"He lost me at "I like Maxtor". Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. Either case... I'd pass a bestbuy job application his way."
I've owned WD, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and Hitachi/IBM drives. The only drive to ever go bad on me was my IBM 75GXP "Deathstar".
I currently run a DiamnondMax 10 SATA 300GB drive. It's quiet, fast, and has been reliable so far.
The MTBF of HDDs is actually pretty poor. It doesn't vary too much by manufacturer, either. It's not surprising that everyone has their own hated-brand of HDD.
If you need reliability, get RAID. My disk is filled with recorded TV, so I'm not too concerned about a failure.
Re:PC Economics according to Microsoft:
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 1
"Cost of Windows XP Professional: $299 plus taxes"
Not even close. You can purchse XP Professional with media for around $140 legally from many websites.
Large OEMs like Dell or HP pay less than $100 for every copy of XP Professional. They get XP Home for around $45, too.
You didn't *really* think that the major OEMs were stupid enough to pay retail, did you?
"because windows isn't a multi-user operating system, unlike *nix."
Huh? Did you miss the last ten years or something?
Windows 9x was not a true multiuser OS, but Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 is, and always has been, a multiuser OS. It was designed to be so from the start.
"X11 has inbuilt networking support so you can display the program locally while running the 'compute' bit on the server."
Yes, but X11 isn't like Windows Terminal Services. XDMCP is closer to what the poster wants, but it's not quite the same. For one, X is not nearly as nippy over a slow connection. Also, if you get disconnected, you lose your session.
What the poster really wants is VNC with a little extra. Even VNC, though, is not intended to be truly multiuser - it uses the idea of "screens", and it doesn't scale very well to 100s of clients.
WTS is really remarkable in that regard. Don't reply "VNC" or "X" unless you've actually *used* WTS.
ASK before you donate. My district won't support anything older than P-III, and we aren't too keen on donated hardware as it requires custom imaging.
Make sure that your hardware is in good condition, and that the district actually needs systems.
My district, for example, already has over 500 decomissioned Pentium-II (450MHz) systems. There are only so many places that we can put computers (and so many ports on the network), so old hardware builds up as it is replaced with newer hardware. We try to reuse hardware wherever possible (computer lab systems might become lookup terminals, for instance), but eventually we have to pay to get the old systems recycled.
Note, however, that this varies dramatically by district. My district donates over 250 systems to our neighboring district every year because they don't have the budget for much new hardware. They are happy to get good-condition P-IIs, and we're happy that they aren't ending up in landfills.
The key is to know what is needed and where.
Also, don't purchase a computer to donate without first consulting the district. My district, for example, purchases only one model each year (last year it was the HP D530 small-form-factor). This simplifies management and deployment. By purchasing the same model, you can save the district a lot of time for years to come.
"Why is it that prejudice against Christians is the last remaining acceptable prejudice?"
Whoa, buddy. You just spouted some grade-A bullshit.
Consider this:
Many consider it acceptable to be prejudiced against gays.
In many nations, women are repressed. Even in the US they often have to overcome rediculous and antiquated notions.
People executed in the US are disproportinately black.
Arab-Americans are more likely to be stopped at airports.
"Could it be that those screaming loudest for tolerance are in fact the least tolerant of differences?"
No. Most of the people protesting Gibson's film did so because of its extreme graphic violence. Not that they are right, of course - personally, I believe that *any* censorship is wrong (with a few notable exceptions such as child pornography). However, I also believe Gibson's film should have been given an NC-17 rating.
"If you want great gas mileage, diesels are unbeaten. Driving normally, [British motoring journalist] Jeremy Clarkson got 75mpg out of a Volkswagen Lupo diesel."
And if you want clean emissions, hybrids are unbeatable. Show me a diesel car that's AT-PZEV rated. Now show me one that has decent acceleration (0-60 in ~10 seconds), enough room for four people with cargo (4 doors, decent headroom).
The Jetta TDI, a much better comparison to the Prius, gets around 45-55 MPG. That's with a manual transmission.
Actual use places the Prius around 45-55 MPG as well. But that's with an automatic (actually, it's continuously-variable) transmission and - get this - a fuel that has about 15% less energy per gallon than diesel.
The Jetta TDI isn't SULEV rated, let alone AT-PZEV. It puts out (at least) 15% more CO2 per mile as well.
I looked up your data, and, yes, we would have to build about 10 TW of power-generation capability to match the current use of fossil fuels.
