Yeah, that's some kind of weird satirical website. The jokes are more subtle than The Onion, but I think that article was even on/. a while ago. I seem to remember this quote:
If you believe Apple's marketing department, the new Mini is "smaller than most packs of gum" and weighs "less than four quarters".
Someone thought maybe the author was mistakenly referring to the tiny iPod Shuffle, but it turns out the whole article is a subtle bit of misinformation and reversed meanings. Like where he talks about how the Mac mini has no serial or PS/2 ports as if it's a bad thing and judges the quality of the Safari browser by how it renders MSN. Oh, and by the way he is proudly proclaimed to be an MCSE at the top of the page. Ha ha, funny. You got duped, and not in the/. sense of the word.;)
I have also read that modern drives are faster than Firewire 400 in theory, while in practice most consumer drives never get close to that maximum 80MB/s you quote. So in real-world applications you can even daisy-chain 2-3 external Firewire drives and as long as they aren't all in heavy use at the same time there will be little conflict for bandwidth unless you purchased top-of-the-line drives. From what I understand Firewire also splits the available bandwidth much more efficiently between multiple devices than USB does, so that helps. And Firewire 800 definitely beats USB 2.0 for ultra-fast drives. Oh, and as you say, lower CPU usage on bulk transfers. Everything favors Firewire.
I honestly don't know how anyone could even begin to think Apple would abandon Firewire for USB, even if Firewire 800 didn't exist.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention Firewire networking! Mac OS X has the capability built-in to use Firewire ports to network between any two Macs at Firewire speeds (4 to 8 times 100baseT Ethernet?). Great for clusters, file servers and general geekiness. Firewire also has the potential to increase in speed up to 3.2Gbps in the future. Why would Apple even think of dropping such a great technology? The mind boggles. All this fuss over a piece of wire.
You're right, in theory. In practice most consumer hard drives can't seem to approach that 80MB/s speed, so they work fine on Firewire 400 ports. As drives get faster the new Firewire 800 will become more popular. Amazingly, we will probably see Firewire 1600 and 3200 on new Macs at some point in the future. Firewire technology can supposedly scale up to 3.2Gbps. That should be able to keep up with drive speeds.
However, that's not why DV people use firewire. They use it because it is the standard. Digital video is fixed at around 3.3 MBps, which USB 2.0 can handle, but USB is not the standard:)
I thought that one of the big reasons why people use Firewire for DV is because it has a concept of guaranteed bandwidth (no dropped frames because another device is using part of the line) which is important for DV work. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that. Also Firewire doesn't require a host computer, so you can hook up two devices to each other with no computer in the middle. Like you can connect two DV cameras and transfer video between them without a computer. At least I think that's how it works.
No, I didn't mean it was an advantage in design, just that it was an important reason to keep Firewire on the Mac platform. I know some USB devices are bootable on the PC side although I've never actually done it. On a Mac it's so mind-bogglingly easy to boot from almost any Firewire storage device that many of us do it all the time. It makes it possible to clone your Mac onto an external drive and have a full, usable backup if something breaks. It's the easiest backup system I've ever seen.
I am glad for this, as firewire is less common than USB 2. The sooner we all agree on a single standard the better.
Ack! If you don't know what you're talking about, please don't talk.
There are many areas in which USB does not compare to Firewire. This isn't a field where we want to get rid of one just because it's less common than the other. Might just as well say we should drop Linux and Macs in favor of a single Microsoft Windows standard, because Windows is much more popular. Go find me a DV camera that has a USB 2.0 port and no Firewire port. USB is good for peripherals like keyboards, mice and printers. Firewire is good for higher bandwidth applications like digital video production and fast external storage drives. The two are not really in conflict, and even if they were, dropping Firewire would be the wrong answer.
That's also why this article is complete and utter FUD, because Apple is doing no such thing. The iPod still has a Firewire port, they are just saving a few bucks and leaving out the Firewire cable because most of the iPod buyers at this point don't use it (since most PCs don't have Firewire). Slashdot should really be ashamed for letting this kind of krud get to their front page. Ha!
Has Firewire Really caught on?
I mean is USB 2 good enough? Or do we need it?
Good enough for what? Firewire and USB are fundamentally different. Firewire isn't as ubiquitous as USB due mostly to marketing, but you won't find any digital video cameras with USB 2.0 ports instead of Firewire ports. Firewire isn't going anywhere, and neither is Apple backing away from it. Every Mac made in the last few years comes with at least one Firewire 400 port (powered 6-pin port, even on the little iBooks!) and new Macs also have Firewire 800, which blows USB 2.0 away speedwise almost as bad as Firewire 400 outstripped USB 1.1. Well, not quite, but it does kick ass.
Main point being, Apple would be totally insane to "back away" from Firewire in any way. This whole article is utter nonsense.
Firewire has a great many advantages in design, most of which I'm not qualified to describe, but one important thing to many of us is that Firewire drives are bootable on any Mac with a Firewire port. AFAIK you can't boot from USB devices on a Mac. Anyone doing DV work uses Firewire. It has more than enough bandwidth for even the fastest external hard drives. And that's just Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394a) not the new Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b).
If you read the post carefully and don't even bother with the article, all it says is that you have to buy the $20 Firewire cable separately. In other words, the iPod still has Firewire built-in! Hello, McFly! This is merely to save costs since most of the buyers of iPods these days are PC users, most of which don't have Firewire, so the cables are being wasted if most of the users never use them. Now that (as another poster stated) the new iPods aren't platform-specific like previous versions, they can't do separate packaging for Windows users.
What's the big deal? If the iPod has a standard Firewire connector you don't even have to buy the cable from Apple. Get one from your local computer store or Newegg.com or Cyberguys.com and save a few bucks. Get one with a 4-pin connector to fit your PC laptop if it doesn't have a standard 6-pin connector. I would have to do this for my laptop.
I'm not too bright most days, but even I can state with certainty that this Slashdot article is pure, unadulterated F.U.D. Total bullshit. As we all know this isn't a real news site. If it were, any editor who let crap of this magnitude be posted on the front page would be looking for a new job.
I can also say this: If I had paid for a/. subscription, I would now be demanding a refund. This kind of crap should be unacceptable even for an amateur blog. I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for funding it.
I am still trying to figure out some things, like how/why/where to 'name' the server? They give server.example.com, but I have no clue where this is done for the real name you give it, or why (why use.COM? do you need to? ) etc.
This is something I have never understood in the slightest. Every time I try to set up a *BSD or Linux system for years I often got a prompt like that, expecting me to give my computer a "something.example.com" full domain name. I've never figured out why I would want to give my internal LAN server or personal computer a Fully Qualified Domain Name. Qualified by whom? I mean, what good does it do unless your server is also the DNS resolver for the whole LAN? How does the average person even know what to enter? I never did, even though I was happily going through all the settings necessary to run a Samba/Netatalk server. It was always a really strange thing to me.
Maybe I'm just stupid, but I sure wish someone could take two seconds and explain it a little better. Why does my computer need a FQDN when it's not a publicly available web server, and even then why does it need one when there is a public DNS system routing that name to my server's address? Why would I want a FQDN on a LAN?
