Can I ask you how a memeory leak occurs with a system using virtual memory? The application crashes with a fatal error -- as a result the memory is reclaimed by the VM. Do I have some large misconception reguarding the concepts?
Then you almost certainly have access to an x86 server of some sort. Put in X11 for OSX, and just SSH in to whatever you've got access to. If you don't know, ask the instructor. The benefit here is that you have the tools to build and run on the same machine the instructor. I'm not sure if Emacs has a x86 ASM highlight mode, though the feature is hardly nessecary.
Probably because the MOOX author's benchmarks for evaluating performance look at the software as a whole rather than particular uses that can be isolated and improved. Also, some of the benchmarks seem a bit fuzzy ("dragging it into the browser window and measuring its load speed"). Especially when considering a performance difference of less than 5 percent. Why not disclose what the actual numbers were too? It would certainly help us evaluate how much human error is involved in the testing process!
The other half of it is that the builds essentially just set a few compiler options to use opcodes that may not be used (SSE2?) for webbrowsing. Additionally, its possible that some of the optimizations are hurting the cache with bloated low level code. It would be interesting to see if the Intel compiler provided any stronger oomph, at a pure compile configuration level. But we don't have any Intel CPUs in the house.
Because some time ago,/. started putting stories in more than one category. For example, this story is in Linux, Apple and what appears to be Television. The only thing the OSX program can't do yet is record; it would be interesting to see a OSX backend that used iCal or something to record shows.
You know, my old K6-2/500 ran Debian and win98 quite well up till I accidentally fried it. Its no number cruncher, but I never noticed any problems with it for writing papers and browsing the web. Of course, it helps to have plenty of RAM (384 or so in my case).
I worked for a while at an insurance company doing data entry. You'd be surprised how little they really need (or how much they purchased). The whole affair was done over a telnet terminal to their mainframe. Of course, I was running that terminal on a brand new Win2K computer, 1.5Ghz at the time, and it was total overkill for typing in claims and filling in form letters telling policy holders their claim was less than the deductable.
That said, windows 98 was a real bitch to maintain. I bought a new video card and the driver installation managed to nuke the drivers.vxd or whatever its called that stores the rest of the drivers(!). I've seen Windows ME machines crippled by software installed on it like weatherbug and comet cursor and the like. Most companies take imaging the hard drives and keeping saved work off of those PCs. That's where productivity can really be lost, by not fighting off those gremlins.
Sounds like an enourmous misinterpretation of the concept of caching. As a multimedia programmer on the Cell, its likely you'll have sole jurisdiction over where stuff goes on your processor. Think of it like programmable cache management. Usually that's pretty stupid, because you want to write things back for longevity, but media is more transient--streams and whatnot. Barriers within that context would be cache levels.
But perhaps they've got some technical details (enough that they can count distinct features) that I can't find with a basic google search on the subject. It would certainly be out of Sony's previous style, though I understand they recently pulled their heads out of their collective asses and discovered that they were selling a loose metaphor of cars and crowbars at the same time, and came out with a public apology for sucking.
Either way, its proof that the masses don't know what the hell makes a great game. MGS2 is easily the worst of the lot, and rated the best!?! I suspect that the 3rd has some downwards rating force from those unimpressed with mgs2.
Even among broadband friends of mine, "Steam sucks." A coworker of mine said that after he discovered I had steam running in the background of my home computer. Eventually, the guy was like "So you actually paid for it? Oh."
I guess steam sucks for single player games, but I'd hate to go back to before steam and multiplayer. Its like apt-get for games, man. No more mirror gobbling, accidentally getting the european mod version BS.
Thats a great way to screw over German games again, you know. As it stands, the original version of halflife was banned in Germany for excessive gore, and they almost banned Counter-Strike.
Anyways, stop selling hl2 in Germany is always an option. If I recall correctly, Vivendi is contracted with Valve to provide Steam with HL2, and Valve currently is not impressed with Vivendi. Expect Valve to ask for slightly more than the fine to provide HL2 sans steam. I don't get all the ill will towards steam, but I presume much of it is predicated on not being able to play the game without paying Valve.
Everybody in the world comes up with a better one. For what amounts to promotional screenshots, you'd think they'd try to at least demonstrate how pretty it can be, even if does eat cycles and causes noticable lag / draw in. Is it just that they dont want to play favorites with the other author's choices?
