Here we go again. Copy/Paste from my last smackdown, with some relevant tweaks:
Hardware costs be damned. Hardware is a commodity, particularly in the PC world where a $474 Dell with is far less useful and will go obsolete far more quickly than a $1049 mac. The mac also has DVD/CDRw as opposed to just CD-Rw, has Firewire, a flatscreen display, Radeon 9200 32MB as opposed to integrated Intel Extreme video, G4 as opposed to Celeron D, and OS X as opposed to XP. Why is the $1049 Mac much much much much better than the $474 Windows box? Because Apple does not make low end machines. Duh.
Time is what has real value. And Windows on x86 is only cheaper than OS X if your time has no value. You might think that by sitting down and playing with OS X a little you can figure out whether or not it's worth your while. But I call BS. It's not true.
"Playing" does not acclimatize you to the workings of the system. If you are good at using Windows and not good at using OS X, then you will be faster on Windows. If you are good at using both, then you will be faster on OS X due to time saved through a more efficient and better designed user environment combined with fewer maintenance needs. Other applications will not steal focus, exposé allows you to access your needed applications more quickly. I still find it astonishing that Microsoft has not streamlined the entering and selection of multiple network configuration through a simple interface. Most people don't know how or want to create scripted netsh commands. And you don't waste your time worrying about patching and rebooting for worm avoidance, keeping your lusers out of IE for spyware avoidance, maintaining firewall rules, and keeping your antivirus up to date. Windows is becoming more and more annoying because you have to manage all kinds of little things in order to keep it safe, secure and working smoothly. You don't have to worry about any of this on a mac and so your time is spent doing your work instead of maintaining the system.
A lot of people think that this is BS, and you can just plug in a new XP box and it works fine, just like OS X. But again I call BS.
If you want to just plug into the power and the network, I hope that you are behind a router or firewall or a mac/linux box sharing the connection, because just plugging an XP box into a broadband connection will get you owned by a worm in under an hour, even if you do absolutely nothing. This is because XP has numerous critical vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to completely compromise a default install of the OS. This is of much safer with a Mac (but of course not perfectly safe with a Mac or Linux or anything else.) If you want to do that with XP, you'll have to get hundreds of MBs of updates (I hope you download faster than the worms find you), and turn off your network messenger to avoid the popups, shut off your uPnP to avoid vulnerabilities, and probably get a firewall set up because it's next to impossbile to close all ports on a windows box.
And when you are done with the mac, you can sell it of course. My iBook is 20 months old now and on eBay it's still going for 40-45% of what I purchased it for. Can you sell an x86 box for 40-45% of its original purchase price after 20 months of use?
Don't get me wrong, I have Windows 2000, Linux and Mac machines. I use each one for what it's good at. And the mac is good for getting work done. And I have found that when it comes down to doing work, if you are good at using all systems, the Mac is by far the least intrusive and just gets out of the way so you can do what you're doing. My primary box is a Win2k/SuSE desktop. My primary notebook is the iBook.
Of course, you can indeed patch up your XP box to make it almost as safe as a Mac, requiring plenty of time installing the patches and installing/configuring third party software. And this takes a lot of time. How many $/h is your time worth? What's the difference in price between a Mac and Windows box (even though it is totally an apples and oranges comparison to begin with?)
x86 is only cheaper than mac if your time has no value.
"I can already play it on Windows, but for less money. Why would I switch?"
Firstly, I don't agree with this point because the 'windows is cheaper' retort only works for the tiny fraction of the population that is composed of geeks. Only if your time is worth next to nothing or you are an extremely skilled geek can you afford to spend all the time necessary to buy parts, know what parts to buy, know how to put them together, build, install the os, patch, secure, update, and maintain a windows machine. I could, and have in the past gone on at length about this, but that's not the subject at hand.
Getting back on topic, I still wouldn't game on the mac. One of the main advantages of apple's machines is that they have a much longer useful life than windows boxes. You need a leading edge machine to get good performance in the latest games, and gaming nullifies that advantage because a three year old mac is still good for almost every common task, except playing new games.
