Perhaps I'm just odd, but my brain can ignore a dim reflected image quite easily. It's an out-of-focus double image unless you look at the reflection rather than the screen. I don't find it distracting at all. But my brain can't compensate for the loss of contrast you get with matte screen if there is any ambient light at all. At the extreme, using a matte screen in bright sunshine is awful compared to a glossy one. It's like your screen has cataracts.
CRT monitors broadcast what's displayed on the screen. That doesn't give you a right to see what's on the screen of every CRT monitor in the vicinity. I thought the "I can see it so it's mine" mentality was confined to infants and toddlers.9666666666
Powering down loses state. Before shutting down you have to save all your files. On powering up you have to reopen all your applications and files and get back to where you were last working. That takes me a damn sight more than 30 seconds and it's my time, not the machine's time. The Debian install on my Eee takes forever to boot, but hibernate works so it's not a problem. The notion that rebooting is acceptable as a normal part of operating a computer should have died long ago.
If there isn't a sign on a building that says it's a church, business or other building which welcomes people in off the street you have absolutely no right to assume it is. All the free, open access points I've seen have had the name of the establishment or something making clear it's free as the SSID, like "SamsCafe" or "FreeBarWiFi".
If you install an unsecured Wi-Fi gateway with DHCP, the device is yelling to everyone within 100 meters "Free network, come on in" and handing out IP addresses to any takers.
It is not saying "come on in". It's saying "here is network X, it is not secured". You can't legally find out if it's running DHCP without being authorised to connect, so that point is moot.
In the spirit of eco-friendliness, let's try a bike analogy. If you left your bike without locking it it would be advertising its presence by bouncing photons and those photons would encode the fact that it is unsecured. That doesn't make it an open invitation to take your bike. It's not advisable to leave you bike unlocked, not because doing so is an open invitation to use it, but because there are vile people like you about who can justify their morally abhorent behaviour to themselves.
WEP will keep out the non-resourceful and the lazy but that's about it.
It'll also keep out the honest who have a machine which defaults to connecting to any open network. It's easy to accidentally connect to an open network if you don't know what you're doing, but breaking into a WEP secured network marks you out unambiguously as a criminal.
Normal people don't install operating systems, they buy a machine in a box at the computer shop.
While its true that most people who buy computers get an OS in the box as it were, it raises the question: who is Microsoft selling boxed copies of its software to?
Abnormal people:) Well, atypical computer users anyway. It's not that nobody upgrades their OS or build their own machines, just that those people are a minority. Geeks, small businesses and power users spring to mind as the kinds of people who buy an OS in a box.
Normal people don't install operating systems, they buy a machine in a box at the computer shop. While I agree that Ubuntu is the distribution that is closest to being ready for mainstream desktops, it has to get pre-installed on those machines in order to really break into the mainstream market. So far, it hasn't. Dell went with Ubuntu, but they aren't exactly pushing their Linux offerings. Asus chose Xandros for their Linux machine. HP have chosen Suse (Novell). Their machines are or will be on sale at the local computer shop. I don't think it's any coincidence that both those companies signed patent agreements with Microsoft. I imagine Microsoft's legal team can be pretty scary if 99% of your business is based on selling hardware to run their software.
Sounds to me more like Microsoft "requested" they don't sell the Linux version any cheaper than the XP version. Making two models of the hardware doesn't make much sense otherwise.
In addition to the fairly poor battery life the power consumption on standby is huge (for the 70x anyway, I doubt they've fixed it for this as it has essentially identical internals). If you go to bed and leave your half-charged Eee on standby don't count on being able to boot it in the morning before plugging it in.
As an Eee 701 owner my advice is wait for the Atom version and the price drop when the competition hits the market. And hope they spend more than $0.12 on the keyboard next time (it's not the size, it's the quality). This market seems to be developing incredibly rapidly, even by computer hardware standards. Things will be different in two or three months time.
The Atom isn't out yet, it'll be used in the next revision of the Eee apparently, perhaps as soon as next month. Asus wanted to rush this model out to gouge the market for maximum profits as quickly as possible (and £110 more than the 4G for an extra 2" of screen and 16GB of flash is some serious gouging). Asus's CEO basically admits this in this very informative interview. The quote I'm referring to is "I think this is the initial price. I believe in June the market will decide the price and it can drop down."
