The white box manufacturer know nothing of the OS. They didn't write it, they don't have the code, they don't even likely have all the documentation. They know how it supposed to run on the machine, but they have no ability to fix errors or look through code to ferret out unexpected and emergent behavior. Furthermore, the average white box manufacturer has a profit margin that is less than 20% of what MS enjoys.
Yet all the support is farmed out to the manufacture, which farms it out to the call center, which farms out to independent contractors reading from a computer script. How many levels does a problem have to move through before someone who can actually fix the problem sees it. I know that 99% of the complaints come from people who just can't seem to remember where the 'any key' is located, but every once in a while a real problem comes up, and it would be nice to talk to someone who knows the underlying architecture. I mean, MS can spend huge amounts of money to provide the anti-piracy annoy ware in MS WIndows XP, but not support the product?
I know when I was doing this sort of thing, it was nice to be in position directly connected to support to fix problems as they occurred. If there is a problem with the business environment right now, it is that everyone wants to be in fancy management positions, but no one wants to be on the front lines helping those annoying customer maximize the use of the product, the exact people who pay good money that makes us all rich in the first place.
(And I know that much of the time the end user is not the customer, only a means to a greater goal, and sometimes when the end user pays no money, the amount of deserved support might be minimal, but the priciple still applies.)
What is interesting is that McCain won't get more than 175 electoral votes. Last spring I looked at states based on race and income and figured that he McCain could clear close 200 electoral votes based solely on those factors, while obama might be able to get 100. This meant that they would be fighting over maybe 250 votes, of which McCain would only need around 70, or less than a third. I expected it be much closer than around 65% win for Obama.
I sort of felt this thing might happen when Palin was selected. She was a women trying to reach a very conservative male base that has been steeped in two years of bashing Hilary Clinton and Pelosi. She brought he unwed pregnant daughter with the baby's daddy like they were the holy couple, and by the way have never announced a wedding date, again in a party that has characterized pregnant teens as future welfare moms. This probably cost McCain crucial states in the east that lead to disaster in the west. It is pretty bad when you have less than 10 votes, and your opponent is approaching 100.
In any case I think we can look on the bright side. Instead of MBA graduate who whined his way into the program on a legacy, we have a Harvard graduate that has consistently advanced on his merits.
Education is a state and local issue, which is why it seems so strange that federal government is so involved, especially when they begin to spread unfunded mandates like the plague.
OTOH, if our educational system is not simply a ploy to minimize the number of young job applicants,then one must allow for the possibility that education does serve another national agenda. Such agendas might provided kids an opportunity to maximize their talents. This in turn may allow the kid to provide future economic benefits to the country. It may be that parents are in o position to allow the kid to explore their talents. Some might say 'too bad', but such thinking is simplistic and naive. We do not live an aristocracy where we lose the economic advantage of a talented kid simply because he or she is not born into the proper class.
As far as teachers, they just mostly teach what they are told, and if not what they are told, what they know. So if there is national agenda for education, then teachers must be given clear guidelines what to teach, and local agencies must be given clear guidelines on who to hire so the teachers who just want to teach what they know at least know something to teach.
None of this eliminates the possibility for local non-government based education. There is plenty of non-accredited educational opportunities for family who wish that. But asserting that we as a nation can achieve optimum economic growth without a coherent educational policy is like saying that we can achieve consistent economic growth growth without a coherent monetary policy. It might be true for a while, but at some point the feds will have to step in rescue the institutions that are just too big to fail.
Which is to say stick with the poison you know. I run Mac OS because I know what to expect and it works with my toys. I don't run windows because it has all these strange things that act weird. Like the active desktop I can't get rid of, though I follow all the instructions. Drivers that need to be loaded from far away places, with many dire warnings, when I use a standard USB. Threats from MS to cut off my ability to earn a living when they are unhappy with changes I make to the hardware.
MS is successful because they provide a very affordable method to get business running on a computer. At some point, if Linux gets a foothold in the enterprise, then the corporate drones will be trained in Linux, and the corporate suppliers will write interfaces for Linux, and MS will have to contend with the fact that while the 'support' line item still exists, the 'MS License', 'MS Compliance', and 'Slush fund against future MS lawsuits' line items will disappear.
It depends on the point of view. As a systems builder that produces integrated products that function largely as intended, and a as firm that gets heavily sued when something in the system is not perfect, there is some wisdom to limited what is allowed on their flagship consumer device. After all, if opera were allowed, and then opera had an issue, Apple would be the one to get sued because they are the ones with cash, and they are the ones that allowed a faulty application on the phone. And don't even talk about the support nightmare.
In other venues it is different. For instance, on some smartphone MS makes the OS, a manufacturer integrates to a device, then a cell phone company sells and supports it. Who is responsible when their is a problem? Is there even a warranty on the device? In this situation of course no one cares what is put on the phone. Is Google or T-Mobile going to support you when your phone goes down? It is probable, however, that the cell co will cut you off is some application is not behaving on the network.
In any case there are many phones out there, and little reason to buy one that has a locked OS if that is not the phone one wants.
Recall that the dock connector was not developed as a USB connector. It was developed as a firewire connector, which could also use USB. While this capability is not useful for most people, and therefore not worth the extra hassle, it at least somewhat justifies the existence of the $30 cable.
I recall when I bought my mini, and how nice it was to have firewire and not to have to wait forever for the music to load over the slow USB port. I also recall leaving the cable plugged into the back of my hard disk, and charging the mini even if the computer was off. Of course now USB ports are as fast as the old firewire, and the iPod/iPhone has not used firewire for data for years, which meant I had to waste money on a USB Hub, and I believe the newer iPod cannot even charge over firewire, so the dock connector is definitely an anachronism. But it is not like MS/IBM/Nokia arbitrary decision to bork the standard.
OTOH, the iPod/iPhone line is based on the dock connector, so it is not going to be given up without a fight, not from Apple, but from consumers. The USB micro standard may work, except for the fact that most of us have tons of the depreciated mini USB cables, so it still look like an excuse to make us buy new cables.
Writing good code is expensive. This is one of the reasons why MS is so popular. It allows developers to write bad code that will still runs, is still sufficiently maintainable, and does the job with minimum reliability. This is why good code, which was never really in fad to begin with, never really took off. Even with modern tools, writing good portable code is largely cost prohibitive.
