Turn in your geek card, citizen, and go watch the original Empire again. That is the tauntaun's head but the furry white thing is the ice creature's arm. The tauntaun isn't that furry around the neck. Watch closely and you'll see the scene where the ice creature jumps up from the snow and strikes the tauntaun on the side of the neck (where in Earth creatures you'll usually find the jugular vein). Whereupon the tauntaun falls down dead in the snow.
As can be seen in the linked images, the ice creature's arm is a big puppet sleeve on the arm of somebody wearing a purple shirt. In the first image the puppeteer's hair is visible. It's hilarious, but it's also sad when you think about all the time and money that has been poured into redoing these DVDs. How the ---- do you miss something like that? Well, I guess George has missed the last two whole movies, so he's had a lot of practice...
If you are prepared to put the time and effort into it, it is all pretty easy.
If you are prepared to put time and effort into anything, it will be pretty easy to achieve your goal. This is nowhere near an excuse for the fact that the average Windows PC has been chock full of spyware and viruses on a steadily increasing basis for the last 15 years or more. The simple fact that other operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X) will stop and prompt you for the admin password makes them just that much safer even for the average security-ignorant user. Then there's the fact that almost all the software on those other platforms actually follows the security model and works without complaint for users who are not running as administrators. What a concept, huh?
I have lost count of the number of reasonably intelligent Windows users who have tried valiantly to NOT run as admin only to fail in the end because the applications made it so difficult to do so without complex security workarounds. Whereupon some Windows guru will call that person an idiot and post something to the effect of "just do X, Y, and Z" which is never simple or obvious or straightforward. Mac OS X has shown that running as a non-priviledged user can be simple and you end up with a fairly secure system. It is not invulnerable and neither is Linux, of course. But they go light-years beyond the basic Windows install.
In contrast, on Windows the users get saturated with the problems they encounter when trying to not run as admin, and most just give up. Part of the blame can be laid on the applications, part on lack of user education, but most of it is right on Microsoft's shoulders. They are the ones who guided the security model and thus software development for the Windows platform for the last 20 flipping years. As a community we have no call to be giving them any slack.
Last time I checked you can't write to a CD-ROM, so you'd need a USB key anyway to store your settings. Otherwise you're starting from scratch every time you boot up. Assuming this MP3 thing is writable, it's more like MandrakeMove where you can take your settings and your entire OS from one computer to another. It's not just meant to be a rescue disk. It's more like Knoppix plus a USB key. Those of us who need rescue disks can build them ourselves.
Obviously this device isn't meant for you. That doesn't mean it has no purpose or shouldn't be marketed at all. Don't like it? Don't buy it. Hurray, capitalistic freedom of choice. I'll never understand why it is that when people don't see a need for something in their personal life, they consistently take the attitude that the object or technology in question is pointless and shouldn't even exist. THAT, is what I don't "get". Seems like these kind of posts are all over the place every time a new technology or piece of hardware or software comes out. It's a big world, why can't you just let people do what they want as long as it doesn't hurt you? Why tell the rest of us that there's a "limit" just because you can't see the point? Why does there need to be a point? I'm sure you'd be similarly annoyed by people saying they don't see the point of rescue disks and why should anyone bother, blah blah blah, etc.
More on-topic, I can't wait to see more FireWire flash drives and keys. Imagine a FireWire compactflash card reader with an 8GB microdrive in it... You could partition it and install Mac OS X, Linux, Linux PPC, and Windows and be able to boot at least one of those on any modern desktop computer. Of course Windows is the least portable of the bunch, and the least compatible with the other filesystems. Might as well not even bother. But you would probably need a FAT32 partition to exchange data between HFS+ and your chosen filesystem on the Linux partition(s). I don't know that for a fact though, maybe Mac OS X can read Ext2/3 and others.
Damn, that would be interesting. Anybody know if it's actually possible to boot multiple operating systems from one FireWire drive? You could boot to a boot manager but can the boot manager then load the OS, or will a special boot manager need to be created for FireWire drives? And then of course there's the mixing of Mac and PC operating systems on the same disk. The file systems can coexist fine, but can they all be booted from the same drive? I think the boot mechanisms are vastly different between the Mac and PC platforms. Are the differences insurmountable?
Of course with the easy daisy-chainability of FireWire (without any massive performance penalty) you could always have one Mac drive and another PC drive and just hook them together after you boot up the main one. Seems like that would work rather well. And if you get a portable jobber it will even be powered by the FireWire bus. Damn, Lacie has portable combo FireWire/USB drives now up to 100GB, with a 60GB version at 7200RPM...
Whelp, looks like I just talked my bad self into a new pet project. Goodbye paycheck!
3 megapixels is "bad" if you ever want to print your photos larger than 8x10. We've had 5MP cameras since 2001 (Minolta Dimage 7 was the first, I think). There are currently many compact cameras with 4-5MP chips, and a new crop with a 7MP chip although they aren't quite compact. So having a new camera come out with "just" 3.2MP isn't too impressive.
Going up just one step there is a group of prosumer cameras with an 8MP chip that have all been out for several months. 8MP will give you the ability to stretch your photo to 16x20 and still have impressive resolution on the paper, thus rivaling the enlargement ability of your typical 35mm consumer film camera. So from the quality perspective a 3MP camera is still sort of a toy unless you'll never print anything but 4x6 snapshots and a few 8x10s. It's only within the last 18 months or so that consumer and prosumer digital cameras have really started to cross the hump and become as good or better than film for most common purposes. 3MP just doesn't cut it if you want quality anywhere close to film.
Typical viewpoint. Everyone else in the world != you.
NiMH AA rechargeables self-discharge much more quickly than Li-Ion, and as you point out they take up more space for the same amount of power. You don't like the camera? Fine, don't buy it. Yay, free market capitalism. But many people are just casual camera users. For them it often makes sense to have a very compact camera that doesn't have batteries that need to be topped off once a week and treated gingerly. Yeah, you can buy some alkalines in a pinch, but that soon gets to be more expensive than just buying another proprietary Li-Ion and recharging it every other month. It's a self-contained solution that for the casual user ends up being a lot simpler to deal with than sets of loose NiMH AAs.
For people like you who use multiple cameras it may make some sense to make sure they all use interchangeable parts, but for most of the rest of us the Li-Ion actually makes some sense, despite the prices. Either way they are immensely cheaper than alkalines in the long run. Have you thought about getting an external Li-Ion powerpack? With those it doesn't matter what type of battery your cameras take as long as you have the proper power connector. Lasts forever too. Check out the DPS-9000 power pack, it screws to the tripod socket so you don't have to mess with a cable running to a belt pack. Great solution if you need to shoot all day.
Somebody else replied with this URL but it looks like he got modded down for being a jerk at the same time. NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice.org that runs without X11. Not exactly native looking yet but they did just add a patch for moving the menu out of the window and onto the real Mac menubar. See here for the patches and download link. Looks like since September they've updated it to using OOo 1.1.2 so it's probably improved a bit since I tried it a couple months back. Good luck.
If you happen to be working for a non-profit you can also check out Techsoup.org and pick up a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac for like $20 a copy. Yes, it sucks to support Microsoft but I've got 8 users here who would go berserk if they were faced with OOo or even NeoOffice in its current condition. Both still need a lot of work on the Mac. And here I thought OOo was supposed to be cross-platform... Anyway, Techsoup.org, a good way for non-profits to avoid giving Microsoft too much money and still be legal.
