An iBook meets your requirements nicely. No PCMCIA, but everything is already built in- Ethernet, modem, USB, Airport and Firewire. YellowDog Linux runs on it already, or you can stick with OSX.
The iBook isn't titanium: that's the G4 laptop. It's polycarbonate plastic, and probably more durable than a TiBook. (My TiBook is beautiful, but feels a bit fragile.)
As far as CPU speed for OSX, my G4-500 TiBook and OSX are ok. The iBook has a G3 but that's not a major speed loss unless you really need Altivec. OSX wants memory, lots and lots of memory. I had 256MB: it's not enough for OSX running Classic and heavy OSX apps. 512 seems more reasonable.
Don't bother with a used machine, PC or Mac. You can get a nice iBook for $1300 or the 600MHz model for $1500 and you can do as well with a new Dell.
Checked the stock prices of internet companies lately? If VA Linux goes bankrupt what happens to/. and it's huge server bills?
The status quo has changed. A popular site doesn't get 100 hits/day anymore like it did back in 1996 when most of the costs were born by universities and the government. (NB: I was at Stanford when Filo and Yang were told to remove Yahoo from the campus network since it was too expensive to keep it up.)
All those people clammoring for new laws (UCITA, DMCA) and new schemes like this are just lazy. They want to put everything right in your face, and put their hands in your pocket at the same time. Well, as Ben Franklin was fond of saying, "You can't have it both ways." Put your content on the *free* internet, or don't. If you want to make a buck, then sell something.
A lot of them want to make a buck. Others would be happy just trying to pay the bills. Bandwidth costs real money, as/. noted yesterday with Limewire ($10k/month).
There is *no* free Internet. There's only Internet where people have found a way to shoulder the costs. That might be by selling you things, by showing you advertising, or simply by paying it out of their own pockets. The latter isn't an option unless you either have a low bandwidth site or you're Bill.
Would I pay a penny/page for most sites? No. Would I pay it for ones I care about? Yes, especially if it gets rid of obnoxious ads.
Up until very recently, I was using 802.11 cards, not 802.11a or 802.11b. These max out at 2mbs. Unless I was spooling a large print job or attempting to do a large LAN-based file transfer, I hardly noticed I only had 2mb of bandwidth available to me.
For a single person, 2Mbs might be ok. We've got the same solution, but instead of one person spooling a large print job, we've got 30 in a classroom attempting to download high resolution artwork. (No, not porn, unless you consider 13th century art porn.)
2Mbs is way, way too slow for this use, as we've painfully found out. We haven't even bothered with 11b, since we know we'll outgrow it way too fast. Until we can get an 11a solution wireless isn't an option here. I spent a lot of time talking to the Intel folks at EDUCAUSE a few weeks ago about what we need to roll it out...
Even the low-power Intel "Mobile" processors can get pretty hot compared to notebook harddrives.
Not to mention the PPC-G4. I was doing some video compression in my hotel room the other day and I swear I saw smoke coming from the bedspread under my TiBook.
Even with that, heat problems more or less seem to be under control: my TiBook can handle it even if the underside gets a bit warm in normal use. Ditto the PIII Dells we have here. It's only when you run them flat out that it gets to be a problem, and that's where Crusoe falls down.
I still wonder about the market for the Crusoe. Laptops eat too much power in other areas and palmtops already use processors that make Crusoe look like a power hog. Nice idea, but the niche was just too small.
I was always interested in doing this type of work-technical writing. Where can you point me to explore this area of endeavor?
I can't offer much since it was never a great interest of mine, but I can offer a suggestion. Do something in the field! I don't have a degree in educational technology: I got my last two jobs by showing some of the software/web stuff I'd done in the field.
Write some documentation, perhaps for Linux, *BSD, or anything else that badly needs it. Visit the Linux Documentation Project ToDo list and see what needs doing. Perhaps you'd rather write a tutorial for some commercial Windows or Macintosh program- that works too. That documentation is your resume: if you can make some horribly hairy Linux system tool or the Curves command in Photoshop clear and understandable, people will take notice.
except in my case it was after a PhD in Chemistry. I just didn't like going to work.