This is why the PHB might not fall into this new trap. It seems that MS is trying to force good coding practices, with new fangled ideas like the MVC pattern. It may become easier to write bad code on an existing long term stable system than invest in the highly skilled, and invariably annoying people, that can write code that is so abstracted that components can be changed out on the fly. After all the MS philosophy is machines are cheaper than people, so it is better to buy more machines to run inefficient and buggy code that to pay people to write efficient and reliable code.
I talk to these people. They use phrases like "whatever country Obama was born in"(America for those of you that are geographically challenged) and have so little faith in our system of government that they claim if Oboma is elected, the country will come to an end. They think that Obama starts the beginning of seven years of the antichrist rule, but ignore the much more compelling evidence that the antichrist has already had the seven years of rule, 9/2001-9/2008, that we have already begun the wars, none of which makes sense but is fun to taunt them with.
In any case many of these people are bigots, but bigotry is not socially acceptable, so they come up with other reasons to justify their fears. You want to attack Arab people, say their religion is denerate. You don't want Arab people in your work place, say that prayer is bad and planning life around worship rather than profit is bad. You don't want to vote for a black/asian/american male, then say he is not christian. Of course the man that divorced his wife to marry a prettier younger and wealthier woman is.
If this is not enough, say he associates with terrorists and his wife hates america and his pastor hates amerca. Of course the candiate that actually courts terrorists organization, and goes to a church that believes witches are the cause of all problems, and whose husband was a member of an organization that has publicly stated that america is bad and has damned everything about amerca, and the candidate herself comes from a state where right now they are damning the america judical system, is irrelevent. Because these candidates are not dark skinned
To be fair not all republicans are bigoted christian rednecks. Many are quite rational. But enough of them are that the RNC has been the primary force behind the use of white supremacist rhetoric to mobilize the masses, re McCain and Palin inciting persons at their rallies to scream "Terrorist, Kill Him" at rallies.
In the states, T-Mobile has almost no 3G coverage outside of several major cities. And data coverage itself, which is often sparse west of the Mississippi, all but disappears when one gets to the middle United states.
All reports indicates that Google has built a very good smart phone OS. Now that it is open sourced we are likely to see a great number of smart phones of varying quality, some which will be very fast and put the propriety guys to shame on certain benchmarks, and with features the proprietary guys would never include. But until we see these phone, on all the networks, I do not see the G1 as anything as an experimental device on a small network. To see if Android really works, we have to see in work in the mass marketplace on a top tier network.
Stevens probably did a lot to help alaska. He probably knows more about the politics than anyone. He was in office for, what, 40 years, only 9 years less than Alaska has been a state. And the charges might be trumped out, and the defense was good. It was essentially what Reagan used in his drug smuggling case. I was not my doing, I don't recall, I don't know. So it is probably an effort to get him out of office. If he should have to office for so long.
OTOH, one has to think that a guy that can't control his household might be over the edges. That he is so much a part of the Washington Elite, that he might not distinguish between what is done to benefit the country and what is done to enrich himself. It really speaks to the accumulation of power, and the corruption that accompanies it. One can imagine that a dictator might not be such a bad thing, except eventually the accumulated power and privilege ends up warping the sense of reality to a mentally deformed image. It is kind of the story of this election, can a guy with 8 houses and 13 cars and a corporate jet and a young rich second wife really represent the bulk of the people who do not have any of these. I don't know. It will be a change in Alaska, and we will see if they can make it. If they have been broken from their benevolent benefactor, or freed from their father figure. I sure he did good, but perhaps did not get out when the good he did was not overwhelming.
My problem with total information on every citizen,and the ability to search without probable cause, is that it allows low level bureaucrats a huge amount of power. The airport screener, some making less that $10 an hour, are allowed to rummage my stuff, take my computers and other computers, throw away my water, all without charging me with any crime or claiming any penalty.
Low level enlisted personel reported listening in on superiors private conversations through the warrantless wire tapping laws. Who knows how many other fucked up bureaucrats spend their days getting themselves off listening to conversations that citizens of the US should have the expectation to be private. And before we say if you don't have anything to hide, remember that Sarah Palin cried like a little girl when her account was hacked and wasted huge amounts of federal dollars looking for the person who did it. If you don't have anything to hide...
In fact I wonder how much of this economic meltdown is caused by the realization that there are no more corporate secrets. Every communique can be intercepted by some disgruntled government worker and be sold to the highest bidder. How much of the meltdown is caused by the realization that Obama might become president, and therefore all the good old boys who were used to breakin' the law, might now be on the ass end of warrentless wire tap. Such abuse of power was OK when a drunk frat boy had the keys.
And let's look a old Joe. The most that will happen to these government worker bees is that they get fired, on assumes, which is OK because this is not the worst that these government workers did to old Joe. Reportedly, someone typed in his name wrong. If the Republican party had their way, Old Joe would not have been able to vote because he drivers license would not have matched his voter registration card . This disenfranchise is reportedly due to a "clerical error". We are now giving low level bureaucrats the power to at least attempt to disenfranchise voters. Can you imagine what would happen if a bunch of voter registration cards came in from a republican area, and the clerk decided to misspell every few names, knowing that a law such as the republicans want to curb voter fraud might at least disenfranchise a few of them?
We really need get back to the constructionist ideals of this country, where those that will trade freedom for security deserve neither.
Books become overnight bestsellers because books are relatively inexpensive, and most don't want to read buy are told that intelligent people read these books, so Oprah provides a path of least resistant to appearing informed and intelligent. The only other alternative is to read lots of books, many of which your friends and acquaintances will be totally unfamiliar with, and so there will be no opportunity to pontificate. After all, who wants to talk about a book, or anything for that matter, not endorsed by a celebrity.
The reader, OTOH, is not inexpensive, so the number of people who can afford it is limited. It is, however, going to be a sign of intelligence to own one, at least for the people who believe intelligence is defined by doing exactly what a celebrity says to do. Therefore there will be a spike in sales.
So, why do we care. Because the Amazon ebook reader is worse than the iPod. At least the ipod can play standard formats and load music not sold by Apple. It is made to support the iTunes music store, but it is also for people who don't want to use the ITMS. It does not cut other retailers, like Amazon, out of the deal, as long as the retailer sells DRM free content.
The Kindle is specifically designed to deliver content from Amazon to the customer. It may do other things, and there may be hacks to make it do more, but it is a device to cut out other retailers. Otherwise why would then not include a PDF reader? Almost everything can be either gotten on PDF or TXT, and therefore no one would have to be stuck with Amazon Delivery. Of course amazon is paying pretty penny to the cell networks for wireless delivery, and these costs have to be paid, which means that if a Amazon does not fully monetize the Kindle customer through some regular purchase, preferably a subscription, Amazon does not have a workable bussiness plan.