"I honestly don't see how Costco copes with its lenient return policy. The number of returns, esp on software that are just "Bought it, burned it, returned it" or "bough it, fucked it up, returned it" have to be astronomical"
Some of the hardware just goes out on the shelves. About half of the Plextor PX-712A DVD burners at the Costco on Gateway Park Drive in Kitchener, ON, Canada are clearly not new. I'm talking dented, ripped up boxes, sloppily repaired with packing tape. This is a new thing, and I do not recall ever seeing something like this at Costco before the Plextor PX-708A burners. (I did return my own 708A there, as it suffered from problems reading all CD/CD-R/CD-Rw discs. This problem was reported by numerous people on CDFreaks, and there was actually a pinned thread about that problem in the Plextor forum.)
I guess one way that Costco can handle the rate of returns is through the profits on their membership fees.
Up until recently, a large bulk of North America's ATM's ran OS/2, but the service contracts and support from IBM started to run out. Alas, some banks chose to pick up Microsoft for their new ATMs.
"I know of no store who will take an item back after the manufacturers warrenty expires (90 days in this case) without an extended warrenty having been purchased."
Costco. They have the best return policy of any store I have ever visited. My cousin bought a camera at Costco in Canada, and then returned to the Caribbean and then moved to the UK. After the 1 year warranty was up, the camera started turning on and off all by itself, extending and retracting the lens, and doing all kinds of madness. Eventually visiting Canada again with the original receipt, we took it there and explained what was happening. Costco refunded the full price of the camera. No fuss. No muss. In cash.
I always try to get my electronics gear there because I know with absolute certainty that if the products acts up, I can get my money back, no questions asked.
"one way to combat this problem is look from the other end, we should educate the public and discourage people from doing any business with online sellers. consumers should be suspicious when such emails appear. i personally think this would help reduce spam"
Keep in mind that very nearly 50% of people are more stupid than the average person. Even after lots of education, the very stupid 0.1% at the bottom will still buy things from spam. And that's all it takes for spamming to become profitable.
"Montreal, as in Quebec? Didn't you guys want to cecede from CANADA? Why did I think that push wasn't so Quebec could join the US?"
LOL, one of the reasons Québec tried to separate was because they wantead to form a 'distinct' society based on their own culture and such. (The legal terms they wanted to abide by after were bordering on hilarious.) Joining the US was the last thing on their agenda.
"Come to think of it, is that the largest border between two countries in the world?"
Not sure, but it is most definitely the largest undefended border. (But customs on both sides is a pain. I've had more trouble from then CDN officers myself, and I am a citizen!)
"Will somebody PLEASE explain to me why people complain about Slashdot not rendering properly in Firefox? Seriously. I am not a troll. I have used nothing but firefox in the last year, updated regularly, and I have yet to see a single problem as described by so many people."
Maybe you are just lucky? I see the problem all the time. It's very obvious and impossible to miss. The main text area is shifted to the left and conspicuously overlaps the left sidebar by a variable amount. Ususally hitting back and then forward corrects it.
" or, maybe they realized that you hitting the refresh button brings in more ad revenue and therefore they will not fix it."
Except that firefox users will simply block ads.osdn.com. Actually I forgot slashdot had banners until I read your comment.:) It's been years since I saw a banner on this site.
"When will Firefox render slashdot properly? I still have the page text overlapping the margins, and about 9 times out of 10 when I submit a comment or click to read into a thread, I get a page full of crap and have to reload a few times."
Whenever slashdot supports web standards, obviously. This site is terrible when it comes to using standards compliant code. In other news, IE is generally better at rendering sites with malformed code than FireFox. (IE is still behind FF in standards compliance of course.)
For those who don't know ... what is this?
on
Netatalk 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's slashdotted now so see a google cache of the homepage.
"Netatalk is a freely-available, kernel level implementation of the AppleTalk Protocol Suite, originally for BSD-derived systems. A *NIX/*BSD system running netatalk is capable of serving many macintosh clients simultaneously as an AppleTalk router, AppleShare file server (AFP), *NIX/*BSD print server, and for accessing AppleTalk printers via Printer Access Protocol (PAP). Included are a number of minor printing and debugging utilities."
So if I understand the functionality correctly: Netatalk:OSX:: Samba:windows
"
I recently upgraded to a 754-pin Athlon64 3000+, and the hottest it's ever been is 51 C, a few degrees more than the room temperature of 43C. On a cooler night, with 100% CPU load for ~2.5 hours [2-pass XviD encoding], it peaked at 47 C. Quite impressive."
Are you aware that a 43C room temperature is incredibly hot? Standard room temperature in an office is 20C. A 47C room is like a scorching Texas day in the middle of summer.
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: 2
The argument about one button mice is a moot point. Just buy a multi-button mouse.
