I have a real problem with the idea of citizenship requiring me to make a solemn pledge of allegiance to a piece of cloth.
As a natural-born American citizen, I haven't said the pledge since I was old enough to understand it, and no one's ever forced me to. I think the whole idea is kind of creepy, but there are several court decisions stating that people can't be forced to say it, and I know many people who don't. It might look a bit suspicious if an applicant for citizenship refused to say it, but you could probably work it out. I don't know exactly how the naturalization process works, but if they make you say the pledge as part of a large group in the final ceremony, no one's gonna know or care if you just mouth your favorite Marx quotes (Karl or Groucho).
Slashdot is not a blog, at least not in the usual sense. A blog is a single person writing about all aspects of their life, whereas/. is multiple people sending in links about technology./. journals could be seen as blogs, but no one uses them anyway.
The principal was constitutionally off-base in restricting the speech, as it is the taxpayer who is funding the paper. He was acting as a representative of the government, and the government cannot selectively restrict speech in this way.
No, you're wrong.
a) Public schools are generally run by local governments, which are under state control. The First Amendment to the federal constitution does not apply to state governments.
b) Even if it did, the guarentee of freedom of speech does not mean that the government has to sponsor that speech.
c) Even if it did, minors do not have the full range of legal rights, just as they don't have the full range of legal responsibility.
Q:Does it play Games? A:No, at least none of the latest ones. Thats more important to any (male at least) kid I've ever known than the size of the box.
Obviously, it's not a power gaming rig, but it still does fairly well. The mini will play all Blizzard games quite well (Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft, and WoW) as well as Everquest, Doom, Quake, Unreal (in all their various versions and mods), and quite a few other games. Of the teenagers I know that play games, the combo of a console and a Mac mini would satisfy almost all of them (including myself).
People download several Gigs of Movies & music in a day.
You != everyone. Much of America is still on dialup, and those on broadband don't spend their every waking hour downloading media. Music doesn't take up all that much space (I've been downloading for years, and my collection still fits nicely on my 20GB iPod), and I don't know anyone that keeps downloaded movies archived on their HD. Most people watch them and delete them, or burn them to a CD/DVD for storage.
Obviously, if what you want is to play every PC game and store tons of content, the Mac mini isn't for you. But it's an excellent machine that would work well for a lot of people.
Not being able to upgrade the video is a big deal to me. The radeon 9200 chip they have is ok for playing basic mpg's or tetris but that's about it.
If you want to play games, you don't want a Mac anyway. If you want to do real video editing or 3D modeling, you don't want a Mac mini. The Radeon 9200 does exactly what 99% of Mini users need it to do. A faster card would pump up the cost and produce more heat and, consequently, noise.
And, of course, Apple doesn't believe anyone could want better sound than what they have built in so *no* mac's have upgradable sound.
WTF are you talking about? Every Power Mac ever made has upgradable internal sound, as do all Powerbooks with PCMCIA. And every Mac made in the past 6 or 7 years has Firewire and USB, either of which can be used for an external sound card with much better quality.
That's just a CYA disclaimer. If you look at the links elsewhere in this thread, you'll see that Apple's policy is that the warrenty is only void if you damage the computer while upgrading it.
Re:More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? E
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 1
Warning or no, most people click past those without reading them.
Which is why the FF default is not to allow people to launch EXEs. If you have the technical knowledge to edit the code and change that, then you probably have the common sense not to open random executables.
Take 500 children. Board them in an exlusive school with good meals, great education and sufficent social skills. Have their parents pay for half (7500) a semester and let the government pay for the other half. Ten years later, we have CEO's Senior Programmers, Writers, Athletes, Teachers, etc. These folk pay taxes, contribute to their community and even may employ other people with less abilty. Net loss to society? Zero. That's a net gain. Boarding schools, macroeconomically are cheap.
Those "exclusive" schools can keep popping out CEOs because they're exclusive - they only admit bright, motivated students. You're not gonna get those results with prisoners, and very few good teachers are interested in teaching them.
As for money, at the $15000/semester rate you've mentioned, that's about $40000 a year. Now factor in security, and you're paying a nice chunk of change.