Now, that is by no means "10,000 of the largest possible nuclear power plants". 1GW is actually a rather modest nuclear power plant; 3GW (and larger) plants have been constructed.
Moreover, 10TW is not out of the question. There is already almost 1/3 of a TW of nuclear power generation in commercial operation today.
1: 30fps is not acceptable. There is some myth that 30fps is 'perfrct'. It's not. You can easily tell the difference in a wide variety of games. Not to mention how screwed you are at 30fps without hardware cursor support.
2: MPEG compression is currently difficult to do in real-time at those resolutions. It requires specialized and expensive hardware. Not to mention that MPEG is LOSSY. Games tend to have lots of sharp detail (e.g. text) that looks like crap when compressed.
3: Have you heard of latency? Even at the speed of light, assuming no overhead, we're talking 50ms from my house to Google and back. Suddenly, Half-Life 3 becomes unplayable.
You don't get it, do you? Thin clients have been around for YEARS. But they always have - and always will - face two problems:
- Bandwidth. Have you ever used Remote Desktop, VNC, Citrix, or Remote 3D? They are *slow*, even on gigabit. That's because it is difficult to transmit large bitmaps. I don't want my desktop turned into a large MPEG, which leaves us with lossless compression.
- Latency. Unless you are sitting next to your ASP, good luck getting a responsive interface. I don't know about you, but 100ms is NOT acceptable.
You keep talking about how thin clients could be 'acceptable'. Why would anyone settle for 'acceptable' when we have something that's better today?
Remote backup can be done with current PCs. So can remote application and data storage. I downloaded HL2 from the internet. But I sure as hell wouldn't want to rely on Valve's bandwidth to run it.
""additional support for CSS2" will mean everything except fixing the major box model and table width bugs. "
Dunno about the "table width" bug (you shouldn't be using tables for layout anyway), but the box model seems mostly compliant in IE6 when you run it in standards-compliant mode.
"What does any of that have to do with the US GSM dropping calls all the time?"
Nothing, because US GSM *doesn't* drop calls all the time. I have T-Mobile (formerly Voicestream), arguably the worst carrier in the US for coverage. Even so, I *rarely* drop calls. Maybe once every six months - and I use at least 400 minutes of airtime every month, too.
Now, head out into the middle of nowhere and you'll start dropping like a hot potato. That has to do with my provider, though - AT&T Cingular actually has very respectable GSM coverage.
"How about the unreliability of US callerID, because there's no universal inter-telco standard?"
I've found Caller ID to be very reliable, both on my landline and on my mobile phone. Neither long-distance nor cross-carrier calls seem to bothter it.
Of course, some cell carriers are idiots and don't bother to provide a name along with the number.
No! RFID tags like those that Wal-Mart will be using are powered by the radio signal. It's not simply a matter of having enough antenna gain or a sensitive enough reciever - you need to produce enough power to activate the tag. It's hard enough to read them 3 inches away - and you need 64x more power to read them even two feet away. At 8ft, you need 1024x more power. Even a relatively low-power signal is now approaching the power range of a microwave oven.
Remember, Bluetooth was designed to have 30+ foot range. You only need 16x more power - and a decent antenna gain - to increase that to 120ft - not a hard feat.
Now, it *is* definately possible to 'snoop' on RFIDs being energized by another reader. That's why RFID credit cards would be a bad idea (and why current RF credit cards *aren't* RFID - they have two-factor authentication).
"I guess I should stop bitching about how, horrible, nonsensicle, slow, clunky, awkward, unintuative, difficult and inferior spatial browsing is and just brainwash myself into liking, no, adoring the 50+ open windows peppered across all my desktops."
Or, you could have taken the 30 seconds that you took to write your post and used them to change the GConf setting.
"If you haven't used one, you don't have the experience to know you don't know what you don't know."
I've used TiVo for over four years now, both standalone and the combo DirecTV/TiVo units.
I can assure you that Microsoft MCE is every bit as good as TiVo. To-do-list, recording history, season passes (with first-run-only options, the same 31-day rule, automatic adjustment to changing schedules, etc.), and most of the other TiVo featureset is present.
The only things I can think of that TiVo has over MCE is:
- WishLists. MCE kind of has them with keyword searching, but TiVo does a much better job.
- Suggestions. I never used them, but only TiVo has them.
But:
- MCE has better conflict resolution. The interface is clearer. The to-do-list shows, at a glance, which shows "lose out" in a conflict.
- MCE is faster. Even the Series 2 units are far too slow. Particularly when you upgrade the disk space. My 300GB MCE box is still quite nippy.