So, the Kindle is hardly an E-book reader. Is a proprietary device that allows customers to receive various content from amazon. As much as I don't trust sony, they seem to have the good e-book reader on the market, though like the market in general, it is still immature and not widely avaiable.
The network is the issue. Everyone bemoaned the fact that the iPhone was only available on the ATT network, and the ATT network was the a useless network, and the phone was not 3G, and it did not have GPS. Of course, compared to the T-Mobile, ATT and Verizon are not that different. And, of course, the iPhone not only works as a phone, but is highly integrated into the Apple space, without being exclusive to it. Google mail is integrated.
OTOH, the G1 is a basic device on a very limited network. There is not much to recommend it other than it does integrate to google. I think that the decision to not integrate to a computer was purposeful. I think it is a good phone, and if Motorola can get Verizon and ATT to carry the phone, we will have a very vibrant market in the US for smartphones. However, I suspect that major players will require such boring hardware that few will be willing to pay for it. Then, of course, is that issue that no one expects to have any expendable income for the next 12-24 months.
Most people are greedy bastards, that is why we are in this crisis.
However, there are people, some of the greedy, that are rather clever. And they can make money in any situation. For example, in this crisis Walmart is reporting a surge in payday purchases, most notably necessities that previously were bought on an as needed basis. This implies that as consumer confidence shrinks, people are concentrating more on necessities, and are very concerned about budgeting money, and are less confident their money will last until the next paycheck, and unsure if credit will be available.
Some might cry doom and gloom, while others try to make money off the situation. How this is done is where cleaver people come in. On a practical basis, Wal Mart, among others, a promoting and economical meal packages. On a more theoretical basis, cleaver designers will develop ad supported websites devoted to economical products. Sure it will reduce profit, but money will be made.
On the OSS basis, OO.org 3.0 clearly points the way. It is criminal for a strapped school district to pay MS for Office when property taxes are driving people out of their houses. I wonder with the availability of Eclipse and other other free IDEs would mean that we need to be taxed to death so students can have the luxury of MS Visual Studio. Sure these luxuries are nice, but when something like Alice is available, which the public has already essentially pay for, when are we dealing with similar commercial products?
The problem is that people require truth, rather than observation, as well as an over dependence on facts. Some articles are fact based. William Shatner portrayed Captain Jame Tiberius Kirk in 79 episodes of the ST:TOS. These are widely known, verifiable facts, and anyone who disputes them is likely delusional.
Some facts are less widely known, like what Shatner was doing last week at tea time, or what motivated someone to jack a car. One might be tempted to ask Shanter or the car jacker, and that would certainly give a credible version of the truth. But what if 10 people saw Shatner at the time on the state day, or what if the car jacker just had a discussion with someone prior the incident describing what he or she was feeling. And what if the first hand and observed description of the 'truth' did not match? Do we accept the personal accounts or first hand observations? Do we accept the car jackers claim that he had been offered the car as a gift when 10 people saw the car being taken at gunpoint? The problem with truth is that we are forced to accept a single version, even though, at least sometimes, both can be seen as reasonable in certain contexts.
Which is why there is no issue here. Wikipedia deals with facts, figures, and personal statements. This is a commonly accepted fact. This is what I saw, and many people agree with me. This is the gestalt consensus of the truth at this moment. Confusing this with anything other than fallible observation causes nothing but problems.
OTOH academic observation often talks about validity. Starting with this data, and using these methods, this is what a reasonable person would conclude. Is the data good? You be judge. Are the methods appropriate? You be the judge. Do you trust that the procedures are carried out properly? That is also a judgement call. There is no truth, just observation and valid conclusions. Wiki cannot handle this because it usually just include out of context 'facts', with little context. No way to know why these 'facts' are more valid that those reported last week. It is this exact thing that makes people so confused about health and nutrition issues. People tend to believe what they are told, even though there is no reason to believe it.
286 sales a day would just about pay for the prize. As the prize money increases, we would expect more sales. I would assume the expected sales versus time would have an concave shape, where at some point people just buy the game in hope of receiving the prize money, and sales go up dramatically, then likely drop significantly. It is like the lottery where lines grow grotesquely long as prize money increases.
The scam tag may be appropriate here, because they can basically engineer the game to be so easy as to insure someone can solve it in a few days, or so hard that that no one can solve it in 30 days. Sure the money will go to charity, but the actual net loss such a donation would generate after taxes and publicity benefits are unclear.
This seems like a credible piece of advertising to boost sales in a market with few opportunities to get noticed. It is low cost, of limited duration, and will encourage people to buy the product with a minimum 200X ROI, for those with a gambling mind.
I try to stay objective, understanding that we will have adverts and press releases on the front page, and slashdot is ad supported, and that is becoming harder, and where would we be if slashdot were not here. But sometimes the press releases are so lame. I mean, don't people get paid good money to write a press release that the intended audience won't laugh at?
For instance, who outside infomercials aimed at the homebound uses the term 'space age materials'. People have been in space, of and on, for 50 years, two generations. Who does not use space age materials? And what are these materials anyway, plastic? Sometimes these adverts just makes me screams incompetent design, and I wonder who in their right mind would buy from these people. Probably the same people who buy the magic stock market accounts.
it is worse than that. Google is providing ad support free-to-the-user services, and when those services are not perfect, the users cry like they matter. A single user on a free service is not worth that much. a single user that complains all the time has negative worth. The best thing to happen is that such a user goes away. Free services usually have plenty of new people signing up.
Now, if a user wishes to pay a fee and become a customer, then there may be a basis to say that the service is not up to par. But until that point, the advertisers are the customers, and dsign decisions are a compromise between giving advertisers what they want and making the service barely tolerable to the user so they won't move to a competing free service.
It is really sad. Even people who should know better, like NYT columnist, think that Google has some responsibility to the free users, and that the free user apps are suitable for critical business use. I fear for the world when I hear such naive statements.
If Psystar had a case, they would go to court. They may be a way to win, if there was a way to get around the Apple license that says that the software can be run only on apple branded machines. At this point, MS would no longer be able to limit OEM copies to the machines they shipped on, DVD could no longer use their copy protection to limit legitimate copies, and the shrink wrap license would in general be history.
