Probably something about RAID not being a proper backup solution.
Thanks for the content-free, absolutely useless reply.
If you know of an easier, faster, better, cheaper way for a home user to back up a terabyte+ drive, other than copying it to another drive of the same size, I'm all ears.
...since they already bought the drives they are selling now, the price hikes are gouging...
No, they're simply anticipating and spreading out the damage. This is microeconomics 101, supply & demand.
Let's say you're a big retailer who sells 10,000 drives per month, buying them for $70 each and selling for $100 each. You make $300,000 a month selling those drives. That revenue pays the salary and benefits for a couple of dozen employees.
Then the manufacturer tells you that, due to factory damage, they can only supply you with 2000 drives per month for the next few months. If all prices remained the same (which they probably won't; the manufacturer will raise your wholesale price if they can), you would lose $240,000 of your monthly revenue.
Now, your market research tells you that there is sufficient demand to sell 2000 drives/month at $200 each. You will still lose $180,000 of your revenue every month, due to lower volume, but the volume is now constrained by your supplier, not the market. Bumping the price saves you $240,000.
So you mark up the price on all of your existing stock now. And you still lose heaps of revenue until the manufacturer gets back up to speed. Might even have to fire a few employees to cut costs.
This is just not something which is worth worrying about, much less spending money on. Save your money for the thing your kid actually needs.
+1
Or even better...spend the money on a vasectomy. It isn't fair to have a child who will be severely disadvantaged in this world by a naive, scared, lazy parent. You shouldn't have kids.
They do have the name that I usually go by online...It's the name that I've been using online from before the internet was open to the public
If you've used the same handle for more than 20 years...you might as well have used your social security number, or passport number, or whatever unique number your government has assigned to you.
The day I join Social Networking is when I can host my own personal P2P SNS that does not allow any huge corporation like Google to analyze my personal data and relationships.
It's not easy.
Hosting a wiki or forum for all of your friends and family is quite easy these days. The software has been free & turn-key for most of the last decade.
Hosting your own listserv is even simpler and more inclusive. Do you have something to share with your social network? Just email it to the list address. Want to keep up with the latest from your network? Just read the emails from the list address.
Pretty much everyone has email. Relatively few folks have accounts on facebook and other "social network" sites.
Facebook and its ilk exist solely because the majority of people are too lazy to manage their own list of friends.
Facebook has reached a level where the user base is roughly estimated to cover around 37% of the total world population
Whuck?
Facebook recently claimed to have 800 million users, which (if true) would be about 11% of the 6.97 billion people on this planet.
A more realistic estimate is that Facebook has at most 100 million unique, active users. "unique" means we're counting individual people, not all of the accounts that each person has. "active" means that they've posted something on FB in the last 30 days. That brings it down to less than 1½% of the world population.
Re:So what if your standing IN FRONT of the wall?
on
Seeing Through Walls
·
· Score: 1
Microwaves are not made of magic. They do not cook things from the 'inside out', as advertisements would have you believe.
I've never seen an advertisement claiming that microwaves cook from the "inside out". Have you?
Microwave ovens can seem to cook some foods from the inside-out because: 1) Many foods have a denser interior, which absorbs more of the energy. The classic example is a jelly donut. 2) The outside of the food is cooled by convection and conduction with its environment; the inside is not.
I dunno if #1 applies for human bodies, but #2 certainly does.
Also consider that your heat receptors (nerve endings) and your cooling system (sweat glands) are both on your skin, not on your insides. So microwave radiation can easily damage your insides before your skin registers it as "damaging".
It's like blaming the city planners that New Orleans was not hurricane proof.
I hate to tell you...but actually...the New Orleans city planners were to blame.
For roughly the first 200 years of its existence, New Orleans was built on the high ground. Then in the 20th century, they started pumping out the swamps to create large amounts of "real estate" below sea level.
I know...the Dutch have done this very successfully...but the Dutch did not try to reclaim swamps on the delta of a massive river that is constantly trying to find a new path.
For more than 50 years, anyone with half a clue knew that the flooding and large-scale destruction of New Orleans was inevitable. Katrina just happened to be the storm that did it. But it was absolutely no surprise. And the blame lays squarely on the shoulders of the city planners, for creating real estate that they ~knew~ could never be defended.