- MCE has a better skip back / skip forward feature. It's far faster, which actually makes it useful - unlike the:30 hack on TiVo.
- MCE handles failure better. If a show is interrupted during recording, MCE will automatically schedule a later showing if it's available and doesn't cause a conflict. This happens even if the recording was one-shot.
- MCE's interface is better. You can see the current program in most of the menus, and there is a clearly defined "back" button with unlimited history.
Try MCE out before you go crapping all over it. You may be surprised.
"Are any of the major motherboard manufacturers going to put out a micro-ATX or smaller desktop motherboard for this to build a media PC upon?"
If it's socket-compatible (as are most AMD mobile CPUs), you'll be able to use it in desktop motherboards.
Regardless, you can already undervolt a A64 Winchester significantly. Mine runs at 1800MHz / 1.1V @ ~ 23W.
I have a Zalman CNPS7000AlCU thermally controlled by my BIOS, and the fan doesn't even turn on unless I fully load the CPU for several minutes. The CPU idles at 42C with the fan off (of course, this is at 800MHz / 0.8V).
Think again. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money refining their UI. It may not be as clean as Mac OS, and there are definately some rough edges, but after seeing how new users pick up on Windows XP's new features, I have no doubts that their product is "easy to use".
"In the same time period Microsoft essentially took Windows 2000, made a few minor fixes and released XP."
No. XP was released in 2001, 2000 was released in 2000. XP is an incremental upgrade from Windows 2000, and it always was.
Since 2000, Microsoft has released two new office suites, three revisions of Windows Media Player, Tablet PC, Media Center, and a whole host of other products.
Try installing Windows XP RTM sometime. It's *not* the same OS as XP-SP2.
XP's longevity stands as an indication to the flexibility of the product. SATA, PCI Express, WPA - they didn't exist when XP was released. But thanks to the flexibility of WDM, XP is still going four years later.
And, quite frankly, Apple has improved OS X so much because everything before Panther sucked. 10.0 was a disaster, and 10.1 had serious performance issues.
Apple releases a new OS every 1.5 years. Microsoft decided to push Longhorn out to 2006 because they felt that their current product was solid.
Yeah, there have been security prolems. SP2 goes a long way to fixing them.
You can't compare "everything Apple releases" to "Windows". It's not comparable.
"OOo is not only as good as MS Office, it is *better.*"
That's just crap. I use both on a daily basis, and OOo sucks in *many* ways:
- The spellchecker sucks. Word has a larger dictionary and gives *far* better suggestions.
- On my P-M 1.7GHz notebook with 512M of DDR and a 7200rpm Hitachi HDD, word takes 3-4 seconds to load. OOo takes 15-20.
- OOo doesn't come with any good presentation templates. Word has quite a few.
- Word properly creates bold versions of fonts automtically. In OOo, you need to have a bold version installed or bold fonts look exactly the same as non-bold fonts.
These are real complaints that affect the functionality of the software. Don't give me crap about OOo being "better" than Office until you've used them both on a daily basis. Neither myself nor the 20 people who I have deployed OOo to (as an alternative to Office) believe that OOo is anywhere near Office in functionality or usability.
Every time someone gives me crap about how OSS app "foo" is better than commercial app "bar", I remind them that people are willing to *pay* for commercial app "bar" instead of using open-source app "foo". Clearly, there is a reason people pay for Photoshop, and there's a reason that people pay for Office. It's not just "vendor lock-in", it's the fact that Office is the best office suite for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
"He lost me at "I like Maxtor". Anyone who recommends maxtor hdds is either on the take, or hasn't been building systems for very long. Either case... I'd pass a bestbuy job application his way."
I've owned WD, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and Hitachi/IBM drives. The only drive to ever go bad on me was my IBM 75GXP "Deathstar".
I currently run a DiamnondMax 10 SATA 300GB drive. It's quiet, fast, and has been reliable so far.
The MTBF of HDDs is actually pretty poor. It doesn't vary too much by manufacturer, either. It's not surprising that everyone has their own hated-brand of HDD.
If you need reliability, get RAID. My disk is filled with recorded TV, so I'm not too concerned about a failure.
"Cost of Windows XP Professional: $299 plus taxes"
Not even close. You can purchse XP Professional with media for around $140 legally from many websites.
Large OEMs like Dell or HP pay less than $100 for every copy of XP Professional. They get XP Home for around $45, too.
You didn't *really* think that the major OEMs were stupid enough to pay retail, did you?
No. Of coruse not. You were just spreading FUD.