Don't get me wrong, I generally agree with you, but what you advocate is never going to happen.
Don't generalize for all high schools. AP classes have a set curriculum, and a lot of common courses are standardized at the state level. I had textbooks in most of my high school classes, and used them quite a bit.
Why would you do captioning in real time for a non-live show? If the show was produced weeks earlier, there's plenty of time to go back and edit the captions.
The comparison is valid because it's between a MAC with a fixed OS (because I agree, why do Linux on the Mac), versus an updated OS (Linux) on a cheap PC. The added cost is there with the Mac if you want to stay up to date, which eventually becomes necessary. Things like new hardware (iPod?) and software (too numerous to mention) make these eventually necessary.
As I see it, Linux on the Mac is almost exactly the same as Linux on a PC, from the user's point of view. As even you admit, there's usually in running Linux on a Mac because OS X is much more suited for general desktop use. If OS X is better than PPC Linux, then it's also better than x86 Linux, and you can't make a valid price comparison. In any case, the cost of Linux is not all that relevant; most PC users will want Windows, which puts you on the same update cycle as OS X. OS X may be updated more frequently than Windows, but I see that as a plus.
I don't buy your argument about forced updates - the iPod works fine in OS 9, for God's sake, let alone any version of OS X. A new Mac can still run Classic programs from a decade ago. Sure, some apps may have incompatibilities, just as many new Windows apps won't work under older versions of Windows, but new applications work on old OS's surprisingly well. Besides, if you're going to be spending $$$ to add major new hardware and software to your computer, I don't think an OS upgrade is too much to ask.
Obviously any software CAN be developed, but the question is WILL it be developed. The list starts with games (not just big ones, but anything online; e.g. I've never seen an online poker program for Mac), but continues with downloading software (KaZaa? anyone), and these are just the ones off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more.
Having never played online poker, I can't argue that one. But as for KaZaA, there are plenty of good Mac p2p apps supporting the Fasttrack (KaZaA) network as well as many others. Sure, the available software library is smaller than Windows', but the quality is generally higher, and there's certainly more software available than for Linux (since pretty much all Linux software can run under OS X).
As for out of date Macs being useful, I would only agree with the aquariums, but I don't think it proves your point. I've never heard of anyone using it for a server, whereas the use of old PCs with Linux is almost synonymous with servers in my mind. At my work place we have two 386s, a mail server and a firewall.
Old PCs generally get used more for servers because they're cheaper than old Macs, but the Macs work just as well. Linux will go on just about anything; if you can put a network card in it, it will work as a server.
My point here is that the usability of this computer is severely hampered without putting more money in for upgrades (and I chose USB as an example). More expensive keyboards, monitors, and adding hubs would be examples of this.
"Severely hampered" depends on the person; I have no problem with buying a $10 USB hub (if I need it, which many people won't) in order to get a computer in the Mini's form factor. Expandibility is the tradeoff for smaller size, but 95% of users are not going to be replacing their PC's motherboard or even adding internal drives. Most external drives are Firewire, so you wouldn't even need a hub to use one with the Mini.
My overall view of the Mini is that no PC could beat it at what it is - no one's going to make a comparable PC at that size and cuteness level. Obviously, if you have a different set of requirements, like massive expandibility or certain Windows-only software, than the Mini doesn't make much sense for you. But I think that what the Mini has - a rock-solid Unix OS, Aqua, iLife, Quicken, a Combo drive, and the ability to run iWork or Office - is exactly what 95% of users need. A PC might be able to do the same stuff cheaper, but it couldn't do it better.
You don't "execute" movies. You open them in a movie player, and the major graphical mail clients support that just fine. An executable program is different, and there's really no legitimate reason to be emailing them around. There's certainly no excuse for indescriminately running them.
1. Unix users are self-selecting; they tend to be technically competent and less likely to be infected than the general populace.
2. Unix systems use a wide range of email applications and web browsers, almost all of which have fewer holes than IE/OE. No Unix mail client will execute an attachment for you; you have to save it, enable the execution flag, and then run it yourself.
