Oh yes. I bet games and 3D-acceleration was Apple's top-priority when they set out to design a low-cost computer for EDUCATION. You keep on whining about how "this machine wont play games that well!". Well, here's a news-flash for you: IT'S NOT MEANT FOR GAMING! What are you, a retard or something? It's meant for students for their education-related tasks and for schools that can use it in their computer-labs. I bet that the schools LIKE the fact that it can't really be used for gaming! That way they will know that it will be used for studying, instead of playing World of Warcraft.
you want a computer that is good at running games? Then buy a computer meant for that task and end your whining. This computer is not the computer you are looking for, it's as simple as that. Sheesh!
Yep, but the "captors" were not the men, it was the TV Network. And the woman could leave anytime she wanted to, so she wasn't being held "captive" in the first place!
"if your positions were reversed, would it have been surprising if she called the cops?"
It would have been EXTREMELY surprising. Do you think that looking at an attractive girl/woman is against the law? What would she tell the cops? "That man over there was looking at me!".
"Most people held captive tend to fall for their captors (Stockholm syndrome)"
Yes, over a prolonged period of time. That is, when the victim is being held captive for days or weeks. Did they hold her for days? No. It seems that they held her for few minutes at most.
"Is it really to much to ask to be able to play a game or two on a cheap computer?"
This computer is meant for EDUCATION. Last time I checked, "education" does not include 3D-accelerated gaming. If you want a computer meant for gaming, go buy something else. Whining that low-cost education-computer is not optimal for gaming, is the epitome of idiocy. If you do want computer suitable for gaming, go buy another brand, or pay few hundred extra and get a proper iMac. Sheesh!
Well, buy the more expensive iMac, and quit your whining. This particular machine is meant for education. If you want to have a computer for "other" tasks besides education, there are alternatives (like the more expensive model).
You get a big hi-quality 17" screen, fast processor, all-in-one design, good OS, and lots of other goodies for $899, and you are now whining that it's not a "good deal" because it has a integrated vid-card? The vid-card is good enough for it's intended use (education, remember?)
I heard those are immune to just about ALL malware out there, and will remain so for eons. And the technology has been tested and troubleshot for centuries, so it's basically bulletproof.
"No, I equate "doing something with the intent of causing confusion" or "doing something unusual as an act of provocation" with "causing trouble"."
Few days ago an attractive girl was checking me out. That was pretty "unusual" and "confusing". Maybe I should have called the cops because she was clearly "causing trouble"?
Well, the thing is that things used to work in Breezy. When I moved to Dapper, all hell broke loose. And it doesn't seem like hardware-issue. Epiphany does not crash (but it's otherwise useless), but Firefox does. Many apps do not crash, but some do. Most of my panel-applets work like they should, but deskbar crashes all the time. I would guess that if I were facing hardware-problems, I would see them everywhere. But I'm not.
"Frankly, I think this is more Gentoo's problem than open source in general. I used to use Gentoo and had no end of problems, but my time with Ubuntu and Debian before that has been without incident."
I wish my experience was like that, and I have been using Linux for YEARS. I'm running Dapper Drake on my PC. And Firefox crashes constantly. One second it's there, the other it's not. Epiphany seems to be more stable, but it's useless as a web-browser. Deskbar crashes constantly. Just about every time I load the desktop I get a message telling me that it has crashed and that do I want to remove it from the desktop entirely. F-spot had problems importing my pictures from my camera, and it insisted on copying those pics tro my home-folder, even though I explicitly told it NOT to do so. The admin-tools... Sometimes they simply refused to load at all. Beagle was just useless and it slowed everything down to a crawl.
I tried re-installing Ubuntu from scratch (I thought that something went wrong when I dist-upgraded from Breezy). And it did fix the performance-issues I had (previously everything seemed sluggish), and SOME of the crashes. But the apps still crash way too often.
end-result of this? I used to have a Mac Mini that acted as a "server" (running Ubuntu-server). I put it back on my desktop and loaded OS X back on it so I would at least have a usable computer.
Re:Pills that treat every major disease costs $0.2
on
The Cost of the iPod
·
· Score: 1
"Apples advantage and strong point is its advertising, not its technology or design"
Have you actually looked at the players? Design of the iPod is miles ahead of Creative and the like. Believe me, I actually went looking for a player, and the design of the Mini was way ahead of Creative and others. Mini was not the first player I looked at, and it wasn't the last. But it WAS the best.
"and is built on the proven superiority of Creative's Audigy sound HW"
Um, what does the Audigy have to do with their mp3-players? And what makes you think that Audigy is "superior"? People in the know usually think that it's quite mediocre.