Its been a while, but I'm pretty sure GNOME has already been using vector graphics for a long time. I recall my roommate doing a background in vector graphics, though that might have been an gdm login screen instead. It had a robot breating fire! Also, I'm pretty sure icons can be vector graphics as well. As for text, all I can really think of is sub pixel rendering, or whatever its called for X. There was an article not too long ago on the subject, just look for something like "cleartype linux."
If you're worried about long term longevity, I heartily recommend Debian. I believe their current stable version has been available for at least that long.
Yet another article about taking fun seriously, and trying to devise a grand unified theory of fun. I should start a pool on when someone conducts a game desgin study using a game with a single button that says "You Win" when clicked on as a control.
Games are difficult to quantify, especially as they're being pulled in so many different directions. Some Professors of Fun want to laud the advent of interactive storytelling and such nonsense (glorified choose your own adventures at best). Just a few days ago we a different opinion on/. on how awesome sequals are, because they add bigger explosions and more outrageous design built upon the backs of predecessors and competitors. And there's plenty more out there telling us how awful commercial games from the standard venues lack innovation.
If you can't figure it out, games are built on competition. All games have a kernel of this, whether overtly present or a computer simulation of such. Street Fighter was one of those early games that brought gaming to the masses. This was a game so popular it found its way into Burger King's in my neighborhood, a feat probably not achieved since Pong itself (another fine multiplayer game). The best games quickly recognize this, and abuse this property in Pavlovian fashion. Goldeneye probably pioneered the incredibly popular method of motivating players to complete and excel at single player campaigns with multiplayer unlockables. Before you consider how many great games have come and gone without a (good) multiplayer aspect, consider how much better they would have been if there HAD been one. Mario 64 is considered one of the best games ever on many metrics, yet even Nintendo was quick to add a multiplayer scenario that's main criticism is not being true to the rest of the game.
Making games fun then boils down to making games fair. Balanced, if you will. It doesn't matter how well scripted the cutscenes are, or how deep the plot is. What matters is that the game is fair. This is difficult to discover without extensive testing. This is a great argument for open source games, which often are available to players long before the game reaches some sort of final version and undergo a significant number of tweaks and revisions to find a perfect balance.
Jesus, did you even bother to look at all for reasons to own a DS before you bought it? Its more than just a geek sex symbol you know. Well, at least it should be. Turns out none of the good games will be available until at least March, and even then, there's nothing definitively good. I'll give it a second look when Metroid and DS Wars are out, or maybe if that dslinux stuff pans out. Till then, I'll just let my money sit in the bank and earn interest, let the DS hardware depriciate on the shelf, and continue to enjoy all the great games on the GBA. I wholly recommend Boktai (either one), though I don't know how well it works with the DS.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of interesting possiblities on that thing, between the wireless and the touch screen. The problem is that it's gonna take time to get a product to market that actually uses these things effectively. The first will probably be either Animal Forest DS (in case it wasn't obvious, this is part of the DemaSked portfolio) or Metroid. In the meantime, Nintendo's hoping that their early release will help stave off the PSP, with yet more rehashes from almost ten years ago. Fortunately, when the PSP finally hits you'll have a nice array of games to brag about to those punks.
Also, Mr. Driller was a great GBC game, and I while I haven't played it on the DS, it sounds like a decent grab.
Well, the curmudegon article does a bang up job introducing you to the legal theory of 2000. Fortunately, nothings changed. But he fails to make ANY argument as to how ALL emulation is Illegal. To do so would require a proof that Nintendo's own emu's offered to developers were themselves illegal (they arent) or a less pedantic argument that emulators themselves are illegal without the permission of the important parties (generally the court cases have shown this to not be true). I think the author would have been more correct in saying "all commercial ROMs are illegal (without explicit permission)". Writing and using emulators for the sake of writing software for the platforms (often done for cost or effiency) is a whole 'nother can and is also actively pursued by some emulation enthusiasts.
Its just what the anandtech people said; I could be mistaken on that. It would be neat to upgrade, although I suspect that larger drives would be quite expensive in that form, and possibly give off considerable heat.
Anandtech had a feature on the mac mini; you can look them up and see for yourself that you won't be able to fit anything more than a 2.5" drive in there. Hell, they were lucky that they could fit in a new 512 ram chip with a heat spreader! The other thing to watch out for is Mac's custom special drive interface. I think you can find some other drives that fit the interface and the space they give you, but, as usual, expect to pay out the nose for it.