Newsflash: Microsoft restricts Windows downloads to people that actually purchase their product!
Let's all get together on Slashdot and WINE about it...
You seem to be suffering from a misunderstanding of what WINE is, or does.
Your comment is totally irrelevant and incorrect, since a test for WINE is NOT a test for whether or not a product has been legally purchased and/or licensed. They have perfectly valid ways for testing the legality of software just by looking for the proper installation codes, registration information, etcetera, just like they've done for years.
WINE is a software layer that lets Windows applications run on top of Linux, thus REPLACING the Windows operating system. It is not a tool for pirating software, which you seem to imply. You can't apply updates to the Windows operating system to WINE. This is about updates to Windows-based applications, not the OS! Testing for WINE is like testing to see if the software is being run inside Virtual PC on a Mac, and restricting the download of updates based on the fact that the software is running on the Mac platform. Although there would be a version of the Windows operating system running inside Virtual PC, the principle is the same in that you are running the Windows version of the software on a non-Windows platform, which is what they seem to dislike.
Microsoft has no legal or ethical basis for restricting WINE users from downloading software updates for legally purchased software like Microsoft Office, or legally downloaded free software like Internet Explorer. If I paid $450 for Microsoft Office and found out that I couldn't download updates just because I choosed to run it on Linux via WINE, I would have a perfect right to complain. In the same way, I would be very upset if I found out that my $999 copy of Adobe Creative Suite wouldn't update itself solely because the update installer tested to see if it was running under WINE.
This isn't about support either. Most WINE users know not to expect Microsoft (or Adobe, et al) to provide support for software that is isntalled on a non-recommended platform. The job of the update installer application is to run properly on Windows and maybe test for proper installation codes in the target software. Then it's up to the WINE developers to support their users and make sure the installer works under WINE the same way it works under Windows. The installer has no business testing for WINE for the same reason the company has no business telling me how or where I am allowed to run their software. As long as I legally purchased it, I can do whatever I want with it short of violating their copyright. I could hack out an emulation layer to let it run natively on Mac OS X, and if they tested for my emulator and refused to apply updates to my legally purchased software, they would be wrong to do so. It's simply the wrong thing on which to be basing a refusal of service.
If Microsoft really are doing what the article states, they are completely in the wrong, as are you.
A restaurant owner may put up a sign that says the "restrooms are for customers only," but most states have health laws that allow the general public to use most restaurant restrooms without purchase. Anti-virus products should likely have the same proviso.
Seems a lot of people are missing the point on this story, due to a misunderstanding of what WINE does. The comment you were replying to was completely irrelevant, as is your reply. Testing for WINE is not a test of whether the software was legally purchased or licensed. People don't run Microsoft Windows under WINE, they run Windows-based software under WINE instead of running it on Microsoft Windows. They aren't downloading updates to the Windows operating system, because they aren't running Windows.
More to the point, in most cases the software running inder WINE is legally purchased and licensed, and often in a commercial environment these days. Crossover Office is WINE, and it's just a way to run Windows software on Linux. We're talking about software like Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, etc. This isn't a case of Microsoft restricting downloads to people who purchase their product, it's a case of Microsoft restricting downloads to people running their software on a platform other than Microsoft Windows.
The closest analogy would be if they could test for Windows software running on a copy of Microsoft Windows installed in Virtual PC on the Mac platform. I'm sure they can test for the Virtual PC virtual machine hardware, but I have a feeling they won't be restricting downloads of updates for VPC users anytime soon. (Even for older versions of VPC from back before they bought it from Connectix.)
Restricting downloads of updates based on whether the software is running on a "real" copy of Windows or on WINE is totally bogus. They have no legal or ethical basis for it. Testing for WINE is NOT a test of whether or not the software was legitimately purchased or licensed. That can be tested for with the registration information, license codes, whatever. What Microsoft is doing with this is in effect using their position in the office suit, web browser and other software markets to promote (require) the use of their operating system for proper functioning of the software you legally purchased. In other words, the usual antitrust stuff.
It would appear that today is one of many days when we have a valid complaint against Microsoft.
People need to work; people need to eat. Sometimes commerce should trump the conclusions of "science."
You won't see me hugging any trees or out on a Greenpeace ship saving the pygmy shrimp, but I simply can't agree with your statement or let it stand without comment. It's completely bogus. That's the exact same statement every industry uses to continue destroying [insert natural resource of your choice here] in a non-sustainable way. "I need to make a living," they say, "I have a perfect right to fish out every fish in the sea until there aren't any left! Damn you fruity environmentalists!" Or "My family needs to eat, so I have a perfect right to clear-cut every forest in the world! Damn you hippie freaks and your environmental laws!" This is no exaggeration, I've seen people say things just like this.
The problem is that people needing to work and eat today always seems to take precedence over people needing to work and eat tomorrow. I don't care if your family depends on logging to make a living, if that logging is being done in a non-sustainable manner that is damaging the ecosystem for future generations. If people working and eating today comes at the price of no work and starvation for the next generation, you're doing something wrong.
If a scientist can show evidence that some chemical presents a certain level of danger to our ecosystem, or a process is non-sustainable, it should ALWAYS trump commerce, because what the hell is commerce going to do when they just go ahead and destroy the resource they are using to make money? We also have to live our day-to-day lives on this planet, not just work here.We have to eat the food that grows in the soil, and drink the water that comes from the available fresh water sources. Money doesn't matter if your drinking water gives your wife and kids cancer. There is no such thing as "disproportionate importance" when it comes to the environment. Either something is sustainable or it isn't. Either something pollutes in a way that the environment can't filter out, or it doesn't.
If a scientist was ignoring science just to destroy business, you could use the available evidence to discredit them, prove them wrong. But somehow I just don't see that happening much. Sure, there are some eno-nuts out there who don't give a shit about science, but greed ensures that the business end will almost always be the one in the wrong, not the scientists. The proof is in the pudding. The world already contains many cesspools of pollution of unbelievable proportions, making vast sections of land basically uninhabitable for the next thousand years.
Most of us really don't care what you do with the environment, as long as it is done in a way that's sustainable and doesn't irreversibly damage people or natural resources like drinking water. "People needing to work and eat" will never be an acceptable reason to destroy the life support system of the only known habitable planet in the universe. It's actually the strongest argument to favor the conclusions of science. No quotes.
The appeal with a Mac Mini is it's size/form factor. WHY is this being done? I'm hoping the title of the article means it's been "maximized" by its size and not it's capabilities. This is just stupid.
May I please have a differing opinion, oh please, kind sir?
- Maybe what appeals to you isn't necessarily what appeals to someone else. - Maybe the Mac mini is not just a small/cute computer, but also a halfway decent computer at a good price, with the only problem being a slow hard drive bottlenecking its performance. - Maybe I want to use some nice Apple hardware to make a server without paying Apple $3000+ for an XServe or $2000 for a G5 tower. - Maybe I just want to use the pretty case as a bookend or a footstool and throw the internal junk in the trash. As long as I've paid my $499, what right do you have to question it? - Maybe it's a piece of economical hardware with capabilities outside of what the Apple designers intended. - Maybe we're geeks who like to take things apart and make them do interesting things they weren't necessarily designed to do, for the fun of it. - Maybe we have a perfect right to do whatever we want with a piece of hardware we own, without being subject to you or Apple's interpretation of what we're supposed to do with it.
