I don't know; there are just so many benefits and negatives on each side of this situation. This entire setup really is just like applying for a loan. The stores are building a home-grown "credit"-reporting system, and analyzing your risk as a financial investment. Not making an exchange is akin to throwing down a 14% interest rate on a mortgage: you still have the right to accept such a rate, and the bank has a chance to retain profitability. Not accepting an exchange is certainly not the optimal way I would choose to go about such a decision, but I suppose it's the best one in the situation posed by a clothing retailer.
On the one hand, it does make for some nasty situations. The woman in the article may not realize it, but even with the $2,000 a year she spends, she may be far less profitable than a person who spends $200 on a single splurge purchase once. Ultimately, that leads to higher prices for all of us, and retailers are trying to go in an entirely opposite direction. The benefits of streamlining and smoothing out everything from supply side to process to (unfortunately) wages means that things are, on a whole, a lot less expensive than I remember even 10 years ago. Having worked in retail, I've seen some of the absolutely nightmarish return scenarios that people don't seem to think twice about: big-screens returned the day after the Superbowl or big-screens that people pretty obviously ruined while trying to save the delivery charge, people "checking out" cameras and camcorders for the length of the exchange period, etc. It comes back on the next guy in the form of higher prices, and it comes back on the employee in the form of smaller profits which equal less pay/less employees.
Of course, the system's also primed for abuse. Best Buy was mentioned in the last such article, and although they explicitly said that they didn't plan on implementing blocks or any actions against "less desirable" customers, there's nothing to stop the next guy down the street from refusing the customer who only buys the loss-leader rebated items (and nothing to stop BBY from changing this policy further down the road).
For the vast majority of us who don't play such games, it means a better deal, for the most part. As other posters have mentioned, though, such lists probably should be subject to the guidelines of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and store employees should always be given the option to override such list systems for returns.
Ultimately, though, this falls into the same category as razor-blade-business-model printers and shortened warranties on products; the free market model assumes a buyer who is educated on the product (and I suppose a buyer who isn't looking to scam the store on said product), and that is a model that is contrary to the average consumer in the real world. How different is such a list, really, from a credit report or insurance analysis? Systems such as these are a way for businesses to compete effevctively in a tighter marketplace. No company has a right to a profit, but they do have a right (within the limits of the law) to implement policies and systems that give them the best chance to earn a profit. Conversely, the consumer has a right to choose a company with a totally different system. While you can certainly argue that the profits go straight to the major shareholders and CEO (and I won't dispute it), they do also make it to the customer in the form of cheaper (in both senses of that word, unfortunately) goods.
In short, I'm not a fan of the system, but I do recognize its usefulness as well as the fact that people who do tend to abuse the system can always shop elsewhere (or straighten up).
I'm not totally clear on what these machines are used for (custom web apps w/ heavy activeX use? Random surfing?), but assuming you haven't heavily focused on IE with custom software, Mozilla/Firefox plus a proper permissions system that denies access to IE and program installation should prevent 95% of the infections.
Top it off with a local DNS that nulls known ad sites and spyware supplies, and you should be good to go.
Both Norton AV 2004 + 2005 and McAfee's current stuff sport spyware detection as a new feature over the older version. Granted, their removal process is god-awful, but even their $40 on the shelf software will detect most spyware programs and can actually remove some.
Um, read what you wrote. That system did cost over $800, just not all at one point. Having a NIC or HDD or Optical drive kicking around doesn't make it free, it just means that it's already paid for. And while it may make the short-term cost easier to swallow, the same goes for eBaying old Mac equipment.
I could probably pull $350 for my $1,200 (at the time) CRT iMac that I've had for four years, whereas a comparable PC is so nearly worthless by that point that it makes more sense to just carry over the random parts than make a pittance online.
A) I'll assume you're using Linux here, since I don't see a price factored for a windows OS. Nevertheless, if you choose to boot that, you'll want to include it in the price comparo. Of course, the fact that you chose to use an ATI card rather than NVidia points to a plan to use Windows.
I'd also like to know how a single processor system is orders of magnitude better than a G5 (you can certainly argue cheaper here, but not "orders of magnitude better").
DIY? Well, it's not really a fair comparison price-wise, but when I actually compare my DIY costs I include all the stuff. Things like OS cost, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. that a lot of people (including your list, apparently) tend to ignore.
Totally independent of that, though, I'd point out that many of the new Mac crew are old Unix-heads who fully comprehend DIY, but recognize the quality inherent in Apple products.
Again, it's not to knock that machine. I'm typing this from a similarly equipped home-brew PC. But you have to ignore a LOT of the things that Apple ships on their units to pretend that your theoretical computeris comparable and not merely "getting the job done."
Having a model that compares was one of the things that nearly doomed Apple in the mid-90's. Simply put, Apple can't afford to have a jillion different product lines, and it's something for which I'm willing to forgive them. Cheaper eMacs and iMacs are expandable over Firewire (not the same thing, I know) for those who can't swing the higher entry point.
While I would love to have a single proc, smaller tower version of the G5 in the mid $1,000s, I also understand why such a product doesn't exist. At the end of the day, I'm happy to take what Apple can afford to provide, given everything else that the company has contributed to the computing world.