MHT might be fine except that isn't the whole story. Read the article more closely. The encrypted MHT file is being encased in a "Rights Managed HTML" file with extention RMH, which can only be opened with an extension for IE. People do seem to be up in arms for a good reason this time. The docs were supposed to be freely available, not "rights managed" and only accessible on a Microsoft platform.
Moderators, please take the time to mod DOWN everyone posting who doesn't understand that this isn't just about MHT. There are a lot of people posting today that either didn't read the article or didn't read it closely enough to get the important point. Don't mod me up, just mod the misinformed people down.
Oh my god, that is so funny, at least for me. I used to live in the back of a hardware store in the tiny town of Richfield, Idaho. We bought it from a very nice old man named Johnny Lemon in 1983... Sooo, the name of the hardware store that was built in 1903 was... you guessed it, Lemon Hardware!
I'd actually forgotten about that, we left there 14 years ago. Maybe you had to be there, but anyway, true story. Weird that I would read that particular message today. Lemon Hardware. Ha! What's interesting is that we actually had some Apple computers at the school way back then. Mmm, Oregon Trails, stick figure hunters shooting stick figure bison to avoid stick figure dysentery. Those were the days.
Sounds like we are in agreement about Macs, but I still disagree about the geek thing, in a couple different ways. Firstly, from what I've seen there are a ton of non-geeks reading Slashdot even though it is a tech-oriented site. This crowd is extremely varied.
Secondly, I've never seen one of those lists targeted directly at geeks. They are always comparing a DIY commodity box with a pre-built computer, in this case a Mac, usually it's compared to a PC from Dell or something. In the context of Slashdot the geeks who know how to build a computer will already know the personal cost differences which are different for each person, and for the rest of the people it's just advice that makes no sense. It's not insightful or informative for either group of people, yet they keep getting modded up as a valid comparison, as if it demonstrates the fact that Macs (or pre-built PCs) are overpriced.
That was, and ever shall be, my beef with commodity spare-part cost lists. I feel they are great for a personal project but don't make sense when you apply them to others, even other geeks. Us geeks can figure that stuff out for ourselves. For me personally, I've figured out that a Mac has come to be a damn good investment for myself and most of the people that I know. (At least since Panther 10.3.3). You are a lucky dog to have a PowerBook in your possession.
You know, there is a lot more to this equation than you think.
Can you get FireWire preinstalled from Dell at that price point, with a quality LCD screen? Every Mac has FireWire 400, most now have FireWire 800 (which is twice as fast as USB 2.0) and every Mac now has USB 2.0 ports too. At that price you're talking about the new iMac. Get an eMac or an older iMac/eMac and we're talking $700-1000 and more than enough power for the average user.
Can you get a high-quality LCD monitor with excellent color response, ultra-wide viewing angles and high pixel-response rates? Not at the same price point. You may get one with the same number of inches but the quality will not be as high unless you pay as much or more.
Can you make a clone of your internal Windows-based hard drive onto an external FireWire drive, then shut down your computer and boot from the FireWire drive for disaster recovery? No? Didn't think so. Windows and Linux are both a pain to backup and restore without a lot of reconfiguration. Macs are a breeze, I could train a monkey to both the backup and the recovery. Norton Ghost sucks ass compared to the simplicity of Carbon Copy Cloner.
Upgrading to the next version of OS X will be a breeze too, just like it was a breeze to upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3. And with every upgrade OS X gets faster, not bigger and slower like another OS we know. I have it running in a very usable state on a 350Mhz old gumdrop iMac that everyone had given up on because OS 9 sucked so bad. And yes, the classic Mac OS sucked hard, I will never dispute anyone on that. Mac OS X is a whole different animal. There is no comparison between the two.
Can you keep your pre-built XP system from being overrun with worms and trojans? Only if you have the requisite knowledge to avoid a large list of things, to activate a proper firewall, to install and update virus software regularly, and keep up to date with Windows patches. On a Mac, yeah it's a good idea to stay up to date with security updates and turn on your firewall, but if you don't there is a good chance you will survive your first day on the Internet, or even your first week, month or year.
Graphics? Last time I checked the Mac platform had some of the most powerful graphics cards in the world, including the one that had to be specially designed to run their huge new 30" cinema LCD monitor. But if all you ever want to do with your PC is to play games, then by all means don't get a low-end Mac. Even though they will all work pretty well with enough memory.
I'm sorry, but you'll also need to define in future discussions what you mean by "where it counts". What most people seem to mean by that is "ooo, Quake framerates, d00d!" So you'll have to be more specific. In my mind "where it counts" is that the average person can do the average computer task like email, internet browsing and word processing without getting clobbered with worms, trojans and macro viruses. "Where it counts" means that I spend very little time supporting an office of 10 Macs. They just work.
So maybe you can think outside your box and maybe even use a newer Mac for a few weeks before telling everyone that a "commodity box" running Linux is somehow competitive in the overall picture. There is a big picture here, and for most people it will never come down to simple dollars spent on hardware. Most people may not include you and me, and that's fine, it's a free world. But don't think that your solution is going to be the best for everyone because it's the "cheapest". In the end for most of us it is both not the right solution and not the cheapest by a long shot. To put it as simply as possible, the Mac is just less of a hassle every single day. And that's worth a lot to some of us.
If you read my whole original message you'd see I've done the same thing myself. My point was that cost lists of a home-built PC running f/Free software are constantly modded up as insightful/informative in comparison to a pre-built Mac, as if they were somehow equal in value. That part is nonsense. It's nonsense for most people but also for any of us/. geeks, unless we do it for fun and place a value of zero dollars on the time we spend doing it. The hardware can be put together for fewer dollars, but the actual cost of the finished hardware/software system is always the same or much higher. We should just learn to stop making these silly comparisons.
All I know is, I have the honor of being in charge of an office with 10 computers, all Mac, all running OS X, and I rejoice every day that I don't have to deal with the trials and tribulations of the PC world.
I never thought people like us don't exist, that wasn't the point. The point is unless you do what you do (build the PC for free for your buddies), the actual cost ends up being much higher. And that doesn't even get into the software side of things. The cost to you for just the hardware is as you say "several hours", and so you either don't value your weekend or you just love to build computers for a pack of beer.
I had a co-worker that just bought a new Dell a few weeks ago. Windows XP, of course. Everything pre-installed. And yet it took me about 4 hours to download and install all the updates that were necessary to get Windows and the security software patched up to date. That doesn't include the time I spent in preparation downloading the 279MB network install of SP2. Was it necessary to download the whole thing? Maybe not, but I wanted to be able to install it on any computer.
So, on a DSL line (low end DSL, granted, but much faster than dial-up) it took at least a couple of hours to download all the necessary updates and install them. Norton AV required around 25MB and six (6!) reboots to get fully up-to-date with program updates and virus definitions.
OK, this computer was running WinXP with 256MB of memory on a 2.8GHz processor, brand new straight from Dell. Want to guess how long it took to log in, log out and switch between users while the computer was otherwise idle? About 3-5 minutes. In other words, just waiting for the machine to reboot after each update was painful and took up at least an hour all by itself. It was ludicrous.