If you feel stupid now, don't fret. It means you've learned something.
"A mind once expanded can never return to it's original dimension."
Huh? So if someone inadvertently takes advantage of a vulnerability, it's not really a vulnerability because they didn't explicitly know they were taking advantage of it?
No, it's like this, uh, you should always carry a towel with you when computing with Norton software installed. You know, to put over your head when you hear a vulnerability coming. That way, the vulnerability will assume that since you can't see it, it can't see you, and it won't really be a vulnerability...
I'm thinking that I tried Google and also went to discoverychannel.com and nationalgeographic.com and found nothing when looking for her name on either website, or Google. So sue me. I don't know why you would expect someone to know to search for "xray" to find "Natalya Demkina", aka Natasha. With the kind of search engines on most websites you're lucky to find anything, no less to find "X-Ray" when you search for "xray". Nothing simple about it. I didn't feel like mucking with it for more than a few minutes.
Anyway, next time provide the link in the first place, which I notice says the same thing every other website said: "doctors have yet to disprove her amazing abilities". So I still don't see any direct evidence that she's a fake, as you seemed to state. I will continue to be skeptical in both directions until I see some incontrovertible evidence.
My comments about ratings are always to the mods. What I saw in your original post was an offhand comment with no backup dismissing the girl's alleged powers, and a minimum of 5 moderators agreeing with you. I perceived this as demonstrating the typical bias toward immediate dismissal of anything that doesn't fit the normal person's worldview, regardless of evidence. My mind is quite open, thank you. I was trying to open some others by pointing out that nothing should be dismissed unless evidence is given.
My comments, and irritation, were mostly aimed at the mods.
What happened to the people on September 11 is worse.
Innocent people died then, not illegal combatant scum that were dissed at Abu Ghraib. "Human" garbage is too nice a term to describe them.
What, exactly, is worse than dying?
Could you get any more idiotic? Who was even talking about 9/11? Are you saying the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib had something to do with 9/11? Because all the evidence that our own government has gathered has proven that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even if they did, it's no excuse to treat prisoners of war like animals (or worse). And what's with the "illegal combatant scum" comment? Even if you were thinking of Guantanamo, you would have no justification for treating human beings like that. Nice straw man argument.
Regardless of whether you or I think anyone at Abu Ghraib "deserved" such treatment, there are still very practical and legal reasons for Americans to adhere to the Geneva Convention, which the United States agreed to follow during wartime. These things are defined as war crimes. You bitch when some other country does it to your prisoners of war, but not the other way around? It doesn't work that way. We are supposed to be the ones setting an example of morality and humanity for the rest of the world.
And by the way, how is dying quickly by incineration worse than dying slowly by being sat on, asphyxiated, beaten or starved to death? Because I fail to see any real difference. Got a mirror around the house? Hold one up and look inside. There you will see the face of a person who cannot claim to be morally superior to Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden, or any of the other "eeevil" people in the world. Have fun living with that person. Hope somebody doesn't "diss" you like they "dissed" the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Dissed. Damn, you are clueless. Inside the borders of this country we have another word for when a prison guard kills an inmate. It's "murder".
Threw a bit of a tantrum when she found out she would not be able to view the bodies of the patients before making her decision.
This person allegedly has the power to see problems inside your body just by looking at you, and the way we are going to test this person is by not allowing her to view the test patients' bodies? I'm all for disproving bogus claims but something about that alleged testing you describe doesn't sound quite right.
Besides which, I can find no reference to Natalya Demkina that matches either National Geographic or the Discovery Channel. Can I also have my bogus +5, Informative now?
Being skeptical means not automatically believing unlikely things without seeing solid unbiased evidence. It also means not automatically believing that something has been disproved without seeing solid unbiased evidence.
Thus, a "torturous" math test is significantly less laden with horror than "torture" at Abu Ghraib (under US management), which is in turn much less nasty than "torture" at Abu Ghraib (under Saddam's management).
Good point about the meaning of the word being flexible, but your example is very poor.
Have you even seenthephotos and descriptions of what was done at Abu Ghraib by US soldiers and independent contractors? I don't see how it can get any nastier than:
- being beaten and/or humiliated on a daily basis - being led around naked and filthy in the cold for days at a time - being hooded with a noose around your neck standing on a chair for hours (days?) at a time - being literally crushed to death for the amusement of the guards - being tortured to death in other ways - being raped by the guards (males and females) - being purposefully set upon and allowed to be bitten by attack dogs, again for the amusement of the guards - etc - etc - ad infinitum
Please don't ever again try to say that what the Americans have done (and probably continue to do without taking photographs) at Abu Ghraib is somehow not as bad as whatever came before under Saddam's administration. Numbers do not matter. One person is 110% too many. The United States military and everyone who worked at that prison has disgraced and endangered the entire nation by stooping to such amazingly abominable behavior which is no different than what happened under Saddam. No different.
There are rules about the treatment of prisoners of war for practical as well as moral reasons. If the enemy knows he's just going to be tortured (possibly tortured to death), how willing is he going to be to give up and surrender, rather than fight to the death on the field of battle? Every American citizen and soldier in the world has been put in greater danger because of the behaviors witnessed at Abu Ghraib. Now all of our enemies will be motivated to keep fighting, and always fight to the death, because it's better than the alternative of getting captured by the Americans.
I am an American and everything that I have described is documented fact, so I have every right to say what I've said, and if this gets marked as a troll I'm going to be pissed. Reality sucks sometimes but it's still reality.
I wonder how much of a problem Paypal really is. Problems affecting only 0.1% of customers can be a real big deal on the Internet.
More important than the percentage is how bad the problems are. If one out of every 10,000 people loses his $500 account to fraud and can't get his money back, that's much worse than if one out of every 100 people lost $500 but could get it back within a few days with a quick phone call. Each and every person who has a problem is important.
Case in point: Macs have very few problems compared to Windows machines. Yet when they do have a problem it is often very, very bad. I have personally witnessed two different Macs in the last year with a phenomenon where the internal hard drive disappeared and the CD drive would no longer boot any bootable CD, AND my Firewire backups were useless because the Firewire port stopped working properly. Apple tech support had no answer besides sending the unit in for service to replace the hard drive, thus losing all the information contained therein. It was simply not a user-fixable issue, no matter how much of a Mac guru you were. Two computers turned into paperweights for no apparent reason. I don't find that particularly acceptable.
In 15 years of working with Intel based computers I have never seen anything to compare. At the very least I could always reformat a Wintel machine and start over. I've never had to send a Wintel machine in for service. All parts are replaceable. So even though there is a much higher percentage of small problems with Wintel machines than with Macs, I am now leery of buying a new Mac or recommending them to my clients, simply because the problems tend to be much worse, leaving people with lost information and requiring expensive servicing. I love my Mac but Apple needs to pull their head out of their anal opening with regards to quality control and fault-tolerance. The number of people posting in the Apple discussion forums about sending their computer in multiple times for replacement of the "logic board" (motherboard) is absolutely astounding.
