, is this 1995 or something?
It's Walmart. They think it's still 1895.
I think we'll discover that the universe really is a mess of hacks and spaghetti code, personally.
By that time we'll be Greg Egan cyberheroes and we'll rewrite the universe as a universal turing machine, and live as strings of code in the quantum foam.
I'd just like to point out that there are several successful wireless input devices.
"Tui stadia mutandis", as they say in Armorica. I expect computers to be able to adapt to what I want to do with them, that's the whole point of having a general purpose computer instead of a gaming console. Saving a couple of cables on my desk isn't worth the hassle of keeping track of even more accessories.
The whole "wireless desktop" thing seems like the kind of faddish style-over-substance nonsense normally associated with Macbook Air and Grey Poupon.
Long story short, if you have battery issues with your wireless input devices, you aren't spending enough money on them.
My Logitech diNovo set cost more than my CPU and motherboard combined. If that's not enough, I'll leave wireless keyboards and mice for the Grey Poupon crowd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
What has been described in the press so far doesn't sound anything like Second Life, except at the most superficial level. These systems are targeting things like IMVU and Puzzle Pirates. There are more similarities between Slashdot and Livejournal than there are between Second Life and Sony Home.
The plugin runs with full privileges.
The scripts (in Actionscript, a version of ECMAscript (nee Javascript)) run in a sandbox.
Instead of a single large mirror (liquid or not), one may instead use an array of smaller mirrors. It is trivially easy to make a lot of small optically flat mirror of perhaps 30 cm in diameter, as opposed to a curved mirror of a much larger size. I'll let the optical/astronomy/math geeks run with this one to figure out an appropriate size array of "flat" mirrors would be within tolerances for truly enormous curved mirror.
OK, what was the science fiction story some years back about this? By Lee Correy? All I can google about it is someone else asking the same question... someone with a pile of Analogs in their attic want to take a look?
"Proctonomics"... There is nothing about the sound of that I don't like.
You got it, added to my vocabulary.
It's always kind of creeped me out that Flash even gives applets access to the microphone and webcam, and I never enable those capabilities in the program.
Yes, I understand the point of it, I just think it's creepy.
Those Fokkers were flying Messerschmitts.
Maybe you could explain this close up image of your campus? (It's from the lower right of the article's image)
That's just a Mirage.
There are certainly things you can do with bluetooth that you can't do with IRDA. I wouldn't want an IRDA headset, and I wouldn't use it over a distance, but BT gets used for all kinds of things that USB (yes, real wires) Wifi, and IRDA are better for.
Printers? Stick them on a network, don't wire them to a computer. If you want wireless access to a printer, use Wifi and Zeroconf/Rendezvous/Bonjour.
Headsets? Perfect application for Bluetooth.
Sharing files, PDA to PDA? You *want* short range and directionality. IR is ideal.
Mice and keyboards? Been there, done that, got the dead batteries and incomplete mess
but "random numbers" sounds so much nicer than rectally extracted data points.
How about "Proctonomics"?
IRDA worked just fine, there's nothing wrong with IRDA. It got killed by Bluetooth, which requires more power and has less inherent security.
There should be some kind of accountability for quoting random numbers...
Unless you can provide a statistical analysis showing that the algorithm that producted those numbers was reliable, you really shouldn't sully the good name of "random numbers" with such back-of-the-haynes estimates.