Make a version with a long-life OLED colour (not 5000 hours because of the blue) monochrome display.
Looking at my keyboard, woo, look, black on white. No reds, purples, greens... well, that might be mouldy cake between the keys.
I'm sure that monochrome would be cheaper for a start, require less bandwidth to update, and for keyboard uses, just as useful.
Currently it is three pressable displays.
Stick a 64x64 monochrome/greyscale OLED into a key-sized key, and make a keyboard from that. Leave the full colour version until the technology is better - both on the OLED side and on the keyboards with display side.
They were good for a short-term boost, but in the long term they made me much more tired. Never mind the times I tried Pro Plus to get more revision time... the only thing red bull and similar drinks are good for is as a mix with vodka.
These days I eat reasonably healthily, I do drink caffeine, but only a couple of cups a day (usually tea) apart from when mixing coke with alcohol:) I subscribe to the 'everything is okay, or even good in moderation' school of thought, rather than the 'abstinence is best' hookum.
I have a reasonable amount of water, or decent squash, every day. Often I have a pint of milk.
Better to have a decent breakfast with slow release energy at the beginning of the day than to snack on food and energy drinks throughout the day. A bowl of porridge is a lot cheaper too. Shame I get up too late to actually make use of this wisdom.
Similarly, exercise is good for you, if you find the time for it. Gyms are boring as hell though, so try running or team sports... hell make your garden neater or repaint the house.
I'm going to fill it full of gay bars, trannie bars, and the like. A core part of the game will be shopping in goth/punk/hellokitty type areas in order to equip your character with all the correct gear for their sexuality. Instead of Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic it'll have Straight-Bi-Gay-RichardSimmons... (yes, this is a joke). It'd get all the business that other games don't want.
I can understand Blizzard's POV - let's not bring these things into the game, it's a game, it's fantasy.
OTOH I can understand that some people might want to be with people who (external to the game) are like them. That's natural. It's like older gamers not wanting to play with punk 14 year olds with attitude problems.
Also most people will improve with practice at this game.
It doesn't rely on over complex controls. Nor pin-point accuracy. Not super-human controller skills. It's addictive because you know you messed up and can do better. And you can get it on $5 LCD games, never mind Gameboys now.
However there aren't many concepts for games this simple.
Increases in costs (taxes, etc) in Britain since 1999 mean that people have less money to spend on frivolous things.
Increase in uptake of alternative media (games consoles, DVDs, etc) also meant that limited budget is being spread around more things.
Of course people are going to stop buying music. It's the easiest thing to access (radio, tv) and it isn't important to own. Especially if it isn't that good.
I certainly used to write games when I was younger. Sadly I don't have the time anymore, and it can get depressing looking at the standards other people set... then you realise that is around 50 man years of work against your X man-evenings...
People who cannot disconnect fake things (games, books, movies) from reality, or indeed people who haven't got an ounce of common sense in their heads, shouldn't be allowed access to the things that might set them off.
This game didn't cause them to crash. Their speeding and racing on a public road did.
A game is just that, a game. Reading a book about murder doesn't cause people to kill.
18 year olds should be old enough to discern the differences. If they aren't, then they shouldn't be given adult status - no cars, no cigarettes, no guns, no alcohol.
Then a lot of these people have done a lot of work.
There's only so far a person, or a bunch of friends, can get when programming [in their spare time most likely] a game of any level of complexity.
Tools are better than they were years ago however. What took a month to program in 1985 in assembler can be done in a couple of evenings now, motivation allowing. As long as someone has some graphical talent you can get good looking games out without too much effort. Sadly they aren't going to have the same level of gameplay as some modern games - it's hard to compete against a multi-million dollar game!
It's easy for an indie band to get good and be better than a mainstream band. It's not too hard to do decent films on a budget either, if the skills are available. But game writing seems to be pretty hard to get something even 10% as good as a commercial offering. Is it a problem with the tools - Java has some pretty simple game libraries now however, but you still need to know some complex stuff if you do a 3D game, for example. Is game-writing the educated-geeks choice of creativity, another pasttime like knitting, a band, amateur dramatics, etc?