To reiterate: The percentage is totally irrelavent compared to the extent of each individual issue.
If it's just having a conversation that impairs your driving, are we supposed to not speak with fellow passengers either?
Yes. If you're in a situation where you have even a remote possibility of getting into an accident, as much of your attention as possible should be focused on the road. Any sort of conversation is a potentially fatal distraction. Cell phones just happen to be worse than talking to someone next to you in the car. If your kids are screaming in the back, should you stop the car safely and beat them until they shut up? If it lowers my risk of getting killed by you when you stray into the wrong lane, then definitely.
We can't, and shouldn't outlaw everything that might be a distraction. But when a certain thing like cell phones is a provable danger to society that is being used irresponsibly by the vast majority of drivers, it is perfectly rational to consider banning their usage while driving, or at the very least making the penalties very high for having an accident while using a cellphone. The main problem with just leaving it up to the driver is that they consider themselves perfectly safe even though they are driving like a drunkard. Just like when you're drunk, you think you're doing just fine until you have an accident.
Let's be fair here, cell phones turn SOME drivers into worse-than-drunk drivers. ANYONE with a.08 BAC is going to drive poorly, only some folks who talk on a cell phone while they drive will drive poorly.
I suppose you can cite the numerous studies that back up this assertion. I suppose you just happen to be one of those people who drives just fine while talking on the phone, fixing your tie, shaving, or reading the newspaper, right? And you've done the proper non-self-evaluated driving tests to confirm this miraculous ability to multi-task while still keeping all your attention on the road and keeping your reaction times as fast as possible. Right? Or maybe, like all the drunks, you just think you're still a good driver while you're on the phone. Which makes you dangerous.
Sorry, distractions are distractions. Some are worse than others. Even talking to someone in the car with you is a distraction, and I try to limit that sort of thing too (eg, "shut up, I'm trying to drive safely here"). Talking on a phone is much worse, due to the fact that part of your consciousness has to be focused on creating an environment in your mind where you can successfully participate in the conversation and decode the poor audio signals, plus probably spend some brain power working your way around any dropouts or static in the conversation.
This study says cell phones are worse than being drunk. Where is your study? Even if you were right, what would we do? Give a special license to anyone who passes a driving-while-talking-on-a-cell-phone test? I think not. Better to ban at the very least the use of cell phones without a hands-free system. Best would be banning cell phones entirely or making the penalties the same as a DUI. That way people could choose whether talking on the phone is worth the risk of having their driver's license suspended or revoked. A little common sense would enter into the mix.
It really is the equivalent of Driving Under the Influence, which last time I checked was against the law, even for the few individuals who can somehow maintain good driving abilities after having a few beers. The risk is simply too great, and we cannot reliably identify those who can "handle" it, if any such persons exist. I do agree that the path we take to limit the use of cell phones should promote the training of users to view the phone as a dangerous distraction, and encourage the development of personal responsibility, but quite obviously we can't rely on those aspects alone.
I didn't see anything in there about "writing". It's all about reading. That's only one small slice of the requirements for an "open" format.
You haven't really made a good point, as far as I can tell. You've just restated what the article submitter said. Big whoop if you can read the file. What if you want to edit it, or write a new one? Will that require MS Office, or violate the license?
Unless you have something more substantial to defend them, we have to as usual assume the absolute worst from Microsoft. That's just based on their observed behavior during the previous 25 years or so. Have they turned a new leaf? Not that we've noticed.
You make a very poor point, if any point at all. No matter which way you slice it, Intuit's software is the one refusing to import the text file on non-technical grounds. It doesn't matter what the "real" reason is. It shouldn't matter what either the bank or Intuit says. Even if what you say is true, they are BOTH at fault. The bank is at fault for "refusing Mac support" and Intuit is at fault for allowing their software to be broken by something non-technical, when it is perfectly capable of importing the file anyway. Not Quicken's fault, my ass.
The end result is, Quicken is in control, instead of you.
I think you will find that the Mac mini is a great computer but will fall short in an area that is important in graphics work: disk speed. Internally it has a 4200rpm notebook hard drive that really slows down disk-intensive applications. If you were adventuresome you could replace it with a new 7200rpm notebook drive (try Newegg, Hitachi makes two different models, 40GB with 1-year warranty and 60GB with 3-year warranty). That, plus a 1GHz stick of guaranteed-compatible RAM from Crucial.com, would make a world of difference.
As for processor speed, it's very difficult to compare the GHz ratings directly because each chip architecture has strong points and weak points in different areas. I have heard tell the PPC chip is pretty good for Photoshop work because of its strong floating point performance.
If you're really worried about speed, I'd get a low-end G5 Power Mac or even a second-hand G4 Power Mac, pack it with RAM and install a fast hard drive like the Western Digital Raptor 10,000rpm SATA drive. If you get a G4 you'll need an SATA controller card, but that's no big deal. The hard drive is really one of the biggest bottlenecks in computers these days. You'll probably be surprised how much a faster drive will help. Hell, pack in two SATA Raptor drives and use Mac OS X's built-in abilities to create a RAID0 array. Talk about speed. Or use the RAID0 as a scratch disk for Photoshop and boot from a third Raptor. But now we're getting a little crazy. Just a little.;)
The Mac mini can be a great home or general work computer, but for a "workstation" machine to use for actual computer-intensive work, I'd personally go for the Power Mac. No bottlenecks, more room for RAM (up to 8GB) and fast drives, etc.
Something is goofy on the list at that second link you gave. They say a DUAL 1.42GHz PPC is only 1.25% faster than a single 1.25GHz PPC. That can't possibly be correct.
That's just goofy to me, that the fan is software-controlled. They've had a lot of trouble with fans in the Power Mac G5s, that must be why. What is the benefit of software control over a nice reliable hardware controller?
Yeah, way to blow things out of proportion. Some web lackey just made a mistake in the source code so the link text isn't displayed. The link is there if you view source and search for the text "this link:". Somebody misplaced the closing bracket for the attachment tag, or forgot it entirely and it got added just before the closing tag automatically, encasing the link text which says "Download", thus making it invisible. Oh, and Firefox doesn't automatically start the download like IE (or Safari?) does. If that bug wasn't in the source this wouldn't actually be a problem.
I don't know what you mean about "products that only work if you install their software", either. There are alternative quicktime players and you can run Linux on a Mac. I don't know what else you could have been referring to. The reason most Mac people don't mind Mac-only stuff is because Apple aren't normally assholes about everything, the software is great instead of crappy, and Apple isn't a monopoly trying to force us all to use Apple-only software. Oh, and for every Apple application there is an alternative, and you can always uninstall the Apple applications if you don't want them. There really isn't any comparison between Apple and MS.