3. Unix desktops are not nearly as common as Windows desktops, so there're fewer incentives to hack them. They're also quite diverse; a binary for PPC MacOS isn't going to work under x86 OpenBSD, Sparc Solaris, or ARM Linux, which reduces the pool of target machines for a given virus.
Of course, if you are listening to classical music on a system that includes a subwoofer, you bought the wrong system.
There's a helluva lot more to classical music than Bach solo violin sonatas. If you're listening to Beethoven's fifth on a system without a subwoofer, you bought the wrong system.
Vorbis is at least as common as WMA on the major torrent sites and p2p networks, and far more common than AAC. A lot of major games use Vorbis (example: Unreal Tournament), while I'm not aware of any using the other next-gen lossy formats. It's nowhere near as common as MP3, of course, but Vorbis isn't quite as obscure as you think.
The OS may need upgrading from time to time, and Apple doesn't just give these away, whereas a cheap PC with free Linux gets you free upgrades for life.
The OS never "needs" upgrading; Apple just provides you with the option. You can install Linux on a Mac and get all the free updates you want for life, but most people don't, because Linux doesn't do what they want it to do. As such, it hardly makes for a valid comparison.
Then there's the amazing flexibility of PCs, with so many people developing new software and mods all the time, even an out of date PC is useful for many things (just look at the XBox), or at least has some retail value.
You make it sound like Macs aren't Turing-complete or something. Any software that can be developed for a PC can be developed for a Mac, and most likely has (excluding big-name commercial games, but the Mini couldn't play them well anyway). Even an out of date Mac is useful for many things, from aquariums to servers, and (generally) has a much higher resale value than an equivalent PC.
Finally, the $499 mini is only suited to the simplest of situations. You want anything more, then you gotta pay more. The first item I would need is a USB hub, as it seems to only come with 2 USB ports.
News flash: PCs in that size (of which there are very few) don't have more than 2 USB ports either. And many of the better keyboards and monitors (including Apple's) have built-in USB hubs.
If anything breaks after the warranty runs out you probably have to throw it out (that's what happened to my iMac), as the repair costs would be close to the price of a new one.
Damn, that's harsh. A part broke in your iMac and Apple was gonna charge you ~$1000 to fix it? Sounds like an interesting story. Care to tell it?
If you're listening to another song, which is likely, then you have to press MENU three times to get back to the artist list, and then the center button three more times (artist/album/song) to select the song. That's six presses total. If you wanted to browse by a different aspect (genre, etc.) it would take eight presses total. It would take four total if you were switching to something from the the same artist, and two if you were in the same album. But if you made a mistake, it would take a couple extra presses to correct. So I think six is typical.
Slashdot Mirror
And quality is awful.
As a natural-born American citizen, I haven't said the pledge since I was old enough to understand it, and no one's ever forced me to. I think the whole idea is kind of creepy, but there are several court decisions stating that people can't be forced to say it, and I know many people who don't. It might look a bit suspicious if an applicant for citizenship refused to say it, but you could probably work it out. I don't know exactly how the naturalization process works, but if they make you say the pledge as part of a large group in the final ceremony, no one's gonna know or care if you just mouth your favorite Marx quotes (Karl or Groucho).
Slashdot is not a blog, at least not in the usual sense. A blog is a single person writing about all aspects of their life, whereas /. is multiple people sending in links about technology. /. journals could be seen as blogs, but no one uses them anyway.
No, you're wrong.
a) Public schools are generally run by local governments, which are under state control. The First Amendment to the federal constitution does not apply to state governments.
b) Even if it did, the guarentee of freedom of speech does not mean that the government has to sponsor that speech.
c) Even if it did, minors do not have the full range of legal rights, just as they don't have the full range of legal responsibility.
65 would be LXV, not VIV.
Obviously, it's not a power gaming rig, but it still does fairly well. The mini will play all Blizzard games quite well (Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft, and WoW) as well as Everquest, Doom, Quake, Unreal (in all their various versions and mods), and quite a few other games. Of the teenagers I know that play games, the combo of a console and a Mac mini would satisfy almost all of them (including myself).
People download several Gigs of Movies & music in a day.