HDD prices are already increasing due to the increasing scarcity of some rare earth magnets.
Do you have any reference for this besides the/. article two months ago, which simply parroted the article from some unknown random website?
I just bought a couple of 2TB external (USB2) hard drives for $80 each, including shipping and cables and wall warts. Six months ago, they cost $100 each without shipping.
Seems to me, prices are still dropping.
Perhaps this Thai flood will provide an excuse for price inflation...but I'll believe it when I see it.
Replacing Keyboards... what is this the 90s? Warranty your crap. Frankenstein laptops are not cool.
If you think it's "cool" to own a disposable laptop, and take it to the Apple store where a "genius" will take several days to "fix" it for you under warranty, and then you can throw it away when your warranty expires, that is your consumer prerogative.
Keyboard errors are the most common laptop failure. This is not surprising when you consider that there are about 100 precision switches in your keyboard.
Failures aside, sometimes you want a brand-new keyboard for aesthetic reasons. There is nothing "Frankenstein" about replacing a laptop keyboard with a new OEM keyboard. For our Latitudes and Thinkpads, I keep spare keyboards on the shelf in case a key starts sticking (this has happened several times over the years), or the trackpoint or mouse buttons wear out (hasn't happened, but the buttons can get noisier/squeakier with age), or the keys just get too shiny. New keyboards cost about $30 for a Latitude, and $50 for a Thinkpad, on ebay.
Our household also has a MacBook that we use for Final Cut. Based on my experience with the MBP, I am not looking forward to the day when I have to replace the keyboard.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that you are a "1 laptop" or "1 laptop + 1 desktop" kind of consumer, probably with no family/kids, so you don't have much experience maintaining a small fleet of computers. Believe me, the Macs are a PITA to maintain compared to the others.
Studies exist to show that Mac users are less of a burden on IT Support departments. Less of a burden means that you can be laid off or outsourced. Sorry... its true
I've never worked in an IT department. Have you? I have, however, managed several dozen Macs and PCs for my own use over the years. My comments are based on personal experience with those machines.
Lenovo had never made a PC like that until recently. Apple goes for functional features as opposed to novel features. I don't want a laptop with tons of shady features. Nobody uses the tablet mode and the stylus because the laptop/tablet form-factor is just dumb.
My X60t is a 5-year old design, not exactly "recent".
The 3-button trackpoint dates back the first Thinkpads about 20 years ago...around the same time that Apple was releasing the first PowerBooks (which btw were my choice of laptops for most of the 1990s).
Mobile graphic designers/illustrators are among the many folks who would disagree with your irrational judgement that a high-precision, pressure-sensitive, active stylus tablet is "dumb".
You have obviously never owned one of these machines.
All your history crap? To prove what?
If you can stretch your attention span back more than one post...I was replying to a post that said Apple had always catered to the consumer.
This is simply not true. For most of Apple's history, they catered to the technophile, or the high-level executive, or higher education, or the creative professional (the point of this article). The consumer focus only started with the iMac and iBook in 1998/1999, i.e., less than 1/3 of Apple's lifetime.
The barrier to entry is practically insurmountable due to the network effect.
Not really.
Facebook's temporary success was mostly due to the fact that they targeted college students. The college years are when most people start to form their lifelong "social networks". The 20's are when most people refine and petrify those networks.
However...every year, rough 140,000,000 people are born on this planet. If you target this year's 140M new high school seniors, or 140M new college freshmen, with a new and better "social networking" service, they will jump on it, because their social connections are still in flux, and the social overlap across years at those ages is relatively small.
If anything, the new HS seniors and college freshmen will pull older college freshmen and sophomores and juniors over to their new "social networking" service.
The first mover advantage simply does not apply here. Facebook is doomed. The only question was whether Goldman Sachs could make a few $100M's off of Facebook before it disappears. And that is exactly what they did with their "special purpose investment vehicle" back in January of this year. Dumb money paid those $100M's for no promises. Restribution of the stupid wealth. The next 12 months is the end game.