Have you ever tutored truly novice user? Someone with absolutely no clue about technology or computers in general? They constantly click the wrong button and get confused when a right click menu appears as opposed to opening the document or program. You have to keep reminding them that it's the left click unless otherwise indicated.
People like you and I are practically hardwired for dealing with computers, (heck I learned to type on a computer before I could write with a pencil.) But many many people out there do not instinctually click the appropriate mouse button, know how to react to different prompts, menus, windows, stimuli, depending on which window has focus, etc. It's hard to imagine what using a computer is like without these intuitive and deeply rooted understandings. Apple simplifies the number of possible responses to these things and reduces user confusion by reducing the number of possible responses.
And when the lusers graduate out of cluelessness, they can simply acquire a multi-button mouse.:)
" On a relatively up to date 10.2.8 running in a Mac on linux window as we speak, my user account cannot write into [Volume Name]: System:Library:StartupItems nor into its subdirectories"
Agreed. My fully patched 10.2.8 machine's admin account cannot write to this directory.
"As for Matrox, sure, they're still in the market... but barely compared with the big 2. I don't think open sourcing their drivers caused them problems (in fact, it may have helped keep them afloat), they simply didn't innovate as well as Nvidia and ATI. Look at the graphics workstations being pumped out today and you'll find that many of them now are using Nvidia's Quadro line."
Matrox is simply in a different market. They don't make money from high end gamers because that's not who they target.
Go to the Front Page of the Matrox site and you will see four items. Only one of them is Graphics Cards. And even in the graphics cards market, Matrox absolutely owns when it comes to dualhead and overall 2D picture quality, sharpeness and clarity. When doing high end video editing (i.e. rendering that is done by dedicated hardware that is separated from your video hardware,) a dualhead system with a matrox card and then dedicated realtime capture and rendering hardware owns the day. Matrox is a giant in both of these fields. (Though still I prefer Canopus for RT video hardware.)
And of course I haven't even touched the high end scientific imaging market, where Matrox provides its cameras, frame grabbers, etc. And there's medical imaging too where Matrox makes all kinds of stuff. These last three points (RT Video Rendering, scientific imaging and medical imaging) are areas that ATi and nVidia don't touch. That is why Matrox is not going away. They simply have a diverse line and are big in markets that the high end gaming companies rightfully don't touch.
"I get to ditch all my DVDs and the machines that can read them! W00T!"
Fortunately the wonderful thing about DVDs being a fully digital and cracked medium is that it will be very easy to copy them over to BluDisc-R whenever that becomes a commodity product.
"How feasable would it be to have devices support both formats, the same way most DVD-writers now are +/- R. Are blu-ray and hd dvd too different or could we end up seeing the same kind of thing where both formats are supported by most devices."
This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them (and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.)
But back to the topic at hand: The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people. The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing. They want to buy a movie and play it, not worry about if this disc will play on their type of player. When we have one unified standard, confusion is reduced, people cam just buy buy buy and made the industry happy. The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff, as opposed to teaching consumers that they need a different player for their Fox releases versus some other studio and then wondering why people don't buy any of these confusing and conflicting products.
Slashdot Mirror
"My company, ChinaForge.com helps businesses manufacture China."
"I'll take two Chinas, please."
Fool! Get your puns correct! Clearly, this is what his company helps other businesses manufacture. </joke>
*sigh*
Here we go again. Copy/Paste from my last smackdown, with some relevant tweaks:
Hardware costs be damned. Hardware is a commodity, particularly in the PC world where a $474 Dell with is far less useful and will go obsolete far more quickly than a $1049 mac. The mac also has DVD/CDRw as opposed to just CD-Rw, has Firewire, a flatscreen display, Radeon 9200 32MB as opposed to integrated Intel Extreme video, G4 as opposed to Celeron D, and OS X as opposed to XP. Why is the $1049 Mac much much much much better than the $474 Windows box? Because Apple does not make low end machines. Duh.
Time is what has real value. And Windows on x86 is only cheaper than OS X if your time has no value. You might think that by sitting down and playing with OS X a little you can figure out whether or not it's worth your while. But I call BS. It's not true.