(Aside: how old is I.D? New crap shouldn't be included in a curriculum, certainly you don't see Gaia being taught in R.S., and that's pretty old.)
Theory: Intelligent Design. Proof: None Evidence: None, apart from hypothesis that things are so complex that it can't have happened naturally. Validity Example: Humans will one day do things to animals that will alter them - intelligence, pets, slaves, whatever. That could be determined to be I.D., although we'd all know it was Steered (Accelerated) Evolution*. David Brin's Startide Rising touches on this idea, and of I.D. at a certain level. It's hard to disprove a theory that an alien 'advanced' us in the past, unless we find the aliens and they tell us. In this case the theory is more of a belief, and thus I.D. is simply another faith, a religion.
Theory: Creationism Proof: None Evidence: Old stories. Even the Christian church says they're stories and evolution fits in with the religion. Creationism in forward thinking parts of the church often points to the creation of the universe as the moment of creation. Failing: Requires faith. It's hard to disprove God.
Theory: Evolution. "Survival of the fittest" Proof: Plenty. Evidence: Everywhere. Faith: Not required, but it seems more sensible to believe in this than I.D!
Clearly Evolution is a scientific theory, and a long-standing one with plenty of evidence, and thousands of man-years of thought put into it. It hasn't been disproved yet, which is promising for such an old theory.
Teach Creationism in Religious Studies, as it is derived from religion. Touch on it in science as an alternative view, i.e., for 5 minutes. Use I.D. as a study on false science.
I have friends who love to dissect this stuff and they can do it very well. They spend the time to read up on all the theories/faiths so that they end up understanding them more than the person they're destroying at the time. I'm usually drunk and can never remember their points that well.
* this probably isn't a very intelligent thing to do however. Very clever, yes. Intelligence usually requires some consideration about whether it should be done, the ramifications, the ethical issues, and so on.
AMD will be doing 65nm during Q3, not at the end of the year.
So Intel have a 9 month lead on process shrinks. They had 300mm wafers years before AMD too - then again they needed them to meet demand. OTOH AMD have third generation SOI in their processors, and their 90nm processors don't have the same issues that Intel's had, AMD dropped power consumption dramatically with 90nm, although top clock speeds haven't been amazingly better.
AMD are a smaller company, and they're growing at a steady, manageable rate.
We should all be thankful that Intel has nearly got over the Netburst disaster on 90nm. Now both companies will be more competitive. AMD will probably keep growing in the server area this year, consolidate its desktop gains, and win more lower-end laptop marketshare. 2007 however will be when Intel are shipping in massive quantities new products that cover the entire market, and right now they look very competitive. What will AMD have? 65nm SOI K8L... not much is known about this though.
PSP might be nice hardware, but until it gets the really fun games, people won't care. All I've heard is that the DS games are really fun, whilst the PSP games are a bit dull.
Has the PSP actually outsold the DS in the US anyway? I didn't think it had. Odd how the headline reads 'To Increase... Lead', when it should probably be 'Predicted to take lead'.
And with the very suggestive 'Touch Me' adverts that appeal to adults, I don't see the DS losing out. However a redesign to be a bit less toylike would do it some good I think, like the SP did to the Advance.
And indeed, I bet the Advance is still selling strongly in the US...
Instead of "Might Linux Violate Sarbanes-Oxley?" which it doesn't, it should be "Non-compliance to terms of GPL might violate Sarbanes-Oxley".
Which makes sense.
I.e., if you claim to have the right to use Linux for your product, but you aren't complying with the license, you might be violating Sarbanes-Oxley.
Re:HI can I have two cans of soup and 100 minutes.
on
Supermarket VOIP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Oh, yeah, my Tesco has:
Buy 3 CDs for £12!!!! (all the CDs cost under £4 on their own)
I've had to put up with the DIY tills for a year or two now. They finally work most of the time now. Haven't had issues with special offers though.
Re:Ahh those marketing geniuses!
on
Supermarket VOIP
·
· Score: 1
BT used to be (I don't know about now) limited by the regulator to not be competitive, as it is a monopoly.
That's why BT never offered free local calls.
Of course, all the cable companies offer them, and competing phone companies too.