Can you imagine a political prisoner on a 3rd-party ticket recieving a million votes today? Too bad the American public doesn't have that much balls anymore.
Maybe not today, but less than 12 years ago Perot got a hell of a lot more than a million votes.
No doubt; my Girlfriend's gaming PC (A mac is her primary machine) cost me just over $600 with a very nice video card, although I got the video card for $7 because an old one had died under warranty.
An $800 computer will NOT have dual processors, a DVD burner, optical digital audio output, slots for 8GB of RAM expansion, both forms of Firewire, GigE, etc. I can build a solid, reliable computer for $800, but I'm not going to try and pretend that it's remotely comparable to a dual 1.8Ghz G5 PowerMac. This is the point that everyone misses when they play this game.
Yeah, you're right, with the exception of a few CPU-level bugs along the way, the BSOD hasn't been built into the CPU, but that's not to say that it's always Windows' fault.
Other things that go into the Windows world's instability include: El-Cheapo hardware du jour. This includes many, many x86 mobo manufacturers, as well as bottom of the barrel RAM and PSU suppliers. Guess what: If you're truly talking about making something the same as a $2,000 Mac for half the price (hyperbole, I know), then you're engaging in some of this, and it is where a lot of the BSODs originate.
As a follow-up to section 1: shitty driver support, particularly in the 9x days when everything, not just video, had an easy chance to cause system-level problems.
When people say x86 in a debate such as this, they generally mean the platform as a whole, not the cost of the chip. A Pentium 4 chip by itself is as useless to me as a G5 by itself. But to say that Linux or some other non-Windows OS is going to be magically immune to the cheap-ass, no-QA hardware that you frequently encounter in the x86 world is completely off base.
Re:I'm a micro-view of the job situation
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The Jobs Crunch
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I'm don't want to come out and straight-up condemn your situation, because I don't know you, but I'm almost forced to.
You must be doing something wrong. Were your grades just spectacularly terrible?
CS, yes, I can certainly understand. Anyone on this site knows that the days of the.com bubble have left job seekers in a difficult position. But Teaching? In Texas? Come off it, my Man. The only way I can effectively believe that you aren't getting a teaching job is if you are insisting on teaching computer science, a course not even offered at many 5A schools, and not Math (which any CS major would certainly have a hearty background in).
Texas had a massive amount of Teachers retire last May. The rules regarding the collection of spousal Social Security funds were about to drastically change, possibly reducing some teacher's retirement amounts by as much as 40%. Thousands of teachers who were anywhere remotely close to retirement all of a sudden decided that it was time to call it quits. On top off all of that, most of these people were career teachers, and since teacher salaries are almost always based on the number of years of experience, these were (relatively speaking) much more expensive teachers than any newbie could ever hope to be. These people effectively cost two to three times as much as a beginning teacher might, especially when you factor in higher insurance claims and absentee rates that might be produced by people closer to retirement.
You complain about people who have spent years in other roles that are just now finishing their degrees, but wouldn't those people be nearly identical to you? Having just earned their degrees, really, they're no different from someone who wasn't a teacher's aide or something similar (what I'm assuming you're referring to) who is just earning his or her degree. The alternative cert. teachers are a point on which I'd certainly agree with you, but I'm not seeing any major data that's pointing to them being a huger influence than they always were. While I personally believe that then alternative or emergency certification should have been done away with under the No Child Left Behind plan, it's here to stay, and you need to deal with it. If you're not prepared to tell an interviewing administrator why your extra year's worth of classes and student teaching are more worthwhile than someone who last saw a classroom 20 years ago, then you need to just stay home from that interview. Alternative cert. teachers are a poorer investment for a school, as they tend to leave the career more readily and cost more for the district to educate (if the district is fronting the cert. money). That's why you tend to see them more in higher demand positions such as Math and Science, not English or History.
Man, I can stroll down the halls of the 5A school I'm at, and almost the entire Freshman English department is under 30; ditto for a goodly amount of science and math teachers. Teachers aren't doing any better, really, but there's no major problem I'm aware of with a teacher glut in anything other than historically low-demand areas such as the infamous health/coach degree holders.
The MLA is definitely not full of shit. The English language has no official group responsible for changes to the language (in the sense that L'Academie Francaise operates). Many of the rules and placements in the language are actually quite logical, and many of the older rules (the rule against double negatives, for example) are based on mathematical concepts.
The purpose of grammar is very similar to the purpose of spelling; a common standard allows for the quickest reading and comprehension possible. While your solution is certainly fine for colloquial speech, it has no place in print (epecially the original case, a semi-official form being posted on a website with readership in the millions). Ignoring the obvious jokes about slashdot and spelling/grammar, phrases that use a plural pronoun to refer to a singular antecedent are unnecessarily confusing for non-native speakers.
As for the citations, I would expect that a/.er would appreciate the fact that a set structure for bibliographis or works cited allows for much easier machine parsing of that information. While this was not the original reason for the rules, it is a very pleasant by-product of them.
It was phrased that way because the original change ("she" in place of "he" for a non-specific third person) was done to correct what many perceived to be a gender bias. It was, as any logical person could immediately see, equally biased.