You != everyone. Much of America is still on dialup, and those on broadband don't spend their every waking hour downloading media. Music doesn't take up all that much space (I've been downloading for years, and my collection still fits nicely on my 20GB iPod), and I don't know anyone that keeps downloaded movies archived on their HD. Most people watch them and delete them, or burn them to a CD/DVD for storage.
Obviously, if what you want is to play every PC game and store tons of content, the Mac mini isn't for you. But it's an excellent machine that would work well for a lot of people.
If you want to play games, you don't want a Mac anyway. If you want to do real video editing or 3D modeling, you don't want a Mac mini. The Radeon 9200 does exactly what 99% of Mini users need it to do. A faster card would pump up the cost and produce more heat and, consequently, noise.
And, of course, Apple doesn't believe anyone could want better sound than what they have built in so *no* mac's have upgradable sound.
WTF are you talking about? Every Power Mac ever made has upgradable internal sound, as do all Powerbooks with PCMCIA. And every Mac made in the past 6 or 7 years has Firewire and USB, either of which can be used for an external sound card with much better quality.
That's just a CYA disclaimer. If you look at the links elsewhere in this thread, you'll see that Apple's policy is that the warrenty is only void if you damage the computer while upgrading it.
Which is why the FF default is not to allow people to launch EXEs. If you have the technical knowledge to edit the code and change that, then you probably have the common sense not to open random executables.
Those "exclusive" schools can keep popping out CEOs because they're exclusive - they only admit bright, motivated students. You're not gonna get those results with prisoners, and very few good teachers are interested in teaching them.
As for money, at the $15000/semester rate you've mentioned, that's about $40000 a year. Now factor in security, and you're paying a nice chunk of change.
Don't get me wrong, I generally agree with you, but what you advocate is never going to happen.
Because boarding schools are expensive.
Don't generalize for all high schools. AP classes have a set curriculum, and a lot of common courses are standardized at the state level. I had textbooks in most of my high school classes, and used them quite a bit.
What about it? Are talented stenographers cheaper to hire than regular minimum-wage secretaries?
Why would you do captioning in real time for a non-live show? If the show was produced weeks earlier, there's plenty of time to go back and edit the captions.
If you use Google, then the ads are contributing to your online experience. If they weren't there, you wouldn't be able to use Google.
As I see it, Linux on the Mac is almost exactly the same as Linux on a PC, from the user's point of view. As even you admit, there's usually in running Linux on a Mac because OS X is much more suited for general desktop use. If OS X is better than PPC Linux, then it's also better than x86 Linux, and you can't make a valid price comparison. In any case, the cost of Linux is not all that relevant; most PC users will want Windows, which puts you on the same update cycle as OS X. OS X may be updated more frequently than Windows, but I see that as a plus.
I don't buy your argument about forced updates - the iPod works fine in OS 9, for God's sake, let alone any version of OS X. A new Mac can still run Classic programs from a decade ago. Sure, some apps may have incompatibilities, just as many new Windows apps won't work under older versions of Windows, but new applications work on old OS's surprisingly well. Besides, if you're going to be spending $$$ to add major new hardware and software to your computer, I don't think an OS upgrade is too much to ask.
Obviously any software CAN be developed, but the question is WILL it be developed. The list starts with games (not just big ones, but anything online; e.g. I've never seen an online poker program for Mac), but continues with downloading software (KaZaa? anyone), and these are just the ones off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more.
Having never played online poker, I can't argue that one. But as for KaZaA, there are plenty of good Mac p2p apps supporting the Fasttrack (KaZaA) network as well as many others. Sure, the available software library is smaller than Windows', but the quality is generally higher, and there's certainly more software available than for Linux (since pretty much all Linux software can run under OS X).
As for out of date Macs being useful, I would only agree with the aquariums, but I don't think it proves your point. I've never heard of anyone using it for a server, whereas the use of old PCs with Linux is almost synonymous with servers in my mind. At my work place we have two 386s, a mail server and a firewall.
Old PCs generally get used more for servers because they're cheaper than old Macs, but the Macs work just as well. Linux will go on just about anything; if you can put a network card in it, it will work as a server.