Oh, and he wasn't right about the email address harvesting either. The standalone page doesn't require any email address to be entered. I don't think the regular page does either, as long as you uncheck the boxes asking for newsletters and updates to be sent to your email address.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's some kind of weird satirical website. The jokes are more subtle than The Onion, but I think that article was even on /. a while ago. I seem to remember this quote:
/. sense of the word. ;)
If you believe Apple's marketing department, the new Mini is "smaller than most packs of gum" and weighs "less than four quarters".
Someone thought maybe the author was mistakenly referring to the tiny iPod Shuffle, but it turns out the whole article is a subtle bit of misinformation and reversed meanings. Like where he talks about how the Mac mini has no serial or PS/2 ports as if it's a bad thing and judges the quality of the Safari browser by how it renders MSN. Oh, and by the way he is proudly proclaimed to be an MCSE at the top of the page. Ha ha, funny. You got duped, and not in the
Very strange website.
Thanks for the word of support.
I have also read that modern drives are faster than Firewire 400 in theory, while in practice most consumer drives never get close to that maximum 80MB/s you quote. So in real-world applications you can even daisy-chain 2-3 external Firewire drives and as long as they aren't all in heavy use at the same time there will be little conflict for bandwidth unless you purchased top-of-the-line drives. From what I understand Firewire also splits the available bandwidth much more efficiently between multiple devices than USB does, so that helps. And Firewire 800 definitely beats USB 2.0 for ultra-fast drives. Oh, and as you say, lower CPU usage on bulk transfers. Everything favors Firewire.
I honestly don't know how anyone could even begin to think Apple would abandon Firewire for USB, even if Firewire 800 didn't exist.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention Firewire networking! Mac OS X has the capability built-in to use Firewire ports to network between any two Macs at Firewire speeds (4 to 8 times 100baseT Ethernet?). Great for clusters, file servers and general geekiness. Firewire also has the potential to increase in speed up to 3.2Gbps in the future. Why would Apple even think of dropping such a great technology? The mind boggles. All this fuss over a piece of wire.
You're right, in theory. In practice most consumer hard drives can't seem to approach that 80MB/s speed, so they work fine on Firewire 400 ports. As drives get faster the new Firewire 800 will become more popular. Amazingly, we will probably see Firewire 1600 and 3200 on new Macs at some point in the future. Firewire technology can supposedly scale up to 3.2Gbps. That should be able to keep up with drive speeds.
:)
However, that's not why DV people use firewire. They use it because it is the standard. Digital video is fixed at around 3.3 MBps, which USB 2.0 can handle, but USB is not the standard
I thought that one of the big reasons why people use Firewire for DV is because it has a concept of guaranteed bandwidth (no dropped frames because another device is using part of the line) which is important for DV work. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that. Also Firewire doesn't require a host computer, so you can hook up two devices to each other with no computer in the middle. Like you can connect two DV cameras and transfer video between them without a computer. At least I think that's how it works.
No, I didn't mean it was an advantage in design, just that it was an important reason to keep Firewire on the Mac platform. I know some USB devices are bootable on the PC side although I've never actually done it. On a Mac it's so mind-bogglingly easy to boot from almost any Firewire storage device that many of us do it all the time. It makes it possible to clone your Mac onto an external drive and have a full, usable backup if something breaks. It's the easiest backup system I've ever seen.
I am glad for this, as firewire is less common than USB 2. The sooner we all agree on a single standard the better.
Ack! If you don't know what you're talking about, please don't talk.
There are many areas in which USB does not compare to Firewire. This isn't a field where we want to get rid of one just because it's less common than the other. Might just as well say we should drop Linux and Macs in favor of a single Microsoft Windows standard, because Windows is much more popular. Go find me a DV camera that has a USB 2.0 port and no Firewire port. USB is good for peripherals like keyboards, mice and printers. Firewire is good for higher bandwidth applications like digital video production and fast external storage drives. The two are not really in conflict, and even if they were, dropping Firewire would be the wrong answer.
That's also why this article is complete and utter FUD, because Apple is doing no such thing. The iPod still has a Firewire port, they are just saving a few bucks and leaving out the Firewire cable because most of the iPod buyers at this point don't use it (since most PCs don't have Firewire). Slashdot should really be ashamed for letting this kind of krud get to their front page. Ha!
Has Firewire Really caught on?
/. subscription, I would now be demanding a refund. This kind of crap should be unacceptable even for an amateur blog. I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for funding it.
I mean is USB 2 good enough? Or do we need it?
Good enough for what? Firewire and USB are fundamentally different. Firewire isn't as ubiquitous as USB due mostly to marketing, but you won't find any digital video cameras with USB 2.0 ports instead of Firewire ports. Firewire isn't going anywhere, and neither is Apple backing away from it. Every Mac made in the last few years comes with at least one Firewire 400 port (powered 6-pin port, even on the little iBooks!) and new Macs also have Firewire 800, which blows USB 2.0 away speedwise almost as bad as Firewire 400 outstripped USB 1.1. Well, not quite, but it does kick ass.
Main point being, Apple would be totally insane to "back away" from Firewire in any way. This whole article is utter nonsense.
Firewire has a great many advantages in design, most of which I'm not qualified to describe, but one important thing to many of us is that Firewire drives are bootable on any Mac with a Firewire port. AFAIK you can't boot from USB devices on a Mac. Anyone doing DV work uses Firewire. It has more than enough bandwidth for even the fastest external hard drives. And that's just Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394a) not the new Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b).
If you read the post carefully and don't even bother with the article, all it says is that you have to buy the $20 Firewire cable separately. In other words, the iPod still has Firewire built-in! Hello, McFly! This is merely to save costs since most of the buyers of iPods these days are PC users, most of which don't have Firewire, so the cables are being wasted if most of the users never use them. Now that (as another poster stated) the new iPods aren't platform-specific like previous versions, they can't do separate packaging for Windows users.
What's the big deal? If the iPod has a standard Firewire connector you don't even have to buy the cable from Apple. Get one from your local computer store or Newegg.com or Cyberguys.com and save a few bucks. Get one with a 4-pin connector to fit your PC laptop if it doesn't have a standard 6-pin connector. I would have to do this for my laptop.
I'm not too bright most days, but even I can state with certainty that this Slashdot article is pure, unadulterated F.U.D. Total bullshit. As we all know this isn't a real news site. If it were, any editor who let crap of this magnitude be posted on the front page would be looking for a new job.
I can also say this: If I had paid for a
I am still trying to figure out some things, like how/why/where to 'name' the server? They give server.example.com, but I have no clue where this is done for the real name you give it, or why (why use .COM? do you need to? ) etc.
This is something I have never understood in the slightest. Every time I try to set up a *BSD or Linux system for years I often got a prompt like that, expecting me to give my computer a "something.example.com" full domain name. I've never figured out why I would want to give my internal LAN server or personal computer a Fully Qualified Domain Name. Qualified by whom? I mean, what good does it do unless your server is also the DNS resolver for the whole LAN? How does the average person even know what to enter? I never did, even though I was happily going through all the settings necessary to run a Samba/Netatalk server. It was always a really strange thing to me.