I don't know that it was ever directly referred to as "reverse gender discrimination" in MLA documents, but I do know that I have heard several grammar instructors use the phrase because of the associated (and relatively recent) history of changes.
I would say the phrase also sticks because gender discrimination is generally commited against the female gender, and it serves to clarify what is happening in this particular situation.
I knew there would be a joke made about this. Approximately ten to fifteen years ago, this was considered the grammatically correct way to speak about about an unknown third person without having to resort to the confusing "when one plugs in one's new hardware device."
It is now considered incorrect because it is, essentially, reverse gender discrimination. No kidding. Who would have thought that the MLA would be so progressive? The correct way to phrase this would be "when the user plugs in his or her new hardware device."
People often complain about how the "non-stop" stream is interrupted to tell you that it's non-stop.
The problem is that, by FCC restrictions, the radio station must announce it's call letters and frequency three or four (I can't remember which) times per hour. So they simply toss in the "you're in the middle of a 45-minute non-stop music on XX.X, KABC."
Since copyright violation is a federal offence, he shouldn't be too bad off. Federal Prisons aren't too bad; they're usually well funded and thus kept up properly and fully staffed. State prison is what you have to watch out for. A lot of states are under constant pressure to slash their prison budgets, and that leads to understaffing, which is when you start getting uncontrollable prison violence, rape, etc. The only downside to federal over state prisons is that they tend to be much tighter with parole and such, so you'll likely be serving the full sentence.
It's the reason why the "federal pound-me-in-the-ass penitentiary" line from Office Space always cracks me up. That's not to say that there hasn't been rape in a federal prison, but it's a much, much lower instance. It's also the reason why, if you ever find yourself committing a felony in the US, you should get across state lines as quickly as possible, as in many cases that's all that's necessary to turn it into a federal offence and thus get you in federal prison.
Most of the 777 series planes and many of the newer 747s have a circular, vaguely cigarette lighter-shaped adapter built into the seat. If you go to your local consumer electronics store, you'll notice that most of the DC->DC adapters support both cigarette lighters and airline plugs. You won't find them on short hops but major national and almost any international flight will be equipped.
When my buddies' folks still lived in Japan, it made the 15 hours flight that much more bearable. A laptop that was powerful enough to play some decent games and a small stack of DVD movies goes a long way.
IIRC, interviews with Jobs during the G4 iMac discussed his displeasure with some of the preliminary G4 designs because they looked just like this. He was indicating that he told his design engineers, "I want something new, not a computer attached to the back of a flat panel." (That's not a verbatim quote, btw). Maybe he feels that because they've had that concept out of the market for long enough that this will work, or maybe the old G4-era prototypes were a lot chunkier. Whatever it was, I certainly think it's nicer on the deskspace than the already small G4 model.
I feel sorta lackluster about this one, though. The tech specs are nice, and I'm glad that it's finally easier to get to the hard drive, but the design just looks too much like the Gateway Profile. I was hoping for something that looked similar to this and priced similarly, but consisted of a slim, 2U sized case that could directly attach to the back of the monitor (and was designed explicitly for that purpose), but could also be purchased stand-alone and used with another monitor. I know, I know, all that junk about cutting into margins and such, but a man can dream, right?
Re the horizontal drive: I don't remember anyone ever mentioning this, though I suppose it could've been cited. I've seen dozens of workstation-type cases going back at least 8 or 10 years, though, that used vertical mount optical drives, so I doubt that's an issue.
You're correct. Most reviews I saw around the 4X->8X transition would benchmark the Radeon 9700 Pro (then top of the line) and see about a 2% performance difference. The only major difference in AGP 8X was the fact that the 3.0 (8X) spec actually supported two AGP slots on a board. Although I have seen old Compaq deskpro boards that used a hardcore proprietary method of making this work (you WILL buy ONLY THESE PARTICULAR CARDS, which are pinned out unlike any other AGP card), I never saw any mobo take advantage of that X feature, although Alienware's SLI system was originally slated to use it.
I was hosting a LAN party at my place about a year or so ago. One of my coworkers showed up with his computer and another 512MB DIMM that he planned on installing before we got started.
We balked. There's an unspoken rule that no hardware changes during the LAN unless necessary. Murphy's law simply looms too large. He ignored it.
The case was a smaller mid-tower that he uses for LANs, and with a couple of hard drives and the associated cabling it gets pretty tight. As he's sliding the RAM into place, we hear a "plink." Shit. The RAM's in place, so he steps back to survey the situation. There's a capacitor sitting on the floor of the case. "Um, maybe it's one of those capacitors that's, you know, for show..." The computer throws a video error at post.
We pull the card. Murphy's law has struck; it's a GeForce 5800 Ultra (the old dustbuster model), and a cap has sheared right off the card. I don't have a soldering iron in my apartment, so the coworker is prepaing for an evening of staring over shoulders. That's when we break out the electrical tape. We give the card a good hard wrap with the tape to hold the cap in place, and...