My advice. Sit back and ask yourself what's really important to you and what you enjoy. In my case, I liked teaching and programming, but not the rest of the baggage that came with being a faculty member. I got into instructional technology, and it's been a much better fit. I'm not rich, but I don't wake up in the morning dreading work.
Do you like to write? Check out technical journalism or documentation. Would you rather just nail boards together? No shame in being a carpenter.
Perhaps no job sounds like fun. In that case, go get an MBA and head for the money. You can enjoy yourself in your time off.
The decision can be wrenching-after all that work, why would you just throw it away? I get asked that all the time. The short answer is that I'm happy now.
Died last summer after ten years: the center number keys (2,5,8) simply stopped working. Bought a 49G, but I don't like the layout or the keys anywhere near as much.
OTOH, I've still got my 18-year old 11-C: I still carry it in my flight bag since I don't need anything more powerful.
The death of HP calculators is truly sad. Best things ever made for computation. I think I'm going to go buy a 48 just as a back up.
About that "grouping similar applications", wasn't that in gnome first?
Perhaps, but I had that with ApplWindows in MacOS back in 1996, and it probably wasn't new then. Beautiful extension: the program menu had sub-menus for every window, the program menu could pop-up under the mouse and you got alt-tab switching years before Apple added it.
Never understood why Apple didn't make ApplWindows standard: IMHO a Mac is totally crippled without it. Someday I'll learn enough OSX programming to rewrite it in my copious free time.
So rather than merely moving OS to (say) Linux, junk all the hardware as well? Apple's school discounts must be fantastic to make that even slightly appealing.
No, we have some Mac users and I'm trying to show how good of a client OS OSX is. We're not moving away from Windows anytime in the foreseeable future: we're moving deeper into the Windows world. (We're replacing the main NT4 servers with W2K/AD this Christmas break: the rest of the W2K migration is basically done.)
Forget Linux. It's not even a remote option here. Doesn't run MS Office- suggest StarOffice and watch me laugh. Doesn't run the educational software we use. Doesn't run the administrative software we use. Nobody but me here knows anything at all about it. We don't even have a comp-sci major: the students here for the most part wouldn't be able to handle Linux on a day-to-day basis.
I've got my little P2-300 Linux server for some Apache/Perl/cgi goodness I cooked up at my last job, but that's it.
What does XP offer me over and above my current win2k? I'm tired of updating to the latest and greatest just for the fun of it. My current os runs all of my applications without much trouble, so what do I get for my money?
Nothing whatsoever: you actually get less with XP.
XP (Home at least) is not an upgrade to W2K users- it's W2K with a candy colored shell, some bundled software, no multiprocessor support and the ability to join domains removed.
We're sticking with W2K here. (We're an almost all MS school, but I'm pushing OSX hard:^)
OTOH, it's a massive upgrade to W95/8/ME users. Anything to finally put a stake through that miserable series of crapware is a good thing for the world.
I agree with you on the PC prices, students could get slightly better discounts. But on Dell's website it's pretty clear that you click on the links saying you are a college and they give you a price. I would doubt they would price it higher than what's listed on the website.
Guess what: they sell it cheaper than even what the education website says. I spec out a machine here and send it up to our purchasing agent: she forwards the quote to our Dell guy and he comes back with a quote that's usually about 5-10% cheaper than the stated price.
I have to agree with the original poster: the author of the document is smoking crack when it comes to educational pricing. We get MS stuff cheap: MS understands the "First hit is free" philosophy quite well.
The best example of this was back in the OS/2 vs. NT4 days. I was working at a University where the department I was in was run by an OS/2 fanatic- everything was OS/2. But I saw the writing on the wall when I went to the bookstore one day. OS/2 3.0, no Internet support, $129. OS/2 3.0 with Internet support $179. Neither came with dev tools.
OTOH MS Visual C++, $79 was on the next shelf. Came with a free copy of NT4. Do the math...
The problem with this is, the software most wanted by business users is Office. But what would be the Microsoft response?
1 - roll over and take it.
I pick #1. Windows is a delivery system for Office (and now.NET): MS would happily sell it for a loss if it was the only way to assure that Office and.NET were standards.
Consider Apple. MS makes a mint off of Mac Office without paying OS development costs. The MS Mac group isn't going away so long as it lines Bill's pockets. I predict MS will be more than happy to sell copies of Office to Lindows users: zero cost to MS past printing the CDs, tons of profit margin.