"Playing" does not acclimatize you to the workings of the system. If you are good at using Windows and not good at using OS X, then you will be faster on Windows. If you are good at using both, then you will be faster on OS X due to time saved through a more efficient and better designed user environment combined with fewer maintenance needs. Other applications will not steal focus, exposé allows you to access your needed applications more quickly. I still find it astonishing that Microsoft has not streamlined the entering and selection of multiple network configuration through a simple interface. Most people don't know how or want to create scripted netsh commands. And you don't waste your time worrying about patching and rebooting for worm avoidance, keeping your lusers out of IE for spyware avoidance, maintaining firewall rules, and keeping your antivirus up to date. Windows is becoming more and more annoying because you have to manage all kinds of little things in order to keep it safe, secure and working smoothly. You don't have to worry about any of this on a mac and so your time is spent doing your work instead of maintaining the system.
A lot of people think that this is BS, and you can just plug in a new XP box and it works fine, just like OS X. But again I call BS.
If you want to just plug into the power and the network, I hope that you are behind a router or firewall or a mac/linux box sharing the connection, because just plugging an XP box into a broadband connection will get you owned by a worm in under an hour, even if you do absolutely nothing. This is because XP has numerous critical vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to completely compromise a default install of the OS. This is of much safer with a Mac (but of course not perfectly safe with a Mac or Linux or anything else.) If you want to do that with XP, you'll have to get hundreds of MBs of updates (I hope you download faster than the worms find you), and turn off your network messenger to avoid the popups, shut off your uPnP to avoid vulnerabilities, and probably get a firewall set up because it's next to impossbile to close all ports on a windows box.
And when you are done with the mac, you can sell it of course. My iBook is 20 months old now and on eBay it's still going for 40-45% of what I purchased it for. Can you sell an x86 box for 40-45% of its original purchase price after 20 months of use?
Don't get me wrong, I have Windows 2000, Linux and Mac machines. I use each one for what it's good at. And the mac is good for getting work done. And I have found that when it comes down to doing work, if you are good at using all systems, the Mac is by far the least intrusive and just gets out of the way so you can do what you're doing. My primary box is a Win2k/SuSE desktop. My primary notebook is the iBook.
Of course, you can indeed patch up your XP box to make it almost as safe as a Mac, requiring plenty of time installing the patches and installing/configuring third party software. And this takes a lot of time. How many $/h is your time worth? What's the difference in price
between a Mac and Windows box (even though it is totally an apples and oranges comparison to begin with?)
x86 is only cheaper than mac if your time has no value.
Firstly, I don't agree with this point because the 'windows is cheaper' retort only works for the tiny fraction of the population that is composed of geeks. Only if your time is worth next to nothing or you are an extremely skilled geek can you afford to spend all the time necessary to buy parts, know what parts to buy, know how to put them together, build, install the os, patch, secure, update, and maintain a windows machine. I could, and have in the past gone on at length about this, but that's not the subject at hand.
Getting back on topic, I still wouldn't game on the mac. One of the main advantages of apple's machines is that they have a much longer useful life than windows boxes. You need a leading edge machine to get good performance in the latest games, and gaming nullifies that advantage because a three year old mac is still good for almost every common task, except playing new games.
Some of the hardware just goes out on the shelves. About half of the Plextor PX-712A DVD burners at the Costco on Gateway Park Drive in Kitchener, ON, Canada are clearly not new. I'm talking dented, ripped up boxes, sloppily repaired with packing tape. This is a new thing, and I do not recall ever seeing something like this at Costco before the Plextor PX-708A burners. (I did return my own 708A there, as it suffered from problems reading all CD/CD-R/CD-Rw discs. This problem was reported by numerous people on CDFreaks, and there was actually a pinned thread about that problem in the Plextor forum.)
I guess one way that Costco can handle the rate of returns is through the profits on their membership fees.
Up until recently, a large bulk of North America's ATM's ran OS/2, but the service contracts and support from IBM started to run out. Alas, some banks chose to pick up Microsoft for their new ATMs.
Costco. They have the best return policy of any store I have ever visited. My cousin bought a camera at Costco in Canada, and then returned to the Caribbean and then moved to the UK. After the 1 year warranty was up, the camera started turning on and off all by itself, extending and retracting the lens, and doing all kinds of madness. Eventually visiting Canada again with the original receipt, we took it there and explained what was happening. Costco refunded the full price of the camera. No fuss. No muss. In cash.
I always try to get my electronics gear there because I know with absolute certainty that if the products acts up, I can get my money back, no questions asked.
Keep in mind that very nearly 50% of people are more stupid than the average person. Even after lots of education, the very stupid 0.1% at the bottom will still buy things from spam. And that's all it takes for spamming to become profitable.