It works spedtacularly. No crashs, no video glitches, no problem. In fact, it works for another month while he waits for the 5900 Ultra to release before exchanging the card. It led us to praise NVidia for the Unified ELectrical TApe architecture (ELTA), which we theorized could provided bootleg performance maintenance across the entire NVidia line, from the TNT2 up.
a) you press F8 at boot and boot to the safe mode w/ command line, assuming your OS isn't so thoroughly trashed that you can't get there. If it is, you
b) boot from an XP or 2K CD, and go to the recovery console, which will generally allow you to get almost anything done, provided your file system isn't shot. If it is, you'd be in the same boat booting to DOS, anyway.
If I'm not mistaken, Dell offered business users a choice of some random flavor of Linux or FreeDOS preinstalled on their computers.
The logic was thusly: Licensing agreements force them to ship the computer with SOME OS on it, but a lot of businesses already have a Windows site license. Because the price of the non-windows Dells was slightly lower than effectively purchasing the license a second time, the companies order these computers with one of those two OSes preinstalled, then wipe the drive and install WinXP/2000.
So while there are a small number of users purchasing their computers with Windows pre-installed and migrating to Linux, that number is effectively buried by businesses doing just the opposite.
Don't forget the other fun TCO calculation often overlooked in the frequent back-and-froth Win vs. Mac debate: Electrical consumption.
Macs need less juice courtesy of the more efficient PPC architecture, and subsequently also put off less heat (which thus requires more AC). In a single computer/home PC environment, we're talking maybe $4 or $5 a month, depending on electrical cost in the area. In a larger-scale, 100 computer installation, we start talking about a savings of $500 per month.
Yeah, I wouldn't ever try to rank things as absolutes either. I own a Windows PC and a Mac, and I wouldn't argue that a Mac is the best for everything (although I do feel that for a general purpose user buying a retail boxed product, it makes more sense most of the time).
The initial post was someone asking why the iPod is popular, because they couldn't for the life of them understand why so many people raved about it. Some of the issues (size and UI) can't easily be communicated without comparing it to other, similar products. Saying, "it's small enough to fit in your pocket" doesn't communicate the same concept as, "it's the largest MP3 player that will comfortably, unobtrusively fit in your pocket, whereas Players X, Y, and Z are just a tad on the bulky/clumsy side." Others, such as iTunes integration, can easily be explained on their own. The iPod is currently the best selling MP3 player because it represents Apple's generally superior approach to design in a reasonably affordable package.
I certainly understand that people buy second best to save money all the time. Therer are some scenarios where it makes a whole lot of sense. MP3 players happen to be one of those products, IMHO, where it's worth it to go for the unit that does everything you need. I would definitely point someone to a DJ or Creative if they were looking for a semi-permanent car-based MP3 player,. For something to carry around frequently, use easily (especially for the non/. crowd, the ones driving the iPod's popularity), and not turn into just another forgotten gadget, however, I feel that it's worth that little extra cash. That's not snootiness, it's personal opinion. It's not that I don't understand why people want to save money, it's that I don't personally feel that the savings justifies the features I give up. Apparently, a lot of people tend to agree with me.
As for the Mass Storage issue, I think you'd be surprised how many of the normal populace, especially the younger crowd more likely to purchase an MP3 player, actually carry around a USB flash drive. Having both your semi-important data and your mp3 player in one box is handy. I also failed to mention that I enjoy the fact that the iPod doesn't look like some cheap plastic-y crap or some beamed-from-mars crazy layout that a crackhead designer thought was "cool". The DJ actually falls into the same category, but the Creative and Rio fail the plastic test, and the iRiver units too frequently fall into the "dude, blue and black looked awesome on that warez site, let's go for it" school of design. Visually pleasing products are worth it (again, at least to me).
You're right, I probably did get partially modded up because there's a sizeable chunk of slashdot who shares my belief. I like to think, though, that I reasonably back up a lot of those assertions (the navigation faux pas excluded). The man asked why the iPod is so popular, and I gave him some of the reasons why I find it worthwhile and recommend it to a lot of people.
Eh, you caught me. I wrote this post in the six minutes before I needed to leave this morning. With ample time, I would've found more supporting evidence. What I did remeber was that several reviewers complained about UI, although to be fair I now realize that most of their complaints were targeted at difficulty getting to slightly more complex functions, such as playlist navigation. Interestingly, while searching I did find several who claimed that you couldn't track back and browse a list while the music was still playing (WHA?!?), but I would assume that firmware fixes have probably corrected that.
I also didn't bring up the issue that the Dell DJ uses MusicMatch, which is pretty widely recognized to be absolutely wretched compared to similar programs. Nor did I cite many initial reviewers complaints that installation on the DJ was occasionally hit-or-miss (fiddly driver installation was cited on more than one website). I also didn't get into the fact that the DJ doesn't follow proper USB Mass Storage rules, meaning you need to install a driver to allow you to use it as an external drive.
Finally, I didn't get into the fact that outside of the 15/.ers who live and die by OGG and thus love the Neuros or Karma players, the Dell product is generally accepted to be the "next best thing" to an iPod by most reviews. And this second best product is physically larger, uses lousier interface software, is not as flexible with mass storage, and (with the release of the 4th gen iPods) has almost no battery or price advantage to fall back on.