And as much as I curse at it, Office
is the standard, and
kicks the living crap out of StarOffice and other Open Source office suites.
3. Libertarian theories do not say that a voluntary national id system would be a bad thing.
Unles those people who do not volunteer are marginalised by their choice (like, being unable to fly on domestic flights for example).
Airlines are private companies. Under Libertarian theory then can do anything they damn well please. Libertarians believe that the government should stay out of transactions between peaceable people or groups. Why should a company be forced to sell you something if they don't want to?
If you want to fly but don't want to agree to what the airlines demand, too bad. Buy your own plane. (It's a lot more fun!)
But then - the best biometric system in the world wouldn't have stopped the WTC attack - the hijackers were passengers with tickets and many used their real names anyway so
You do know that the FBI was busy looking for several of the terrorists even as the planes hit the WTC, right? They got into the country and disappeared- a face check at the gate might have flagged them and possibly prevented the attacks. The terrorists would have at least been delayed enough to stop some of the attacks.
You're right: biometrics is coming. This could be a very good thing if we drive the technology to good use. Fingerprint check when I use a credit card: why not? I'd love it if the store *knew* I was the owner of that card- I've had my number stolen before. Ever spoken with someone who's had their identity stolen? It's a multi-year nightmare of wrecked credit, endless phone calls and general heartburn.
Realize that we have almost no privacy anyway. Various large companies know a *lot* about me. They know personal details down to my last dollar, my taste for mint chip ice cream and the fact my wife and I are infertile. The government has run at least 3 background checks on me that I know of, the most recent within the last month. (I got my pilot's license recently: the FBI has already visited the airports I used to pull my records.)
Biometrics won't change that-what we need to do is make sure the transparancy goes both ways.
0.1% are "Hello World" copied out of "Java for Dummies".
Or rather, 0.1% is the third or fourth attempt at copying "Hello World" out of "Java for Dummies", after 20 minutes of looking at (s, "s and;s.
Eric
Re:A big plus of giving your GF a UNIX account...
on
Linux on the Desktop
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· Score: 2
Windows 9x, not W2K or NT. MS should advertise "Full porn security!" for W2K- sales would go through the roof.
Re:Video editing is a killer app
on
2.2 GHz Xeon
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· Score: 2
the cost of a digital cam-corder with which you can transfer and edit video is still high; let's not forget that, for the home user, there really isn't a ton of video editing to be had that I can imagine...
Your imagination is failing:^).
Digital camcorders are cheap- I just bought a Sony TRV900 for $1500, and the TRV900 is close to the top of the line consumer machine out there. For not much more you can buy the same equipment that Spike Lee uses to make his films (Canon GL-1 and XL-1s.) Single CCD MiniDV camcorders go for $800 on the low end. All of these machine have Firewire interfaces.
On the computer side, Firewire cards are $60-$100. If you have a Mac like my TiBook it's standard. (Macs also come with NLE software bundled- iMovie. Not as powerful as Premiere but just fine for home movies.) Disk and memory are so cheap today it's scary. I bought a DV <-> analog bridge for $250 so I can go either way with tapes.
What am I going to use this stuff for? Well, I have a new baby. I'm putting together a video of him for relatives who aren't going to get to see him, such as his uncle who's stationed in Hawaii with the Army. Another copy is going to his birthmother. (He's adopted)
I've been working on video of my wife's grandmother's farm as well. She's a tough old lady, but she is old and we don't know how much longer the farm will be in the family.
What else? Well, the TRV-900 has the ability to do both time lapse and very high shutter speed photos- I'm having fun filming storms and water droplets. When the current ban on general aviation VFR flights is lifted I'm going to have do aerial still and video shots of the area.
Video editing is never going to be immense on the level of word processing, but I think we'll be seeing a lot more of it in the future. Look at the huge growth in the digital camera market.
Also, unlikely that the industry would ever standardize on them (or any common reference standard). They have nothing to gain from cooperation.
SPEC is the only benchmark that every major processor maker but one submits their machines to. It's as close as a cross-platform neutral benchmark for CPUs as we're likely to get.
Guess who the one is? Hint: there's a reason why Apple doesn't quote SPEC when saying that G4s are as fast as P4s.