However people just want one number, and more and more frequently they want it to be the mobile number. It's nice and easy, it isn't tied to your location, and the phones do lots of useful & neat things too. The number's the same if I move house, go on holiday, etc. The housemate has her own mobile phone and thus there's no argument over the phone bill. It's all good.
I hate the line rental fees that all the companies have though. They have no basis in reality. £11 a month just to have the line - that's £132 a year, which is a big pile of DVDs, and that's before services that bring normal mobile features (caller display, voicemail, etc) to it. Insane.
Tesco is getting too big for anybody's good though. Unless you're like me and scavenge the reduced price section after work regularly for a cheap dinner. heh.
Programming Labs full of computers that aren't connected to the internet.
Yes, it would suck.
But it would stop the cheating. You'd have to monitor them of course, but it just goes to show that if a certain percentage will go that far to cheat, you have to do something.
Maybe if you catch them doing it - which is easy enough if each person has to explain their assignment, why they did it the way they did - you could force them to do future programming assignments in the lab, under supervision (that the student will have to pay for) until they won't ever do it again.
The first year was bad. Horribly unreliable. The software on them has improved now though, it works pretty well in fact, apart from the 'item bagged' detection. And barcodes on certain items.
Maybe the next time you have to use one it'll be an updated version!
And it isn't a nice ding. It is a loud machine beep. I want a nice happy 'ding!' sound.
And it complains too often about not putting the item in the bag. Please put the item in the bag. It's in the fucking bag, bitch! That, or 'please pack your items, and continue scanning'.
And there's no cute checkout girl to check out either.
However nobody else likes using them, so they're always empty when the checkout queues are still very long. I still feel like I'm doing a job that someone else should be doing though:(
1) Non-gaming software. Apart from some specialised applications, every software area is covered just as well for Mac OS as for Windows.
2) Games. Yes, an issue to be sure. I bet that now Apple are on x86 that Transgaming will release their software to get Windows games running under Mac OS X.
Macs are for people who don't want to think about the computer, and just get the work done. Quite often these people aren't hard-core geeks, but they earn a lot of money from their work, and they more often than not choose Apple hardware to earn their money. Interesting that.
As a (non-Windows) programmer, working under Mac OS X merges the benefits of Linux/BSD (decent environment) and having excellent applications on top, with a good user interface. Although the Aqua look is starting to look a bit samey to me now.
Apple's hardware prices are generally in line with market rates in the 'not cheap tat' market areas.
For example, the PowerMac is competitive price wise with any 4-core system you can configure from the major PC manufacturers.
And now the MacBook Pro is similarly competitive, price wise. The parent poster did rightly point out that you have many more options on the PC side however.
You can either save money on the PC side by going with a lesser manufacturer, building it yourself, or making use of a wider range of customisable options. For example, Acer's Core Duo laptop is supposed to be significantly cheaper than the MacBook Pro. OTOH IBM's ThinkPads are roughly on par.
Also don't forget that many people are fed up to the eyeballs with Windows XP, and hell, that Mac OS X keeps getting recommended, and there's all those applications, and my iPod is easy to use, hmm, maybe it is worth a couple of hundred dollars on its own to not get the XP stress.
It does show how overpriced previous PowerBooks were. I wouldn't have liked to buy one in the past few months just to have this come out.
Doesn't spyware typically also collect personal identifiable information alongside the other crap? Often Spyware includes minor malware - where it alters the operation of software it really shouldn't have the right to affect, or tracks your keypresses for searches, and so on.
I.e., if Apple were storing in a database a list of AppleID->Songs then it would be spyware. If Apple were overwriting links to competing music stores in your browser (which they aren't), again that'd be spyware and malware.
However this is unlikely. Most likely it is anonymous, although the webserver / iTunesMiniStoreServer may be logging the requests, as any web server will log them. Then the issue is: "Hey, I didn't explicitly request that, so don't log that request, only my explicit requests can be logged, I understand that as part of using the internet". However iTunes is getting more and more web-enabled, and thus this gets more and more expected. Anyway, any music ripping application will make requests to FreeDB, Gracenote, etc, with your personal music CD identifier... no-one complains about that!