The ridiculous thing is that building a mac clone would be about half as hard as building the IBM clone. No one needs to work under clean room condition to make sure that the multiple phalanxes of IBM lawyers do not win the first born child of the cloners. No one needs to write a OS from scratch. All that is needed is an appropriate *nix subsystem, with a virtual machine that can run either windows and a Mac OS UI clone simultaneously. The technology is out there, all we need is some innovative company to do it.
Instead what we get is some kids hacking and selling POS hardware hoping they can get a little more than the razor thin margins currently awarded to the PC OEM. The reason we have not seen an innovative PC in 10 years is that there is no money in it. MS virtually destroyed the system builder, and now they are the only ones making money. The only hope for an innovative PC, besides Apple, is the market of competing virtual machine on top of commodity hardware. Whatever OS can run on top of it. This will break the cycle of single vendor malaise that lead to the crap Vista.
I am all for Apple to lose it's 'monopoly' of Mac OS X on Apple hardware. I am all for MS to be forced to stop 'illegally' tying an OS to a certain machine. But this is not going happen by putting out crappy machines running the same old crappy software. It will happen by a system builder designing a new kind of GPC. of course, the problem is will the market want it. Such a machine would require a significant amount of engineering, which would have to be recouped by a higher margin, which means a PC that costs more than $500, without a high level OS.
The fact is that Android is simply a free smart phone OS and SDK controlled by google. What will and will not happen on android, and the phones developed by it, will ultimate be controlled by google and the phone company. The presence of a kill switch strongly suggests that google is going to pull a bait and switch. The allegations that to get a unlock code for the G1 in the US is going to require the payment of three months of service and then a termination fee indicates that Google is giving wide latitude to the cell companies to screw companies. At least Apple is honest and upfront, and asked you politely to pull down your pants.
I see Google doing the same thing that MS did way back when, which clearly created some advantages, but did not create the milk and honey world so many predicted. MS did provide a cheap OS for the emerging cheap PC. It was still as single source as IBM or Apple, but it was cheaper. In those days, the PC market had not become 100% based on commodity parts, so the computers were still pretty single sourced as well. Over time, MS pushed it advantage to attack customers(threatening copyright violation on customers that did not pay for all MS services for every machine), limit innovation of the PC by forcing OEM to only include MS products, and risking world commerce by purposefully borking common communications between OSes. We can see that while google will play nice while it is still cementing it dominant status, assuming that it will continue to play by those rules are naive.
To end lets look at two common passages in the license the use provides Apple for Mobile me and Google for Docs. While the user grants both license to do what is necessary with the data to organize and transmit the data across all appropriate network, Apple explicitly states this is, at least theoretically, a limited situation. Both allow content to be uploaded, sometimes sensitive content
Said license will terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you or Apple remove such Content from the public area.
Google contains no such limitations. Google does however contain this section
You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services..
I am sure some people will spin this, just like the kill switch, into a situation where Google is only doing this to help the consumer, and would never expose sensitive data for financial gain. Such a spin would of course be ludicrous.
A google phone is just another smart phone. It is a good choice for people who want to use Google to store personal data, or people who think having the most apps makes them a winner in life. The iPhone is a good phone for those who.mac for the storage of personal data, or iTunes for music, or has apple kit. The Blackberry has obviously developed a good set of solutions for enterprise. I am not sure what MS phones are good for. But all these phones exist to generate a profit for the company by locking the customers into certain other services. All these phones run on networks controlled by private companies that are very protective of their networks and can exert some control over what kit is used. I do not see how the G1 has changed the features or services of T-Mobile. I do not yet see the App for the G1 that will unlock it, or set it up as independent WiFi device that does not need a cell contract, as it will just up VOIP. Maybe that will come, and when it does then Google has done something other that generate a profit for itself.
It is just not in the mainstream, so there is little reason to include it on a machine that is primarily made to meed a price point. Most people who want a computer for $1000 probably have similar price requirements for other devices, which means they are unlikely to pay a 20% premium on a lacie hard disk with firewire. This is not a case of a cheap technology like a floppy disk being removed because no one uses it. It is a matter or an expensive technology being removed because most people do not wish to pay for it. This was certainly the case with iPod. I was able to charge an ipod by plugging it into my external hard disk, which was nice. But the iPod being a consumer product, had to be sold for consumer product, and the average consumer is not willing to pay for the premium Apple hardware and service, so the iPod, and unfortunately the iPhone, uses the lame and inferior USB protocol.It is not a big deal, but I had to buy a USB hub.
There is also a matter of not putting gratuitous features on the machine just to meet the buzz word compliance features. For example, many people complain that the Airport has no firewire port, and I am one of those because some of my kit is firewire only. But given the wireless transfer speeds, 54 Mbits/second, why put a 400 Mbit/sec on it. Sure, if one is using GHz ethernet, it would be nice a FW800 interface, but how many of us do this. And this is the case, perhaps an network aware hard drive is a better solution, which I see are not very expensive.
What is true is that Apple does not waste resources support tech that no longer serves a broad purpose. This means that many of us have closets full of old tech. What this also means is that we don't have to worry about installing drivers every time we put in a USB drive, most cameras work with the standard picture protocol, and if we are willing to pay for the machine, we have external hardware that communicates at fast speeds, built in.
It is about money. It is about competing with cheap PCs that do not have the expense of the firewire. It is about building a reasonable mac laptop that can be had from the Apple Store for less that a 1K. This is something that most whiners seem to want. A less expensive mac. Firewire is still available, and if it is needed the more expensive machine can be had.
This reminds me when Apple went to IDE drives on the cheaper laptops. It was not ideal, as the IDE drives were still slower than SCSI drives. However, combined with a slower front side bus and some other things it allowed the portable to be priced for around $1K. This was at a time when top of the line Macs portables were nearly $4K. There is nothing
This is annoying because large groups complain that Macs are expensive, but when Apple makes the compromises to make the machines cheaper they complain that compromises have been made. Given that 20% markup on Apples is as forgone a conclusion as the 80% markup on MS Windows, something else has to give.
Of course people will still say that even with all the compromises, the Mac is still overpriced. Sure you can buy a POS laptop for $500, but it is going to have firewire port? Is it going have a fast bus, matched processor, good battery time? A minimally acceptable HP laptop worth a full healthy version of Vista retails for nearly $1500, online promotions bringing it to around $1200. This is about what the consumer mac costs. I can certainly see how people would complain about have to pay $2000 to get a mac with firewire, but how much would one have to pay to get that on another machine? And would the other machine be able to use the data, or would it be tacked on option, like USB ports used to be. Barely functional.