Maybe I'm just stupid, but I sure wish someone could take two seconds and explain it a little better. Why does my computer need a FQDN when it's not a publicly available web server, and even then why does it need one when there is a public DNS system routing that name to my server's address? Why would I want a FQDN on a LAN?
Newsflash: Microsoft restricts Windows downloads to people that actually purchase their product!
Let's all get together on Slashdot and WINE about it...
You seem to be suffering from a misunderstanding of what WINE is, or does.
Your comment is totally irrelevant and incorrect, since a test for WINE is NOT a test for whether or not a product has been legally purchased and/or licensed. They have perfectly valid ways for testing the legality of software just by looking for the proper installation codes, registration information, etcetera, just like they've done for years.
WINE is a software layer that lets Windows applications run on top of Linux, thus REPLACING the Windows operating system. It is not a tool for pirating software, which you seem to imply. You can't apply updates to the Windows operating system to WINE. This is about updates to Windows-based applications, not the OS! Testing for WINE is like testing to see if the software is being run inside Virtual PC on a Mac, and restricting the download of updates based on the fact that the software is running on the Mac platform. Although there would be a version of the Windows operating system running inside Virtual PC, the principle is the same in that you are running the Windows version of the software on a non-Windows platform, which is what they seem to dislike.
Microsoft has no legal or ethical basis for restricting WINE users from downloading software updates for legally purchased software like Microsoft Office, or legally downloaded free software like Internet Explorer. If I paid $450 for Microsoft Office and found out that I couldn't download updates just because I choosed to run it on Linux via WINE, I would have a perfect right to complain. In the same way, I would be very upset if I found out that my $999 copy of Adobe Creative Suite wouldn't update itself solely because the update installer tested to see if it was running under WINE.
This isn't about support either. Most WINE users know not to expect Microsoft (or Adobe, et al) to provide support for software that is isntalled on a non-recommended platform. The job of the update installer application is to run properly on Windows and maybe test for proper installation codes in the target software. Then it's up to the WINE developers to support their users and make sure the installer works under WINE the same way it works under Windows. The installer has no business testing for WINE for the same reason the company has no business telling me how or where I am allowed to run their software. As long as I legally purchased it, I can do whatever I want with it short of violating their copyright. I could hack out an emulation layer to let it run natively on Mac OS X, and if they tested for my emulator and refused to apply updates to my legally purchased software, they would be wrong to do so. It's simply the wrong thing on which to be basing a refusal of service.
If Microsoft really are doing what the article states, they are completely in the wrong, as are you.
A restaurant owner may put up a sign that says the "restrooms are for customers only," but most states have health laws that allow the general public to use most restaurant restrooms without purchase. Anti-virus products should likely have the same proviso.
Seems a lot of people are missing the point on this story, due to a misunderstanding of what WINE does. The comment you were replying to was completely irrelevant, as is your reply. Testing for WINE is not a test of whether the software was legally purchased or licensed. People don't run Microsoft Windows under WINE, they run Windows-based software under WINE instead of running it on Microsoft Windows. They aren't downloading updates to the Windows operating system, because they aren't running Windows.
More to the point, in most cases the software running inder WINE is legally purchased and licensed, and often in a commercial environment these days. Crossover Office is WINE, and it's just a way to run Windows software on Linux. We're talking about software like Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, etc. This isn't a case of Microsoft restricting downloads to people who purchase their product, it's a case of Microsoft restricting downloads to people running their software on a platform other than Microsoft Windows.
The closest analogy would be if they could test for Windows software running on a copy of Microsoft Windows installed in Virtual PC on the Mac platform. I'm sure they can test for the Virtual PC virtual machine hardware, but I have a feeling they won't be restricting downloads of updates for VPC users anytime soon. (Even for older versions of VPC from back before they bought it from Connectix.)
Restricting downloads of updates based on whether the software is running on a "real" copy of Windows or on WINE is totally bogus. They have no legal or ethical basis for it. Testing for WINE is NOT a test of whether or not the software was legitimately purchased or licensed. That can be tested for with the registration information, license codes, whatever. What Microsoft is doing with this is in effect using their position in the office suit, web browser and other software markets to promote (require) the use of their operating system for proper functioning of the software you legally purchased. In other words, the usual antitrust stuff.
It would appear that today is one of many days when we have a valid complaint against Microsoft.
People need to work; people need to eat. Sometimes commerce should trump the conclusions of "science."
You won't see me hugging any trees or out on a Greenpeace ship saving the pygmy shrimp, but I simply can't agree with your statement or let it stand without comment. It's completely bogus. That's the exact same statement every industry uses to continue destroying [insert natural resource of your choice here] in a non-sustainable way. "I need to make a living," they say, "I have a perfect right to fish out every fish in the sea until there aren't any left! Damn you fruity environmentalists!" Or "My family needs to eat, so I have a perfect right to clear-cut every forest in the world! Damn you hippie freaks and your environmental laws!" This is no exaggeration, I've seen people say things just like this.
The problem is that people needing to work and eat today always seems to take precedence over people needing to work and eat tomorrow. I don't care if your family depends on logging to make a living, if that logging is being done in a non-sustainable manner that is damaging the ecosystem for future generations. If people working and eating today comes at the price of no work and starvation for the next generation, you're doing something wrong.
If a scientist can show evidence that some chemical presents a certain level of danger to our ecosystem, or a process is non-sustainable, it should ALWAYS trump commerce, because what the hell is commerce going to do when they just go ahead and destroy the resource they are using to make money? We also have to live our day-to-day lives on this planet, not just work here.We have to eat the food that grows in the soil, and drink the water that comes from the available fresh water sources. Money doesn't matter if your drinking water gives your wife and kids cancer. There is no such thing as "disproportionate importance" when it comes to the environment. Either something is sustainable or it isn't. Either something pollutes in a way that the environment can't filter out, or it doesn't.
If a scientist was ignoring science just to destroy business, you could use the available evidence to discredit them, prove them wrong. But somehow I just don't see that happening much. Sure, there are some eno-nuts out there who don't give a shit about science, but greed ensures that the business end will almost always be the one in the wrong, not the scientists. The proof is in the pudding. The world already contains many cesspools of pollution of unbelievable proportions, making vast sections of land basically uninhabitable for the next thousand years.
Most of us really don't care what you do with the environment, as long as it is done in a way that's sustainable and doesn't irreversibly damage people or natural resources like drinking water. "People needing to work and eat" will never be an acceptable reason to destroy the life support system of the only known habitable planet in the universe. It's actually the strongest argument to favor the conclusions of science. No quotes.
May I please have a differing opinion, oh please, kind sir?
- Maybe what appeals to you isn't necessarily what appeals to someone else.
- Maybe the Mac mini is not just a small/cute computer, but also a halfway decent computer at a good price, with the only problem being a slow hard drive bottlenecking its performance.
- Maybe I want to use some nice Apple hardware to make a server without paying Apple $3000+ for an XServe or $2000 for a G5 tower.
- Maybe I just want to use the pretty case as a bookend or a footstool and throw the internal junk in the trash. As long as I've paid my $499, what right do you have to question it?