"It is vanity to be impressed by a case, it is intelligence to look inside."
I was impressed by how the player felt in my hand. Creative felt cheap, iPod did not. And I DID "look inside". The UI in the Mini was superior to the one found in the other players. Feel free to disagree, but I just don't share your opinion on this matter.
And I find quite funny that you talk of "intelligence" while calling the iPod "iCrap". Yeah, that show really intelligence and maturity.
So, we have now established that this individual is 100% ignorant when it comes to this particular subject-matter. Instead of whining about it on/., has any of you actually contacted him and told him that he's wrong?
Re:Pills that treat every major disease costs $0.2
on
The Cost of the iPod
·
· Score: 1
All my music is encoded as mp3's, and the iPod plays them back just fine.
"with an ipod you pay for the brand"
I paid for the DESIGN. I went shopping for mp3-player. I tried different models, and they felt plastique, they felt cheap, they didn't feel comfortable in the hand, they had needless clutter on them ("The Creative Uber-zen videoplayer XMA500+", why does it have to constantly remind me which brand of mp3-player I bought?). Then I tried iPod Mini. It was made from aluminium, it felt like solid piece of metal. It felt smooth and uncluttered. The controls were dead-simple. It just felt RIGHT. Yes, it cost a bit more than the competitors, but not outrageously so It became obvious to me the moment I picked the Mini up, that that extra money does get you something extra.
I find this really surprising to be honest. Good design does take work, but it's not rocket-science. Why is it that after all these years, only Apple does it right, whereas Creative and the others do not?
"Because it's not illegal to achieve a monopoly, only to use the dominating position in one area (OS) to force out the competition in other markets (browsers, media players)"
And through the dominance of Windows, Microsoft is also pushing DirectX. Why can they push DirectX, but they can't push Media Player or IE?
"In this case I'd say games are free to go with either DirectX or OpenGL on Windows - the games ship with the latest redistributable anyway so there's no particular "preinstall" advantage"
Except that on Vista, OpenGL is inherintly crippled, with vendor-ICD's or not.
"If MS locked down Windows so that only DX API's could be used (no OpenGL, etc) then there'd be cause for argument."
And that is what they are doing with Vista, basically. In Vista, OpenGL is just a wrapper around Direct3D, and it takes about 50% performance-hit. Sure, vendors (NVIDIA etc.) could provide their own OpenGL-implementation, but that means that the spiffy 3D-desktop Vista has would not work anymore. In other words: Microsoft is making sure that OpenGL is as undesireable as possible in Vista.
because when you buy a Dell or some other OEM-machine, they will all ship with Vista? Most people get theor OS with their computer, and pretty soon those computers are going to be running Vista by default.
Couldn't you just as well say that "Windows is not a gaming-monopoly, since we have lots of people playing real-life poker"? What makes you think that console is replacement for PC as far as gaming is concerned?
Why have we had lawsuits about media-players and the like, while something like DirectX has been left alone? I mean, DirectX (or more precisely: Direct3D) is replacing OpenGL, especially in games. And DirectX runs only on Windows. Doesn't that mean that porting those games to other platforms would end up being very difficult, and if you wanted to play games on your PC, you practically needed Windows (well, that's true even today, but the reasons for that are elsewhere).
In short: authorities were concerned about Microsoft dominance in the web-browser market. And they have been worried about Mcirosoft dominance in the media-playback market. Yet they are not concerned about DirectX and the dominance it gives to Microsoft? How come?
"What part of "I'm referring to the implementation details here, not to packaging and marketing arrangements" did you not understand?"
In other words: you are artificially limiting the discussion because you know that your argument has no merit. So you only talk about the things that support your argument, and disregard the things that oppose it. What was that you said about "fundamentalists" again?
Fine, let's talk of implementation-details: KHTML is a part of the KDE-desktop. There are some Linux-distros that ship with KDE by default (and others that do not). And those distros support removal of KDE. So there's nothing stopping you from removing KHTML and KDE from your OS. WINDOWS DOES NOT SUPPORT REMOVAL OF THE DESKTOP. Isn't this an "implementation detail"? Why yes, I do believe that it is!
"The implementations are very similar, in that neither one is part of the OS kernel."
No they are not. Sure, you might say that IE is a component of the Windows-desktop, just as KHTML is a component of KDE. But in Linux you can remove the desktop. You can choose not to install the desktop. You can replace it with something else. That is not supported in Windows! That is a HUGE difference in the implementation! One is a truly modular design that support removal of components. Other is a monolithic design with hardwired desktop.