I either have to go to an Apple reseller (None within 150 miles of me) or pony up $20 in S&H. Given that pressing the CD and mailing it costs all of about $2 and that I'm already in the database as an OSX owner, $20 is about 80% profit.
Apple's selling the upgrade, just like the makers of the "Free Herbal Viagra" that is advertised endlessly late at night[1] are selling it- the price is all in the S&H.
[1] When you have a 2-month old you watch a lot of late night TV while holding a bottle...
Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla
on
Mozilla 0.9.4 Released
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· Score: 2
but I think this is a good example of the major reason I've now switched to Mac OS X: Apple wouldn't dream of making a feature that didn't have a UI interface whereas with Linux it's the norm.
So tell me: how do I move the Dock to the right side of the screen or make the disclosure triangles blue if the app is frontmost?
Both can be done, but only if you know the magic incantations to feed to a command prompt. Apple really needs to work on the Dock, although I understand pinning will at least be an option in 10.1
One of the reasons I will always be a loyal Apple customer is they don't try to pull any licensing bullsh*t like Microsoft does
They don't? Perhaps not as often, but I've gotten burned twice by being an early adopter
I bought one of the very first PPC Macs off the line. 7.1.2 was the OS shipped and it was a true abortion- unstable and slow. Wanted to upgrade to 7.5 three months later? Too bad: cough up the dough, since anyone who bought a x100 PowerMac within the 1st month didn't get the upgrade free. (7.5 sucked too, but not as bad.)
Now Apple's telling me I have to pay for 10.1, despite the fact that 10.0.x is clearly a public beta and not the real OS- it too is unstable and slow. Yeah, yeah, Unix, blah blah. I've locked up OSX badly enough to require pulling the battery out of my TiBook a number of times. By the standards I'm used to (AIX) it's not stable. At least it's not as bad as 7.1.2 was, but then again a house of cards was more stable. We won't even discuss Aqua's speed: I've got the best laptop made today and plenty of RAM and it feels like my old 6100.
Slashdot Mirror
The iBook isn't titanium: that's the G4 laptop. It's polycarbonate plastic, and probably more durable than a TiBook. (My TiBook is beautiful, but feels a bit fragile.)
As far as CPU speed for OSX, my G4-500 TiBook and OSX are ok. The iBook has a G3 but that's not a major speed loss unless you really need Altivec. OSX wants memory, lots and lots of memory. I had 256MB: it's not enough for OSX running Classic and heavy OSX apps. 512 seems more reasonable.
Don't bother with a used machine, PC or Mac. You can get a nice iBook for $1300 or the 600MHz model for $1500 and you can do as well with a new Dell.
Eric
The status quo works fine.
Checked the stock prices of internet companies lately? If VA Linux goes bankrupt what happens to /. and it's huge server bills?
The status quo has changed. A popular site doesn't get 100 hits/day anymore like it did back in 1996 when most of the costs were born by universities and the government. (NB: I was at Stanford when Filo and Yang were told to remove Yahoo from the campus network since it was too expensive to keep it up.)
All those people clammoring for new laws (UCITA, DMCA) and new schemes like this are just lazy. They want to put everything right in your face, and put their hands in your pocket at the same time. Well, as Ben Franklin was fond of saying, "You can't have it both ways." Put your content on the *free* internet, or don't. If you want to make a buck, then sell something.
A lot of them want to make a buck. Others would be happy just trying to pay the bills. Bandwidth costs real money, as /. noted yesterday with Limewire ($10k/month).
There is *no* free Internet. There's only Internet where people have found a way to shoulder the costs. That might be by selling you things, by showing you advertising, or simply by paying it out of their own pockets. The latter isn't an option unless you either have a low bandwidth site or you're Bill.
Would I pay a penny/page for most sites? No. Would I pay it for ones I care about? Yes, especially if it gets rid of obnoxious ads.
Eric
Up until very recently, I was using 802.11 cards, not 802.11a or 802.11b. These max out at 2mbs. Unless I was spooling a large print job or attempting to do a large LAN-based file transfer, I hardly noticed I only had 2mb of bandwidth available to me.
For a single person, 2Mbs might be ok. We've got the same solution, but instead of one person spooling a large print job, we've got 30 in a classroom attempting to download high resolution artwork. (No, not porn, unless you consider 13th century art porn.)