- Maybe it's a piece of economical hardware with capabilities outside of what the Apple designers intended.
- Maybe we're geeks who like to take things apart and make them do interesting things they weren't necessarily designed to do, for the fun of it.
- Maybe we have a perfect right to do whatever we want with a piece of hardware we own, without being subject to you or Apple's interpretation of what we're supposed to do with it.
If you feel stupid now, don't fret. It means you've learned something.
"A mind once expanded can never return to it's original dimension."
Oliver Wendall Holmes
Huh? So if someone inadvertently takes advantage of a vulnerability, it's not really a vulnerability because they didn't explicitly know they were taking advantage of it?
No, it's like this, uh, you should always carry a towel with you when computing with Norton software installed. You know, to put over your head when you hear a vulnerability coming. That way, the vulnerability will assume that since you can't see it, it can't see you, and it won't really be a vulnerability...
(With apologies to Douglas Adams/HHGttG)
I'm thinking that I tried Google and also went to discoverychannel.com and nationalgeographic.com and found nothing when looking for her name on either website, or Google. So sue me. I don't know why you would expect someone to know to search for "xray" to find "Natalya Demkina", aka Natasha. With the kind of search engines on most websites you're lucky to find anything, no less to find "X-Ray" when you search for "xray". Nothing simple about it. I didn't feel like mucking with it for more than a few minutes.
Anyway, next time provide the link in the first place, which I notice says the same thing every other website said: "doctors have yet to disprove her amazing abilities". So I still don't see any direct evidence that she's a fake, as you seemed to state. I will continue to be skeptical in both directions until I see some incontrovertible evidence.
My comments about ratings are always to the mods. What I saw in your original post was an offhand comment with no backup dismissing the girl's alleged powers, and a minimum of 5 moderators agreeing with you. I perceived this as demonstrating the typical bias toward immediate dismissal of anything that doesn't fit the normal person's worldview, regardless of evidence. My mind is quite open, thank you. I was trying to open some others by pointing out that nothing should be dismissed unless evidence is given.
My comments, and irritation, were mostly aimed at the mods.
What, exactly, is worse than dying?
Could you get any more idiotic? Who was even talking about 9/11? Are you saying the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib had something to do with 9/11? Because all the evidence that our own government has gathered has proven that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even if they did, it's no excuse to treat prisoners of war like animals (or worse). And what's with the "illegal combatant scum" comment? Even if you were thinking of Guantanamo, you would have no justification for treating human beings like that. Nice straw man argument.
Regardless of whether you or I think anyone at Abu Ghraib "deserved" such treatment, there are still very practical and legal reasons for Americans to adhere to the Geneva Convention, which the United States agreed to follow during wartime. These things are defined as war crimes. You bitch when some other country does it to your prisoners of war, but not the other way around? It doesn't work that way. We are supposed to be the ones setting an example of morality and humanity for the rest of the world.
And by the way, how is dying quickly by incineration worse than dying slowly by being sat on, asphyxiated, beaten or starved to death? Because I fail to see any real difference. Got a mirror around the house? Hold one up and look inside. There you will see the face of a person who cannot claim to be morally superior to Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin Laden, or any of the other "eeevil" people in the world. Have fun living with that person. Hope somebody doesn't "diss" you like they "dissed" the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Dissed. Damn, you are clueless. Inside the borders of this country we have another word for when a prison guard kills an inmate. It's "murder".
Threw a bit of a tantrum when she found out she would not be able to view the bodies of the patients before making her decision.
This person allegedly has the power to see problems inside your body just by looking at you, and the way we are going to test this person is by not allowing her to view the test patients' bodies? I'm all for disproving bogus claims but something about that alleged testing you describe doesn't sound quite right.
Besides which, I can find no reference to Natalya Demkina that matches either National Geographic or the Discovery Channel. Can I also have my bogus +5, Informative now?
Being skeptical means not automatically believing unlikely things without seeing solid unbiased evidence. It also means not automatically believing that something has been disproved without seeing solid unbiased evidence.
Thus, a "torturous" math test is significantly less laden with horror than "torture" at Abu Ghraib (under US management), which is in turn much less nasty than "torture" at Abu Ghraib (under Saddam's management).
Good point about the meaning of the word being flexible, but your example is very poor.
Have you even seen the photos and descriptions of what was done at Abu Ghraib by US soldiers and independent contractors? I don't see how it can get any nastier than:
- being beaten and/or humiliated on a daily basis
- being led around naked and filthy in the cold for days at a time
- being hooded with a noose around your neck standing on a chair for hours (days?) at a time
- being literally crushed to death for the amusement of the guards
- being tortured to death in other ways
- being raped by the guards (males and females)
- being purposefully set upon and allowed to be bitten by attack dogs, again for the amusement of the guards
- etc
- etc
- ad infinitum
Please don't ever again try to say that what the Americans have done (and probably continue to do without taking photographs) at Abu Ghraib is somehow not as bad as whatever came before under Saddam's administration. Numbers do not matter. One person is 110% too many. The United States military and everyone who worked at that prison has disgraced and endangered the entire nation by stooping to such amazingly abominable behavior which is no different than what happened under Saddam. No different.
There are rules about the treatment of prisoners of war for practical as well as moral reasons. If the enemy knows he's just going to be tortured (possibly tortured to death), how willing is he going to be to give up and surrender, rather than fight to the death on the field of battle? Every American citizen and soldier in the world has been put in greater danger because of the behaviors witnessed at Abu Ghraib. Now all of our enemies will be motivated to keep fighting, and always fight to the death, because it's better than the alternative of getting captured by the Americans.
I am an American and everything that I have described is documented fact, so I have every right to say what I've said, and if this gets marked as a troll I'm going to be pissed. Reality sucks sometimes but it's still reality.
I wonder how much of a problem Paypal really is. Problems affecting only 0.1% of customers can be a real big deal on the Internet.
More important than the percentage is how bad the problems are. If one out of every 10,000 people loses his $500 account to fraud and can't get his money back, that's much worse than if one out of every 100 people lost $500 but could get it back within a few days with a quick phone call. Each and every person who has a problem is important.
Case in point: Macs have very few problems compared to Windows machines. Yet when they do have a problem it is often very, very bad. I have personally witnessed two different Macs in the last year with a phenomenon where the internal hard drive disappeared and the CD drive would no longer boot any bootable CD, AND my Firewire backups were useless because the Firewire port stopped working properly. Apple tech support had no answer besides sending the unit in for service to replace the hard drive, thus losing all the information contained therein. It was simply not a user-fixable issue, no matter how much of a Mac guru you were. Two computers turned into paperweights for no apparent reason. I don't find that particularly acceptable.
In 15 years of working with Intel based computers I have never seen anything to compare. At the very least I could always reformat a Wintel machine and start over. I've never had to send a Wintel machine in for service. All parts are replaceable. So even though there is a much higher percentage of small problems with Wintel machines than with Macs, I am now leery of buying a new Mac or recommending them to my clients, simply because the problems tend to be much worse, leaving people with lost information and requiring expensive servicing. I love my Mac but Apple needs to pull their head out of their anal opening with regards to quality control and fault-tolerance. The number of people posting in the Apple discussion forums about sending their computer in multiple times for replacement of the "logic board" (motherboard) is absolutely astounding.