Try it again with an Italian accent ;)
See also: "I AMA DILDO" (source)
Are you aware that the name "419 Scams" comes from section section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, which is used to prosecute these guys?
LOL, one of the reasons Québec tried to separate was because they wantead to form a 'distinct' society based on their own culture and such. (The legal terms they wanted to abide by after were bordering on hilarious.) Joining the US was the last thing on their agenda.
Not sure, but it is most definitely the largest undefended border. (But customs on both sides is a pain. I've had more trouble from then CDN officers myself, and I am a citizen!)
I work for the CDN government and I can see Dubya's site from the office. Yes, his site is viewable in Canada. :P
They're saying that US politics doesn't affect people outside of the US? Yeah, sure.
Maybe you are just lucky? I see the problem all the time. It's very obvious and impossible to miss. The main text area is shifted to the left and conspicuously overlaps the left sidebar by a variable amount. Ususally hitting back and then forward corrects it.
Except that firefox users will simply block ads.osdn.com. Actually I forgot slashdot had banners until I read your comment. :) It's been years since I saw a banner on this site.
Whenever slashdot supports web standards, obviously. This site is terrible when it comes to using standards compliant code. In other news, IE is generally better at rendering sites with malformed code than FireFox. (IE is still behind FF in standards compliance of course.)
"Netatalk is a freely-available, kernel level implementation of the AppleTalk Protocol Suite, originally for BSD-derived systems. A *NIX/*BSD system running netatalk is capable of serving many macintosh clients simultaneously as an AppleTalk router, AppleShare file server (AFP), *NIX/*BSD print server, and for accessing AppleTalk printers via Printer Access Protocol (PAP). Included are a number of minor printing and debugging utilities."
So if I understand the functionality correctly: Netatalk:OSX :: Samba:windows
I, for one, welcome our new 64-bit overlords!
Are you aware that a 43C room temperature is incredibly hot? Standard room temperature in an office is 20C. A 47C room is like a scorching Texas day in the middle of summer.
Have you ever tutored truly novice user? Someone with absolutely no clue about technology or computers in general? They constantly click the wrong button and get confused when a right click menu appears as opposed to opening the document or program. You have to keep reminding them that it's the left click unless otherwise indicated.
People like you and I are practically hardwired for dealing with computers, (heck I learned to type on a computer before I could write with a pencil.) But many many people out there do not instinctually click the appropriate mouse button, know how to react to different prompts, menus, windows, stimuli, depending on which window has focus, etc. It's hard to imagine what using a computer is like without these intuitive and deeply rooted understandings. Apple simplifies the number of possible responses to these things and reduces user confusion by reducing the number of possible responses.
And when the lusers graduate out of cluelessness, they can simply acquire a multi-button mouse. :)
Agreed. My fully patched 10.2.8 machine's admin account cannot write to this directory.
Matrox is simply in a different market. They don't make money from high end gamers because that's not who they target.
Go to the Front Page of the Matrox site and you will see four items. Only one of them is Graphics Cards. And even in the graphics cards market, Matrox absolutely owns when it comes to dualhead and overall 2D picture quality, sharpeness and clarity. When doing high end video editing (i.e. rendering that is done by dedicated hardware that is separated from your video hardware,) a dualhead system with a matrox card and then dedicated realtime capture and rendering hardware owns the day. Matrox is a giant in both of these fields. (Though still I prefer Canopus for RT video hardware.)
And of course I haven't even touched the high end scientific imaging market, where Matrox provides its cameras, frame grabbers, etc. And there's medical imaging too where Matrox makes all kinds of stuff. These last three points (RT Video Rendering, scientific imaging and medical imaging) are areas that ATi and nVidia don't touch. That is why Matrox is not going away. They simply have a diverse line and are big in markets that the high end gaming companies rightfully don't touch.
Fortunately the wonderful thing about DVDs being a fully digital and cracked medium is that it will be very easy to copy them over to BluDisc-R whenever that becomes a commodity product.
This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them (and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.)
But back to the topic at hand: The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people. The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing. They want to buy a movie and play it, not worry about if this disc will play on their type of player. When we have one unified standard, confusion is reduced, people cam just buy buy buy and made the industry happy. The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff, as opposed to teaching consumers that they need a different player for their Fox releases versus some other studio and then wondering why people don't buy any of these confusing and conflicting products.
Dear next-gen disc industry: ONE STANDARD PLEASE!