In contrast I have seen Mac OS X (Panther) running usably on a 350Mhz gumdrop iMac from 1999, with 320MB of RAM. The important word here is "usably". It's not a gaming machine, but it will do Internet, email and many other things almost as quickly as any other computer I've ever laid hands on. OS X runs nearly as well on that old machine as OS 9 did, but with many more capabilities and much better stability. It was like getting a new computer. Can you put WinXP on a 600MHz PC and still have a usable computer?
Of course I also took the time on the XP computer to install Firefox, Thunderbird, Spybot S&D, Adaware, Spyware Blaster, and anything else I could think of to help keep this totally non-technical person from acquiring all the current worms, trojans and viruses on their first day on the Internet. If you don't do these things for your friends when you build them a computer, you are being irresponsible. I doubt very much that you can install the OS, all the necessary security software, patch it, and install some needed utility software all in 30-45 minutes. Sounds like you just dump WinXP on the machine and hand it over. For a non-technical computer user, that's insane.
Getting back to what I was originally talking about, we geeks on/. that actually like to build computers and have the requisite knowledge to match up all the parts (and the time to learn which parts go together and order them), we are a minority. Even on this website, but in the real world we are probably around 2% of the population. Most people don't have the time or the knowledge to build the computer, and they certainly don't have the time or the knowledge necessary to keep their Windows computer from becoming infested with malware, unless someone like us sets it up properly in the first place. That means that in the end, it takes a lot of time to set up a PC to be equivalent to a Mac in terms of being usable and safe to use on the Internet.
I'm sorry, but for numerous reasons I can no longer recommend a PC for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing, and that includes about 8 out of 10 people. For those people I recommend a new Mac, because whatever perceived price difference there is is well worth it.
$120 DVD-+RW drive (one of the new dual layer capable ones) $180 Asus Mobo with built-in Optical audio, gigabit, a normal ethernet connection, AGP 8x PRO, pci express, firewire, and USB 2.0 and an Athlon XP 3200 installed $120 120 GB harddrive $250 Decent monitor - 19" or higher $100 512 MB RAM $20 Modem $80 video card
I'm sorry.
Rant mode on.
I too used to think lists like this made some sort of sense. But they don't. The only way this list makes sense is if you are a computer expert who uses Linux (or pirates Windows), AND you are building this computer for yourself, AND you can get the parts all from the same place or inexpensively shipped, AND you somehow managed to get all the right parts out of the dozens of different types of cases, motherboards, and CPUs, AND you know how to put them together correctly AND all the miscellaneous cheap parts you bought all work together and none are faulty and need to be replaced AND etcetera ad infinitum...
Everyone who makes a list like this is just wasting his time. The list only makes sense to you, unless you are in the habit of spending many hours ordering parts and building computers for other people FOR FREE... If you wanted to make any profit at all by selling that particular system to someone, there's this little thing called economics that gets in the way. You'll have to double the cost of all the parts, add compensation for shipping, and then bill for labor. Suddenly you have a machine that costs double the price of a low-end Mac (eMac) and you still haven't even added any software!
And lets be realistic here, 80% of the populace is either not ready for Linux or simply won't be happy with it (in its current state). Even if you do discount the cost of the software, to duplicate the usability of a Mac or even Windows you or someone else will have to spend X amount of hours setting this system up so all the hardware works and all the necessary software is installed to do the same basic tasks that can be easily done on either Mac OS X or Windows.
Just as a little experiment, why don't you go ahead and build yourself one of these systems from scratch. Just be sure and keep careful track of all the time you use from planning to ordering to assembly to installation and configuration of the software. When you're finally done and have a moderately usable system, multiply the number of hours it took you by whatever you get paid at your current job. Even if you don't get paid much you will probably be shocked at the number that comes up. Your time just spent finding each part will probably negate the "$40 less" that you think you can get all those parts for.
If you are a geek who uses Linux and you have free time on your hands then building a computer from scratch can be an entertaining, educational and satisfying experience. It's loads of fun, I've even done it myself a few times. But trying to compare this list to the actual market price of any pre-built computer with all necessary software installed... it's just insane. Another thing, you do not need a $2000 Mac to get the same functionality, usability and apparent speed as a PC half the price, this is a myth today. Macs simply cannot be directly compared to PCs speed-wise for anything but a few specific operations that only a small segment of the population uses their computer for. For most poeple, a Mac that costs $800-$1200 will be more usable, safer to use on the Internet, and more fun to use than any PC in the same price range, no matter if it's running Windows or Linux.
End of rant. I hate older Macs and Mac OS 7/8/9 and have been running Linux at home for years, so don't even think of calling me a Mac zealot. I'm just tired of seeing these BS "cost" lists being taken seriously here. The general reader and the moderaters need to come to the realization that they literally make no sense for anyone besides the original poster, unless the value of your time is zero and you already have all the requisite knowledge.
Just a side note, one place I know of where you can get a notebook computer without an OS installed is Power Notebooks. They've consistently been one of the highest rated businesses on ResellerRatings.com. That's a handy tool for sorting out who to order from online, BTW. No affiliation with either entity.
I'm not a professional photographer, so I'm sure they have their reasons for needing an $8,000 digital camera. For someone who doesn't make a living taking pictures, though, is there any way to justify a camera that costs more than a used Toyota?
I DONT NO ABOOT YU BUT I CANT TAKE GOOD PIKCHURE WITH USED TOYOTA!!!11ONE!1
There are lots of us driving station wagons that look longingly at the tanks, and wish... just wish that someone would just slap a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals on it, and be done with it.
Someone did. They took one of those tanks, made it easy to operate, made it easier on the eyes, and along the way they made it amphibious. Next year they'll be adding flight capability. I think I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which dealer I'm referring to. No, these tanks aren't free for the taking, unfortunately.
We might mention that Nikon beat Canon to the punch with a wireless adapter for the D2H back in July. Still a cool development from Canon, but give credit where credit is due, I allus say.
IMHO (and this jusy may be because I've got a good paying job) I have no problems paying DishNetwork for their protected access to AV content. How is THAT different from a Microsoft Cartel doing the same thing for the same (or less) money?
Does DishNetwork have an effective monopoly on ALL popular media, forcing you to have DishNetwork service if you want to watch anything besides the local news? No, normally you have a choice between them and other cable/satellite providers. You can also rent/buy movies from a video store, listen to the radio or get music from a music store. DishNetworks is not a "cartel" that is being allowed to hardware-control the entire personal entertainment spectrum of products. THAT is the difference.
Anyway, shouldn't you be against "cartels" as a matter of principle at the very least? They do real damage to the economy and our freedom of choice. Are you against freedom of choice because you have a good paying job?
But in an enviroment filled with Google Bar, Webshots, Gator, Weatherbug and other crap, not including the pure spywear and viruses, the PCs will fail. It has nothing to do with the OS, but everything to do with stupid users, and a lazy and ineffective IT department.
You sound amazingly like all the Mac zealots that tell the user he's an idiot because he didn't do some kind of black magic and his Mac crashed. I actually read a message just like yours the other day from a Mac-head, and he actually said "idiot".
Oh, and you sound a lot like all the Linux zealots that tell you you must be an idiot because your Linux box crashed. Stupid users, stupid users, you users are so stupid because you aren't infinitely intelligent and knowledgable like me.