I agree. Windows should just boot up quickly, and be instant on from sleep. I think this is a minimum requirement. I think in the bad old days, the it was good to have the windows logo sitting there for multiple minutes for branding purposes, unlike the MS DOS days when one did not even know what the OS was a the diagnostics and loading were done in seconds.
Now that MS does not need to brand MS Windows, and in fact ran away from the brand with MS Vista, some work was done to get move to the desktop quickly. But that just deferred some work until after the user logged in. Honestly, if the machine was responsive 15-30 seconds after the desktop loaded, it would not be so bad. Some it may be an XP issue fixed in Vista. Some of it should be solved when MS has 100% of the OS code threaded and optimized for multicores. I think this would be much better use of time than hacking a PDA on top of the OS.
Everyone is saying, Look! it is easy to remove the hardrive! Yeah!
This is stupid. I think the most insane thing about any laptop is easy harddrive removal. It screams of a manufacturer that is going to save money using defective harddrives since they will be so easy to replace. Even if they go up in smoke after a year, the user will be able to replaced it.
Here is why I think this is a bad philosophy. First, the hard drive is where my data is stored. Even with a backup, I want to know that when I turn it on, it will work. Especially with a laptop. It is not like I am going to carry my backup with me? The naysayer will remind me that drive do not fail often. I reply that I buy macs because I do not want this critical component to fail at all. In all my years, I have only had three mac drives fail on me, and only after a few years of use. Ports, DVD drives, power adapters, fine. I can still get what I need to get done, then get it to the shop. Skimping on hard drives is unacceptable.
Second is security. I love the way that Apple has always built physical security into the products. Lockable lathes on the back of desktops, kensington lock on laptops. expensive components not trivial to reach. The only thing easy to steal on a pro laptop is the battery and sometimes the memory, which is a reasonable compromise as these are things that maybe switched out somewhat often. Ram at least requires a few screws being removed, which I think is good.
(note: it is possible that the latch is locked when the kensington cable it in. I can't tell, in which case this paragraph is not valid)
But why in the world would anyone want a hard drive that could be stolen in 30 seconds. This is data. This is some people life. I know it is not a huge security issue, but really. I see some HP laptops that could be stripped in a minute. The Ti Powerbook was the perfect compromise. Several screws, mostly of the same size, to remove the bottom cover, then a few more screws to remove the hard drive. I know from experience that the 12" powerbook is insane, and the Apple designer that did that should be flogged. Hard drives do fail, so one should not have to disassemble the whole machine to fix a part that is not likely to last the lifetime of the machine. I don't know how it is in the Mac Pro machines. Exposing the hard disk every time the battery is changed is just plan silly.
For that matter, making a battery change a two step process is silly. I know I just ranted on security, and how things might get stolen, but there has been times when I changed the battery every day. I am willing to risk a hundred dollars for an easier change out. I am not willing to trust Filevault to protect my data when someone steals the hard disk from my tethered and locked machine.
And what is it about hiding the memory. Apple must be really hard up for money if they are going to hid memory in hopes that users will buy Apple memory. There is only one thing that is still over priced at Apple. The memory. I will do without rather than pay apple prices. Non replaceable battery and memory in the macbook air, fine. No SD slot in the iPhone, fine. But making the HD a user replaceable part and the memory not, that is just silly.
In any case, the new mac books are something different, and will take some time to digest. I kind of like the mac book air if these are the compromises that are going to have to be made on the pro line. I guess we will wait and see what happens with the 17", if it ever appears. Maybe they will follow the rest of the industry and make it 18". That might be worth some shenanigans with memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet all the support is farmed out to the manufacture, which farms it out to the call center, which farms out to independent contractors reading from a computer script. How many levels does a problem have to move through before someone who can actually fix the problem sees it. I know that 99% of the complaints come from people who just can't seem to remember where the 'any key' is located, but every once in a while a real problem comes up, and it would be nice to talk to someone who knows the underlying architecture. I mean, MS can spend huge amounts of money to provide the anti-piracy annoy ware in MS WIndows XP, but not support the product?
I know when I was doing this sort of thing, it was nice to be in position directly connected to support to fix problems as they occurred. If there is a problem with the business environment right now, it is that everyone wants to be in fancy management positions, but no one wants to be on the front lines helping those annoying customer maximize the use of the product, the exact people who pay good money that makes us all rich in the first place.
(And I know that much of the time the end user is not the customer, only a means to a greater goal, and sometimes when the end user pays no money, the amount of deserved support might be minimal, but the priciple still applies.)
I sort of felt this thing might happen when Palin was selected. She was a women trying to reach a very conservative male base that has been steeped in two years of bashing Hilary Clinton and Pelosi. She brought he unwed pregnant daughter with the baby's daddy like they were the holy couple, and by the way have never announced a wedding date, again in a party that has characterized pregnant teens as future welfare moms. This probably cost McCain crucial states in the east that lead to disaster in the west. It is pretty bad when you have less than 10 votes, and your opponent is approaching 100.
In any case I think we can look on the bright side. Instead of MBA graduate who whined his way into the program on a legacy, we have a Harvard graduate that has consistently advanced on his merits.
OTOH, if our educational system is not simply a ploy to minimize the number of young job applicants,then one must allow for the possibility that education does serve another national agenda. Such agendas might provided kids an opportunity to maximize their talents. This in turn may allow the kid to provide future economic benefits to the country. It may be that parents are in o position to allow the kid to explore their talents. Some might say 'too bad', but such thinking is simplistic and naive. We do not live an aristocracy where we lose the economic advantage of a talented kid simply because he or she is not born into the proper class.
As far as teachers, they just mostly teach what they are told, and if not what they are told, what they know. So if there is national agenda for education, then teachers must be given clear guidelines what to teach, and local agencies must be given clear guidelines on who to hire so the teachers who just want to teach what they know at least know something to teach.
None of this eliminates the possibility for local non-government based education. There is plenty of non-accredited educational opportunities for family who wish that. But asserting that we as a nation can achieve optimum economic growth without a coherent educational policy is like saying that we can achieve consistent economic growth growth without a coherent monetary policy. It might be true for a while, but at some point the feds will have to step in rescue the institutions that are just too big to fail.
MS is successful because they provide a very affordable method to get business running on a computer. At some point, if Linux gets a foothold in the enterprise, then the corporate drones will be trained in Linux, and the corporate suppliers will write interfaces for Linux, and MS will have to contend with the fact that while the 'support' line item still exists, the 'MS License', 'MS Compliance', and 'Slush fund against future MS lawsuits' line items will disappear.