To reiterate: The percentage is totally irrelavent compared to the extent of each individual issue.
If it's just having a conversation that impairs your driving, are we supposed to not speak with fellow passengers either?
Yes. If you're in a situation where you have even a remote possibility of getting into an accident, as much of your attention as possible should be focused on the road. Any sort of conversation is a potentially fatal distraction. Cell phones just happen to be worse than talking to someone next to you in the car. If your kids are screaming in the back, should you stop the car safely and beat them until they shut up? If it lowers my risk of getting killed by you when you stray into the wrong lane, then definitely.
We can't, and shouldn't outlaw everything that might be a distraction. But when a certain thing like cell phones is a provable danger to society that is being used irresponsibly by the vast majority of drivers, it is perfectly rational to consider banning their usage while driving, or at the very least making the penalties very high for having an accident while using a cellphone. The main problem with just leaving it up to the driver is that they consider themselves perfectly safe even though they are driving like a drunkard. Just like when you're drunk, you think you're doing just fine until you have an accident.
Let's be fair here, cell phones turn SOME drivers into worse-than-drunk drivers. ANYONE with a .08 BAC is going to drive poorly, only some folks who talk on a cell phone while they drive will drive poorly.
I suppose you can cite the numerous studies that back up this assertion. I suppose you just happen to be one of those people who drives just fine while talking on the phone, fixing your tie, shaving, or reading the newspaper, right? And you've done the proper non-self-evaluated driving tests to confirm this miraculous ability to multi-task while still keeping all your attention on the road and keeping your reaction times as fast as possible. Right? Or maybe, like all the drunks, you just think you're still a good driver while you're on the phone. Which makes you dangerous.
Sorry, distractions are distractions. Some are worse than others. Even talking to someone in the car with you is a distraction, and I try to limit that sort of thing too (eg, "shut up, I'm trying to drive safely here"). Talking on a phone is much worse, due to the fact that part of your consciousness has to be focused on creating an environment in your mind where you can successfully participate in the conversation and decode the poor audio signals, plus probably spend some brain power working your way around any dropouts or static in the conversation.
This study says cell phones are worse than being drunk. Where is your study? Even if you were right, what would we do? Give a special license to anyone who passes a driving-while-talking-on-a-cell-phone test? I think not. Better to ban at the very least the use of cell phones without a hands-free system. Best would be banning cell phones entirely or making the penalties the same as a DUI. That way people could choose whether talking on the phone is worth the risk of having their driver's license suspended or revoked. A little common sense would enter into the mix.
It really is the equivalent of Driving Under the Influence, which last time I checked was against the law, even for the few individuals who can somehow maintain good driving abilities after having a few beers. The risk is simply too great, and we cannot reliably identify those who can "handle" it, if any such persons exist. I do agree that the path we take to limit the use of cell phones should promote the training of users to view the phone as a dangerous distraction, and encourage the development of personal responsibility, but quite obviously we can't rely on those aspects alone.
I didn't see anything in there about "writing". It's all about reading. That's only one small slice of the requirements for an "open" format.
You haven't really made a good point, as far as I can tell. You've just restated what the article submitter said. Big whoop if you can read the file. What if you want to edit it, or write a new one? Will that require MS Office, or violate the license?
Unless you have something more substantial to defend them, we have to as usual assume the absolute worst from Microsoft. That's just based on their observed behavior during the previous 25 years or so. Have they turned a new leaf? Not that we've noticed.
You make a very poor point, if any point at all. No matter which way you slice it, Intuit's software is the one refusing to import the text file on non-technical grounds. It doesn't matter what the "real" reason is. It shouldn't matter what either the bank or Intuit says. Even if what you say is true, they are BOTH at fault. The bank is at fault for "refusing Mac support" and Intuit is at fault for allowing their software to be broken by something non-technical, when it is perfectly capable of importing the file anyway. Not Quicken's fault, my ass.
The end result is, Quicken is in control, instead of you.
I think you will find that the Mac mini is a great computer but will fall short in an area that is important in graphics work: disk speed. Internally it has a 4200rpm notebook hard drive that really slows down disk-intensive applications. If you were adventuresome you could replace it with a new 7200rpm notebook drive (try Newegg, Hitachi makes two different models, 40GB with 1-year warranty and 60GB with 3-year warranty). That, plus a 1GHz stick of guaranteed-compatible RAM from Crucial.com, would make a world of difference.
;)
As for processor speed, it's very difficult to compare the GHz ratings directly because each chip architecture has strong points and weak points in different areas. I have heard tell the PPC chip is pretty good for Photoshop work because of its strong floating point performance.
If you're really worried about speed, I'd get a low-end G5 Power Mac or even a second-hand G4 Power Mac, pack it with RAM and install a fast hard drive like the Western Digital Raptor 10,000rpm SATA drive. If you get a G4 you'll need an SATA controller card, but that's no big deal. The hard drive is really one of the biggest bottlenecks in computers these days. You'll probably be surprised how much a faster drive will help. Hell, pack in two SATA Raptor drives and use Mac OS X's built-in abilities to create a RAID0 array. Talk about speed. Or use the RAID0 as a scratch disk for Photoshop and boot from a third Raptor. But now we're getting a little crazy. Just a little.
The Mac mini can be a great home or general work computer, but for a "workstation" machine to use for actual computer-intensive work, I'd personally go for the Power Mac. No bottlenecks, more room for RAM (up to 8GB) and fast drives, etc.
Something is goofy on the list at that second link you gave. They say a DUAL 1.42GHz PPC is only 1.25% faster than a single 1.25GHz PPC. That can't possibly be correct.
That's just goofy to me, that the fan is software-controlled. They've had a lot of trouble with fans in the Power Mac G5s, that must be why. What is the benefit of software control over a nice reliable hardware controller?
Yeah, way to blow things out of proportion. Some web lackey just made a mistake in the source code so the link text isn't displayed. The link is there if you view source and search for the text "this link:". Somebody misplaced the closing bracket for the attachment tag, or forgot it entirely and it got added just before the closing tag automatically, encasing the link text which says "Download", thus making it invisible. Oh, and Firefox doesn't automatically start the download like IE (or Safari?) does. If that bug wasn't in the source this wouldn't actually be a problem.
I don't know what you mean about "products that only work if you install their software", either. There are alternative quicktime players and you can run Linux on a Mac. I don't know what else you could have been referring to. The reason most Mac people don't mind Mac-only stuff is because Apple aren't normally assholes about everything, the software is great instead of crappy, and Apple isn't a monopoly trying to force us all to use Apple-only software. Oh, and for every Apple application there is an alternative, and you can always uninstall the Apple applications if you don't want them. There really isn't any comparison between Apple and MS.
Oh, and he wasn't right about the email address harvesting either. The standalone page doesn't require any email address to be entered. I don't think the regular page does either, as long as you uncheck the boxes asking for newsletters and updates to be sent to your email address.