As to the "portability of a cellphone", well... Perhaps you have been misinformed about the size of the Eee. Or perhaps you have a 5-foot-wide ass and thus huge pockets in your trousers. Or maybe you're just completely fucking insane.
I have a cellphone. I have an Eee. The phone goes with me everywhere and I barely notice it in my trouser pocket. The Eee comes with me some of the time and I sure a hell know it's there, because it's big enough that carrying it on my person is not viable, so I need a bag, or least to carry it in my hand. It is not pocketable, even if you wear combats.
If they'd set the Tsar Bomba off under the ocean and created a tsunami, instead of an airblast which made a loud noise and broke some windows, it might have had a more devastating effect.
On the scale of volcanic eruptions Mt. St. Helens is a piddly little thing. For example, the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 in the Phillipines was much bigger.
Oh come on, get with the program. Mt. St. Helens was in America so it was obviously the most important. What are you, a freaking communist?
Wouldn't the RCA connector patented by.... oh, I don't know.... RCA?
RCA presumably had the original utility patent (long since expired), but the patents in this case are design patents. It would also be possible get a utility patent on novel aspects of an RCA connector (a completely new kind of wire termination, say), though I find it hard to imagine a case where something like that would apply specifically to RCA connectors.
Not trying to defend Monster, but gold plated contacts are intended to reduce corrosion, so unless the test was conducted over the course of many years or with accelerated corrosion that particular aspect of connector construction wasn't tested. Gold plating of contacts isn't pure snake-oil, though plating with cheaper metals is fine for the majority of applications and may be better, as gold is pretty soft, so the plating wears off easily.
Sarcasm? Fighting meritless lawsuits wouldn't bring world peace, but a world where companies didn't think bringing meritless lawsuits was a viable business plan would sure as hell be better than the world we've got now. People putting their principles before their financial or physical security is how you got the freedoms you enjoy now, smartass.
I do hate to bring physics to bear on a debate about audio cables, but twisted pair has higher capacitance between pairs than untwisted (not least because it's just plain longer and the insulation tends to be thinner). So if you do use it you're better off connecting both legs of each pair to the same speaker terminal. Shielded cables have non-negligible capacitance to ground too, so you are better off using UTP than STP. I've no idea how audible these effects might be, probably not very or not at all, but I suspect more audible than the reduction of noise you'd get from using STP and connecting each leg of the pair to a different terminal.
I think the problem with them selling that type of system is that it would be too easy to compare with the output of box-shifters you see in $computer_store. Nothing in Apple's consumer range looks anything like a typical WinTel box - the Mini is tiny and the iMacs are just a screen. They are obviously not the same thing as the midi-tower + monitor next to them in the store's display, so your average joe won't make a 1:1 comparison. If they sold a midi-tower box which looked pretty much like another one (big enough for optical drive bays and expansion slots) with directly comparable headline specs - (x86 processor, hard drive, RAM) they would lose heavily in that market to the cheapo crap that dominates high-street computer sales.
I hope they manage to design their way out of that though. I'd like something with at least iMac-like specs, easily accessible RAM and two 3.5" hard drive bays. The 5 1/4 bay and PCI slots I could live without. I never thought I'd ever say that after years of building my own x86 boxes, but USB and Firewire are a damn sight faster than the external connections of old, which makes external peripherals a viable option. in all that time, the only thing I can think of that doesn't now come built in to machines that I've added is a TV capture card. It was always a pain to plug cameras etc. in to the back of the computer so having that at the end of a USB lead wouldn't be a bad thing at all.
I use a Mini as my main desktop machine and I was worried abut the lack of expandability, but other than the slow hard drive and not-so-hot graphics it's just fine - I don't play games on PCs any more. Silence is very nice, as is space under the desk.
From the Leopard EULA: BY USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT USE THE SOFTWARE.
[Fucking lameness filter making me add a load of garbage because Apple decided to write chunks of their EULA in all-caps. Mary had little lamb its fleece was white as Snow, who sang the (c)rap hit "Informer". Is that enough fluff yet, lameness filter?]
Apple certainly have high margins on their hardware, that's for sure, but they're not the only ones - other manufacturers charge high margins on their premium machines too. Sony sell similar laptops and Dell similar workstations at similar prices, for example. The real killer is that Apple don't sell any non-premium hardware and don't want to. That makes them easy to undercut with a machine with the same headline figures. Rather like the Open[1] in fact, which compared to a Mini is a: absolutely fucking huge, b: has no OS, c: has no firewire, d: has no gigabit ethernet, e) isn't virtually silent.