In other venues it is different. For instance, on some smartphone MS makes the OS, a manufacturer integrates to a device, then a cell phone company sells and supports it. Who is responsible when their is a problem? Is there even a warranty on the device? In this situation of course no one cares what is put on the phone. Is Google or T-Mobile going to support you when your phone goes down? It is probable, however, that the cell co will cut you off is some application is not behaving on the network.
In any case there are many phones out there, and little reason to buy one that has a locked OS if that is not the phone one wants.
I recall when I bought my mini, and how nice it was to have firewire and not to have to wait forever for the music to load over the slow USB port. I also recall leaving the cable plugged into the back of my hard disk, and charging the mini even if the computer was off. Of course now USB ports are as fast as the old firewire, and the iPod/iPhone has not used firewire for data for years, which meant I had to waste money on a USB Hub, and I believe the newer iPod cannot even charge over firewire, so the dock connector is definitely an anachronism. But it is not like MS/IBM/Nokia arbitrary decision to bork the standard.
OTOH, the iPod/iPhone line is based on the dock connector, so it is not going to be given up without a fight, not from Apple, but from consumers. The USB micro standard may work, except for the fact that most of us have tons of the depreciated mini USB cables, so it still look like an excuse to make us buy new cables.
This is why the PHB might not fall into this new trap. It seems that MS is trying to force good coding practices, with new fangled ideas like the MVC pattern. It may become easier to write bad code on an existing long term stable system than invest in the highly skilled, and invariably annoying people, that can write code that is so abstracted that components can be changed out on the fly. After all the MS philosophy is machines are cheaper than people, so it is better to buy more machines to run inefficient and buggy code that to pay people to write efficient and reliable code.
In any case many of these people are bigots, but bigotry is not socially acceptable, so they come up with other reasons to justify their fears. You want to attack Arab people, say their religion is denerate. You don't want Arab people in your work place, say that prayer is bad and planning life around worship rather than profit is bad. You don't want to vote for a black/asian/american male, then say he is not christian. Of course the man that divorced his wife to marry a prettier younger and wealthier woman is.
If this is not enough, say he associates with terrorists and his wife hates america and his pastor hates amerca. Of course the candiate that actually courts terrorists organization, and goes to a church that believes witches are the cause of all problems, and whose husband was a member of an organization that has publicly stated that america is bad and has damned everything about amerca, and the candidate herself comes from a state where right now they are damning the america judical system, is irrelevent. Because these candidates are not dark skinned
To be fair not all republicans are bigoted christian rednecks. Many are quite rational. But enough of them are that the RNC has been the primary force behind the use of white supremacist rhetoric to mobilize the masses, re McCain and Palin inciting persons at their rallies to scream "Terrorist, Kill Him" at rallies.
All reports indicates that Google has built a very good smart phone OS. Now that it is open sourced we are likely to see a great number of smart phones of varying quality, some which will be very fast and put the propriety guys to shame on certain benchmarks, and with features the proprietary guys would never include. But until we see these phone, on all the networks, I do not see the G1 as anything as an experimental device on a small network. To see if Android really works, we have to see in work in the mass marketplace on a top tier network.
OTOH, one has to think that a guy that can't control his household might be over the edges. That he is so much a part of the Washington Elite, that he might not distinguish between what is done to benefit the country and what is done to enrich himself. It really speaks to the accumulation of power, and the corruption that accompanies it. One can imagine that a dictator might not be such a bad thing, except eventually the accumulated power and privilege ends up warping the sense of reality to a mentally deformed image. It is kind of the story of this election, can a guy with 8 houses and 13 cars and a corporate jet and a young rich second wife really represent the bulk of the people who do not have any of these. I don't know. It will be a change in Alaska, and we will see if they can make it. If they have been broken from their benevolent benefactor, or freed from their father figure. I sure he did good, but perhaps did not get out when the good he did was not overwhelming.
It is not just GSM phones. My old RAZR had the same problem. At meeting, anytime a phone rings we get all sorts of interference with audio.
Low level enlisted personel reported listening in on superiors private conversations through the warrantless wire tapping laws. Who knows how many other fucked up bureaucrats spend their days getting themselves off listening to conversations that citizens of the US should have the expectation to be private. And before we say if you don't have anything to hide, remember that Sarah Palin cried like a little girl when her account was hacked and wasted huge amounts of federal dollars looking for the person who did it. If you don't have anything to hide...
In fact I wonder how much of this economic meltdown is caused by the realization that there are no more corporate secrets. Every communique can be intercepted by some disgruntled government worker and be sold to the highest bidder. How much of the meltdown is caused by the realization that Obama might become president, and therefore all the good old boys who were used to breakin' the law, might now be on the ass end of warrentless wire tap. Such abuse of power was OK when a drunk frat boy had the keys.
And let's look a old Joe. The most that will happen to these government worker bees is that they get fired, on assumes, which is OK because this is not the worst that these government workers did to old Joe. Reportedly, someone typed in his name wrong. If the Republican party had their way, Old Joe would not have been able to vote because he drivers license would not have matched his voter registration card . This disenfranchise is reportedly due to a "clerical error". We are now giving low level bureaucrats the power to at least attempt to disenfranchise voters. Can you imagine what would happen if a bunch of voter registration cards came in from a republican area, and the clerk decided to misspell every few names, knowing that a law such as the republicans want to curb voter fraud might at least disenfranchise a few of them?
We really need get back to the constructionist ideals of this country, where those that will trade freedom for security deserve neither.
The reader, OTOH, is not inexpensive, so the number of people who can afford it is limited. It is, however, going to be a sign of intelligence to own one, at least for the people who believe intelligence is defined by doing exactly what a celebrity says to do. Therefore there will be a spike in sales.
So, why do we care. Because the Amazon ebook reader is worse than the iPod. At least the ipod can play standard formats and load music not sold by Apple. It is made to support the iTunes music store, but it is also for people who don't want to use the ITMS. It does not cut other retailers, like Amazon, out of the deal, as long as the retailer sells DRM free content.
The Kindle is specifically designed to deliver content from Amazon to the customer. It may do other things, and there may be hacks to make it do more, but it is a device to cut out other retailers. Otherwise why would then not include a PDF reader? Almost everything can be either gotten on PDF or TXT, and therefore no one would have to be stuck with Amazon Delivery. Of course amazon is paying pretty penny to the cell networks for wireless delivery, and these costs have to be paid, which means that if a Amazon does not fully monetize the Kindle customer through some regular purchase, preferably a subscription, Amazon does not have a workable bussiness plan.