I think what he means is that copyright is not nessecarily a natural right, and not exactly a property right either. Some fringe legal scholars and armchair theorists say that property rights give owners the right to "exclude people," and that the theft of property denies the owner use of his property while an infringer of copyright need not diminsh the intrinsic value of the work. One such thinker includes Jefferson, while describing the majesty of knowledge, drawing an analogy to fire and candles; that by lighting the candle of anothers with your own flame, your own is not diminished.
Furthermore, one might suppose that copyright isn't a natural right at all! Man lived for several hundred years (likely much more) without a notion of copyright. In fact, in the past people were often given entirely to the profession of copying another's works verbatim. They were not called "pirates" but rather "scribes," who's efforts protected what they saw as valuable knowledge. You could also recall that copyright was originally a device to silence critics of the British throne, now perverted by the bookmakers for their profits and embraced by their contemporaries for the same.
Does an author have exclusive domain over his own works, and the right to make derivative works? If so, this flies in the face of hundreds of years of human endevors building upon one another. Musicians will tell you that it is quite rare to create a truly original piece. We say that it is frequent that we quote one another, without attribution. We steal ideas and concepts and bring in new ones. Certainly, Beowulf was not the work of a single man (in fact it is widely speculated that one of the aforementioned scribes did a quite a number on it), yet there is no wide damnation in any field concerning permission of these people. Furthermore, if copyright is a natural law of property, why do they expire? Certainly you must admit that eventual copyright expiration is in the public's interest!
Copyright isn't a "legal fiction" but it does make a bargin with the creators in the world; give temporary control over your work in exchange for sharing it with the world. When so many (napster-heads, fan fiction authors, warez distributers, cover bands, photoshoppers, etc) refuse implicitly recognize the legal authority of a law, one has to question its status as "natural law."
Well, I can't really gauge the size differences between the two, since I haven't ever really looked at either one. So I'll take your word on that.
But I don't know how you got 1137. The secondary gives you a lot more pricing options (and also seems to give you more CPUs on the cheaper side). I ditched most everything and came in around 530 dollars. One thing to remember is that the page doesn't refresh the total in realtime. You have to scroll down to the bottom and click "refresh total." Completely stupid, but that's Dell for ya.
Actually, take a look at the Dell Optiplex SX280 (I hope thats the one I'm thinking of). I've seen a few Dell machines in offices, where the PC basically that small as the Mac mini. Judging by the Dell.com website, the system is about a hundred dollars more expensive, but the additional upgrades available are far FAR cheaper. Want a gig of RAM? It will cost you nearly three times less than the mini. An 80 gig HDD? 20 more bucks, and if you want/need more, its available for a reasonable price. So far the only downside appears to be that its by Dell.
Interestingly enough, Dell's webpage appears to advertise different prices for the thing depending on whether you're a small or medium/large business. You'd think the pricing is somewhat represented by volume discount, except that large businesses are charged a higher amount than "Small businesses." If the Mac mini does well, you might see them start to prune some of the costs out of it and start offering it to consumers as well (it comes with things like a mouse and keyboard, no discount offered for not taking it). They already have a couple of "cheap" models, so certainly there's some worry that they'd be displacing themselves rather than competitors.
75 isn't a raw deal. Its not the best price out there, but hey, at least you didnt spring for a gigabyte. That's where they suddenly hike the price up ridiculusly, presumably to keep people from just buying the cheapest mac and sticking an assload of RAM in it to make up for the differences. Bravo, Apple.
No shit man. I'd rather have seen what chips this thing had than an in depth microscopic of the fucking USB cover. Congratulations AppleMatters, way to blow up an iPod.
I have to agree especially within the home user segment. People think of platform wars like Linux versus OSX versus windows and compare it to a well known field, with similarities: video games. Everyone (apparently) knows that what drives console sales is "killer apps." That's why you see exclusive deals only for PS2 or gamecube or xbox, etc. The HUGE difference here is that most people don't go out and buy a second computer like they might a 150 dollar game system. Switching means giving up all of the known goods you have right now, in favor of wasting a weekend with a machine that causes you so much anxiety when it doesn't work. Buying a new console means dropping 200 dollars on a console and a new game and wasting a weekend ignoring your every problem, distracted by a game. Notice the significant difference?