2Mbs is way, way too slow for this use, as we've painfully found out. We haven't even bothered with 11b, since we know we'll outgrow it way too fast. Until we can get an 11a solution wireless isn't an option here. I spent a lot of time talking to the Intel folks at EDUCAUSE a few weeks ago about what we need to roll it out...
Eric
Some pretty hot porn, huh?
Oh yeah, there's nothing like watching a hot, pregnant professor diagram Latin dactylic hexameter on a Smartboard.
Yes, that's really what I was editing/compressing. Sad, no?
Eric
Even the low-power Intel "Mobile" processors can get pretty hot compared to notebook harddrives.
Not to mention the PPC-G4. I was doing some video compression in my hotel room the other day and I swear I saw smoke coming from the bedspread under my TiBook.
Even with that, heat problems more or less seem to be under control: my TiBook can handle it even if the underside gets a bit warm in normal use. Ditto the PIII Dells we have here. It's only when you run them flat out that it gets to be a problem, and that's where Crusoe falls down.
I still wonder about the market for the Crusoe. Laptops eat too much power in other areas and palmtops already use processors that make Crusoe look like a power hog. Nice idea, but the niche was just too small.
Eric
I was always interested in doing this type of work-technical writing. Where can you point me to explore this area of endeavor?
I can't offer much since it was never a great interest of mine, but I can offer a suggestion. Do something in the field! I don't have a degree in educational technology: I got my last two jobs by showing some of the software/web stuff I'd done in the field.
Write some documentation, perhaps for Linux, *BSD, or anything else that badly needs it. Visit the Linux Documentation Project ToDo list and see what needs doing. Perhaps you'd rather write a tutorial for some commercial Windows or Macintosh program- that works too. That documentation is your resume: if you can make some horribly hairy Linux system tool or the Curves command in Photoshop clear and understandable, people will take notice.
Eric
My advice. Sit back and ask yourself what's really important to you and what you enjoy. In my case, I liked teaching and programming, but not the rest of the baggage that came with being a faculty member. I got into instructional technology, and it's been a much better fit. I'm not rich, but I don't wake up in the morning dreading work.
Do you like to write? Check out technical journalism or documentation. Would you rather just nail boards together? No shame in being a carpenter.
Perhaps no job sounds like fun. In that case, go get an MBA and head for the money. You can enjoy yourself in your time off.
The decision can be wrenching-after all that work, why would you just throw it away? I get asked that all the time. The short answer is that I'm happy now.
Eric
OTOH, I've still got my 18-year old 11-C: I still carry it in my flight bag since I don't need anything more powerful.
The death of HP calculators is truly sad. Best things ever made for computation. I think I'm going to go buy a 48 just as a back up.
Eric
Well, if those words were part of an established dictionary, then yes, a proper thesarus should suggest those words. Duh.
Just checked Webster's dictionary.com: kike, spic and nigger are all there.
They aren't in Roget's Thesaurus though. Is Roget's not a "proper" thesaurus? If it isn't, I don't know what is.
Well .. no shit Sherlock. How the hell was this modded up to Informative?
Gee, perhaps because that was what the guy asked?! Perhaps you understand XP Home isn't an W2K upgrade, but he didn't.
About that "grouping similar applications", wasn't that in gnome first?
Perhaps, but I had that with ApplWindows in MacOS back in 1996, and it probably wasn't new then. Beautiful extension: the program menu had sub-menus for every window, the program menu could pop-up under the mouse and you got alt-tab switching years before Apple added it.
Never understood why Apple didn't make ApplWindows standard: IMHO a Mac is totally crippled without it. Someday I'll learn enough OSX programming to rewrite it in my copious free time.
Eric
So rather than merely moving OS to (say) Linux, junk all the hardware as well? Apple's school discounts must be fantastic to make that even slightly appealing.
No, we have some Mac users and I'm trying to show how good of a client OS OSX is. We're not moving away from Windows anytime in the foreseeable future: we're moving deeper into the Windows world. (We're replacing the main NT4 servers with W2K/AD this Christmas break: the rest of the W2K migration is basically done.)