You are trying to artificially limit the discussion by talking only about the kernel. The kernel is irrelevant. you can't say "Aha! IE is not part of the kernel, so MS isn't doing anything wrong here!". It might not be part of the kernel, but it is VERY MUCH part of the overall OS, since it's part of the desktop, and the desktop is hardwired to the OS! In Linux, the desktop is NOT hardwired to the OS! There's your fucking "implementation detail"!
"Thus demonstrating my point a third time. If I tried to claim that KHTML is part of the OS, I'd be slapped down (and rightly so) by hordes of Linux fans explaining that the "OS" is the kernel, not the desktop environment."
You just don't "get it". In Linux, you can freely remove the desktop. You can replace the desktop with something else. The OS might come with a desktop by default, but removing it is very, very easy. Or you could replace it with something else during the install. And most Linux-OS'es support installation with NO desktop.
In Windows, the desktop is VERY MUCH part of the OS. You simply can't install Windows without the desktop. Replacing the desktop is not supported, and you simply can't eliminate the desktop if you wanted to.
"That technical distinction is just as applicable to Windows as it is to Linux"
In Linux, you can remove the desktop. In Windows, you can not.
"My point (the one you're being kind enough to demonstrate for me) is that Linux fans tend to ignore that distinction whenever it gets in the way of taking a cheap shot at Microsoft - just like you're doing right now."
What you seem to not understand is the fact that Windows and Linux are different. When "Linux zealots" say that "But the desktop is not part of the Linux-OS", they are right. And when they say that "The desktop is part of Windows" they are also right. And that is so because Windows and Linux are different. There is no double-standards here. There's just two different OS'es. Just because something is true in Linux does not mean that it's true in Windows. In Linux, the desktop can be freely replaced, removed or not installed at all. That does not apply to Windows. In Linux, the desktop is not part of the OS, it can be removed with minimium of fuzz. In Windows it IS part of the OS, and you simply can't get rid of it.
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"Idiocy? from Apple's marketing department, yes."
Oh yes. I bet games and 3D-acceleration was Apple's top-priority when they set out to design a low-cost computer for EDUCATION. You keep on whining about how "this machine wont play games that well!". Well, here's a news-flash for you: IT'S NOT MEANT FOR GAMING! What are you, a retard or something? It's meant for students for their education-related tasks and for schools that can use it in their computer-labs. I bet that the schools LIKE the fact that it can't really be used for gaming! That way they will know that it will be used for studying, instead of playing World of Warcraft.
you want a computer that is good at running games? Then buy a computer meant for that task and end your whining. This computer is not the computer you are looking for, it's as simple as that. Sheesh!
Yep, but the "captors" were not the men, it was the TV Network. And the woman could leave anytime she wanted to, so she wasn't being held "captive" in the first place!
"if your positions were reversed, would it have been surprising if she called the cops?"
It would have been EXTREMELY surprising. Do you think that looking at an attractive girl/woman is against the law? What would she tell the cops? "That man over there was looking at me!".
"Most people held captive tend to fall for their captors (Stockholm syndrome)"
Yes, over a prolonged period of time. That is, when the victim is being held captive for days or weeks. Did they hold her for days? No. It seems that they held her for few minutes at most.
"Is it really to much to ask to be able to play a game or two on a cheap computer?"
This computer is meant for EDUCATION. Last time I checked, "education" does not include 3D-accelerated gaming. If you want a computer meant for gaming, go buy something else. Whining that low-cost education-computer is not optimal for gaming, is the epitome of idiocy. If you do want computer suitable for gaming, go buy another brand, or pay few hundred extra and get a proper iMac. Sheesh!
Well, buy the more expensive iMac, and quit your whining. This particular machine is meant for education. If you want to have a computer for "other" tasks besides education, there are alternatives (like the more expensive model).
Oh, And I want a p0ny while we are at it!
You get a big hi-quality 17" screen, fast processor, all-in-one design, good OS, and lots of other goodies for $899, and you are now whining that it's not a "good deal" because it has a integrated vid-card? The vid-card is good enough for it's intended use (education, remember?)
"laminated medium"
Gold-pressed latinum! w00t! Oh, you said "laminated"? nevermind....
I heard those are immune to just about ALL malware out there, and will remain so for eons. And the technology has been tested and troubleshot for centuries, so it's basically bulletproof.
"No, I equate "doing something with the intent of causing confusion" or "doing something unusual as an act of provocation" with "causing trouble"."
