Because the world oil supply is largely controlled by countries with which we have shaky political relationships (Venezuela, most of the Middle East, etc.).
People also pirate when it comes time to update. After all, incremental updates like win2k-winxp or winxp-win vista should be free.
Oh really? You expect Microsoft to employ thousands of programmers for six years in order to give away the fruits of their labors for free?
Something reasonable for most would be windows ($140),office ($300), a/v, firewall ($60), 3 anti-spyware apps ($90), adobe photoshop ($600), nero 6 ultra ($90), quickbooks ($199), cd ripper/converter/tagger ($79), and alarm software ($20).
WTF are you smoking? Something reasonable would be:
Windows
Openoffice (free) or Works Suite ($69) if you really need Word
AVG/Antivir antivirus (free)
Ad-Aware/Spybot (free)
Paint.NET/Picasa (both free)
CDBurnerXP Pro (free)
iTunes (free)
I've never used Quickbooks or alarm software (alarm software? what the fuck?) but I'm sure there are lower-cost alternatives as well for those who need them. Also, stripped-down versions of Nero and Photoshop come free with most burners and cameras/scanners respectively. No need to pirate them.
Have you actually tested it with Openoffice? Not having a Linux install on hand, I can't be sure, but I'm pretty sure those tools are only for GTK apps (which OO isn't really, although it tries).
AFAIK, in both traditional and online music selling, the retailer takes a cut. Apple takes a cut from iTunes sales, but Amazon or your local record store will take an similar cut from CD sales (above and beyond distribution costs). Either way, the record company should be getting a similar amount out of the sale.
You can't really license a song idea, as far as I know. But even if it were in the public domain, Al probably still wouldn't use it, because I imagine he's the sort of person who likes coming up with his own ideas and doing original work. (insert stupid missing-the-point reply about parodies not being original work here)
Gmail.com is just a redirect to mail.google.com/mail, and it's an exception. Look at the rest of their services: there's no googleimages.com, googlemaps.com, googleanswers.com, etc. It's always just *.google.com (except for Froogle, for some reason).
Halo 2 is written for DirectX 10. If the graphics card doesn't support a DirectX 10 feature, it can be emulated in software, but you still have to have the software (DirectX 10), which is only available on Vista.
Well, yes, that was my point. The grandparent was trying to say that Macs were ideal game machines because they had standard hardware and could be programmed down to the metal like a console, and I was saying that that wasn't the case; Macs have differing GPUs and have to be programmed just like PCs, with abstraction layers such as OpenGL.
There's only so many different configurations available, so it's more or less like programming for a game console
Macs come with all sorts of CPUs and GPUs; a game written specifically for the Radeon X1600 in a Macbook Pro isn't gonna work well on the Intel chip in the Macbook/Mac mini or on the NVidia chips in a Power Mac (or Mac Pro, as it may turn out). I don't think Macs are really any more standardized than PCs as far as game programming goes.
If this guy is gonna be flying to work, I doubt he's too worried about missing out on public transport. And if you can afford a round-trip plane ticket every week, then you can afford a mortgage.
Despite whatever problems MS software might have, performance is very much in their dictionary. Office is a fast piece of software. My dad runs Office 2003 on an 8-year-old 450Mhz PIII, and Word/Excel/Powerpoint all start in less than a second and run perfectly smoothly (and no, they're not preloaded). Meanwhile, Openoffice 2 on the same machine takes about 30 seconds to start and sometimes has trouble keeping up with typing input.
Using wine to run windows software is NOT porting apps.
True, but that's not what they're doing. They're using winelib, which is a native Linux/X toolkit. It only just happens to behave very similarly to the Windows API.
What exactly makes Google less evil than Yahoo? I like Google too, but there's really not that much of a moral difference. Sure, Yahoo caved in to the Chinese thought police, but then again so did Google.
Disk consumption is a valid point, although with modern HDs a couple hundred MB is nothing. But a pared-down XP uses no more CPU or memory than 2000, in my experience. And even if it did, the difference is so small that it's not worth vomiting over.
I knew people at my high school that showed up after their 16th birthday with brand new Hummer H1s that their parents had bought them. The monthly payment on something like that is more than a 42 inch plasma nowdays. $2000 on video games and an HDTV would be a drop in the bucket.
Maybe 0.5% of American families have that kind of money and are willing to spend it. That's still five kids in a school of 1000, but it's not a very large market.
Wow, I can buy a cheap piece of crap Chinese manufactured PC knockoff that will break down in six months
Lenovo==IBM. They have pretty much the best reputation for quality and reliability among PC laptops.
As for price-for-features, the MacBooks are, like most Apples, excellent values if the features you want are exactly the features that Apple offers. But when you start configuring, that's not always true. Throw 2GB of RAM into a MacBook and it'll cost far more than the Dell equivilent.
It depends on what you want and how you configure it. An Inspiron E1405 with 1.83Ghz Core Duo, remote control, glossy screen, 60GB HD, combo drive, and integrated graphics and audio comes to $1,080. Compare to an MacBook at $1099, which has all the same stuff as well as a camera, optical audio in/out, and OSX + iLife, and is also lighter and has a better battery. I'd say the MacBook is a better value in that case.