So, the Kindle is hardly an E-book reader. Is a proprietary device that allows customers to receive various content from amazon. As much as I don't trust sony, they seem to have the good e-book reader on the market, though like the market in general, it is still immature and not widely avaiable.
OTOH, the G1 is a basic device on a very limited network. There is not much to recommend it other than it does integrate to google. I think that the decision to not integrate to a computer was purposeful. I think it is a good phone, and if Motorola can get Verizon and ATT to carry the phone, we will have a very vibrant market in the US for smartphones. However, I suspect that major players will require such boring hardware that few will be willing to pay for it. Then, of course, is that issue that no one expects to have any expendable income for the next 12-24 months.
However, there are people, some of the greedy, that are rather clever. And they can make money in any situation. For example, in this crisis Walmart is reporting a surge in payday purchases, most notably necessities that previously were bought on an as needed basis. This implies that as consumer confidence shrinks, people are concentrating more on necessities, and are very concerned about budgeting money, and are less confident their money will last until the next paycheck, and unsure if credit will be available.
Some might cry doom and gloom, while others try to make money off the situation. How this is done is where cleaver people come in. On a practical basis, Wal Mart, among others, a promoting and economical meal packages. On a more theoretical basis, cleaver designers will develop ad supported websites devoted to economical products. Sure it will reduce profit, but money will be made.
On the OSS basis, OO.org 3.0 clearly points the way. It is criminal for a strapped school district to pay MS for Office when property taxes are driving people out of their houses. I wonder with the availability of Eclipse and other other free IDEs would mean that we need to be taxed to death so students can have the luxury of MS Visual Studio. Sure these luxuries are nice, but when something like Alice is available, which the public has already essentially pay for, when are we dealing with similar commercial products?
Some facts are less widely known, like what Shatner was doing last week at tea time, or what motivated someone to jack a car. One might be tempted to ask Shanter or the car jacker, and that would certainly give a credible version of the truth. But what if 10 people saw Shatner at the time on the state day, or what if the car jacker just had a discussion with someone prior the incident describing what he or she was feeling. And what if the first hand and observed description of the 'truth' did not match? Do we accept the personal accounts or first hand observations? Do we accept the car jackers claim that he had been offered the car as a gift when 10 people saw the car being taken at gunpoint? The problem with truth is that we are forced to accept a single version, even though, at least sometimes, both can be seen as reasonable in certain contexts.
Which is why there is no issue here. Wikipedia deals with facts, figures, and personal statements. This is a commonly accepted fact. This is what I saw, and many people agree with me. This is the gestalt consensus of the truth at this moment. Confusing this with anything other than fallible observation causes nothing but problems.
OTOH academic observation often talks about validity. Starting with this data, and using these methods, this is what a reasonable person would conclude. Is the data good? You be judge. Are the methods appropriate? You be the judge. Do you trust that the procedures are carried out properly? That is also a judgement call. There is no truth, just observation and valid conclusions. Wiki cannot handle this because it usually just include out of context 'facts', with little context. No way to know why these 'facts' are more valid that those reported last week. It is this exact thing that makes people so confused about health and nutrition issues. People tend to believe what they are told, even though there is no reason to believe it.
The scam tag may be appropriate here, because they can basically engineer the game to be so easy as to insure someone can solve it in a few days, or so hard that that no one can solve it in 30 days. Sure the money will go to charity, but the actual net loss such a donation would generate after taxes and publicity benefits are unclear.
This seems like a credible piece of advertising to boost sales in a market with few opportunities to get noticed. It is low cost, of limited duration, and will encourage people to buy the product with a minimum 200X ROI, for those with a gambling mind.
For instance, who outside infomercials aimed at the homebound uses the term 'space age materials'. People have been in space, of and on, for 50 years, two generations. Who does not use space age materials? And what are these materials anyway, plastic? Sometimes these adverts just makes me screams incompetent design, and I wonder who in their right mind would buy from these people. Probably the same people who buy the magic stock market accounts.
Now, if a user wishes to pay a fee and become a customer, then there may be a basis to say that the service is not up to par. But until that point, the advertisers are the customers, and dsign decisions are a compromise between giving advertisers what they want and making the service barely tolerable to the user so they won't move to a competing free service.
It is really sad. Even people who should know better, like NYT columnist, think that Google has some responsibility to the free users, and that the free user apps are suitable for critical business use. I fear for the world when I hear such naive statements.
The ridiculous thing is that building a mac clone would be about half as hard as building the IBM clone. No one needs to work under clean room condition to make sure that the multiple phalanxes of IBM lawyers do not win the first born child of the cloners. No one needs to write a OS from scratch. All that is needed is an appropriate *nix subsystem, with a virtual machine that can run either windows and a Mac OS UI clone simultaneously. The technology is out there, all we need is some innovative company to do it.
Instead what we get is some kids hacking and selling POS hardware hoping they can get a little more than the razor thin margins currently awarded to the PC OEM. The reason we have not seen an innovative PC in 10 years is that there is no money in it. MS virtually destroyed the system builder, and now they are the only ones making money. The only hope for an innovative PC, besides Apple, is the market of competing virtual machine on top of commodity hardware. Whatever OS can run on top of it. This will break the cycle of single vendor malaise that lead to the crap Vista.
I am all for Apple to lose it's 'monopoly' of Mac OS X on Apple hardware. I am all for MS to be forced to stop 'illegally' tying an OS to a certain machine. But this is not going happen by putting out crappy machines running the same old crappy software. It will happen by a system builder designing a new kind of GPC. of course, the problem is will the market want it. Such a machine would require a significant amount of engineering, which would have to be recouped by a higher margin, which means a PC that costs more than $500, without a high level OS.
I see Google doing the same thing that MS did way back when, which clearly created some advantages, but did not create the milk and honey world so many predicted. MS did provide a cheap OS for the emerging cheap PC. It was still as single source as IBM or Apple, but it was cheaper. In those days, the PC market had not become 100% based on commodity parts, so the computers were still pretty single sourced as well. Over time, MS pushed it advantage to attack customers(threatening copyright violation on customers that did not pay for all MS services for every machine), limit innovation of the PC by forcing OEM to only include MS products, and risking world commerce by purposefully borking common communications between OSes. We can see that while google will play nice while it is still cementing it dominant status, assuming that it will continue to play by those rules are naive.