Forget Linux. It's not even a remote option here. Doesn't run MS Office- suggest StarOffice and watch me laugh. Doesn't run the educational software we use. Doesn't run the administrative software we use. Nobody but me here knows anything at all about it. We don't even have a comp-sci major: the students here for the most part wouldn't be able to handle Linux on a day-to-day basis.
I've got my little P2-300 Linux server for some Apache/Perl/cgi goodness I cooked up at my last job, but that's it.
Eric
What does XP offer me over and above my current win2k? I'm tired of updating to the latest and greatest just for the fun of it. My current os runs all of my applications without much trouble, so what do I get for my money?
Nothing whatsoever: you actually get less with XP.
XP (Home at least) is not an upgrade to W2K users- it's W2K with a candy colored shell, some bundled software, no multiprocessor support and the ability to join domains removed. We're sticking with W2K here. (We're an almost all MS school, but I'm pushing OSX hard :^)
OTOH, it's a massive upgrade to W95/8/ME users. Anything to finally put a stake through that miserable series of crapware is a good thing for the world.
Eric
I agree with you on the PC prices, students could get slightly better discounts. But on Dell's website it's pretty clear that you click on the links saying you are a college and they give you a price. I would doubt they would price it higher than what's listed on the website.
Guess what: they sell it cheaper than even what the education website says. I spec out a machine here and send it up to our purchasing agent: she forwards the quote to our Dell guy and he comes back with a quote that's usually about 5-10% cheaper than the stated price.
I have to agree with the original poster: the author of the document is smoking crack when it comes to educational pricing. We get MS stuff cheap: MS understands the "First hit is free" philosophy quite well.
The best example of this was back in the OS/2 vs. NT4 days. I was working at a University where the department I was in was run by an OS/2 fanatic- everything was OS/2. But I saw the writing on the wall when I went to the bookstore one day. OS/2 3.0, no Internet support, $129. OS/2 3.0 with Internet support $179. Neither came with dev tools.
OTOH MS Visual C++, $79 was on the next shelf. Came with a free copy of NT4. Do the math...
Eric
The problem with this is, the software most wanted by business users is Office. But what would be the Microsoft response?
1 - roll over and take it.
I pick #1. Windows is a delivery system for Office (and now .NET): MS would happily sell it for a loss if it was the only way to assure that Office and .NET were standards.
Consider Apple. MS makes a mint off of Mac Office without paying OS development costs. The MS Mac group isn't going away so long as it lines Bill's pockets. I predict MS will be more than happy to sell copies of Office to Lindows users: zero cost to MS past printing the CDs, tons of profit margin.
And as much as I curse at it, Office
Eric
3. Libertarian theories do not say that a voluntary national id system would be a bad thing.
Unles those people who do not volunteer are marginalised by their choice (like, being unable to fly on domestic flights for example).
Airlines are private companies. Under Libertarian theory then can do anything they damn well please. Libertarians believe that the government should stay out of transactions between peaceable people or groups. Why should a company be forced to sell you something if they don't want to?
If you want to fly but don't want to agree to what the airlines demand, too bad. Buy your own plane. (It's a lot more fun!)
Eric
And putting "Click here to see Pamela Anderson nekkid!" on the button wouldn't act the same as an autoload macro?
But then - the best biometric system in the world wouldn't have stopped the WTC attack - the hijackers were passengers with tickets and many used their real names anyway so
You do know that the FBI was busy looking for several of the terrorists even as the planes hit the WTC, right? They got into the country and disappeared- a face check at the gate might have flagged them and possibly prevented the attacks. The terrorists would have at least been delayed enough to stop some of the attacks.
You're right: biometrics is coming. This could be a very good thing if we drive the technology to good use. Fingerprint check when I use a credit card: why not? I'd love it if the store *knew* I was the owner of that card- I've had my number stolen before. Ever spoken with someone who's had their identity stolen? It's a multi-year nightmare of wrecked credit, endless phone calls and general heartburn.
Realize that we have almost no privacy anyway. Various large companies know a *lot* about me. They know personal details down to my last dollar, my taste for mint chip ice cream and the fact my wife and I are infertile. The government has run at least 3 background checks on me that I know of, the most recent within the last month. (I got my pilot's license recently: the FBI has already visited the airports I used to pull my records.)
Biometrics won't change that-what we need to do is make sure the transparancy goes both ways.