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I don't know; there are just so many benefits and negatives on each side of this situation. This entire setup really is just like applying for a loan. The stores are building a home-grown "credit"-reporting system, and analyzing your risk as a financial investment. Not making an exchange is akin to throwing down a 14% interest rate on a mortgage: you still have the right to accept such a rate, and the bank has a chance to retain profitability. Not accepting an exchange is certainly not the optimal way I would choose to go about such a decision, but I suppose it's the best one in the situation posed by a clothing retailer.
On the one hand, it does make for some nasty situations. The woman in the article may not realize it, but even with the $2,000 a year she spends, she may be far less profitable than a person who spends $200 on a single splurge purchase once. Ultimately, that leads to higher prices for all of us, and retailers are trying to go in an entirely opposite direction. The benefits of streamlining and smoothing out everything from supply side to process to (unfortunately) wages means that things are, on a whole, a lot less expensive than I remember even 10 years ago. Having worked in retail, I've seen some of the absolutely nightmarish return scenarios that people don't seem to think twice about: big-screens returned the day after the Superbowl or big-screens that people pretty obviously ruined while trying to save the delivery charge, people "checking out" cameras and camcorders for the length of the exchange period, etc. It comes back on the next guy in the form of higher prices, and it comes back on the employee in the form of smaller profits which equal less pay/less employees.
Of course, the system's also primed for abuse. Best Buy was mentioned in the last such article, and although they explicitly said that they didn't plan on implementing blocks or any actions against "less desirable" customers, there's nothing to stop the next guy down the street from refusing the customer who only buys the loss-leader rebated items (and nothing to stop BBY from changing this policy further down the road).
For the vast majority of us who don't play such games, it means a better deal, for the most part. As other posters have mentioned, though, such lists probably should be subject to the guidelines of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and store employees should always be given the option to override such list systems for returns.
Ultimately, though, this falls into the same category as razor-blade-business-model printers and shortened warranties on products; the free market model assumes a buyer who is educated on the product (and I suppose a buyer who isn't looking to scam the store on said product), and that is a model that is contrary to the average consumer in the real world. How different is such a list, really, from a credit report or insurance analysis? Systems such as these are a way for businesses to compete effevctively in a tighter marketplace. No company has a right to a profit, but they do have a right (within the limits of the law) to implement policies and systems that give them the best chance to earn a profit. Conversely, the consumer has a right to choose a company with a totally different system. While you can certainly argue that the profits go straight to the major shareholders and CEO (and I won't dispute it), they do also make it to the customer in the form of cheaper (in both senses of that word, unfortunately) goods.
In short, I'm not a fan of the system, but I do recognize its usefulness as well as the fact that people who do tend to abuse the system can always shop elsewhere (or straighten up).
I'm not totally clear on what these machines are used for (custom web apps w/ heavy activeX use? Random surfing?), but assuming you haven't heavily focused on IE with custom software, Mozilla/Firefox plus a proper permissions system that denies access to IE and program installation should prevent 95% of the infections.
Top it off with a local DNS that nulls known ad sites and spyware supplies, and you should be good to go.
Both Norton AV 2004 + 2005 and McAfee's current stuff sport spyware detection as a new feature over the older version. Granted, their removal process is god-awful, but even their $40 on the shelf software will detect most spyware programs and can actually remove some.
Um, read what you wrote. That system did cost over $800, just not all at one point. Having a NIC or HDD or Optical drive kicking around doesn't make it free, it just means that it's already paid for. And while it may make the short-term cost easier to swallow, the same goes for eBaying old Mac equipment.
I could probably pull $350 for my $1,200 (at the time) CRT iMac that I've had for four years, whereas a comparable PC is so nearly worthless by that point that it makes more sense to just carry over the random parts than make a pittance online.
A) I'll assume you're using Linux here, since I don't see a price factored for a windows OS. Nevertheless, if you choose to boot that, you'll want to include it in the price comparo. Of course, the fact that you chose to use an ATI card rather than NVidia points to a plan to use Windows.
I'd also like to know how a single processor system is orders of magnitude better than a G5 (you can certainly argue cheaper here, but not "orders of magnitude better").
DIY? Well, it's not really a fair comparison price-wise, but when I actually compare my DIY costs I include all the stuff. Things like OS cost, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. that a lot of people (including your list, apparently) tend to ignore.
Totally independent of that, though, I'd point out that many of the new Mac crew are old Unix-heads who fully comprehend DIY, but recognize the quality inherent in Apple products.
Again, it's not to knock that machine. I'm typing this from a similarly equipped home-brew PC. But you have to ignore a LOT of the things that Apple ships on their units to pretend that your theoretical computeris comparable and not merely "getting the job done."
Having a model that compares was one of the things that nearly doomed Apple in the mid-90's. Simply put, Apple can't afford to have a jillion different product lines, and it's something for which I'm willing to forgive them. Cheaper eMacs and iMacs are expandable over Firewire (not the same thing, I know) for those who can't swing the higher entry point.
While I would love to have a single proc, smaller tower version of the G5 in the mid $1,000s, I also understand why such a product doesn't exist. At the end of the day, I'm happy to take what Apple can afford to provide, given everything else that the company has contributed to the computing world.