Lawyers coming after you is an entirely different scenario from personal data collection.
Like I said, go read your ISP's ToS, or privacy policy, or whatever they call it.
Chances are, your ISP logs whatever they want from your traffic. That information is proven valuable, and companies are in business to make money, so they will exploit it. Unless you personally know and trust the board & management of your ISP, you have absolutely no reason to trust the company.
Go play your teenaged games with someone less experienced.
From your replies, I'm fairly sure that I have at least 10 years more experience than you. Perhaps even 20 or 30 years more experience.
Unless you run all of your Internet traffic through a very sophisticated & trusted anonymizing proxy, every website that you visit knows your ISP. Plus they can "fingerprint" your specific machine with at least 95% confidence.
My post above contains a great deal of verifiable factual information, but it was irrationally down-modded by some Apple zealot who did not want to hear the truth.
...still require a court order to start sniffing someone's network traffic without their consent, which they can can grant by simply accepting the terms of service.
FTFY. Go read the fine print on your terms of service. Even better, post a link to the ToS for your wonderfully-private ISP.
-----
my provider (no, I won't tell you who)
That's a very strange statement. Why can't you name your mythical power-to-the-people ISP?
I think you mean your W-2 form. You know, the form that all American wage-slaves sign, to tell their slave-master how much of their paycheck should automatically go to the government.
Logically, I'm not sure why anyone would want to sign a privacy agreement that is attached to their agreement to pay money. IMHO they should pay you if they want your private information.
But of course it doesn't work that way. All it takes is for the sheeple to remain ignorant. Witness the recent 4-year extension of the USA-PATRIOT Act.
Besides, the sheeple have proven themselves to be remarkably stupid when it comes to actively signing away their life savings to "financial institutions" in the form of mortgages, retirement accounts, etc.
Just keeping watching those TV shows with a laugh track. They will tell you what to do.
Only if your ISP sucks. Mine lets me do whatever the hell I want with my space
Not sure what you mean by "my space". Your account on myspace.com?
I was talking about your network traffic,. Which, for most folks, goes through a cable or phone line and various routers that do guarantee any privacy whatsoever. Unless your traffic is encrypted, which for most folks is not the case unless they are sending a password or credit card or bank account number. And even then, you can see from the logs that there was a certain amount of traffic from X to Y at time Z, even if you can't read it.
Your ISP has access to far more information than any web network like Facebook, Google, etc.
Please do tell us more about your ISP, and their contractual agreement to anonymize all of your network traffic. Who are they? Where are they? How much do they charge for that level of privacy?
Today, aesthetic quirks aside, the only difference between a Macbook and a PC laptop is the Macbook's ability to natively run OS X.
Also...the PC laptops are cheaper, easier to maintain, and offer a broader range of features and quality components than the MBs.
For example: I'm writing this on a Thinkpad X60t, which has a tablet-convertible display, Wacom digitizer (active, pressure-sensitve stylus), touchscreen, 3-button mouse, IBM trackpoint, BOE-Hydis AFFS+ LCD (better than IPS)...and it weighs about 3½ pounds.
Apple has never made any machine that comes remotely close to that level of functionality and quality.
And then there is maintenance to consider. Ever have a keyboard key stick or fail on a MBP keyboard? Apple Store wants $200+ to fix it. And with good reason. The MacBooks are built to be disposable devices. Replacing a keyboard requires not only a heap of screws/fasteners, and removal of various subcomponents, but also some adhesives, and some bend & break tabs.
On our Thinkpads, I've replaced keyboards in less than 1 minute, 4 screws. On Dell laptops, 30 seconds, 2 screws. Hard drive, 1 screw. Memory, 2 screws. Etc. IBM and Dell designed their computers to be maintained. Apple did not.
Apple has, and hopefully always be, about making profit by catering to the consumer. Let's not get deluded about that.
As long as you mean the "highest-end" consumer.
From it's very beginning, Apple has charged a heavy premium for their products, and targeted them at the top 5% of consumers. The iPod and iPhone are radical changes from Apple's historical market. But...they still have that "high end" residue.