My point here is that the usability of this computer is severely hampered without putting more money in for upgrades (and I chose USB as an example). More expensive keyboards, monitors, and adding hubs would be examples of this.
"Severely hampered" depends on the person; I have no problem with buying a $10 USB hub (if I need it, which many people won't) in order to get a computer in the Mini's form factor. Expandibility is the tradeoff for smaller size, but 95% of users are not going to be replacing their PC's motherboard or even adding internal drives. Most external drives are Firewire, so you wouldn't even need a hub to use one with the Mini.
My overall view of the Mini is that no PC could beat it at what it is - no one's going to make a comparable PC at that size and cuteness level. Obviously, if you have a different set of requirements, like massive expandibility or certain Windows-only software, than the Mini doesn't make much sense for you. But I think that what the Mini has - a rock-solid Unix OS, Aqua, iLife, Quicken, a Combo drive, and the ability to run iWork or Office - is exactly what 95% of users need. A PC might be able to do the same stuff cheaper, but it couldn't do it better.
So, umm... What, exactly, did that post have to do with the post it was supposed to be in response to?
You don't "execute" movies. You open them in a movie player, and the major graphical mail clients support that just fine. An executable program is different, and there's really no legitimate reason to be emailing them around. There's certainly no excuse for indescriminately running them.
1. Unix users are self-selecting; they tend to be technically competent and less likely to be infected than the general populace.
2. Unix systems use a wide range of email applications and web browsers, almost all of which have fewer holes than IE/OE. No Unix mail client will execute an attachment for you; you have to save it, enable the execution flag, and then run it yourself.
3. Unix desktops are not nearly as common as Windows desktops, so there're fewer incentives to hack them. They're also quite diverse; a binary for PPC MacOS isn't going to work under x86 OpenBSD, Sparc Solaris, or ARM Linux, which reduces the pool of target machines for a given virus.
You most certainly can bass-boost on the iPod. There's an equalizer setting for it.
There's a helluva lot more to classical music than Bach solo violin sonatas. If you're listening to Beethoven's fifth on a system without a subwoofer, you bought the wrong system.
Vorbis is at least as common as WMA on the major torrent sites and p2p networks, and far more common than AAC. A lot of major games use Vorbis (example: Unreal Tournament), while I'm not aware of any using the other next-gen lossy formats. It's nowhere near as common as MP3, of course, but Vorbis isn't quite as obscure as you think.
The OS never "needs" upgrading; Apple just provides you with the option. You can install Linux on a Mac and get all the free updates you want for life, but most people don't, because Linux doesn't do what they want it to do. As such, it hardly makes for a valid comparison.
Then there's the amazing flexibility of PCs, with so many people developing new software and mods all the time, even an out of date PC is useful for many things (just look at the XBox), or at least has some retail value.
You make it sound like Macs aren't Turing-complete or something. Any software that can be developed for a PC can be developed for a Mac, and most likely has (excluding big-name commercial games, but the Mini couldn't play them well anyway). Even an out of date Mac is useful for many things, from aquariums to servers, and (generally) has a much higher resale value than an equivalent PC.
Finally, the $499 mini is only suited to the simplest of situations. You want anything more, then you gotta pay more. The first item I would need is a USB hub, as it seems to only come with 2 USB ports.
News flash: PCs in that size (of which there are very few) don't have more than 2 USB ports either. And many of the better keyboards and monitors (including Apple's) have built-in USB hubs.
If anything breaks after the warranty runs out you probably have to throw it out (that's what happened to my iMac), as the repair costs would be close to the price of a new one.
Damn, that's harsh. A part broke in your iMac and Apple was gonna charge you ~$1000 to fix it? Sounds like an interesting story. Care to tell it?
That said, you're right; it'd be quite easy for any half-decent Windows programmer.
If you're listening to another song, which is likely, then you have to press MENU three times to get back to the artist list, and then the center button three more times (artist/album/song) to select the song. That's six presses total. If you wanted to browse by a different aspect (genre, etc.) it would take eight presses total. It would take four total if you were switching to something from the the same artist, and two if you were in the same album. But if you made a mistake, it would take a couple extra presses to correct. So I think six is typical.