Few days ago an attractive girl was checking me out. That was pretty "unusual" and "confusing". Maybe I should have called the cops because she was clearly "causing trouble"?
"Surprisingly, the circuits look nothing like normal brain anatomy"
Well, it IS possible! Right?
Well, the thing is that things used to work in Breezy. When I moved to Dapper, all hell broke loose. And it doesn't seem like hardware-issue. Epiphany does not crash (but it's otherwise useless), but Firefox does. Many apps do not crash, but some do. Most of my panel-applets work like they should, but deskbar crashes all the time. I would guess that if I were facing hardware-problems, I would see them everywhere. But I'm not.
"Frankly, I think this is more Gentoo's problem than open source in general. I used to use Gentoo and had no end of problems, but my time with Ubuntu and Debian before that has been without incident."
I wish my experience was like that, and I have been using Linux for YEARS. I'm running Dapper Drake on my PC. And Firefox crashes constantly. One second it's there, the other it's not. Epiphany seems to be more stable, but it's useless as a web-browser. Deskbar crashes constantly. Just about every time I load the desktop I get a message telling me that it has crashed and that do I want to remove it from the desktop entirely. F-spot had problems importing my pictures from my camera, and it insisted on copying those pics tro my home-folder, even though I explicitly told it NOT to do so. The admin-tools... Sometimes they simply refused to load at all. Beagle was just useless and it slowed everything down to a crawl.
I tried re-installing Ubuntu from scratch (I thought that something went wrong when I dist-upgraded from Breezy). And it did fix the performance-issues I had (previously everything seemed sluggish), and SOME of the crashes. But the apps still crash way too often.
end-result of this? I used to have a Mac Mini that acted as a "server" (running Ubuntu-server). I put it back on my desktop and loaded OS X back on it so I would at least have a usable computer.
"Apples advantage and strong point is its advertising, not its technology or design"
Have you actually looked at the players? Design of the iPod is miles ahead of Creative and the like. Believe me, I actually went looking for a player, and the design of the Mini was way ahead of Creative and others. Mini was not the first player I looked at, and it wasn't the last. But it WAS the best.
"and is built on the proven superiority of Creative's Audigy sound HW"
Um, what does the Audigy have to do with their mp3-players? And what makes you think that Audigy is "superior"? People in the know usually think that it's quite mediocre.
"It is vanity to be impressed by a case, it is intelligence to look inside."
I was impressed by how the player felt in my hand. Creative felt cheap, iPod did not. And I DID "look inside". The UI in the Mini was superior to the one found in the other players. Feel free to disagree, but I just don't share your opinion on this matter.
And I find quite funny that you talk of "intelligence" while calling the iPod "iCrap". Yeah, that show really intelligence and maturity.
So, we have now established that this individual is 100% ignorant when it comes to this particular subject-matter. Instead of whining about it on /., has any of you actually contacted him and told him that he's wrong?
"I need the craptunes SW to access my music"
I used my iPod with Banshee. It worked fine.
"it uses the inferior AAC codec"
All my music is encoded as mp3's, and the iPod plays them back just fine.
"with an ipod you pay for the brand"
I paid for the DESIGN. I went shopping for mp3-player. I tried different models, and they felt plastique, they felt cheap, they didn't feel comfortable in the hand, they had needless clutter on them ("The Creative Uber-zen videoplayer XMA500+", why does it have to constantly remind me which brand of mp3-player I bought?). Then I tried iPod Mini. It was made from aluminium, it felt like solid piece of metal. It felt smooth and uncluttered. The controls were dead-simple. It just felt RIGHT. Yes, it cost a bit more than the competitors, but not outrageously so It became obvious to me the moment I picked the Mini up, that that extra money does get you something extra.
I find this really surprising to be honest. Good design does take work, but it's not rocket-science. Why is it that after all these years, only Apple does it right, whereas Creative and the others do not?
"And how is that then?"
If the vid-card uses OpenGL, one of the major new features in Vista, the 3D-accelerated GUI will stop working.
"Because it's not illegal to achieve a monopoly, only to use the dominating position in one area (OS) to force out the competition in other markets (browsers, media players)"
And through the dominance of Windows, Microsoft is also pushing DirectX. Why can they push DirectX, but they can't push Media Player or IE?
"In this case I'd say games are free to go with either DirectX or OpenGL on Windows - the games ship with the latest redistributable anyway so there's no particular "preinstall" advantage"
Except that on Vista, OpenGL is inherintly crippled, with vendor-ICD's or not.