Historically:
The Apple IIe was the longest-lived Apple computer. Released 1983 for $1400, competing against the equally-capable Commodore 64 which was released 1982 for $595. The Apple IIe was produced for 10 years. I don't have sales numbers for the IIe only, but all Apple II models combined sold only 5-6 million units. By contrast, the single model C64 sold around 15 million units.
The Apple Lisa cost $10,000 in 1983. That's $22,000 in 2011 dollars. Not exactly a "consumer" product, unless the average consumer thinks a computer should cost as much as their car.
The first Macintosh, in 1984, cost $2500. Somewhat more than $5000 in today's dollars. But by then they had competition in the PC space, which cost much much less.
Over the years I have owned & used many Apple computers...Apple II series, Mac Plus/SE, Mac II models, PowerBooks (including that nifty dockable PowerBook Duo 230, etc. Since the mid-1990s, they have ALWAYS cost more and delivered less functionality than high-end PCs. So I went from being a mostly Apple user, to a mixed Apple/PC user, to a mostly PC user.
Portable devices are a brave new world. Apple has a very clear lead in design & technology & marketing & retail clout right now. I love my iPhone, much as I loved my first Mac and first PowerBook. But I totally expect that it will be replaced by a cheaper, more flexible system in about 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably something about RAID not being a proper backup solution.
Thanks for the content-free, absolutely useless reply.
If you know of an easier, faster, better, cheaper way for a home user to back up a terabyte+ drive, other than copying it to another drive of the same size, I'm all ears.
Mirroring is the easiest form of backup.
*giggles*
Mirroring is the easiest form of backup.
*giggles*
Whoosh!
Explain the giggles?
Typo.
Bumping the prices saves you $60,000 per month. $180,000 per quarter, which may be how long it takes these factories to ramp up again.
...since they already bought the drives they are selling now, the price hikes are gouging...
No, they're simply anticipating and spreading out the damage. This is microeconomics 101, supply & demand.
Let's say you're a big retailer who sells 10,000 drives per month, buying them for $70 each and selling for $100 each. You make $300,000 a month selling those drives. That revenue pays the salary and benefits for a couple of dozen employees.
Then the manufacturer tells you that, due to factory damage, they can only supply you with 2000 drives per month for the next few months. If all prices remained the same (which they probably won't; the manufacturer will raise your wholesale price if they can), you would lose $240,000 of your monthly revenue.
Now, your market research tells you that there is sufficient demand to sell 2000 drives/month at $200 each. You will still lose $180,000 of your revenue every month, due to lower volume, but the volume is now constrained by your supplier, not the market. Bumping the price saves you $240,000.
So you mark up the price on all of your existing stock now. And you still lose heaps of revenue until the manufacturer gets back up to speed. Might even have to fire a few employees to cut costs.
Classic PR tick to fake scarcity to make a bad deal appear better than it is. 99% of customers would only buy 1 anyway.
Agree on the marketing trick, but disagree on the 99%. Many customers buy hard drives only in pairs. Mirroring is the easiest form of backup.
This is just not something which is worth worrying about, much less spending money on. Save your money for the thing your kid actually needs.
+1
Or even better...spend the money on a vasectomy. It isn't fair to have a child who will be severely disadvantaged in this world by a naive, scared, lazy parent. You shouldn't have kids.
Also clean your gutters.
Youngin. Java didn't exist when I took AP comp sci. :)
Youngin. AP comp sci didn't exist when I went to high school.
As to the GP's post, if coding is "repetitive tedious, and fuckin boring", it's because you are repetitive, tedious, and boring.
The main purpose of programming is to eliminate human repetition.
If you can't figure out how to eliminate repetitive coding, you aren't a real programmer. Just a hack.
Did you miss the link to the story about the 60% drop on active users that was posted 10 days ago?
Nope. But you apparently you failed to follow the link.
Ask yourself: How in the world would a dodgy little Indian SEO consultancy have access to Google's numbers.
Answer: They wouldn't. The article was a complete fabrication, and Facebook has already been called out for planting such PR fabrications.
Wake up, tool.
They do have the name that I usually go by online...It's the name that I've been using online from before the internet was open to the public
If you've used the same handle for more than 20 years...you might as well have used your social security number, or passport number, or whatever unique number your government has assigned to you.