If you're reading this, the above argument doesn't make much sense to you. "Linux installers have made huge leaps of progress in the last few years, and you can always use WINE or dual boot!" For most home users burning a.iso is a confusing process, let alone tinkering with dual booting or emulators. The other barrier against a "killer app" argument is that there's a learning curve over the status quo. A whole new slew of terms (CUPS? ALSA?), and an uncanny likeness to windows with hidden trapdoors (control-alt backspace, x mouse behaviors, etc), quickly give people the impression that they'll have to learn something Different, and therefore its Harder than doing Nothing.
As far as offices go, you'd be surprised how many places simply use windows as a terminal emulator to an old text based system for their various needs. The killer app isn't going to happen for them; these people are focused on reliability #1. Expectations for IT teams are to pump up efficiency 1% a year, or better. Sure, we both think that businesses could find a couple percentage points of efficiency in OSS and Linux, but taking a windows office and migrating takes a buttload of planning to make sure there isn't a single percentage point lopping hiccup in the transition. Six months with a Linux or Solaris in the workplace experienced staff, probably a year if your simply tinkers with Gentoo or Debian at home. It gets much worse if you have to train your people. Does Joe want to learn Linux? Is he capable of learning to administer one?
Sure. Its not nearly as Apple-like as you would imagine. Whoops, I just moved my start bar to the top of the screen in XP. Hope apple doesn't sue. Seriously, though, the visual appearance of GNOME is very malleable. Hell, I don't think the basic theme does the group justice. But even with a very pretty theme, buttonset, icons and wallpaper, its still a far cry from the intricacies of Apple's GUI. You don't see 90% of the menus dissapear when you click on the background, and the applications themselves dont set the upper panel content. Its really more like the Windows setup with the start bar on top rather than bottom. Unfortunately, I haven't used gnome since like 2.4 or 2.6.
Not to mention, Apple petitioning GNOME would be a really fast way to build ill will towards their beleaguered stance in the market. And lets not forget old Xerox;).
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Can I ask you how a memeory leak occurs with a system using virtual memory? The application crashes with a fatal error -- as a result the memory is reclaimed by the VM. Do I have some large misconception reguarding the concepts?
So then, how Did Microsoft Office end up defeating WordPerfect?
Then you almost certainly have access to an x86 server of some sort. Put in X11 for OSX, and just SSH in to whatever you've got access to. If you don't know, ask the instructor. The benefit here is that you have the tools to build and run on the same machine the instructor. I'm not sure if Emacs has a x86 ASM highlight mode, though the feature is hardly nessecary.
Probably because the MOOX author's benchmarks for evaluating performance look at the software as a whole rather than particular uses that can be isolated and improved. Also, some of the benchmarks seem a bit fuzzy ("dragging it into the browser window and measuring its load speed"). Especially when considering a performance difference of less than 5 percent. Why not disclose what the actual numbers were too? It would certainly help us evaluate how much human error is involved in the testing process!
The other half of it is that the builds essentially just set a few compiler options to use opcodes that may not be used (SSE2?) for webbrowsing. Additionally, its possible that some of the optimizations are hurting the cache with bloated low level code. It would be interesting to see if the Intel compiler provided any stronger oomph, at a pure compile configuration level. But we don't have any Intel CPUs in the house.
Because some time ago, /. started putting stories in more than one category. For example, this story is in Linux, Apple and what appears to be Television. The only thing the OSX program can't do yet is record; it would be interesting to see a OSX backend that used iCal or something to record shows.
You know, my old K6-2/500 ran Debian and win98 quite well up till I accidentally fried it. Its no number cruncher, but I never noticed any problems with it for writing papers and browsing the web. Of course, it helps to have plenty of RAM (384 or so in my case).
I worked for a while at an insurance company doing data entry. You'd be surprised how little they really need (or how much they purchased). The whole affair was done over a telnet terminal to their mainframe. Of course, I was running that terminal on a brand new Win2K computer, 1.5Ghz at the time, and it was total overkill for typing in claims and filling in form letters telling policy holders their claim was less than the deductable.