I don't care what OS you're using, if a regular user-space application can break it, it means it wasn't designed correctly. The user should certainly be motivated to learn enough to help protect his broken OS if he doesn't want it to crash, but the fact that it's so easy to crash is NEVER the user's fault. Calling everyone stupid does NOT solve the problem.
In an enterprise business environment, where IT controls the PCs, and people who install Yahoo Search Bar and other webtastic crap are fired, the O/S run great.
If we all lived in hermetically sealed suits our entire lives we would never get sick, but is that what you really want? Doesn't seem like a very realistic way to live your life. And who cares about all those home users who aren't full-time enterprise computer techs? What are they supposed to do, fire themselves when they do something they didn't have any way of knowing they weren't supposed to do?
i wonder why digital camera's don't come with internal hard drives, and better battery packs. size could be an issue, but if they can make 512 meg usb keychain drives (imagine it without the plastic casing and it is even smaller), i am sure they can put a gigabyte on a camera and still leave a slot for a memory card.
One reason is cost. People would be confronted with a camera price that in some cases would be as much as double the base price of the camera. Another reason is the fast moving pace of technology, and consumer choice. All memory is not created equal. As consumers we have a choice about which brand of memory to put in and how much. If I only take 10 photos any given day and don't care about how fast they get written to the card, then I can pay $20 for a 32-64MB average-speed card.
But if I'm into action photography and like to take loads of pics I can take the same camera and pour $300 into a bunch of the latest, fastest memory cards. This time next year I have the option of upgrading to a new generation of even faster memory cards, and/or larger cards. If the camera manufacturer built-in a memory card it would probably end up being much slower and smaller than anything available on the market within just a few months, thus making the cost of that internal card a waste of money from the perspective of many people. It can't be upgraded, and can't be taken out and resold to help finance a new card. It just doesn't make enough sense. That's why they include a small card for you to play with and then let you make a choice about how much more to put in. Many of the higher-end models don't even include a starter card.
Another thing is, it would make the camera bigger. Compact cameras are already using stamp-size, credit-card-thin new memory cards like the SD card and xD Picture card. They don't have room for both an internal and an external card. Even on larger cameras making the camera bigger is usually not desirable unless there is some real benefit. And I don't really see any.
The following is mainly OFFTOPIC:
what digi camera's do people have, and how do they like them?
Like you, I also bought a 2MP camera about 18 months ago. It was Canon PowerShot A40 which took decent pics and was easy to use. Upgraded to a PowerShot A70 when it came out last year (3.2MP). Again, easy to use and great colors. Pics can be printed out at least 8x10 and still look very nice. Possibly even larger with proper processing. In general I can recommend any Canon PowerShot digital for being easy to use, quick and generally taking well-exposed pictures with accurate colors.
Gave the A70 to a friend and bought into the "ultra-zoom" craze with an Olympus Camedia C-750 last year (4MP). Again the resolution is good for 8x10 prints or even a bit larger, 13x19 would be stretching the limits of the resolution however. All this is assuming you want film-quality resolution in your printed photos. The Olympus C-750 is a great camera with lots of nice features and 10x optical zoom. I like it but it is slow to focus and it's often difficult to get to many options because you have to navigate through layers of menus instead of using a dedicated button.
That is one of the reasons I've been looking at the new Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 recently (8MP). It's got a lot of external controls that make it easy to modify a dozen or more different settings quickly. The A2 is one of 5 new cameras with an 8MP chip (the others are from Nikon, Olympus, Canon, and Sony). This is enough resolution for 16x20 prints at 150dpi (near enough to photographic quality to not really matter).
For a casual camera I just bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ3 (3MP) for my wife's birthday. Good enough for 8x10 prints at least. 12x optical zoom, image stabilization (it works) all in a compact package. Very nice camera. Pretty much any 3-4MP camera will make good 8x10 prints these days.
These new sensors are getting into the realm of the ridiculous for the casual snapshooter. There are simpl
For instance, I already have a hardware firewall, so I don't need the software firewall to be enabled.
Does your hardware firewall protect you from other computers on your local network, or just from the Internet connection? It's getting to the point that all computers should really have software firewalls installed to augment the hardware firewalls. A lot of companies and universities have been noticing recently that their hardware firewalls don't cut it. Just like in the real world, much of the damage can come from an "inside job". It only takes one infected computer inside the firewall to endanger all the others. Unless of course each individual computer has its own firewall.
Besides which, how do you know your hardware firewall is perfect? It can't be. It's hardware separate from your computer, but it's still run by software (firmware), and as we all know any program longer than 3 lines has bugs (who said that?). I think you're making a big mistake by comparing a hardware firewall outside the computer with an internal software firewall. Today, it's a good idea to have both. Security works best in multiple layers, and two is better than one. A single point of failure is always bad. Think it over.
Why on Earth would you want to turn it off anyway? Do you think it will increase performance or something?
Which Windows? Windows ME? Windows 2000? Windows XP Home? Windows XP Professional?
That does not serve your point at all. We both know that the common user will have a choice between WinXP and XP Pro, if they are even given a choice at all. WinME has been deprecated by XP, and it is difficult to get an average computer with Win2K unless you're ordering for a business. The usual home computer just comes with XP Home now. None of this disproves the fact that distinguishing between the different Linux distros is very confusing for the uninitiated user.
Also, even in friendly distros like Mandrake they don't always just set you up with a "clear" default unless you know enough to choose that during the install. Normally there is a list of several window managers you can choose to log into, include KDE, GNOME, IceWM, and a few others. This is all very confusing to most people, and rightly so.
Oh, and the fact that you can run GNOME apps on a KDE desktop and vice versa is great, but it is still confusing and totally non-obvious. I had probably been a Linux desktop user for at least a year before I understood that the apps weren't mutually exclusive. They certainly make no effor to act as if they worked flawlessly together, and to this day most GNOME apps will look horribly out of place on a KDE desktop, and vice versa again. Until both desktop environments use the exact same themes, this will be one of the things about a Linux desktop that confuses new users.
So I guess in retrospect I don't agree with anything in your post, and I don't think any of it was really insightful at all. The myth that Linux desktops are confusing is not a myth but a fact (I can say this having used Linux for years now, from Debian to Mandrake) and nothing you've said really disproves that. The things you've said just demonstrate that you've adapted to the initial confusion by learning a lot about the system, so you're now blind (in a dyslexic sort of way) to how confusing a Linux desktop really is. I'm not trying to be insulting, mind you. We all have this type of blindness to varying degrees. It takes a lot of thinking to really see things from the other side. The side we all used to be on.
I did something similar. Even in the dark you can see the keys by the light from the screen. But I didn't want to bother my parents who were sleeping upstairs, so I put a pillowcase over the keyboard. BAM! Within a few hours of typing that way my typing improved dramatically. I went from semi-touch-typing to real touch-typing. This was after a full typing class I'd taken a year or so before where I barely made it to 28wpm by the end of the class. Having the keyboard totally blocked from view forced those synaptic pathways to strengthen themselves and remember all the keys without even bothering to look. I actually started to enjoy typing. I still have bad rhythm so I'm not the greatest typist, but as of today I can average anywhere from 45-75wpm. Mostly because of that stupid pillowcase.
Slashdot Mirror
Turn in your geek card, citizen, and go watch the original Empire again. That is the tauntaun's head but the furry white thing is the ice creature's arm. The tauntaun isn't that furry around the neck. Watch closely and you'll see the scene where the ice creature jumps up from the snow and strikes the tauntaun on the side of the neck (where in Earth creatures you'll usually find the jugular vein). Whereupon the tauntaun falls down dead in the snow.