The day I join Social Networking is when I can host my own personal P2P SNS that does not allow any huge corporation like Google to analyze my personal data and relationships.
It's not easy.
Hosting a wiki or forum for all of your friends and family is quite easy these days. The software has been free & turn-key for most of the last decade.
Hosting your own listserv is even simpler and more inclusive. Do you have something to share with your social network? Just email it to the list address. Want to keep up with the latest from your network? Just read the emails from the list address.
Pretty much everyone has email. Relatively few folks have accounts on facebook and other "social network" sites.
Facebook and its ilk exist solely because the majority of people are too lazy to manage their own list of friends.
Facebook has reached a level where the user base is roughly estimated to cover around 37% of the total world population
Whuck?
Facebook recently claimed to have 800 million users, which (if true) would be about 11% of the 6.97 billion people on this planet.
A more realistic estimate is that Facebook has at most 100 million unique, active users.
"unique" means we're counting individual people, not all of the accounts that each person has.
"active" means that they've posted something on FB in the last 30 days.
That brings it down to less than 1½% of the world population.
Microwaves are not made of magic. They do not cook things from the 'inside out', as advertisements would have you believe.
I've never seen an advertisement claiming that microwaves cook from the "inside out". Have you?
Microwave ovens can seem to cook some foods from the inside-out because:
1) Many foods have a denser interior, which absorbs more of the energy. The classic example is a jelly donut.
2) The outside of the food is cooled by convection and conduction with its environment; the inside is not.
I dunno if #1 applies for human bodies, but #2 certainly does.
Also consider that your heat receptors (nerve endings) and your cooling system (sweat glands) are both on your skin, not on your insides. So microwave radiation can easily damage your insides before your skin registers it as "damaging".
It's like blaming the city planners that New Orleans was not hurricane proof.
I hate to tell you...but actually...the New Orleans city planners were to blame.
For roughly the first 200 years of its existence, New Orleans was built on the high ground. Then in the 20th century, they started pumping out the swamps to create large amounts of "real estate" below sea level.
I know...the Dutch have done this very successfully...but the Dutch did not try to reclaim swamps on the delta of a massive river that is constantly trying to find a new path.
For more than 50 years, anyone with half a clue knew that the flooding and large-scale destruction of New Orleans was inevitable. Katrina just happened to be the storm that did it. But it was absolutely no surprise. And the blame lays squarely on the shoulders of the city planners, for creating real estate that they ~knew~ could never be defended.
HDD prices are already increasing due to the increasing scarcity of some rare earth magnets.
Do you have any reference for this besides the /. article two months ago, which simply parroted the article from some unknown random website?
I just bought a couple of 2TB external (USB2) hard drives for $80 each, including shipping and cables and wall warts. Six months ago, they cost $100 each without shipping.
Seems to me, prices are still dropping.
Perhaps this Thai flood will provide an excuse for price inflation...but I'll believe it when I see it.
Replacing Keyboards... what is this the 90s? Warranty your crap. Frankenstein laptops are not cool.
If you think it's "cool" to own a disposable laptop, and take it to the Apple store where a "genius" will take several days to "fix" it for you under warranty, and then you can throw it away when your warranty expires, that is your consumer prerogative.
Keyboard errors are the most common laptop failure. This is not surprising when you consider that there are about 100 precision switches in your keyboard.
Failures aside, sometimes you want a brand-new keyboard for aesthetic reasons. There is nothing "Frankenstein" about replacing a laptop keyboard with a new OEM keyboard. For our Latitudes and Thinkpads, I keep spare keyboards on the shelf in case a key starts sticking (this has happened several times over the years), or the trackpoint or mouse buttons wear out (hasn't happened, but the buttons can get noisier/squeakier with age), or the keys just get too shiny. New keyboards cost about $30 for a Latitude, and $50 for a Thinkpad, on ebay.
Our household also has a MacBook that we use for Final Cut. Based on my experience with the MBP, I am not looking forward to the day when I have to replace the keyboard.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that you are a "1 laptop" or "1 laptop + 1 desktop" kind of consumer, probably with no family/kids, so you don't have much experience maintaining a small fleet of computers. Believe me, the Macs are a PITA to maintain compared to the others.