That said, windows 98 was a real bitch to maintain. I bought a new video card and the driver installation managed to nuke the drivers.vxd or whatever its called that stores the rest of the drivers(!). I've seen Windows ME machines crippled by software installed on it like weatherbug and comet cursor and the like. Most companies take imaging the hard drives and keeping saved work off of those PCs. That's where productivity can really be lost, by not fighting off those gremlins.
Sounds like an enourmous misinterpretation of the concept of caching. As a multimedia programmer on the Cell, its likely you'll have sole jurisdiction over where stuff goes on your processor. Think of it like programmable cache management. Usually that's pretty stupid, because you want to write things back for longevity, but media is more transient--streams and whatnot. Barriers within that context would be cache levels.
But perhaps they've got some technical details (enough that they can count distinct features) that I can't find with a basic google search on the subject. It would certainly be out of Sony's previous style, though I understand they recently pulled their heads out of their collective asses and discovered that they were selling a loose metaphor of cars and crowbars at the same time, and came out with a public apology for sucking.
Either way, its proof that the masses don't know what the hell makes a great game. MGS2 is easily the worst of the lot, and rated the best!?! I suspect that the 3rd has some downwards rating force from those unimpressed with mgs2.
Even among broadband friends of mine, "Steam sucks." A coworker of mine said that after he discovered I had steam running in the background of my home computer. Eventually, the guy was like "So you actually paid for it? Oh."
I guess steam sucks for single player games, but I'd hate to go back to before steam and multiplayer. Its like apt-get for games, man. No more mirror gobbling, accidentally getting the european mod version BS.
Thats a great way to screw over German games again, you know. As it stands, the original version of halflife was banned in Germany for excessive gore, and they almost banned Counter-Strike.
Anyways, stop selling hl2 in Germany is always an option. If I recall correctly, Vivendi is contracted with Valve to provide Steam with HL2, and Valve currently is not impressed with Vivendi. Expect Valve to ask for slightly more than the fine to provide HL2 sans steam. I don't get all the ill will towards steam, but I presume much of it is predicated on not being able to play the game without paying Valve.
Everybody in the world comes up with a better one. For what amounts to promotional screenshots, you'd think they'd try to at least demonstrate how pretty it can be, even if does eat cycles and causes noticable lag / draw in. Is it just that they dont want to play favorites with the other author's choices?
Its been a while, but I'm pretty sure GNOME has already been using vector graphics for a long time. I recall my roommate doing a background in vector graphics, though that might have been an gdm login screen instead. It had a robot breating fire! Also, I'm pretty sure icons can be vector graphics as well. As for text, all I can really think of is sub pixel rendering, or whatever its called for X. There was an article not too long ago on the subject, just look for something like "cleartype linux."
If you're worried about long term longevity, I heartily recommend Debian. I believe their current stable version has been available for at least that long.
Yet another article about taking fun seriously, and trying to devise a grand unified theory of fun. I should start a pool on when someone conducts a game desgin study using a game with a single button that says "You Win" when clicked on as a control.
/. on how awesome sequals are, because they add bigger explosions and more outrageous design built upon the backs of predecessors and competitors. And there's plenty more out there telling us how awful commercial games from the standard venues lack innovation.
Games are difficult to quantify, especially as they're being pulled in so many different directions. Some Professors of Fun want to laud the advent of interactive storytelling and such nonsense (glorified choose your own adventures at best). Just a few days ago we a different opinion on
If you can't figure it out, games are built on competition. All games have a kernel of this, whether overtly present or a computer simulation of such. Street Fighter was one of those early games that brought gaming to the masses. This was a game so popular it found its way into Burger King's in my neighborhood, a feat probably not achieved since Pong itself (another fine multiplayer game). The best games quickly recognize this, and abuse this property in Pavlovian fashion. Goldeneye probably pioneered the incredibly popular method of motivating players to complete and excel at single player campaigns with multiplayer unlockables. Before you consider how many great games have come and gone without a (good) multiplayer aspect, consider how much better they would have been if there HAD been one. Mario 64 is considered one of the best games ever on many metrics, yet even Nintendo was quick to add a multiplayer scenario that's main criticism is not being true to the rest of the game.
Making games fun then boils down to making games fair. Balanced, if you will. It doesn't matter how well scripted the cutscenes are, or how deep the plot is. What matters is that the game is fair. This is difficult to discover without extensive testing. This is a great argument for open source games, which often are available to players long before the game reaches some sort of final version and undergo a significant number of tweaks and revisions to find a perfect balance.