[1] As of a not-long-ago site redesign, the OpenMac is now the Open.
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Perhaps I'm just odd, but my brain can ignore a dim reflected image quite easily. It's an out-of-focus double image unless you look at the reflection rather than the screen. I don't find it distracting at all. But my brain can't compensate for the loss of contrast you get with matte screen if there is any ambient light at all. At the extreme, using a matte screen in bright sunshine is awful compared to a glossy one. It's like your screen has cataracts.
Erm, that last bit was a message from my cat, who decided to add her comments just as I clicked "Submit".
CRT monitors broadcast what's displayed on the screen. That doesn't give you a right to see what's on the screen of every CRT monitor in the vicinity. I thought the "I can see it so it's mine" mentality was confined to infants and toddlers.9666666666
Some people and places deliberately share their bikes too. That doesn't give you the right to assume you can take any bike you see unlocked.
Powering down loses state. Before shutting down you have to save all your files. On powering up you have to reopen all your applications and files and get back to where you were last working. That takes me a damn sight more than 30 seconds and it's my time, not the machine's time. The Debian install on my Eee takes forever to boot, but hibernate works so it's not a problem. The notion that rebooting is acceptable as a normal part of operating a computer should have died long ago.
If there isn't a sign on a building that says it's a church, business or other building which welcomes people in off the street you have absolutely no right to assume it is. All the free, open access points I've seen have had the name of the establishment or something making clear it's free as the SSID, like "SamsCafe" or "FreeBarWiFi".
It is not saying "come on in". It's saying "here is network X, it is not secured". You can't legally find out if it's running DHCP without being authorised to connect, so that point is moot.
In the spirit of eco-friendliness, let's try a bike analogy. If you left your bike without locking it it would be advertising its presence by bouncing photons and those photons would encode the fact that it is unsecured. That doesn't make it an open invitation to take your bike. It's not advisable to leave you bike unlocked, not because doing so is an open invitation to use it, but because there are vile people like you about who can justify their morally abhorent behaviour to themselves.
Abnormal people :) Well, atypical computer users anyway. It's not that nobody upgrades their OS or build their own machines, just that those people are a minority. Geeks, small businesses and power users spring to mind as the kinds of people who buy an OS in a box.
Normal people don't install operating systems, they buy a machine in a box at the computer shop. While I agree that Ubuntu is the distribution that is closest to being ready for mainstream desktops, it has to get pre-installed on those machines in order to really break into the mainstream market. So far, it hasn't. Dell went with Ubuntu, but they aren't exactly pushing their Linux offerings. Asus chose Xandros for their Linux machine. HP have chosen Suse (Novell). Their machines are or will be on sale at the local computer shop. I don't think it's any coincidence that both those companies signed patent agreements with Microsoft. I imagine Microsoft's legal team can be pretty scary if 99% of your business is based on selling hardware to run their software.
Sounds to me more like Microsoft "requested" they don't sell the Linux version any cheaper than the XP version. Making two models of the hardware doesn't make much sense otherwise.
In addition to the fairly poor battery life the power consumption on standby is huge (for the 70x anyway, I doubt they've fixed it for this as it has essentially identical internals). If you go to bed and leave your half-charged Eee on standby don't count on being able to boot it in the morning before plugging it in.
As an Eee 701 owner my advice is wait for the Atom version and the price drop when the competition hits the market. And hope they spend more than $0.12 on the keyboard next time (it's not the size, it's the quality). This market seems to be developing incredibly rapidly, even by computer hardware standards. Things will be different in two or three months time.
The Atom isn't out yet, it'll be used in the next revision of the Eee apparently, perhaps as soon as next month. Asus wanted to rush this model out to gouge the market for maximum profits as quickly as possible (and £110 more than the 4G for an extra 2" of screen and 16GB of flash is some serious gouging). Asus's CEO basically admits this in this very informative interview. The quote I'm referring to is "I think this is the initial price. I believe in June the market will decide the price and it can drop down."
As to the "portability of a cellphone", well... Perhaps you have been misinformed about the size of the Eee. Or perhaps you have a 5-foot-wide ass and thus huge pockets in your trousers. Or maybe you're just completely fucking insane.