As can be seen in the linked images, the ice creature's arm is a big puppet sleeve on the arm of somebody wearing a purple shirt. In the first image the puppeteer's hair is visible. It's hilarious, but it's also sad when you think about all the time and money that has been poured into redoing these DVDs. How the ---- do you miss something like that? Well, I guess George has missed the last two whole movies, so he's had a lot of practice...
If you are prepared to put the time and effort into it, it is all pretty easy.
If you are prepared to put time and effort into anything, it will be pretty easy to achieve your goal. This is nowhere near an excuse for the fact that the average Windows PC has been chock full of spyware and viruses on a steadily increasing basis for the last 15 years or more. The simple fact that other operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X) will stop and prompt you for the admin password makes them just that much safer even for the average security-ignorant user. Then there's the fact that almost all the software on those other platforms actually follows the security model and works without complaint for users who are not running as administrators. What a concept, huh?
I have lost count of the number of reasonably intelligent Windows users who have tried valiantly to NOT run as admin only to fail in the end because the applications made it so difficult to do so without complex security workarounds. Whereupon some Windows guru will call that person an idiot and post something to the effect of "just do X, Y, and Z" which is never simple or obvious or straightforward. Mac OS X has shown that running as a non-priviledged user can be simple and you end up with a fairly secure system. It is not invulnerable and neither is Linux, of course. But they go light-years beyond the basic Windows install.
In contrast, on Windows the users get saturated with the problems they encounter when trying to not run as admin, and most just give up. Part of the blame can be laid on the applications, part on lack of user education, but most of it is right on Microsoft's shoulders. They are the ones who guided the security model and thus software development for the Windows platform for the last 20 flipping years. As a community we have no call to be giving them any slack.
Last time I checked you can't write to a CD-ROM, so you'd need a USB key anyway to store your settings. Otherwise you're starting from scratch every time you boot up. Assuming this MP3 thing is writable, it's more like MandrakeMove where you can take your settings and your entire OS from one computer to another. It's not just meant to be a rescue disk. It's more like Knoppix plus a USB key. Those of us who need rescue disks can build them ourselves.
Obviously this device isn't meant for you. That doesn't mean it has no purpose or shouldn't be marketed at all. Don't like it? Don't buy it. Hurray, capitalistic freedom of choice. I'll never understand why it is that when people don't see a need for something in their personal life, they consistently take the attitude that the object or technology in question is pointless and shouldn't even exist. THAT, is what I don't "get". Seems like these kind of posts are all over the place every time a new technology or piece of hardware or software comes out. It's a big world, why can't you just let people do what they want as long as it doesn't hurt you? Why tell the rest of us that there's a "limit" just because you can't see the point? Why does there need to be a point? I'm sure you'd be similarly annoyed by people saying they don't see the point of rescue disks and why should anyone bother, blah blah blah, etc.
More on-topic, I can't wait to see more FireWire flash drives and keys. Imagine a FireWire compactflash card reader with an 8GB microdrive in it... You could partition it and install Mac OS X, Linux, Linux PPC, and Windows and be able to boot at least one of those on any modern desktop computer. Of course Windows is the least portable of the bunch, and the least compatible with the other filesystems. Might as well not even bother. But you would probably need a FAT32 partition to exchange data between HFS+ and your chosen filesystem on the Linux partition(s). I don't know that for a fact though, maybe Mac OS X can read Ext2/3 and others.
Damn, that would be interesting. Anybody know if it's actually possible to boot multiple operating systems from one FireWire drive? You could boot to a boot manager but can the boot manager then load the OS, or will a special boot manager need to be created for FireWire drives? And then of course there's the mixing of Mac and PC operating systems on the same disk. The file systems can coexist fine, but can they all be booted from the same drive? I think the boot mechanisms are vastly different between the Mac and PC platforms. Are the differences insurmountable?
Of course with the easy daisy-chainability of FireWire (without any massive performance penalty) you could always have one Mac drive and another PC drive and just hook them together after you boot up the main one. Seems like that would work rather well. And if you get a portable jobber it will even be powered by the FireWire bus. Damn, Lacie has portable combo FireWire/USB drives now up to 100GB, with a 60GB version at 7200RPM...
Whelp, looks like I just talked my bad self into a new pet project. Goodbye paycheck!
3 megapixels is "bad" if you ever want to print your photos larger than 8x10. We've had 5MP cameras since 2001 (Minolta Dimage 7 was the first, I think). There are currently many compact cameras with 4-5MP chips, and a new crop with a 7MP chip although they aren't quite compact. So having a new camera come out with "just" 3.2MP isn't too impressive.
Going up just one step there is a group of prosumer cameras with an 8MP chip that have all been out for several months. 8MP will give you the ability to stretch your photo to 16x20 and still have impressive resolution on the paper, thus rivaling the enlargement ability of your typical 35mm consumer film camera. So from the quality perspective a 3MP camera is still sort of a toy unless you'll never print anything but 4x6 snapshots and a few 8x10s. It's only within the last 18 months or so that consumer and prosumer digital cameras have really started to cross the hump and become as good or better than film for most common purposes. 3MP just doesn't cut it if you want quality anywhere close to film.
Typical viewpoint. Everyone else in the world != you.
NiMH AA rechargeables self-discharge much more quickly than Li-Ion, and as you point out they take up more space for the same amount of power. You don't like the camera? Fine, don't buy it. Yay, free market capitalism. But many people are just casual camera users. For them it often makes sense to have a very compact camera that doesn't have batteries that need to be topped off once a week and treated gingerly. Yeah, you can buy some alkalines in a pinch, but that soon gets to be more expensive than just buying another proprietary Li-Ion and recharging it every other month. It's a self-contained solution that for the casual user ends up being a lot simpler to deal with than sets of loose NiMH AAs.
For people like you who use multiple cameras it may make some sense to make sure they all use interchangeable parts, but for most of the rest of us the Li-Ion actually makes some sense, despite the prices. Either way they are immensely cheaper than alkalines in the long run. Have you thought about getting an external Li-Ion powerpack? With those it doesn't matter what type of battery your cameras take as long as you have the proper power connector. Lasts forever too. Check out the DPS-9000 power pack, it screws to the tripod socket so you don't have to mess with a cable running to a belt pack. Great solution if you need to shoot all day.
Somebody else replied with this URL but it looks like he got modded down for being a jerk at the same time. NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice.org that runs without X11. Not exactly native looking yet but they did just add a patch for moving the menu out of the window and onto the real Mac menubar. See here for the patches and download link. Looks like since September they've updated it to using OOo 1.1.2 so it's probably improved a bit since I tried it a couple months back. Good luck.
If you happen to be working for a non-profit you can also check out Techsoup.org and pick up a copy of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac for like $20 a copy. Yes, it sucks to support Microsoft but I've got 8 users here who would go berserk if they were faced with OOo or even NeoOffice in its current condition. Both still need a lot of work on the Mac. And here I thought OOo was supposed to be cross-platform... Anyway, Techsoup.org, a good way for non-profits to avoid giving Microsoft too much money and still be legal.