Studies exist to show that Mac users are less of a burden on IT Support departments. Less of a burden means that you can be laid off or outsourced. Sorry... its true
I've never worked in an IT department. Have you? I have, however, managed several dozen Macs and PCs for my own use over the years. My comments are based on personal experience with those machines.
Lenovo had never made a PC like that until recently. Apple goes for functional features as opposed to novel features. I don't want a laptop with tons of shady features. Nobody uses the tablet mode and the stylus because the laptop/tablet form-factor is just dumb.
My X60t is a 5-year old design, not exactly "recent".
The 3-button trackpoint dates back the first Thinkpads about 20 years ago...around the same time that Apple was releasing the first PowerBooks (which btw were my choice of laptops for most of the 1990s).
Mobile graphic designers/illustrators are among the many folks who would disagree with your irrational judgement that a high-precision, pressure-sensitive, active stylus tablet is "dumb".
You have obviously never owned one of these machines.
All your history crap? To prove what?
If you can stretch your attention span back more than one post...I was replying to a post that said Apple had always catered to the consumer.
This is simply not true. For most of Apple's history, they catered to the technophile, or the high-level executive, or higher education, or the creative professional (the point of this article). The consumer focus only started with the iMac and iBook in 1998/1999, i.e., less than 1/3 of Apple's lifetime.
Now, get off my lawn. :)
RIM: "As a show of...appreciation for your patience during the recent service disruptions, umm...here's a sandwich!"
Customer: "But-"
RIM: "Thanks for coming everybody! Goodnight!"
Customer: "Noooo! Wait!"
RIM: "What? You got your sandwich!"
The barrier to entry is practically insurmountable due to the network effect.
Not really.
Facebook's temporary success was mostly due to the fact that they targeted college students. The college years are when most people start to form their lifelong "social networks". The 20's are when most people refine and petrify those networks.
However...every year, rough 140,000,000 people are born on this planet. If you target this year's 140M new high school seniors, or 140M new college freshmen, with a new and better "social networking" service, they will jump on it, because their social connections are still in flux, and the social overlap across years at those ages is relatively small.
If anything, the new HS seniors and college freshmen will pull older college freshmen and sophomores and juniors over to their new "social networking" service.
The first mover advantage simply does not apply here. Facebook is doomed. The only question was whether Goldman Sachs could make a few $100M's off of Facebook before it disappears. And that is exactly what they did with their "special purpose investment vehicle" back in January of this year. Dumb money paid those $100M's for no promises. Restribution of the stupid wealth. The next 12 months is the end game.
Lawyers coming after you is an entirely different scenario from personal data collection.
Like I said, go read your ISP's ToS, or privacy policy, or whatever they call it.
Chances are, your ISP logs whatever they want from your traffic. That information is proven valuable, and companies are in business to make money, so they will exploit it. Unless you personally know and trust the board & management of your ISP, you have absolutely no reason to trust the company.
Go play your teenaged games with someone less experienced.
From your replies, I'm fairly sure that I have at least 10 years more experience than you. Perhaps even 20 or 30 years more experience.
Unless you run all of your Internet traffic through a very sophisticated & trusted anonymizing proxy, every website that you visit knows your ISP. Plus they can "fingerprint" your specific machine with at least 95% confidence.
Wake up.
My post above contains a great deal of verifiable factual information, but it was irrationally down-modded by some Apple zealot who did not want to hear the truth.
If you have points, please mod it back up.
Thanks.
...still require a court order to start sniffing someone's network traffic without their consent, which they can can grant by simply accepting the terms of service.
FTFY. Go read the fine print on your terms of service. Even better, post a link to the ToS for your wonderfully-private ISP.
-----
my provider (no, I won't tell you who)
That's a very strange statement. Why can't you name your mythical power-to-the-people ISP?
D'oh!
I meant to say W-4 form.
All else still applies.
I think you mean your W-2 form. You know, the form that all American wage-slaves sign, to tell their slave-master how much of their paycheck should automatically go to the government.