Jesus, did you even bother to look at all for reasons to own a DS before you bought it? Its more than just a geek sex symbol you know. Well, at least it should be. Turns out none of the good games will be available until at least March, and even then, there's nothing definitively good. I'll give it a second look when Metroid and DS Wars are out, or maybe if that dslinux stuff pans out. Till then, I'll just let my money sit in the bank and earn interest, let the DS hardware depriciate on the shelf, and continue to enjoy all the great games on the GBA. I wholly recommend Boktai (either one), though I don't know how well it works with the DS.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of interesting possiblities on that thing, between the wireless and the touch screen. The problem is that it's gonna take time to get a product to market that actually uses these things effectively. The first will probably be either Animal Forest DS (in case it wasn't obvious, this is part of the DemaSked portfolio) or Metroid. In the meantime, Nintendo's hoping that their early release will help stave off the PSP, with yet more rehashes from almost ten years ago. Fortunately, when the PSP finally hits you'll have a nice array of games to brag about to those punks.
Also, Mr. Driller was a great GBC game, and I while I haven't played it on the DS, it sounds like a decent grab.
Well, the curmudegon article does a bang up job introducing you to the legal theory of 2000. Fortunately, nothings changed. But he fails to make ANY argument as to how ALL emulation is Illegal. To do so would require a proof that Nintendo's own emu's offered to developers were themselves illegal (they arent) or a less pedantic argument that emulators themselves are illegal without the permission of the important parties (generally the court cases have shown this to not be true). I think the author would have been more correct in saying "all commercial ROMs are illegal (without explicit permission)". Writing and using emulators for the sake of writing software for the platforms (often done for cost or effiency) is a whole 'nother can and is also actively pursued by some emulation enthusiasts.
Its just what the anandtech people said; I could be mistaken on that. It would be neat to upgrade, although I suspect that larger drives would be quite expensive in that form, and possibly give off considerable heat.
Anandtech had a feature on the mac mini; you can look them up and see for yourself that you won't be able to fit anything more than a 2.5" drive in there. Hell, they were lucky that they could fit in a new 512 ram chip with a heat spreader! The other thing to watch out for is Mac's custom special drive interface. I think you can find some other drives that fit the interface and the space they give you, but, as usual, expect to pay out the nose for it.
I think what he means is that copyright is not nessecarily a natural right, and not exactly a property right either. Some fringe legal scholars and armchair theorists say that property rights give owners the right to "exclude people," and that the theft of property denies the owner use of his property while an infringer of copyright need not diminsh the intrinsic value of the work. One such thinker includes Jefferson, while describing the majesty of knowledge, drawing an analogy to fire and candles; that by lighting the candle of anothers with your own flame, your own is not diminished.
Furthermore, one might suppose that copyright isn't a natural right at all! Man lived for several hundred years (likely much more) without a notion of copyright. In fact, in the past people were often given entirely to the profession of copying another's works verbatim. They were not called "pirates" but rather "scribes," who's efforts protected what they saw as valuable knowledge. You could also recall that copyright was originally a device to silence critics of the British throne, now perverted by the bookmakers for their profits and embraced by their contemporaries for the same.
Does an author have exclusive domain over his own works, and the right to make derivative works? If so, this flies in the face of hundreds of years of human endevors building upon one another. Musicians will tell you that it is quite rare to create a truly original piece. We say that it is frequent that we quote one another, without attribution. We steal ideas and concepts and bring in new ones. Certainly, Beowulf was not the work of a single man (in fact it is widely speculated that one of the aforementioned scribes did a quite a number on it), yet there is no wide damnation in any field concerning permission of these people. Furthermore, if copyright is a natural law of property, why do they expire? Certainly you must admit that eventual copyright expiration is in the public's interest!
Copyright isn't a "legal fiction" but it does make a bargin with the creators in the world; give temporary control over your work in exchange for sharing it with the world. When so many (napster-heads, fan fiction authors, warez distributers, cover bands, photoshoppers, etc) refuse implicitly recognize the legal authority of a law, one has to question its status as "natural law."
Well, I can't really gauge the size differences between the two, since I haven't ever really looked at either one. So I'll take your word on that.