"because windows isn't a multi-user operating system, unlike *nix."
Huh? Did you miss the last ten years or something?
Windows 9x was not a true multiuser OS, but Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 is, and always has been, a multiuser OS. It was designed to be so from the start.
"X11 has inbuilt networking support so you can display the program locally while running the 'compute' bit on the server."
Yes, but X11 isn't like Windows Terminal Services. XDMCP is closer to what the poster wants, but it's not quite the same. For one, X is not nearly as nippy over a slow connection. Also, if you get disconnected, you lose your session.
What the poster really wants is VNC with a little extra. Even VNC, though, is not intended to be truly multiuser - it uses the idea of "screens", and it doesn't scale very well to 100s of clients.
WTS is really remarkable in that regard. Don't reply "VNC" or "X" unless you've actually *used* WTS.
ASK before you donate. My district won't support anything older than P-III, and we aren't too keen on donated hardware as it requires custom imaging.
Make sure that your hardware is in good condition, and that the district actually needs systems.
My district, for example, already has over 500 decomissioned Pentium-II (450MHz) systems. There are only so many places that we can put computers (and so many ports on the network), so old hardware builds up as it is replaced with newer hardware. We try to reuse hardware wherever possible (computer lab systems might become lookup terminals, for instance), but eventually we have to pay to get the old systems recycled.
Note, however, that this varies dramatically by district. My district donates over 250 systems to our neighboring district every year because they don't have the budget for much new hardware. They are happy to get good-condition P-IIs, and we're happy that they aren't ending up in landfills.
The key is to know what is needed and where.
Also, don't purchase a computer to donate without first consulting the district. My district, for example, purchases only one model each year (last year it was the HP D530 small-form-factor). This simplifies management and deployment. By purchasing the same model, you can save the district a lot of time for years to come.
"Why is it that prejudice against Christians is the last remaining acceptable prejudice?"
Whoa, buddy. You just spouted some grade-A bullshit.
Consider this:
Many consider it acceptable to be prejudiced against gays.
In many nations, women are repressed. Even in the US they often have to overcome rediculous and antiquated notions.
People executed in the US are disproportinately black.
Arab-Americans are more likely to be stopped at airports.
"Could it be that those screaming loudest for tolerance are in fact the least tolerant of differences?"
No. Most of the people protesting Gibson's film did so because of its extreme graphic violence. Not that they are right, of course - personally, I believe that *any* censorship is wrong (with a few notable exceptions such as child pornography). However, I also believe Gibson's film should have been given an NC-17 rating.
Not true. There is an Opera version for Windows Powered Smartphone, which is Windows CE based.
There is not, however, a version for Pocket PC.
"non-secure"
How is the registry non-secure? Registry keys have the same privelage options as items in the filesystem under Windows.
"If you want great gas mileage, diesels are unbeaten. Driving normally, [British motoring journalist] Jeremy Clarkson got 75mpg out of a Volkswagen Lupo diesel."
And if you want clean emissions, hybrids are unbeatable. Show me a diesel car that's AT-PZEV rated. Now show me one that has decent acceleration (0-60 in ~10 seconds), enough room for four people with cargo (4 doors, decent headroom).
The Jetta TDI, a much better comparison to the Prius, gets around 45-55 MPG. That's with a manual transmission.
Actual use places the Prius around 45-55 MPG as well. But that's with an automatic (actually, it's continuously-variable) transmission and - get this - a fuel that has about 15% less energy per gallon than diesel.
The Jetta TDI isn't SULEV rated, let alone AT-PZEV. It puts out (at least) 15% more CO2 per mile as well.
I looked up your data, and, yes, we would have to build about 10 TW of power-generation capability to match the current use of fossil fuels.
Now, that is by no means "10,000 of the largest possible nuclear power plants". 1GW is actually a rather modest nuclear power plant; 3GW (and larger) plants have been constructed.
Moreover, 10TW is not out of the question. There is already almost 1/3 of a TW of nuclear power generation in commercial operation today.
"there will be too many of us who will be migrating core pieces of our daily work to thin client models that run on established internet protocols"
Dude, what are you smoking?
Longhorn will be released next year. The RTM date has already been set.
Thin clients have been "poised" to take over the desktop for 10 years now. It hasn't happened. Nothing is going to change that in the next 12 months.
Longhorn is the most significant release of Windows in almost 5 years. It will be as significant as Windows 98 > Windows 2000.
Don't sell Microsoft short. They have a lot of great talent and they *can* produce a world-class product.