Even then Apple would have to statistically analyse the logfile specifically regarding IP address. And that wouldn't identify you unless they ran it against logfiles of AppleID->IP Address from other sources.
However, we are taking their word for it. We give them the benefit of the doubt because, unlike Sony or real Spyware systems, Apple have a good reputation. However too many things like this could damage it.
As other people have said, every website will log your accesses, I'm sure most sites you can buy from will also monitor your purchases, your IDs, your accesses, your IP address, and run statistics against them.
The question is, are we happy for this type of profiling.
Given the uptake of store cards and so on, I think that the vast majority are. And the rest of us play around with their systems to break their statistics, such as browsing euro-pop all day when all your purchases are heavy metal. Or not.
That's why AMD waited for DDR2-667 rather than starting with DDR2-400 and DDR2-533, like Intel. The latency tradeoffs aren't as bad. The 5-15% increase is probably with DDR2-800.
But indeed, you can probably simulate the expected performance increases with very high end DDR. However you can't simulate core enhancements that may, or may not be, present in the next AMD stepping.
Winamp is spyware! Gracenote DB is spyware!
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
Seriously, unless the data that is sent is associated with you, and stored in a database, then what is the problem?
How else would the feature work?
Winamp (IIRC) had a feature, enabled by default, that did pretty much the same, it clearly sent the current song's information to a server and dragged back relevant information for the author, including pictures and more.
I bet WMP and other media players do the same.
The issue is, as I said, are Apple storing your playlist, song by song, in a database with your AppleID? Seriously, if they wanted to do that, they'd just dump your playlist across the network and you wouldn't even know!
This isn't malware. This isn't spyware, unless the information is used for a purpose that isn't recommending similar music in a mini-store panel.
I hadn't noticed the mini-store though, was it in the iTunes update? I'll have to take a look! Sounds useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Make a version with a long-life OLED colour (not 5000 hours because of the blue) monochrome display.
... well, that might be mouldy cake between the keys.
Looking at my keyboard, woo, look, black on white. No reds, purples, greens
I'm sure that monochrome would be cheaper for a start, require less bandwidth to update, and for keyboard uses, just as useful.
Currently it is three pressable displays.
Stick a 64x64 monochrome/greyscale OLED into a key-sized key, and make a keyboard from that. Leave the full colour version until the technology is better - both on the OLED side and on the keyboards with display side.
They were good for a short-term boost, but in the long term they made me much more tired. Never mind the times I tried Pro Plus to get more revision time... the only thing red bull and similar drinks are good for is as a mix with vodka.
:) I subscribe to the 'everything is okay, or even good in moderation' school of thought, rather than the 'abstinence is best' hookum.
These days I eat reasonably healthily, I do drink caffeine, but only a couple of cups a day (usually tea) apart from when mixing coke with alcohol
I have a reasonable amount of water, or decent squash, every day. Often I have a pint of milk.
Better to have a decent breakfast with slow release energy at the beginning of the day than to snack on food and energy drinks throughout the day. A bowl of porridge is a lot cheaper too. Shame I get up too late to actually make use of this wisdom.
Similarly, exercise is good for you, if you find the time for it. Gyms are boring as hell though, so try running or team sports... hell make your garden neater or repaint the house.
Yeah, that's handy stuff.
:)
Large Fisting Group? Wank on The Biscuit? Willy Tossing Society?
Maybe the games should have an auto-translate feature that can be disabled that tells you that LFG is in fact Looking For Group.
NUJP is a handy one. I hope the book explains it.
I'm going to fill it full of gay bars, trannie bars, and the like. A core part of the game will be shopping in goth/punk/hellokitty type areas in order to equip your character with all the correct gear for their sexuality. Instead of Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic it'll have Straight-Bi-Gay-RichardSimmons... (yes, this is a joke). It'd get all the business that other games don't want.
I can understand Blizzard's POV - let's not bring these things into the game, it's a game, it's fantasy.
OTOH I can understand that some people might want to be with people who (external to the game) are like them. That's natural. It's like older gamers not wanting to play with punk 14 year olds with attitude problems.
That's why it succeeded.
Also most people will improve with practice at this game.