Logically, I'm not sure why anyone would want to sign a privacy agreement that is attached to their agreement to pay money. IMHO they should pay you if they want your private information.
But of course it doesn't work that way. All it takes is for the sheeple to remain ignorant. Witness the recent 4-year extension of the USA-PATRIOT Act.
Besides, the sheeple have proven themselves to be remarkably stupid when it comes to actively signing away their life savings to "financial institutions" in the form of mortgages, retirement accounts, etc.
Just keeping watching those TV shows with a laugh track. They will tell you what to do.
Only if your ISP sucks. Mine lets me do whatever the hell I want with my space
Not sure what you mean by "my space". Your account on myspace.com?
I was talking about your network traffic,. Which, for most folks, goes through a cable or phone line and various routers that do guarantee any privacy whatsoever. Unless your traffic is encrypted, which for most folks is not the case unless they are sending a password or credit card or bank account number. And even then, you can see from the logs that there was a certain amount of traffic from X to Y at time Z, even if you can't read it.
Your ISP has access to far more information than any web network like Facebook, Google, etc.
Please do tell us more about your ISP, and their contractual agreement to anonymize all of your network traffic. Who are they? Where are they? How much do they charge for that level of privacy?
Please mod parent up, for factually responding to GP's uninformed challenge. Thank you.
Today, aesthetic quirks aside, the only difference between a Macbook and a PC laptop is the Macbook's ability to natively run OS X.
Also...the PC laptops are cheaper, easier to maintain, and offer a broader range of features and quality components than the MBs.
For example: I'm writing this on a Thinkpad X60t, which has a tablet-convertible display, Wacom digitizer (active, pressure-sensitve stylus), touchscreen, 3-button mouse, IBM trackpoint, BOE-Hydis AFFS+ LCD (better than IPS)...and it weighs about 3½ pounds.
Apple has never made any machine that comes remotely close to that level of functionality and quality.
And then there is maintenance to consider. Ever have a keyboard key stick or fail on a MBP keyboard? Apple Store wants $200+ to fix it. And with good reason. The MacBooks are built to be disposable devices. Replacing a keyboard requires not only a heap of screws/fasteners, and removal of various subcomponents, but also some adhesives, and some bend & break tabs.
On our Thinkpads, I've replaced keyboards in less than 1 minute, 4 screws. On Dell laptops, 30 seconds, 2 screws. Hard drive, 1 screw. Memory, 2 screws. Etc. IBM and Dell designed their computers to be maintained. Apple did not.
Apple has, and hopefully always be, about making profit by catering to the consumer. Let's not get deluded about that.
As long as you mean the "highest-end" consumer.
From it's very beginning, Apple has charged a heavy premium for their products, and targeted them at the top 5% of consumers. The iPod and iPhone are radical changes from Apple's historical market. But...they still have that "high end" residue.
Historically:
The Apple IIe was the longest-lived Apple computer. Released 1983 for $1400, competing against the equally-capable Commodore 64 which was released 1982 for $595. The Apple IIe was produced for 10 years. I don't have sales numbers for the IIe only, but all Apple II models combined sold only 5-6 million units. By contrast, the single model C64 sold around 15 million units.
The Apple Lisa cost $10,000 in 1983. That's $22,000 in 2011 dollars. Not exactly a "consumer" product, unless the average consumer thinks a computer should cost as much as their car.
The first Macintosh, in 1984, cost $2500. Somewhat more than $5000 in today's dollars. But by then they had competition in the PC space, which cost much much less.
Over the years I have owned & used many Apple computers...Apple II series, Mac Plus/SE, Mac II models, PowerBooks (including that nifty dockable PowerBook Duo 230, etc. Since the mid-1990s, they have ALWAYS cost more and delivered less functionality than high-end PCs. So I went from being a mostly Apple user, to a mixed Apple/PC user, to a mostly PC user.
Portable devices are a brave new world. Apple has a very clear lead in design & technology & marketing & retail clout right now. I love my iPhone, much as I loved my first Mac and first PowerBook. But I totally expect that it will be replaced by a cheaper, more flexible system in about 5 years.