1: 30fps is not acceptable. There is some myth that 30fps is 'perfrct'. It's not. You can easily tell the difference in a wide variety of games. Not to mention how screwed you are at 30fps without hardware cursor support.
2: MPEG compression is currently difficult to do in real-time at those resolutions. It requires specialized and expensive hardware. Not to mention that MPEG is LOSSY. Games tend to have lots of sharp detail (e.g. text) that looks like crap when compressed.
3: Have you heard of latency? Even at the speed of light, assuming no overhead, we're talking 50ms from my house to Google and back. Suddenly, Half-Life 3 becomes unplayable.
You don't get it, do you? Thin clients have been around for YEARS. But they always have - and always will - face two problems:
- Bandwidth. Have you ever used Remote Desktop, VNC, Citrix, or Remote 3D? They are *slow*, even on gigabit. That's because it is difficult to transmit large bitmaps. I don't want my desktop turned into a large MPEG, which leaves us with lossless compression.
- Latency. Unless you are sitting next to your ASP, good luck getting a responsive interface. I don't know about you, but 100ms is NOT acceptable.
You keep talking about how thin clients could be 'acceptable'. Why would anyone settle for 'acceptable' when we have something that's better today?
Remote backup can be done with current PCs. So can remote application and data storage. I downloaded HL2 from the internet. But I sure as hell wouldn't want to rely on Valve's bandwidth to run it.
""additional support for CSS2" will mean everything except fixing the major box model and table width bugs. "
Dunno about the "table width" bug (you shouldn't be using tables for layout anyway), but the box model seems mostly compliant in IE6 when you run it in standards-compliant mode.
"What does any of that have to do with the US GSM dropping calls all the time?"
Nothing, because US GSM *doesn't* drop calls all the time. I have T-Mobile (formerly Voicestream), arguably the worst carrier in the US for coverage. Even so, I *rarely* drop calls. Maybe once every six months - and I use at least 400 minutes of airtime every month, too.
Now, head out into the middle of nowhere and you'll start dropping like a hot potato. That has to do with my provider, though - AT&T Cingular actually has very respectable GSM coverage.
"How about the unreliability of US callerID, because there's no universal inter-telco standard?"
I've found Caller ID to be very reliable, both on my landline and on my mobile phone. Neither long-distance nor cross-carrier calls seem to bothter it.
Of course, some cell carriers are idiots and don't bother to provide a name along with the number.
No! RFID tags like those that Wal-Mart will be using are powered by the radio signal. It's not simply a matter of having enough antenna gain or a sensitive enough reciever - you need to produce enough power to activate the tag. It's hard enough to read them 3 inches away - and you need 64x more power to read them even two feet away. At 8ft, you need 1024x more power. Even a relatively low-power signal is now approaching the power range of a microwave oven.
Remember, Bluetooth was designed to have 30+ foot range. You only need 16x more power - and a decent antenna gain - to increase that to 120ft - not a hard feat.
Now, it *is* definately possible to 'snoop' on RFIDs being energized by another reader. That's why RFID credit cards would be a bad idea (and why current RF credit cards *aren't* RFID - they have two-factor authentication).
"I guess I should stop bitching about how, horrible, nonsensicle, slow, clunky, awkward, unintuative, difficult and inferior spatial browsing is and just brainwash myself into liking, no, adoring the 50+ open windows peppered across all my desktops."
Or, you could have taken the 30 seconds that you took to write your post and used them to change the GConf setting.
"Video professionals STILL use Beta."
They use Betacam, not Betamax. It's a different format.
"If you haven't used one, you don't have the experience to know you don't know what you don't know."
:30 hack on TiVo.
I've used TiVo for over four years now, both standalone and the combo DirecTV/TiVo units.
I can assure you that Microsoft MCE is every bit as good as TiVo. To-do-list, recording history, season passes (with first-run-only options, the same 31-day rule, automatic adjustment to changing schedules, etc.), and most of the other TiVo featureset is present.
The only things I can think of that TiVo has over MCE is:
- WishLists. MCE kind of has them with keyword searching, but TiVo does a much better job.
- Suggestions. I never used them, but only TiVo has them.
But:
- MCE has better conflict resolution. The interface is clearer. The to-do-list shows, at a glance, which shows "lose out" in a conflict.
- MCE is faster. Even the Series 2 units are far too slow. Particularly when you upgrade the disk space. My 300GB MCE box is still quite nippy.