Eric
Or rather, 0.1% is the third or fourth attempt at copying "Hello World" out of "Java for Dummies", after 20 minutes of looking at (s, "s and ;s.
Eric
Windows 9x, not W2K or NT. MS should advertise "Full porn security!" for W2K- sales would go through the roof.
the cost of a digital cam-corder with which you can transfer and edit video is still high; let's not forget that, for the home user, there really isn't a ton of video editing to be had that I can imagine...
Your imagination is failing :^).
Digital camcorders are cheap- I just bought a Sony TRV900 for $1500, and the TRV900 is close to the top of the line consumer machine out there. For not much more you can buy the same equipment that Spike Lee uses to make his films (Canon GL-1 and XL-1s.) Single CCD MiniDV camcorders go for $800 on the low end. All of these machine have Firewire interfaces.
On the computer side, Firewire cards are $60-$100. If you have a Mac like my TiBook it's standard. (Macs also come with NLE software bundled- iMovie. Not as powerful as Premiere but just fine for home movies.) Disk and memory are so cheap today it's scary. I bought a DV <-> analog bridge for $250 so I can go either way with tapes.
What am I going to use this stuff for? Well, I have a new baby. I'm putting together a video of him for relatives who aren't going to get to see him, such as his uncle who's stationed in Hawaii with the Army. Another copy is going to his birthmother. (He's adopted)
I've been working on video of my wife's grandmother's farm as well. She's a tough old lady, but she is old and we don't know how much longer the farm will be in the family.
What else? Well, the TRV-900 has the ability to do both time lapse and very high shutter speed photos- I'm having fun filming storms and water droplets. When the current ban on general aviation VFR flights is lifted I'm going to have do aerial still and video shots of the area.
Video editing is never going to be immense on the level of word processing, but I think we'll be seeing a lot more of it in the future. Look at the huge growth in the digital camera market.
Eric
Also, unlikely that the industry would ever standardize on them (or any common reference standard). They have nothing to gain from cooperation.
SPEC is the only benchmark that every major processor maker but one submits their machines to. It's as close as a cross-platform neutral benchmark for CPUs as we're likely to get.
Guess who the one is? Hint: there's a reason why Apple doesn't quote SPEC when saying that G4s are as fast as P4s.
Eric
Not good enough IMHO.
I either have to go to an Apple reseller (None within 150 miles of me) or pony up $20 in S&H. Given that pressing the CD and mailing it costs all of about $2 and that I'm already in the database as an OSX owner, $20 is about 80% profit.
Apple's selling the upgrade, just like the makers of the "Free Herbal Viagra" that is advertised endlessly late at night[1] are selling it- the price is all in the S&H.
[1] When you have a 2-month old you watch a lot of late night TV while holding a bottle...
but I think this is a good example of the major reason I've now switched to Mac OS X: Apple wouldn't dream of making a feature that didn't have a UI interface whereas with Linux it's the norm.
So tell me: how do I move the Dock to the right side of the screen or make the disclosure triangles blue if the app is frontmost?
Both can be done, but only if you know the magic incantations to feed to a command prompt. Apple really needs to work on the Dock, although I understand pinning will at least be an option in 10.1
Eric
One of the reasons I will always be a loyal Apple customer is they don't try to pull any licensing bullsh*t like Microsoft does
They don't? Perhaps not as often, but I've gotten burned twice by being an early adopter
I bought one of the very first PPC Macs off the line. 7.1.2 was the OS shipped and it was a true abortion- unstable and slow. Wanted to upgrade to 7.5 three months later? Too bad: cough up the dough, since anyone who bought a x100 PowerMac within the 1st month didn't get the upgrade free. (7.5 sucked too, but not as bad.)
Now Apple's telling me I have to pay for 10.1, despite the fact that 10.0.x is clearly a public beta and not the real OS- it too is unstable and slow. Yeah, yeah, Unix, blah blah. I've locked up OSX badly enough to require pulling the battery out of my TiBook a number of times. By the standards I'm used to (AIX) it's not stable. At least it's not as bad as 7.1.2 was, but then again a house of cards was more stable. We won't even discuss Aqua's speed: I've got the best laptop made today and plenty of RAM and it feels like my old 6100.
Eric