Can you imagine a political prisoner on a 3rd-party ticket recieving a million votes today? Too bad the American public doesn't have that much balls anymore.
Maybe not today, but less than 12 years ago Perot got a hell of a lot more than a million votes.
No doubt; my Girlfriend's gaming PC (A mac is her primary machine) cost me just over $600 with a very nice video card, although I got the video card for $7 because an old one had died under warranty.
An $800 computer will NOT have dual processors, a DVD burner, optical digital audio output, slots for 8GB of RAM expansion, both forms of Firewire, GigE, etc. I can build a solid, reliable computer for $800, but I'm not going to try and pretend that it's remotely comparable to a dual 1.8Ghz G5 PowerMac. This is the point that everyone misses when they play this game.
Yeah, you're right, with the exception of a few CPU-level bugs along the way, the BSOD hasn't been built into the CPU, but that's not to say that it's always Windows' fault.
Other things that go into the Windows world's instability include:
El-Cheapo hardware du jour. This includes many, many x86 mobo manufacturers, as well as bottom of the barrel RAM and PSU suppliers. Guess what: If you're truly talking about making something the same as a $2,000 Mac for half the price (hyperbole, I know), then you're engaging in some of this, and it is where a lot of the BSODs originate.
As a follow-up to section 1: shitty driver support, particularly in the 9x days when everything, not just video, had an easy chance to cause system-level problems.
When people say x86 in a debate such as this, they generally mean the platform as a whole, not the cost of the chip. A Pentium 4 chip by itself is as useless to me as a G5 by itself. But to say that Linux or some other non-Windows OS is going to be magically immune to the cheap-ass, no-QA hardware that you frequently encounter in the x86 world is completely off base.
I'm don't want to come out and straight-up condemn your situation, because I don't know you, but I'm almost forced to.
.com bubble have left job seekers in a difficult position. But Teaching? In Texas? Come off it, my Man. The only way I can effectively believe that you aren't getting a teaching job is if you are insisting on teaching computer science, a course not even offered at many 5A schools, and not Math (which any CS major would certainly have a hearty background in).
You must be doing something wrong. Were your grades just spectacularly terrible?
CS, yes, I can certainly understand. Anyone on this site knows that the days of the
Texas had a massive amount of Teachers retire last May. The rules regarding the collection of spousal Social Security funds were about to drastically change, possibly reducing some teacher's retirement amounts by as much as 40%. Thousands of teachers who were anywhere remotely close to retirement all of a sudden decided that it was time to call it quits. On top off all of that, most of these people were career teachers, and since teacher salaries are almost always based on the number of years of experience, these were (relatively speaking) much more expensive teachers than any newbie could ever hope to be. These people effectively cost two to three times as much as a beginning teacher might, especially when you factor in higher insurance claims and absentee rates that might be produced by people closer to retirement.
You complain about people who have spent years in other roles that are just now finishing their degrees, but wouldn't those people be nearly identical to you? Having just earned their degrees, really, they're no different from someone who wasn't a teacher's aide or something similar (what I'm assuming you're referring to) who is just earning his or her degree. The alternative cert. teachers are a point on which I'd certainly agree with you, but I'm not seeing any major data that's pointing to them being a huger influence than they always were. While I personally believe that then alternative or emergency certification should have been done away with under the No Child Left Behind plan, it's here to stay, and you need to deal with it. If you're not prepared to tell an interviewing administrator why your extra year's worth of classes and student teaching are more worthwhile than someone who last saw a classroom 20 years ago, then you need to just stay home from that interview. Alternative cert. teachers are a poorer investment for a school, as they tend to leave the career more readily and cost more for the district to educate (if the district is fronting the cert. money). That's why you tend to see them more in higher demand positions such as Math and Science, not English or History.
Man, I can stroll down the halls of the 5A school I'm at, and almost the entire Freshman English department is under 30; ditto for a goodly amount of science and math teachers. Teachers aren't doing any better, really, but there's no major problem I'm aware of with a teacher glut in anything other than historically low-demand areas such as the infamous health/coach degree holders.
The MLA is definitely not full of shit. The English language has no official group responsible for changes to the language (in the sense that L'Academie Francaise operates). Many of the rules and placements in the language are actually quite logical, and many of the older rules (the rule against double negatives, for example) are based on mathematical concepts.
/.er would appreciate the fact that a set structure for bibliographis or works cited allows for much easier machine parsing of that information. While this was not the original reason for the rules, it is a very pleasant by-product of them.
The purpose of grammar is very similar to the purpose of spelling; a common standard allows for the quickest reading and comprehension possible. While your solution is certainly fine for colloquial speech, it has no place in print (epecially the original case, a semi-official form being posted on a website with readership in the millions). Ignoring the obvious jokes about slashdot and spelling/grammar, phrases that use a plural pronoun to refer to a singular antecedent are unnecessarily confusing for non-native speakers.
As for the citations, I would expect that a
It was phrased that way because the original change ("she" in place of "he" for a non-specific third person) was done to correct what many perceived to be a gender bias. It was, as any logical person could immediately see, equally biased.
I don't know that it was ever directly referred to as "reverse gender discrimination" in MLA documents, but I do know that I have heard several grammar instructors use the phrase because of the associated (and relatively recent) history of changes.