I have a cellphone. I have an Eee. The phone goes with me everywhere and I barely notice it in my trouser pocket. The Eee comes with me some of the time and I sure a hell know it's there, because it's big enough that carrying it on my person is not viable, so I need a bag, or least to carry it in my hand. It is not pocketable, even if you wear combats.
Like, huh? Seriously, huh?
(aside: The keyboard on the Eee I'm typing this on missed six keypresses during the typing of this post. Make that seven, no, nine.)
If they'd set the Tsar Bomba off under the ocean and created a tsunami, instead of an airblast which made a loud noise and broke some windows, it might have had a more devastating effect.
Oh come on, get with the program. Mt. St. Helens was in America so it was obviously the most important. What are you, a freaking communist?
RCA presumably had the original utility patent (long since expired), but the patents in this case are design patents. It would also be possible get a utility patent on novel aspects of an RCA connector (a completely new kind of wire termination, say), though I find it hard to imagine a case where something like that would apply specifically to RCA connectors.
Not trying to defend Monster, but gold plated contacts are intended to reduce corrosion, so unless the test was conducted over the course of many years or with accelerated corrosion that particular aspect of connector construction wasn't tested. Gold plating of contacts isn't pure snake-oil, though plating with cheaper metals is fine for the majority of applications and may be better, as gold is pretty soft, so the plating wears off easily.
Sarcasm? Fighting meritless lawsuits wouldn't bring world peace, but a world where companies didn't think bringing meritless lawsuits was a viable business plan would sure as hell be better than the world we've got now. People putting their principles before their financial or physical security is how you got the freedoms you enjoy now, smartass.
I do hate to bring physics to bear on a debate about audio cables, but twisted pair has higher capacitance between pairs than untwisted (not least because it's just plain longer and the insulation tends to be thinner). So if you do use it you're better off connecting both legs of each pair to the same speaker terminal. Shielded cables have non-negligible capacitance to ground too, so you are better off using UTP than STP. I've no idea how audible these effects might be, probably not very or not at all, but I suspect more audible than the reduction of noise you'd get from using STP and connecting each leg of the pair to a different terminal.
I think the problem with them selling that type of system is that it would be too easy to compare with the output of box-shifters you see in $computer_store. Nothing in Apple's consumer range looks anything like a typical WinTel box - the Mini is tiny and the iMacs are just a screen. They are obviously not the same thing as the midi-tower + monitor next to them in the store's display, so your average joe won't make a 1:1 comparison. If they sold a midi-tower box which looked pretty much like another one (big enough for optical drive bays and expansion slots) with directly comparable headline specs - (x86 processor, hard drive, RAM) they would lose heavily in that market to the cheapo crap that dominates high-street computer sales.
I hope they manage to design their way out of that though. I'd like something with at least iMac-like specs, easily accessible RAM and two 3.5" hard drive bays. The 5 1/4 bay and PCI slots I could live without. I never thought I'd ever say that after years of building my own x86 boxes, but USB and Firewire are a damn sight faster than the external connections of old, which makes external peripherals a viable option. in all that time, the only thing I can think of that doesn't now come built in to machines that I've added is a TV capture card. It was always a pain to plug cameras etc. in to the back of the computer so having that at the end of a USB lead wouldn't be a bad thing at all.
I use a Mini as my main desktop machine and I was worried abut the lack of expandability, but other than the slow hard drive and not-so-hot graphics it's just fine - I don't play games on PCs any more. Silence is very nice, as is space under the desk.
If we go with the upgrade argument, you were upgrading Mac OS, just not Mac OS X specifically.
From the Leopard EULA: BY USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT USE THE SOFTWARE.
[Fucking lameness filter making me add a load of garbage because Apple decided to write chunks of their EULA in all-caps. Mary had little lamb its fleece was white as Snow, who sang the (c)rap hit "Informer". Is that enough fluff yet, lameness filter?]
Apple certainly have high margins on their hardware, that's for sure, but they're not the only ones - other manufacturers charge high margins on their premium machines too. Sony sell similar laptops and Dell similar workstations at similar prices, for example. The real killer is that Apple don't sell any non-premium hardware and don't want to. That makes them easy to undercut with a machine with the same headline figures. Rather like the Open[1] in fact, which compared to a Mini is a: absolutely fucking huge, b: has no OS, c: has no firewire, d: has no gigabit ethernet, e) isn't virtually silent.
[1] As of a not-long-ago site redesign, the OpenMac is now the Open.