MHT might be fine except that isn't the whole story. Read the article more closely. The encrypted MHT file is being encased in a "Rights Managed HTML" file with extention RMH, which can only be opened with an extension for IE. People do seem to be up in arms for a good reason this time. The docs were supposed to be freely available, not "rights managed" and only accessible on a Microsoft platform.
Moderators, please take the time to mod DOWN everyone posting who doesn't understand that this isn't just about MHT. There are a lot of people posting today that either didn't read the article or didn't read it closely enough to get the important point. Don't mod me up, just mod the misinformed people down.
So what you're saying is the right mouse button is the wrong mouse button.
CherryOS.. run Apple software on Lemon hardware.
Oh my god, that is so funny, at least for me. I used to live in the back of a hardware store in the tiny town of Richfield, Idaho. We bought it from a very nice old man named Johnny Lemon in 1983... Sooo, the name of the hardware store that was built in 1903 was... you guessed it, Lemon Hardware!
I'd actually forgotten about that, we left there 14 years ago. Maybe you had to be there, but anyway, true story. Weird that I would read that particular message today. Lemon Hardware. Ha! What's interesting is that we actually had some Apple computers at the school way back then. Mmm, Oregon Trails, stick figure hunters shooting stick figure bison to avoid stick figure dysentery. Those were the days.
Sounds like we are in agreement about Macs, but I still disagree about the geek thing, in a couple different ways. Firstly, from what I've seen there are a ton of non-geeks reading Slashdot even though it is a tech-oriented site. This crowd is extremely varied.
Secondly, I've never seen one of those lists targeted directly at geeks. They are always comparing a DIY commodity box with a pre-built computer, in this case a Mac, usually it's compared to a PC from Dell or something. In the context of Slashdot the geeks who know how to build a computer will already know the personal cost differences which are different for each person, and for the rest of the people it's just advice that makes no sense. It's not insightful or informative for either group of people, yet they keep getting modded up as a valid comparison, as if it demonstrates the fact that Macs (or pre-built PCs) are overpriced.
That was, and ever shall be, my beef with commodity spare-part cost lists. I feel they are great for a personal project but don't make sense when you apply them to others, even other geeks. Us geeks can figure that stuff out for ourselves. For me personally, I've figured out that a Mac has come to be a damn good investment for myself and most of the people that I know. (At least since Panther 10.3.3). You are a lucky dog to have a PowerBook in your possession.
Cheers.
You know, there is a lot more to this equation than you think.
Can you get FireWire preinstalled from Dell at that price point, with a quality LCD screen? Every Mac has FireWire 400, most now have FireWire 800 (which is twice as fast as USB 2.0) and every Mac now has USB 2.0 ports too. At that price you're talking about the new iMac. Get an eMac or an older iMac/eMac and we're talking $700-1000 and more than enough power for the average user.
Can you get a high-quality LCD monitor with excellent color response, ultra-wide viewing angles and high pixel-response rates? Not at the same price point. You may get one with the same number of inches but the quality will not be as high unless you pay as much or more.
Can you make a clone of your internal Windows-based hard drive onto an external FireWire drive, then shut down your computer and boot from the FireWire drive for disaster recovery? No? Didn't think so. Windows and Linux are both a pain to backup and restore without a lot of reconfiguration. Macs are a breeze, I could train a monkey to both the backup and the recovery. Norton Ghost sucks ass compared to the simplicity of Carbon Copy Cloner.
Upgrading to the next version of OS X will be a breeze too, just like it was a breeze to upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3. And with every upgrade OS X gets faster, not bigger and slower like another OS we know. I have it running in a very usable state on a 350Mhz old gumdrop iMac that everyone had given up on because OS 9 sucked so bad. And yes, the classic Mac OS sucked hard, I will never dispute anyone on that. Mac OS X is a whole different animal. There is no comparison between the two.
Can you keep your pre-built XP system from being overrun with worms and trojans? Only if you have the requisite knowledge to avoid a large list of things, to activate a proper firewall, to install and update virus software regularly, and keep up to date with Windows patches. On a Mac, yeah it's a good idea to stay up to date with security updates and turn on your firewall, but if you don't there is a good chance you will survive your first day on the Internet, or even your first week, month or year.
Graphics? Last time I checked the Mac platform had some of the most powerful graphics cards in the world, including the one that had to be specially designed to run their huge new 30" cinema LCD monitor. But if all you ever want to do with your PC is to play games, then by all means don't get a low-end Mac. Even though they will all work pretty well with enough memory.
I'm sorry, but you'll also need to define in future discussions what you mean by "where it counts". What most people seem to mean by that is "ooo, Quake framerates, d00d!" So you'll have to be more specific. In my mind "where it counts" is that the average person can do the average computer task like email, internet browsing and word processing without getting clobbered with worms, trojans and macro viruses. "Where it counts" means that I spend very little time supporting an office of 10 Macs. They just work.
So maybe you can think outside your box and maybe even use a newer Mac for a few weeks before telling everyone that a "commodity box" running Linux is somehow competitive in the overall picture. There is a big picture here, and for most people it will never come down to simple dollars spent on hardware. Most people may not include you and me, and that's fine, it's a free world. But don't think that your solution is going to be the best for everyone because it's the "cheapest". In the end for most of us it is both not the right solution and not the cheapest by a long shot. To put it as simply as possible, the Mac is just less of a hassle every single day. And that's worth a lot to some of us.
If you read my whole original message you'd see I've done the same thing myself. My point was that cost lists of a home-built PC running f/Free software are constantly modded up as insightful/informative in comparison to a pre-built Mac, as if they were somehow equal in value. That part is nonsense. It's nonsense for most people but also for any of us /. geeks, unless we do it for fun and place a value of zero dollars on the time we spend doing it. The hardware can be put together for fewer dollars, but the actual cost of the finished hardware/software system is always the same or much higher. We should just learn to stop making these silly comparisons.
All I know is, I have the honor of being in charge of an office with 10 computers, all Mac, all running OS X, and I rejoice every day that I don't have to deal with the trials and tribulations of the PC world.
I never thought people like us don't exist, that wasn't the point. The point is unless you do what you do (build the PC for free for your buddies), the actual cost ends up being much higher. And that doesn't even get into the software side of things. The cost to you for just the hardware is as you say "several hours", and so you either don't value your weekend or you just love to build computers for a pack of beer.
/. that actually like to build computers and have the requisite knowledge to match up all the parts (and the time to learn which parts go together and order them), we are a minority. Even on this website, but in the real world we are probably around 2% of the population. Most people don't have the time or the knowledge to build the computer, and they certainly don't have the time or the knowledge necessary to keep their Windows computer from becoming infested with malware, unless someone like us sets it up properly in the first place. That means that in the end, it takes a lot of time to set up a PC to be equivalent to a Mac in terms of being usable and safe to use on the Internet.
I had a co-worker that just bought a new Dell a few weeks ago. Windows XP, of course. Everything pre-installed. And yet it took me about 4 hours to download and install all the updates that were necessary to get Windows and the security software patched up to date. That doesn't include the time I spent in preparation downloading the 279MB network install of SP2. Was it necessary to download the whole thing? Maybe not, but I wanted to be able to install it on any computer.
So, on a DSL line (low end DSL, granted, but much faster than dial-up) it took at least a couple of hours to download all the necessary updates and install them. Norton AV required around 25MB and six (6!) reboots to get fully up-to-date with program updates and virus definitions.