It doesn't rely on over complex controls. Nor pin-point accuracy. Not super-human controller skills. It's addictive because you know you messed up and can do better. And you can get it on $5 LCD games, never mind Gameboys now.
However there aren't many concepts for games this simple.
Increases in costs (taxes, etc) in Britain since 1999 mean that people have less money to spend on frivolous things.
Increase in uptake of alternative media (games consoles, DVDs, etc) also meant that limited budget is being spread around more things.
Of course people are going to stop buying music. It's the easiest thing to access (radio, tv) and it isn't important to own. Especially if it isn't that good.
but:
1) I'm shit at games
2) I don't have much free time
3) I'd get addicted and lose my job
Would I be happier with a shittier job, a small residence and spending all my time playing games? Hmm...
Heh, one day later and we find out that there's a redesign of the DS!
(makes it looks more like the upcoming Revolution a bit, in terms of styling)
Hurrah.
I certainly used to write games when I was younger. Sadly I don't have the time anymore, and it can get depressing looking at the standards other people set ... then you realise that is around 50 man years of work against your X man-evenings...
...
One day
People who cannot disconnect fake things (games, books, movies) from reality, or indeed people who haven't got an ounce of common sense in their heads, shouldn't be allowed access to the things that might set them off.
This game didn't cause them to crash. Their speeding and racing on a public road did.
A game is just that, a game. Reading a book about murder doesn't cause people to kill.
18 year olds should be old enough to discern the differences. If they aren't, then they shouldn't be given adult status - no cars, no cigarettes, no guns, no alcohol.
Then a lot of these people have done a lot of work.
There's only so far a person, or a bunch of friends, can get when programming [in their spare time most likely] a game of any level of complexity.
Tools are better than they were years ago however. What took a month to program in 1985 in assembler can be done in a couple of evenings now, motivation allowing. As long as someone has some graphical talent you can get good looking games out without too much effort. Sadly they aren't going to have the same level of gameplay as some modern games - it's hard to compete against a multi-million dollar game!
It's easy for an indie band to get good and be better than a mainstream band. It's not too hard to do decent films on a budget either, if the skills are available. But game writing seems to be pretty hard to get something even 10% as good as a commercial offering. Is it a problem with the tools - Java has some pretty simple game libraries now however, but you still need to know some complex stuff if you do a 3D game, for example. Is game-writing the educated-geeks choice of creativity, another pasttime like knitting, a band, amateur dramatics, etc?
(Aside: how old is I.D? New crap shouldn't be included in a curriculum, certainly you don't see Gaia being taught in R.S., and that's pretty old.)
Theory: Intelligent Design.
Proof: None
Evidence: None, apart from hypothesis that things are so complex that it can't have happened naturally.
Validity Example: Humans will one day do things to animals that will alter them - intelligence, pets, slaves, whatever. That could be determined to be I.D., although we'd all know it was Steered (Accelerated) Evolution*. David Brin's Startide Rising touches on this idea, and of I.D. at a certain level. It's hard to disprove a theory that an alien 'advanced' us in the past, unless we find the aliens and they tell us. In this case the theory is more of a belief, and thus I.D. is simply another faith, a religion.
Theory: Creationism
Proof: None
Evidence: Old stories. Even the Christian church says they're stories and evolution fits in with the religion. Creationism in forward thinking parts of the church often points to the creation of the universe as the moment of creation.
Failing: Requires faith. It's hard to disprove God.
Theory: Evolution. "Survival of the fittest"
Proof: Plenty.
Evidence: Everywhere.
Faith: Not required, but it seems more sensible to believe in this than I.D!
Clearly Evolution is a scientific theory, and a long-standing one with plenty of evidence, and thousands of man-years of thought put into it. It hasn't been disproved yet, which is promising for such an old theory.
Teach Creationism in Religious Studies, as it is derived from religion. Touch on it in science as an alternative view, i.e., for 5 minutes. Use I.D. as a study on false science.
I have friends who love to dissect this stuff and they can do it very well. They spend the time to read up on all the theories/faiths so that they end up understanding them more than the person they're destroying at the time. I'm usually drunk and can never remember their points that well.