Of course, you can also find configurations (like yours) for which the Dell is the better deal, at least on paper. Personally, while I wouldn't buy either right now, I would take your $1549 MacBook over the $1229 Dell because the extra design, OSX, and support are worth it to me. Obviously not everyone would agree.
Apple charges it because people will pay it. Sure, it might cost them a little more to make (it's a different type finish than the white), but mostly that pricing is just supply and demand.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the world oil supply is largely controlled by countries with which we have shaky political relationships (Venezuela, most of the Middle East, etc.).
Oh really? You expect Microsoft to employ thousands of programmers for six years in order to give away the fruits of their labors for free?
Something reasonable for most would be windows ($140),office ($300), a/v, firewall ($60), 3 anti-spyware apps ($90), adobe photoshop ($600), nero 6 ultra ($90), quickbooks ($199), cd ripper/converter/tagger ($79), and alarm software ($20).
WTF are you smoking? Something reasonable would be:
I've never used Quickbooks or alarm software (alarm software? what the fuck?) but I'm sure there are lower-cost alternatives as well for those who need them. Also, stripped-down versions of Nero and Photoshop come free with most burners and cameras/scanners respectively. No need to pirate them.
Have you actually tested it with Openoffice? Not having a Linux install on hand, I can't be sure, but I'm pretty sure those tools are only for GTK apps (which OO isn't really, although it tries).
Fluxbox is a window manager. GTK is a UI toolkit. They don't even compete; you're comparing apples and oranges.
I think it's new with the MacBooks.
AFAIK, in both traditional and online music selling, the retailer takes a cut. Apple takes a cut from iTunes sales, but Amazon or your local record store will take an similar cut from CD sales (above and beyond distribution costs). Either way, the record company should be getting a similar amount out of the sale.
You can't really license a song idea, as far as I know. But even if it were in the public domain, Al probably still wouldn't use it, because I imagine he's the sort of person who likes coming up with his own ideas and doing original work. (insert stupid missing-the-point reply about parodies not being original work here)
Gmail.com is just a redirect to mail.google.com/mail, and it's an exception. Look at the rest of their services: there's no googleimages.com, googlemaps.com, googleanswers.com, etc. It's always just *.google.com (except for Froogle, for some reason).
Halo 2 is written for DirectX 10. If the graphics card doesn't support a DirectX 10 feature, it can be emulated in software, but you still have to have the software (DirectX 10), which is only available on Vista.
Well, yes, that was my point. The grandparent was trying to say that Macs were ideal game machines because they had standard hardware and could be programmed down to the metal like a console, and I was saying that that wasn't the case; Macs have differing GPUs and have to be programmed just like PCs, with abstraction layers such as OpenGL.
IIRC, the iMac has the same X1600 as that MBP, and it's cheaper.
Macs come with all sorts of CPUs and GPUs; a game written specifically for the Radeon X1600 in a Macbook Pro isn't gonna work well on the Intel chip in the Macbook/Mac mini or on the NVidia chips in a Power Mac (or Mac Pro, as it may turn out). I don't think Macs are really any more standardized than PCs as far as game programming goes.
If this guy is gonna be flying to work, I doubt he's too worried about missing out on public transport. And if you can afford a round-trip plane ticket every week, then you can afford a mortgage.
Despite whatever problems MS software might have, performance is very much in their dictionary. Office is a fast piece of software. My dad runs Office 2003 on an 8-year-old 450Mhz PIII, and Word/Excel/Powerpoint all start in less than a second and run perfectly smoothly (and no, they're not preloaded). Meanwhile, Openoffice 2 on the same machine takes about 30 seconds to start and sometimes has trouble keeping up with typing input.
True, but that's not what they're doing. They're using winelib, which is a native Linux/X toolkit. It only just happens to behave very similarly to the Windows API.
What exactly makes Google less evil than Yahoo? I like Google too, but there's really not that much of a moral difference. Sure, Yahoo caved in to the Chinese thought police, but then again so did Google.
MNG does all of those, IIRC.
Disk consumption is a valid point, although with modern HDs a couple hundred MB is nothing. But a pared-down XP uses no more CPU or memory than 2000, in my experience. And even if it did, the difference is so small that it's not worth vomiting over.
That's just stupid. Windows 2000 has no advantages over XP in classic mode, and several disadvantages.
Maybe 0.5% of American families have that kind of money and are willing to spend it. That's still five kids in a school of 1000, but it's not a very large market.
Lenovo==IBM. They have pretty much the best reputation for quality and reliability among PC laptops.
As for price-for-features, the MacBooks are, like most Apples, excellent values if the features you want are exactly the features that Apple offers. But when you start configuring, that's not always true. Throw 2GB of RAM into a MacBook and it'll cost far more than the Dell equivilent.
Of course, you can also find configurations (like yours) for which the Dell is the better deal, at least on paper. Personally, while I wouldn't buy either right now, I would take your $1549 MacBook over the $1229 Dell because the extra design, OSX, and support are worth it to me. Obviously not everyone would agree.
Apple charges it because people will pay it. Sure, it might cost them a little more to make (it's a different type finish than the white), but mostly that pricing is just supply and demand.
OK, but it still has only integrated graphics.
Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure no planes ever crashed into WTC-7.