OK, this computer was running WinXP with 256MB of memory on a 2.8GHz processor, brand new straight from Dell. Want to guess how long it took to log in, log out and switch between users while the computer was otherwise idle? About 3-5 minutes. In other words, just waiting for the machine to reboot after each update was painful and took up at least an hour all by itself. It was ludicrous.
In contrast I have seen Mac OS X (Panther) running usably on a 350Mhz gumdrop iMac from 1999, with 320MB of RAM. The important word here is "usably". It's not a gaming machine, but it will do Internet, email and many other things almost as quickly as any other computer I've ever laid hands on. OS X runs nearly as well on that old machine as OS 9 did, but with many more capabilities and much better stability. It was like getting a new computer. Can you put WinXP on a 600MHz PC and still have a usable computer?
Of course I also took the time on the XP computer to install Firefox, Thunderbird, Spybot S&D, Adaware, Spyware Blaster, and anything else I could think of to help keep this totally non-technical person from acquiring all the current worms, trojans and viruses on their first day on the Internet. If you don't do these things for your friends when you build them a computer, you are being irresponsible. I doubt very much that you can install the OS, all the necessary security software, patch it, and install some needed utility software all in 30-45 minutes. Sounds like you just dump WinXP on the machine and hand it over. For a non-technical computer user, that's insane.
Getting back to what I was originally talking about, we geeks on
I'm sorry, but for numerous reasons I can no longer recommend a PC for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing, and that includes about 8 out of 10 people. For those people I recommend a new Mac, because whatever perceived price difference there is is well worth it.
I'd really like to know what you mean
$120 DVD-+RW drive (one of the new dual layer capable ones)
$180 Asus Mobo with built-in Optical audio, gigabit, a normal ethernet connection, AGP 8x PRO, pci express, firewire, and USB 2.0 and an Athlon XP 3200 installed
$120 120 GB harddrive
$250 Decent monitor - 19" or higher
$100 512 MB RAM
$20 Modem
$80 video card
I'm sorry.
Rant mode on.
I too used to think lists like this made some sort of sense. But they don't. The only way this list makes sense is if you are a computer expert who uses Linux (or pirates Windows), AND you are building this computer for yourself, AND you can get the parts all from the same place or inexpensively shipped, AND you somehow managed to get all the right parts out of the dozens of different types of cases, motherboards, and CPUs, AND you know how to put them together correctly AND all the miscellaneous cheap parts you bought all work together and none are faulty and need to be replaced AND etcetera ad infinitum...
Everyone who makes a list like this is just wasting his time. The list only makes sense to you, unless you are in the habit of spending many hours ordering parts and building computers for other people FOR FREE... If you wanted to make any profit at all by selling that particular system to someone, there's this little thing called economics that gets in the way. You'll have to double the cost of all the parts, add compensation for shipping, and then bill for labor. Suddenly you have a machine that costs double the price of a low-end Mac (eMac) and you still haven't even added any software!
And lets be realistic here, 80% of the populace is either not ready for Linux or simply won't be happy with it (in its current state). Even if you do discount the cost of the software, to duplicate the usability of a Mac or even Windows you or someone else will have to spend X amount of hours setting this system up so all the hardware works and all the necessary software is installed to do the same basic tasks that can be easily done on either Mac OS X or Windows.
Just as a little experiment, why don't you go ahead and build yourself one of these systems from scratch. Just be sure and keep careful track of all the time you use from planning to ordering to assembly to installation and configuration of the software. When you're finally done and have a moderately usable system, multiply the number of hours it took you by whatever you get paid at your current job. Even if you don't get paid much you will probably be shocked at the number that comes up. Your time just spent finding each part will probably negate the "$40 less" that you think you can get all those parts for.
If you are a geek who uses Linux and you have free time on your hands then building a computer from scratch can be an entertaining, educational and satisfying experience. It's loads of fun, I've even done it myself a few times. But trying to compare this list to the actual market price of any pre-built computer with all necessary software installed... it's just insane. Another thing, you do not need a $2000 Mac to get the same functionality, usability and apparent speed as a PC half the price, this is a myth today. Macs simply cannot be directly compared to PCs speed-wise for anything but a few specific operations that only a small segment of the population uses their computer for. For most poeple, a Mac that costs $800-$1200 will be more usable, safer to use on the Internet, and more fun to use than any PC in the same price range, no matter if it's running Windows or Linux.
End of rant. I hate older Macs and Mac OS 7/8/9 and have been running Linux at home for years, so don't even think of calling me a Mac zealot. I'm just tired of seeing these BS "cost" lists being taken seriously here. The general reader and the moderaters need to come to the realization that they literally make no sense for anyone besides the original poster, unless the value of your time is zero and you already have all the requisite knowledge.
(just try getting a laptop without Windows)
Just a side note, one place I know of where you can get a notebook computer without an OS installed is Power Notebooks. They've consistently been one of the highest rated businesses on ResellerRatings.com. That's a handy tool for sorting out who to order from online, BTW. No affiliation with either entity.
I'm not a professional photographer, so I'm sure they have their reasons for needing an $8,000 digital camera. For someone who doesn't make a living taking pictures, though, is there any way to justify a camera that costs more than a used Toyota?
I DONT NO ABOOT YU BUT I CANT TAKE GOOD PIKCHURE WITH USED TOYOTA!!!11ONE!1
There are lots of us driving station wagons that look longingly at the tanks, and wish... just wish that someone would just slap a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals on it, and be done with it.
Someone did. They took one of those tanks, made it easy to operate, made it easier on the eyes, and along the way they made it amphibious. Next year they'll be adding flight capability. I think I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which dealer I'm referring to. No, these tanks aren't free for the taking, unfortunately.
We might mention that Nikon beat Canon to the punch with a wireless adapter for the D2H back in July. Still a cool development from Canon, but give credit where credit is due, I allus say.
IMHO (and this jusy may be because I've got a good paying job) I have no problems paying DishNetwork for their protected access to AV content. How is THAT different from a Microsoft Cartel doing the same thing for the same (or less) money?
Does DishNetwork have an effective monopoly on ALL popular media, forcing you to have DishNetwork service if you want to watch anything besides the local news? No, normally you have a choice between them and other cable/satellite providers. You can also rent/buy movies from a video store, listen to the radio or get music from a music store. DishNetworks is not a "cartel" that is being allowed to hardware-control the entire personal entertainment spectrum of products. THAT is the difference.
Anyway, shouldn't you be against "cartels" as a matter of principle at the very least? They do real damage to the economy and our freedom of choice. Are you against freedom of choice because you have a good paying job?
But in an enviroment filled with Google Bar, Webshots, Gator, Weatherbug and other crap, not including the pure spywear and viruses, the PCs will fail. It has nothing to do with the OS, but everything to do with stupid users, and a lazy and ineffective IT department.
You sound amazingly like all the Mac zealots that tell the user he's an idiot because he didn't do some kind of black magic and his Mac crashed. I actually read a message just like yours the other day from a Mac-head, and he actually said "idiot".
Oh, and you sound a lot like all the Linux zealots that tell you you must be an idiot because your Linux box crashed. Stupid users, stupid users, you users are so stupid because you aren't infinitely intelligent and knowledgable like me.