* this probably isn't a very intelligent thing to do however. Very clever, yes. Intelligence usually requires some consideration about whether it should be done, the ramifications, the ethical issues, and so on.
AMD will be doing 65nm during Q3, not at the end of the year.
... not much is known about this though.
So Intel have a 9 month lead on process shrinks. They had 300mm wafers years before AMD too - then again they needed them to meet demand. OTOH AMD have third generation SOI in their processors, and their 90nm processors don't have the same issues that Intel's had, AMD dropped power consumption dramatically with 90nm, although top clock speeds haven't been amazingly better.
AMD are a smaller company, and they're growing at a steady, manageable rate.
We should all be thankful that Intel has nearly got over the Netburst disaster on 90nm. Now both companies will be more competitive. AMD will probably keep growing in the server area this year, consolidate its desktop gains, and win more lower-end laptop marketshare. 2007 however will be when Intel are shipping in massive quantities new products that cover the entire market, and right now they look very competitive. What will AMD have? 65nm SOI K8L
Silly Analyst.
... Lead', when it should probably be 'Predicted to take lead'.
PSP might be nice hardware, but until it gets the really fun games, people won't care. All I've heard is that the DS games are really fun, whilst the PSP games are a bit dull.
Has the PSP actually outsold the DS in the US anyway? I didn't think it had. Odd how the headline reads 'To Increase
And with the very suggestive 'Touch Me' adverts that appeal to adults, I don't see the DS losing out. However a redesign to be a bit less toylike would do it some good I think, like the SP did to the Advance.
And indeed, I bet the Advance is still selling strongly in the US...
Instead of "Might Linux Violate Sarbanes-Oxley?" which it doesn't, it should be "Non-compliance to terms of GPL might violate Sarbanes-Oxley".
Which makes sense.
I.e., if you claim to have the right to use Linux for your product, but you aren't complying with the license, you might be violating Sarbanes-Oxley.
Oh, yeah, my Tesco has:
Buy 3 CDs for £12!!!!
(all the CDs cost under £4 on their own)
I've had to put up with the DIY tills for a year or two now. They finally work most of the time now. Haven't had issues with special offers though.
BT used to be (I don't know about now) limited by the regulator to not be competitive, as it is a monopoly.
That's why BT never offered free local calls.
Of course, all the cable companies offer them, and competing phone companies too.
However people just want one number, and more and more frequently they want it to be the mobile number. It's nice and easy, it isn't tied to your location, and the phones do lots of useful & neat things too. The number's the same if I move house, go on holiday, etc. The housemate has her own mobile phone and thus there's no argument over the phone bill. It's all good.
I hate the line rental fees that all the companies have though. They have no basis in reality. £11 a month just to have the line - that's £132 a year, which is a big pile of DVDs, and that's before services that bring normal mobile features (caller display, voicemail, etc) to it. Insane.
Tesco is getting too big for anybody's good though. Unless you're like me and scavenge the reduced price section after work regularly for a cheap dinner. heh.
Programming Labs full of computers that aren't connected to the internet.
Yes, it would suck.
But it would stop the cheating. You'd have to monitor them of course, but it just goes to show that if a certain percentage will go that far to cheat, you have to do something.
Maybe if you catch them doing it - which is easy enough if each person has to explain their assignment, why they did it the way they did - you could force them to do future programming assignments in the lab, under supervision (that the student will have to pay for) until they won't ever do it again.
My local Tesco has had them for two years now.
The first year was bad. Horribly unreliable. The software on them has improved now though, it works pretty well in fact, apart from the 'item bagged' detection. And barcodes on certain items.
Maybe the next time you have to use one it'll be an updated version!
We've got those checkouts too.
:(
Grrr!
And it isn't a nice ding. It is a loud machine beep. I want a nice happy 'ding!' sound.
And it complains too often about not putting the item in the bag. Please put the item in the bag. It's in the fucking bag, bitch! That, or 'please pack your items, and continue scanning'.
And there's no cute checkout girl to check out either.
However nobody else likes using them, so they're always empty when the checkout queues are still very long. I still feel like I'm doing a job that someone else should be doing though
And you know it.
1) Non-gaming software. Apart from some specialised applications, every software area is covered just as well for Mac OS as for Windows.