I would say the phrase also sticks because gender discrimination is generally commited against the female gender, and it serves to clarify what is happening in this particular situation.
I knew there would be a joke made about this. Approximately ten to fifteen years ago, this was considered the grammatically correct way to speak about about an unknown third person without having to resort to the confusing "when one plugs in one's new hardware device."
It is now considered incorrect because it is, essentially, reverse gender discrimination. No kidding. Who would have thought that the MLA would be so progressive? The correct way to phrase this would be "when the user plugs in his or her new hardware device."
People often complain about how the "non-stop" stream is interrupted to tell you that it's non-stop.
The problem is that, by FCC restrictions, the radio station must announce it's call letters and frequency three or four (I can't remember which) times per hour. So they simply toss in the "you're in the middle of a 45-minute non-stop music on XX.X, KABC."
Since copyright violation is a federal offence, he shouldn't be too bad off. Federal Prisons aren't too bad; they're usually well funded and thus kept up properly and fully staffed. State prison is what you have to watch out for. A lot of states are under constant pressure to slash their prison budgets, and that leads to understaffing, which is when you start getting uncontrollable prison violence, rape, etc. The only downside to federal over state prisons is that they tend to be much tighter with parole and such, so you'll likely be serving the full sentence.
It's the reason why the "federal pound-me-in-the-ass penitentiary" line from Office Space always cracks me up. That's not to say that there hasn't been rape in a federal prison, but it's a much, much lower instance. It's also the reason why, if you ever find yourself committing a felony in the US, you should get across state lines as quickly as possible, as in many cases that's all that's necessary to turn it into a federal offence and thus get you in federal prison.
Most of the 777 series planes and many of the newer 747s have a circular, vaguely cigarette lighter-shaped adapter built into the seat. If you go to your local consumer electronics store, you'll notice that most of the DC->DC adapters support both cigarette lighters and airline plugs. You won't find them on short hops but major national and almost any international flight will be equipped.
When my buddies' folks still lived in Japan, it made the 15 hours flight that much more bearable. A laptop that was powerful enough to play some decent games and a small stack of DVD movies goes a long way.
IIRC, interviews with Jobs during the G4 iMac discussed his displeasure with some of the preliminary G4 designs because they looked just like this. He was indicating that he told his design engineers, "I want something new, not a computer attached to the back of a flat panel." (That's not a verbatim quote, btw). Maybe he feels that because they've had that concept out of the market for long enough that this will work, or maybe the old G4-era prototypes were a lot chunkier. Whatever it was, I certainly think it's nicer on the deskspace than the already small G4 model.
I feel sorta lackluster about this one, though. The tech specs are nice, and I'm glad that it's finally easier to get to the hard drive, but the design just looks too much like the Gateway Profile. I was hoping for something that looked similar to this and priced similarly, but consisted of a slim, 2U sized case that could directly attach to the back of the monitor (and was designed explicitly for that purpose), but could also be purchased stand-alone and used with another monitor. I know, I know, all that junk about cutting into margins and such, but a man can dream, right?
Re the horizontal drive: I don't remember anyone ever mentioning this, though I suppose it could've been cited. I've seen dozens of workstation-type cases going back at least 8 or 10 years, though, that used vertical mount optical drives, so I doubt that's an issue.
Wouldn't the larger cahced Opteron, the product actually positioned by AMD to compete with the Xeon series processors, have been a better comparison?
You're correct. Most reviews I saw around the 4X->8X transition would benchmark the Radeon 9700 Pro (then top of the line) and see about a 2% performance difference. The only major difference in AGP 8X was the fact that the 3.0 (8X) spec actually supported two AGP slots on a board. Although I have seen old Compaq deskpro boards that used a hardcore proprietary method of making this work (you WILL buy ONLY THESE PARTICULAR CARDS, which are pinned out unlike any other AGP card), I never saw any mobo take advantage of that X feature, although Alienware's SLI system was originally slated to use it.
I was hosting a LAN party at my place about a year or so ago. One of my coworkers showed up with his computer and another 512MB DIMM that he planned on installing before we got started.
We balked. There's an unspoken rule that no hardware changes during the LAN unless necessary. Murphy's law simply looms too large. He ignored it.
The case was a smaller mid-tower that he uses for LANs, and with a couple of hard drives and the associated cabling it gets pretty tight. As he's sliding the RAM into place, we hear a "plink." Shit. The RAM's in place, so he steps back to survey the situation. There's a capacitor sitting on the floor of the case. "Um, maybe it's one of those capacitors that's, you know, for show..." The computer throws a video error at post.
We pull the card. Murphy's law has struck; it's a GeForce 5800 Ultra (the old dustbuster model), and a cap has sheared right off the card. I don't have a soldering iron in my apartment, so the coworker is prepaing for an evening of staring over shoulders. That's when we break out the electrical tape. We give the card a good hard wrap with the tape to hold the cap in place, and...
It works spedtacularly. No crashs, no video glitches, no problem. In fact, it works for another month while he waits for the 5900 Ultra to release before exchanging the card. It led us to praise NVidia for the Unified ELectrical TApe architecture (ELTA), which we theorized could provided bootleg performance maintenance across the entire NVidia line, from the TNT2 up.