I don't care what OS you're using, if a regular user-space application can break it, it means it wasn't designed correctly. The user should certainly be motivated to learn enough to help protect his broken OS if he doesn't want it to crash, but the fact that it's so easy to crash is NEVER the user's fault. Calling everyone stupid does NOT solve the problem.
In an enterprise business environment, where IT controls the PCs, and people who install Yahoo Search Bar and other webtastic crap are fired, the O/S run great.
If we all lived in hermetically sealed suits our entire lives we would never get sick, but is that what you really want? Doesn't seem like a very realistic way to live your life. And who cares about all those home users who aren't full-time enterprise computer techs? What are they supposed to do, fire themselves when they do something they didn't have any way of knowing they weren't supposed to do?
i wonder why digital camera's don't come with internal hard drives, and better battery packs. size could be an issue, but if they can make 512 meg usb keychain drives (imagine it without the plastic casing and it is even smaller), i am sure they can put a gigabyte on a camera and still leave a slot for a memory card.
One reason is cost. People would be confronted with a camera price that in some cases would be as much as double the base price of the camera. Another reason is the fast moving pace of technology, and consumer choice. All memory is not created equal. As consumers we have a choice about which brand of memory to put in and how much. If I only take 10 photos any given day and don't care about how fast they get written to the card, then I can pay $20 for a 32-64MB average-speed card.
But if I'm into action photography and like to take loads of pics I can take the same camera and pour $300 into a bunch of the latest, fastest memory cards. This time next year I have the option of upgrading to a new generation of even faster memory cards, and/or larger cards. If the camera manufacturer built-in a memory card it would probably end up being much slower and smaller than anything available on the market within just a few months, thus making the cost of that internal card a waste of money from the perspective of many people. It can't be upgraded, and can't be taken out and resold to help finance a new card. It just doesn't make enough sense. That's why they include a small card for you to play with and then let you make a choice about how much more to put in. Many of the higher-end models don't even include a starter card.
Another thing is, it would make the camera bigger. Compact cameras are already using stamp-size, credit-card-thin new memory cards like the SD card and xD Picture card. They don't have room for both an internal and an external card. Even on larger cameras making the camera bigger is usually not desirable unless there is some real benefit. And I don't really see any.
The following is mainly OFFTOPIC:
what digi camera's do people have, and how do they like them?
Like you, I also bought a 2MP camera about 18 months ago. It was Canon PowerShot A40 which took decent pics and was easy to use. Upgraded to a PowerShot A70 when it came out last year (3.2MP). Again, easy to use and great colors. Pics can be printed out at least 8x10 and still look very nice. Possibly even larger with proper processing. In general I can recommend any Canon PowerShot digital for being easy to use, quick and generally taking well-exposed pictures with accurate colors.
Gave the A70 to a friend and bought into the "ultra-zoom" craze with an Olympus Camedia C-750 last year (4MP). Again the resolution is good for 8x10 prints or even a bit larger, 13x19 would be stretching the limits of the resolution however. All this is assuming you want film-quality resolution in your printed photos. The Olympus C-750 is a great camera with lots of nice features and 10x optical zoom. I like it but it is slow to focus and it's often difficult to get to many options because you have to navigate through layers of menus instead of using a dedicated button.
That is one of the reasons I've been looking at the new Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2 recently (8MP). It's got a lot of external controls that make it easy to modify a dozen or more different settings quickly. The A2 is one of 5 new cameras with an 8MP chip (the others are from Nikon, Olympus, Canon, and Sony). This is enough resolution for 16x20 prints at 150dpi (near enough to photographic quality to not really matter).
For a casual camera I just bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ3 (3MP) for my wife's birthday. Good enough for 8x10 prints at least. 12x optical zoom, image stabilization (it works) all in a compact package. Very nice camera. Pretty much any 3-4MP camera will make good 8x10 prints these days.
These new sensors are getting into the realm of the ridiculous for the casual snapshooter. There are simpl
For instance, I already have a hardware firewall, so I don't need the software firewall to be enabled.
Does your hardware firewall protect you from other computers on your local network, or just from the Internet connection? It's getting to the point that all computers should really have software firewalls installed to augment the hardware firewalls. A lot of companies and universities have been noticing recently that their hardware firewalls don't cut it. Just like in the real world, much of the damage can come from an "inside job". It only takes one infected computer inside the firewall to endanger all the others. Unless of course each individual computer has its own firewall.
Besides which, how do you know your hardware firewall is perfect? It can't be. It's hardware separate from your computer, but it's still run by software (firmware), and as we all know any program longer than 3 lines has bugs (who said that?). I think you're making a big mistake by comparing a hardware firewall outside the computer with an internal software firewall. Today, it's a good idea to have both. Security works best in multiple layers, and two is better than one. A single point of failure is always bad. Think it over.
Why on Earth would you want to turn it off anyway? Do you think it will increase performance or something?
That's all good except for this line:
Which Windows? Windows ME? Windows 2000? Windows XP Home? Windows XP Professional?
That does not serve your point at all. We both know that the common user will have a choice between WinXP and XP Pro, if they are even given a choice at all. WinME has been deprecated by XP, and it is difficult to get an average computer with Win2K unless you're ordering for a business. The usual home computer just comes with XP Home now. None of this disproves the fact that distinguishing between the different Linux distros is very confusing for the uninitiated user.
Also, even in friendly distros like Mandrake they don't always just set you up with a "clear" default unless you know enough to choose that during the install. Normally there is a list of several window managers you can choose to log into, include KDE, GNOME, IceWM, and a few others. This is all very confusing to most people, and rightly so.
Oh, and the fact that you can run GNOME apps on a KDE desktop and vice versa is great, but it is still confusing and totally non-obvious. I had probably been a Linux desktop user for at least a year before I understood that the apps weren't mutually exclusive. They certainly make no effor to act as if they worked flawlessly together, and to this day most GNOME apps will look horribly out of place on a KDE desktop, and vice versa again. Until both desktop environments use the exact same themes, this will be one of the things about a Linux desktop that confuses new users.
So I guess in retrospect I don't agree with anything in your post, and I don't think any of it was really insightful at all. The myth that Linux desktops are confusing is not a myth but a fact (I can say this having used Linux for years now, from Debian to Mandrake) and nothing you've said really disproves that. The things you've said just demonstrate that you've adapted to the initial confusion by learning a lot about the system, so you're now blind (in a dyslexic sort of way) to how confusing a Linux desktop really is. I'm not trying to be insulting, mind you. We all have this type of blindness to varying degrees. It takes a lot of thinking to really see things from the other side. The side we all used to be on.
The way I heard it was:
"If your Uncle Jack was on the fence, would you help your Uncle Jack off?"
It's better when you administer it aurally--um, I mean when you say it out loud. Heh.
I did something similar. Even in the dark you can see the keys by the light from the screen. But I didn't want to bother my parents who were sleeping upstairs, so I put a pillowcase over the keyboard. BAM! Within a few hours of typing that way my typing improved dramatically. I went from semi-touch-typing to real touch-typing. This was after a full typing class I'd taken a year or so before where I barely made it to 28wpm by the end of the class. Having the keyboard totally blocked from view forced those synaptic pathways to strengthen themselves and remember all the keys without even bothering to look. I actually started to enjoy typing. I still have bad rhythm so I'm not the greatest typist, but as of today I can average anywhere from 45-75wpm. Mostly because of that stupid pillowcase.