To end lets look at two common passages in the license the use provides Apple for Mobile me and Google for Docs. While the user grants both license to do what is necessary with the data to organize and transmit the data across all appropriate network, Apple explicitly states this is, at least theoretically, a limited situation. Both allow content to be uploaded, sometimes sensitive content
Said license will terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you or Apple remove such Content from the public area.
Google contains no such limitations. Google does however contain this section
You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services..
I am sure some people will spin this, just like the kill switch, into a situation where Google is only doing this to help the consumer, and would never expose sensitive data for financial gain. Such a spin would of course be ludicrous.
A google phone is just another smart phone. It is a good choice for people who want to use Google to store personal data, or people who think having the most apps makes them a winner in life. The iPhone is a good phone for those who .mac for the storage of personal data, or iTunes for music, or has apple kit. The Blackberry has obviously developed a good set of solutions for enterprise. I am not sure what MS phones are good for. But all these phones exist to generate a profit for the company by locking the customers into certain other services. All these phones run on networks controlled by private companies that are very protective of their networks and can exert some control over what kit is used. I do not see how the G1 has changed the features or services of T-Mobile. I do not yet see the App for the G1 that will unlock it, or set it up as independent WiFi device that does not need a cell contract, as it will just up VOIP. Maybe that will come, and when it does then Google has done something other that generate a profit for itself.
There is also a matter of not putting gratuitous features on the machine just to meet the buzz word compliance features. For example, many people complain that the Airport has no firewire port, and I am one of those because some of my kit is firewire only. But given the wireless transfer speeds, 54 Mbits/second, why put a 400 Mbit/sec on it. Sure, if one is using GHz ethernet, it would be nice a FW800 interface, but how many of us do this. And this is the case, perhaps an network aware hard drive is a better solution, which I see are not very expensive.
What is true is that Apple does not waste resources support tech that no longer serves a broad purpose. This means that many of us have closets full of old tech. What this also means is that we don't have to worry about installing drivers every time we put in a USB drive, most cameras work with the standard picture protocol, and if we are willing to pay for the machine, we have external hardware that communicates at fast speeds, built in.
This reminds me when Apple went to IDE drives on the cheaper laptops. It was not ideal, as the IDE drives were still slower than SCSI drives. However, combined with a slower front side bus and some other things it allowed the portable to be priced for around $1K. This was at a time when top of the line Macs portables were nearly $4K. There is nothing
This is annoying because large groups complain that Macs are expensive, but when Apple makes the compromises to make the machines cheaper they complain that compromises have been made. Given that 20% markup on Apples is as forgone a conclusion as the 80% markup on MS Windows, something else has to give.
Of course people will still say that even with all the compromises, the Mac is still overpriced. Sure you can buy a POS laptop for $500, but it is going to have firewire port? Is it going have a fast bus, matched processor, good battery time? A minimally acceptable HP laptop worth a full healthy version of Vista retails for nearly $1500, online promotions bringing it to around $1200. This is about what the consumer mac costs. I can certainly see how people would complain about have to pay $2000 to get a mac with firewire, but how much would one have to pay to get that on another machine? And would the other machine be able to use the data, or would it be tacked on option, like USB ports used to be. Barely functional.
Now that MS does not need to brand MS Windows, and in fact ran away from the brand with MS Vista, some work was done to get move to the desktop quickly. But that just deferred some work until after the user logged in. Honestly, if the machine was responsive 15-30 seconds after the desktop loaded, it would not be so bad. Some it may be an XP issue fixed in Vista. Some of it should be solved when MS has 100% of the OS code threaded and optimized for multicores. I think this would be much better use of time than hacking a PDA on top of the OS.
This is stupid. I think the most insane thing about any laptop is easy harddrive removal. It screams of a manufacturer that is going to save money using defective harddrives since they will be so easy to replace. Even if they go up in smoke after a year, the user will be able to replaced it.
Here is why I think this is a bad philosophy. First, the hard drive is where my data is stored. Even with a backup, I want to know that when I turn it on, it will work. Especially with a laptop. It is not like I am going to carry my backup with me? The naysayer will remind me that drive do not fail often. I reply that I buy macs because I do not want this critical component to fail at all. In all my years, I have only had three mac drives fail on me, and only after a few years of use. Ports, DVD drives, power adapters, fine. I can still get what I need to get done, then get it to the shop. Skimping on hard drives is unacceptable.
Second is security. I love the way that Apple has always built physical security into the products. Lockable lathes on the back of desktops, kensington lock on laptops. expensive components not trivial to reach. The only thing easy to steal on a pro laptop is the battery and sometimes the memory, which is a reasonable compromise as these are things that maybe switched out somewhat often. Ram at least requires a few screws being removed, which I think is good.
(note: it is possible that the latch is locked when the kensington cable it in. I can't tell, in which case this paragraph is not valid)
But why in the world would anyone want a hard drive that could be stolen in 30 seconds. This is data. This is some people life. I know it is not a huge security issue, but really. I see some HP laptops that could be stripped in a minute. The Ti Powerbook was the perfect compromise. Several screws, mostly of the same size, to remove the bottom cover, then a few more screws to remove the hard drive. I know from experience that the 12" powerbook is insane, and the Apple designer that did that should be flogged. Hard drives do fail, so one should not have to disassemble the whole machine to fix a part that is not likely to last the lifetime of the machine. I don't know how it is in the Mac Pro machines. Exposing the hard disk every time the battery is changed is just plan silly.
For that matter, making a battery change a two step process is silly. I know I just ranted on security, and how things might get stolen, but there has been times when I changed the battery every day. I am willing to risk a hundred dollars for an easier change out. I am not willing to trust Filevault to protect my data when someone steals the hard disk from my tethered and locked machine.
And what is it about hiding the memory. Apple must be really hard up for money if they are going to hid memory in hopes that users will buy Apple memory. There is only one thing that is still over priced at Apple. The memory. I will do without rather than pay apple prices. Non replaceable battery and memory in the macbook air, fine. No SD slot in the iPhone, fine. But making the HD a user replaceable part and the memory not, that is just silly.
In any case, the new mac books are something different, and will take some time to digest. I kind of like the mac book air if these are the compromises that are going to have to be made on the pro line. I guess we will wait and see what happens with the 17", if it ever appears. Maybe they will follow the rest of the industry and make it 18". That might be worth some shenanigans with memory.