"If MS locked down Windows so that only DX API's could be used (no OpenGL, etc) then there'd be cause for argument."
And that is what they are doing with Vista, basically. In Vista, OpenGL is just a wrapper around Direct3D, and it takes about 50% performance-hit. Sure, vendors (NVIDIA etc.) could provide their own OpenGL-implementation, but that means that the spiffy 3D-desktop Vista has would not work anymore. In other words: Microsoft is making sure that OpenGL is as undesireable as possible in Vista.
because when you buy a Dell or some other OEM-machine, they will all ship with Vista? Most people get theor OS with their computer, and pretty soon those computers are going to be running Vista by default.
Couldn't you just as well say that "Windows is not a gaming-monopoly, since we have lots of people playing real-life poker"? What makes you think that console is replacement for PC as far as gaming is concerned?
Looking at how Microsoft plans to cripple OpenGL in Vista, I think that developers might not have a choice on the matter.
Why have we had lawsuits about media-players and the like, while something like DirectX has been left alone? I mean, DirectX (or more precisely: Direct3D) is replacing OpenGL, especially in games. And DirectX runs only on Windows. Doesn't that mean that porting those games to other platforms would end up being very difficult, and if you wanted to play games on your PC, you practically needed Windows (well, that's true even today, but the reasons for that are elsewhere).
In short: authorities were concerned about Microsoft dominance in the web-browser market. And they have been worried about Mcirosoft dominance in the media-playback market. Yet they are not concerned about DirectX and the dominance it gives to Microsoft? How come?
"What part of "I'm referring to the implementation details here, not to packaging and marketing arrangements" did you not understand?"
In other words: you are artificially limiting the discussion because you know that your argument has no merit. So you only talk about the things that support your argument, and disregard the things that oppose it. What was that you said about "fundamentalists" again?
Fine, let's talk of implementation-details: KHTML is a part of the KDE-desktop. There are some Linux-distros that ship with KDE by default (and others that do not). And those distros support removal of KDE. So there's nothing stopping you from removing KHTML and KDE from your OS. WINDOWS DOES NOT SUPPORT REMOVAL OF THE DESKTOP. Isn't this an "implementation detail"? Why yes, I do believe that it is!
"The implementations are very similar, in that neither one is part of the OS kernel."
No they are not. Sure, you might say that IE is a component of the Windows-desktop, just as KHTML is a component of KDE. But in Linux you can remove the desktop. You can choose not to install the desktop. You can replace it with something else. That is not supported in Windows! That is a HUGE difference in the implementation! One is a truly modular design that support removal of components. Other is a monolithic design with hardwired desktop.
You are trying to artificially limit the discussion by talking only about the kernel. The kernel is irrelevant. you can't say "Aha! IE is not part of the kernel, so MS isn't doing anything wrong here!". It might not be part of the kernel, but it is VERY MUCH part of the overall OS, since it's part of the desktop, and the desktop is hardwired to the OS! In Linux, the desktop is NOT hardwired to the OS! There's your fucking "implementation detail"!
"Thus demonstrating my point a third time. If I tried to claim that KHTML is part of the OS, I'd be slapped down (and rightly so) by hordes of Linux fans explaining that the "OS" is the kernel, not the desktop environment."
You just don't "get it". In Linux, you can freely remove the desktop. You can replace the desktop with something else. The OS might come with a desktop by default, but removing it is very, very easy. Or you could replace it with something else during the install. And most Linux-OS'es support installation with NO desktop.
In Windows, the desktop is VERY MUCH part of the OS. You simply can't install Windows without the desktop. Replacing the desktop is not supported, and you simply can't eliminate the desktop if you wanted to.
"That technical distinction is just as applicable to Windows as it is to Linux"
In Linux, you can remove the desktop. In Windows, you can not.
"My point (the one you're being kind enough to demonstrate for me) is that Linux fans tend to ignore that distinction whenever it gets in the way of taking a cheap shot at Microsoft - just like you're doing right now."
What you seem to not understand is the fact that Windows and Linux are different. When "Linux zealots" say that "But the desktop is not part of the Linux-OS", they are right. And when they say that "The desktop is part of Windows" they are also right. And that is so because Windows and Linux are different. There is no double-standards here. There's just two different OS'es. Just because something is true in Linux does not mean that it's true in Windows. In Linux, the desktop can be freely replaced, removed or not installed at all. That does not apply to Windows. In Linux, the desktop is not part of the OS, it can be removed with minimium of fuzz. In Windows it IS part of the OS, and you simply can't get rid of it.