But I don't know how you got 1137. The secondary gives you a lot more pricing options (and also seems to give you more CPUs on the cheaper side). I ditched most everything and came in around 530 dollars. One thing to remember is that the page doesn't refresh the total in realtime. You have to scroll down to the bottom and click "refresh total." Completely stupid, but that's Dell for ya.
Actually, take a look at the Dell Optiplex SX280 (I hope thats the one I'm thinking of). I've seen a few Dell machines in offices, where the PC basically that small as the Mac mini. Judging by the Dell.com website, the system is about a hundred dollars more expensive, but the additional upgrades available are far FAR cheaper. Want a gig of RAM? It will cost you nearly three times less than the mini. An 80 gig HDD? 20 more bucks, and if you want/need more, its available for a reasonable price. So far the only downside appears to be that its by Dell.
Interestingly enough, Dell's webpage appears to advertise different prices for the thing depending on whether you're a small or medium/large business. You'd think the pricing is somewhat represented by volume discount, except that large businesses are charged a higher amount than "Small businesses." If the Mac mini does well, you might see them start to prune some of the costs out of it and start offering it to consumers as well (it comes with things like a mouse and keyboard, no discount offered for not taking it). They already have a couple of "cheap" models, so certainly there's some worry that they'd be displacing themselves rather than competitors.
75 isn't a raw deal. Its not the best price out there, but hey, at least you didnt spring for a gigabyte. That's where they suddenly hike the price up ridiculusly, presumably to keep people from just buying the cheapest mac and sticking an assload of RAM in it to make up for the differences. Bravo, Apple.
No shit man. I'd rather have seen what chips this thing had than an in depth microscopic of the fucking USB cover. Congratulations AppleMatters, way to blow up an iPod.
I have to agree especially within the home user segment. People think of platform wars like Linux versus OSX versus windows and compare it to a well known field, with similarities: video games. Everyone (apparently) knows that what drives console sales is "killer apps." That's why you see exclusive deals only for PS2 or gamecube or xbox, etc. The HUGE difference here is that most people don't go out and buy a second computer like they might a 150 dollar game system. Switching means giving up all of the known goods you have right now, in favor of wasting a weekend with a machine that causes you so much anxiety when it doesn't work. Buying a new console means dropping 200 dollars on a console and a new game and wasting a weekend ignoring your every problem, distracted by a game. Notice the significant difference?
.iso is a confusing process, let alone tinkering with dual booting or emulators. The other barrier against a "killer app" argument is that there's a learning curve over the status quo. A whole new slew of terms (CUPS? ALSA?), and an uncanny likeness to windows with hidden trapdoors (control-alt backspace, x mouse behaviors, etc), quickly give people the impression that they'll have to learn something Different, and therefore its Harder than doing Nothing.
If you're reading this, the above argument doesn't make much sense to you. "Linux installers have made huge leaps of progress in the last few years, and you can always use WINE or dual boot!" For most home users burning a
As far as offices go, you'd be surprised how many places simply use windows as a terminal emulator to an old text based system for their various needs. The killer app isn't going to happen for them; these people are focused on reliability #1. Expectations for IT teams are to pump up efficiency 1% a year, or better. Sure, we both think that businesses could find a couple percentage points of efficiency in OSS and Linux, but taking a windows office and migrating takes a buttload of planning to make sure there isn't a single percentage point lopping hiccup in the transition. Six months with a Linux or Solaris in the workplace experienced staff, probably a year if your simply tinkers with Gentoo or Debian at home. It gets much worse if you have to train your people. Does Joe want to learn Linux? Is he capable of learning to administer one?
If there's a killer app, its probably Pixie Dust.
Sure. Its not nearly as Apple-like as you would imagine. Whoops, I just moved my start bar to the top of the screen in XP. Hope apple doesn't sue. Seriously, though, the visual appearance of GNOME is very malleable. Hell, I don't think the basic theme does the group justice. But even with a very pretty theme, buttonset, icons and wallpaper, its still a far cry from the intricacies of Apple's GUI. You don't see 90% of the menus dissapear when you click on the background, and the applications themselves dont set the upper panel content. Its really more like the Windows setup with the start bar on top rather than bottom. Unfortunately, I haven't used gnome since like 2.4 or 2.6.
;).
Not to mention, Apple petitioning GNOME would be a really fast way to build ill will towards their beleaguered stance in the market. And lets not forget old Xerox