Just had to offer my two cents here.
:)
How do you boot to DOS on XP?
a) you press F8 at boot and boot to the safe mode w/ command line, assuming your OS isn't so thoroughly trashed that you can't get there. If it is, you
b) boot from an XP or 2K CD, and go to the recovery console, which will generally allow you to get almost anything done, provided your file system isn't shot. If it is, you'd be in the same boat booting to DOS, anyway.
If I'm not mistaken, Dell offered business users a choice of some random flavor of Linux or FreeDOS preinstalled on their computers.
The logic was thusly: Licensing agreements force them to ship the computer with SOME OS on it, but a lot of businesses already have a Windows site license. Because the price of the non-windows Dells was slightly lower than effectively purchasing the license a second time, the companies order these computers with one of those two OSes preinstalled, then wipe the drive and install WinXP/2000.
So while there are a small number of users purchasing their computers with Windows pre-installed and migrating to Linux, that number is effectively buried by businesses doing just the opposite.
Don't forget the other fun TCO calculation often overlooked in the frequent back-and-froth Win vs. Mac debate: Electrical consumption.
Macs need less juice courtesy of the more efficient PPC architecture, and subsequently also put off less heat (which thus requires more AC). In a single computer/home PC environment, we're talking maybe $4 or $5 a month, depending on electrical cost in the area. In a larger-scale, 100 computer installation, we start talking about a savings of $500 per month.
Yeah, I wouldn't ever try to rank things as absolutes either. I own a Windows PC and a Mac, and I wouldn't argue that a Mac is the best for everything (although I do feel that for a general purpose user buying a retail boxed product, it makes more sense most of the time).
/. crowd, the ones driving the iPod's popularity), and not turn into just another forgotten gadget, however, I feel that it's worth that little extra cash. That's not snootiness, it's personal opinion. It's not that I don't understand why people want to save money, it's that I don't personally feel that the savings justifies the features I give up. Apparently, a lot of people tend to agree with me.
The initial post was someone asking why the iPod is popular, because they couldn't for the life of them understand why so many people raved about it. Some of the issues (size and UI) can't easily be communicated without comparing it to other, similar products. Saying, "it's small enough to fit in your pocket" doesn't communicate the same concept as, "it's the largest MP3 player that will comfortably, unobtrusively fit in your pocket, whereas Players X, Y, and Z are just a tad on the bulky/clumsy side." Others, such as iTunes integration, can easily be explained on their own. The iPod is currently the best selling MP3 player because it represents Apple's generally superior approach to design in a reasonably affordable package.
I certainly understand that people buy second best to save money all the time. Therer are some scenarios where it makes a whole lot of sense. MP3 players happen to be one of those products, IMHO, where it's worth it to go for the unit that does everything you need. I would definitely point someone to a DJ or Creative if they were looking for a semi-permanent car-based MP3 player,. For something to carry around frequently, use easily (especially for the non
As for the Mass Storage issue, I think you'd be surprised how many of the normal populace, especially the younger crowd more likely to purchase an MP3 player, actually carry around a USB flash drive. Having both your semi-important data and your mp3 player in one box is handy. I also failed to mention that I enjoy the fact that the iPod doesn't look like some cheap plastic-y crap or some beamed-from-mars crazy layout that a crackhead designer thought was "cool". The DJ actually falls into the same category, but the Creative and Rio fail the plastic test, and the iRiver units too frequently fall into the "dude, blue and black looked awesome on that warez site, let's go for it" school of design. Visually pleasing products are worth it (again, at least to me).
You're right, I probably did get partially modded up because there's a sizeable chunk of slashdot who shares my belief. I like to think, though, that I reasonably back up a lot of those assertions (the navigation faux pas excluded). The man asked why the iPod is so popular, and I gave him some of the reasons why I find it worthwhile and recommend it to a lot of people.
Eh, you caught me. I wrote this post in the six minutes before I needed to leave this morning. With ample time, I would've found more supporting evidence. What I did remeber was that several reviewers complained about UI, although to be fair I now realize that most of their complaints were targeted at difficulty getting to slightly more complex functions, such as playlist navigation. Interestingly, while searching I did find several who claimed that you couldn't track back and browse a list while the music was still playing (WHA?!?), but I would assume that firmware fixes have probably corrected that.
/.ers who live and die by OGG and thus love the Neuros or Karma players, the Dell product is generally accepted to be the "next best thing" to an iPod by most reviews. And this second best product is physically larger, uses lousier interface software, is not as flexible with mass storage, and (with the release of the 4th gen iPods) has almost no battery or price advantage to fall back on.
I also didn't bring up the issue that the Dell DJ uses MusicMatch, which is pretty widely recognized to be absolutely wretched compared to similar programs. Nor did I cite many initial reviewers complaints that installation on the DJ was occasionally hit-or-miss (fiddly driver installation was cited on more than one website). I also didn't get into the fact that the DJ doesn't follow proper USB Mass Storage rules, meaning you need to install a driver to allow you to use it as an external drive.
Finally, I didn't get into the fact that outside of the 15