- MCE has a better skip back / skip forward feature. It's far faster, which actually makes it useful - unlike the
- MCE handles failure better. If a show is interrupted during recording, MCE will automatically schedule a later showing if it's available and doesn't cause a conflict. This happens even if the recording was one-shot.
- MCE softpads automatically, and unlike TiVo's padding, softpadding doesn't create conflicts.
- MCE's interface is better. You can see the current program in most of the menus, and there is a clearly defined "back" button with unlimited history.
Try MCE out before you go crapping all over it. You may be surprised.
"Are any of the major motherboard manufacturers going to put out a micro-ATX or smaller desktop motherboard for this to build a media PC upon?"
If it's socket-compatible (as are most AMD mobile CPUs), you'll be able to use it in desktop motherboards.
Regardless, you can already undervolt a A64 Winchester significantly. Mine runs at 1800MHz / 1.1V @ ~ 23W.
I have a Zalman CNPS7000AlCU thermally controlled by my BIOS, and the fan doesn't even turn on unless I fully load the CPU for several minutes. The CPU idles at 42C with the fan off (of course, this is at 800MHz / 0.8V).
"In my town of 1.5M people, I haven't managed to find a store that sells AMD-powered laptop. We must be the forgotten ones."
Do you have a Sams Club, a Best Buy, an Office Depot, or a Circuit City?
You're not looking hard enough.
"I think Micrsoft UI's are generally lousy"
Think again. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money refining their UI. It may not be as clean as Mac OS, and there are definately some rough edges, but after seeing how new users pick up on Windows XP's new features, I have no doubts that their product is "easy to use".
"it almost seems like Microsoft wanted the XBox to be hacked (I mean, just look at the layout of the D0 points)."
Microsoft wanted the XBox to be easy to debug.
The i-opener had IDE pins on the motherboard for the same reason.
"In the same time period Microsoft essentially took Windows 2000, made a few minor fixes and released XP."
No. XP was released in 2001, 2000 was released in 2000. XP is an incremental upgrade from Windows 2000, and it always was.
Since 2000, Microsoft has released two new office suites, three revisions of Windows Media Player, Tablet PC, Media Center, and a whole host of other products.
Try installing Windows XP RTM sometime. It's *not* the same OS as XP-SP2.
XP's longevity stands as an indication to the flexibility of the product. SATA, PCI Express, WPA - they didn't exist when XP was released. But thanks to the flexibility of WDM, XP is still going four years later.
And, quite frankly, Apple has improved OS X so much because everything before Panther sucked. 10.0 was a disaster, and 10.1 had serious performance issues.
Apple releases a new OS every 1.5 years. Microsoft decided to push Longhorn out to 2006 because they felt that their current product was solid.
Yeah, there have been security prolems. SP2 goes a long way to fixing them.
You can't compare "everything Apple releases" to "Windows". It's not comparable.
"This is just a response to kill the buzz on Apple's Spotlight, which is actually shipping."
Really? Last time I checked, Tiger wasn't RTM.
Stop spreading BS.
"OOo is not only as good as MS Office, it is *better.*"
That's just crap. I use both on a daily basis, and OOo sucks in *many* ways:
- The spellchecker sucks. Word has a larger dictionary and gives *far* better suggestions.
- On my P-M 1.7GHz notebook with 512M of DDR and a 7200rpm Hitachi HDD, word takes 3-4 seconds to load. OOo takes 15-20.
- OOo doesn't come with any good presentation templates. Word has quite a few.
- Word properly creates bold versions of fonts automtically. In OOo, you need to have a bold version installed or bold fonts look exactly the same as non-bold fonts.
These are real complaints that affect the functionality of the software. Don't give me crap about OOo being "better" than Office until you've used them both on a daily basis. Neither myself nor the 20 people who I have deployed OOo to (as an alternative to Office) believe that OOo is anywhere near Office in functionality or usability.
Every time someone gives me crap about how OSS app "foo" is better than commercial app "bar", I remind them that people are willing to *pay* for commercial app "bar" instead of using open-source app "foo". Clearly, there is a reason people pay for Photoshop, and there's a reason that people pay for Office. It's not just "vendor lock-in", it's the fact that Office is the best office suite for Windows.
"Enlighten me and tell me what Apple has done that is unlawful?"
The same thing that Microsoft did.
They take their music player, the iPod, which has a near-monopoly, and ensure that it only works with their music store.
Microsoft takes their OS and loads Internet Explorer, and bullies OEMs into not shipping competing products.
It's leveraging one monopoly to get another. It's illegal, and Microsoft was convicted of it. Now Apple is doing it with the iPod.