2) Games. Yes, an issue to be sure. I bet that now Apple are on x86 that Transgaming will release their software to get Windows games running under Mac OS X.
Macs are for people who don't want to think about the computer, and just get the work done. Quite often these people aren't hard-core geeks, but they earn a lot of money from their work, and they more often than not choose Apple hardware to earn their money. Interesting that.
As a (non-Windows) programmer, working under Mac OS X merges the benefits of Linux/BSD (decent environment) and having excellent applications on top, with a good user interface. Although the Aqua look is starting to look a bit samey to me now.
Apple's hardware prices are generally in line with market rates in the 'not cheap tat' market areas.
For example, the PowerMac is competitive price wise with any 4-core system you can configure from the major PC manufacturers.
And now the MacBook Pro is similarly competitive, price wise. The parent poster did rightly point out that you have many more options on the PC side however.
You can either save money on the PC side by going with a lesser manufacturer, building it yourself, or making use of a wider range of customisable options. For example, Acer's Core Duo laptop is supposed to be significantly cheaper than the MacBook Pro. OTOH IBM's ThinkPads are roughly on par.
Also don't forget that many people are fed up to the eyeballs with Windows XP, and hell, that Mac OS X keeps getting recommended, and there's all those applications, and my iPod is easy to use, hmm, maybe it is worth a couple of hundred dollars on its own to not get the XP stress.
It does show how overpriced previous PowerBooks were. I wouldn't have liked to buy one in the past few months just to have this come out.
Doesn't spyware typically also collect personal identifiable information alongside the other crap? Often Spyware includes minor malware - where it alters the operation of software it really shouldn't have the right to affect, or tracks your keypresses for searches, and so on.
... no-one complains about that!
I.e., if Apple were storing in a database a list of AppleID->Songs then it would be spyware. If Apple were overwriting links to competing music stores in your browser (which they aren't), again that'd be spyware and malware.
However this is unlikely. Most likely it is anonymous, although the webserver / iTunesMiniStoreServer may be logging the requests, as any web server will log them. Then the issue is: "Hey, I didn't explicitly request that, so don't log that request, only my explicit requests can be logged, I understand that as part of using the internet". However iTunes is getting more and more web-enabled, and thus this gets more and more expected. Anyway, any music ripping application will make requests to FreeDB, Gracenote, etc, with your personal music CD identifier
Even then Apple would have to statistically analyse the logfile specifically regarding IP address. And that wouldn't identify you unless they ran it against logfiles of AppleID->IP Address from other sources.
However, we are taking their word for it. We give them the benefit of the doubt because, unlike Sony or real Spyware systems, Apple have a good reputation. However too many things like this could damage it.
As other people have said, every website will log your accesses, I'm sure most sites you can buy from will also monitor your purchases, your IDs, your accesses, your IP address, and run statistics against them.
The question is, are we happy for this type of profiling.
Given the uptake of store cards and so on, I think that the vast majority are. And the rest of us play around with their systems to break their statistics, such as browsing euro-pop all day when all your purchases are heavy metal. Or not.
That's why AMD waited for DDR2-667 rather than starting with DDR2-400 and DDR2-533, like Intel. The latency tradeoffs aren't as bad. The 5-15% increase is probably with DDR2-800.
But indeed, you can probably simulate the expected performance increases with very high end DDR. However you can't simulate core enhancements that may, or may not be, present in the next AMD stepping.
Seriously, unless the data that is sent is associated with you, and stored in a database, then what is the problem?
How else would the feature work?
Winamp (IIRC) had a feature, enabled by default, that did pretty much the same, it clearly sent the current song's information to a server and dragged back relevant information for the author, including pictures and more.
I bet WMP and other media players do the same.
The issue is, as I said, are Apple storing your playlist, song by song, in a database with your AppleID? Seriously, if they wanted to do that, they'd just dump your playlist across the network and you wouldn't even know!
This isn't malware.
This isn't spyware, unless the information is used for a purpose that isn't recommending similar music in a mini-store panel.
I hadn't noticed the mini-store though, was it in the iTunes update? I'll have to take a look! Sounds useful.