I would strongly disagree that there is an absurd invariance in strike zones across different home plate umpires. If anything, the fact that there is a little over 1% difference in the machine and the actual human strike zone recognition proves this point. In general, umpires working in MLB have worked very hard through A, AA, AAA leagues to get where they are, and they are there for a reason.
From a baseball purist standpoint, MLB has become a Home Run Derby of sorts, but that has VERY little to do with strike zone, and much more to do with performance enhancing drugs, different composition used in the actual ball, expansion thinning out pitching talent, and the general change in the makeup of ballparks (read: home run alleys as found in PacBell Park, and the new Great American Ballpark in Cinncinati).
Personally, and I believe many die-hard baseball fans feel similarly, this new machine ruins the game. Pitching and hitting are arts, and the ability of a good pitcher to locate pitches just on the corners is something that is special to the game, and makes a great pitcher amazing. This machine has served it's purpose: it has proven that the Umpires are doing a very good job dealing with a highly subjective condition. Leave the subjectivity to the humans, and the web serving to the machines.
From Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary:
Law: the felonious taking of the property of another from his or her persion
or
in his or her immediate presence, against his or her will, by violence or intimidation.
How does this analogy not fit? If I steal, I get prosecuted/jailed. The record industry colluded, which took money from the populus, and you argue this is NOT stealing? You're being ridiculous. They took our money by anti-competitive practices and they aren't found at fault. If I stole/robbed/took I would face the letter of the law.
If you want to argue the dictionary, look up larceny (which you used in your definition) and tell me that doesn't fit.
No, you dont get it. Of course they didn't hold a gun to my head and make me buy their CDs, but I also had NO IDEA they were colluding to fix prices. That is illegal, anti-competitive, and quite frankly, robbery. Now that I know the cost of the CD I want to buy is grossly overpriced, I think twice before buying a CD. My point is, they are doing something illegal. Collusion and price fixing are illegal, and they took billions of dollars from people before we found out about it. Now that we know, buyer beware, but before, they were stealing.
The analogy fits. They stole from all of us and we had no idea. Reprecusions? None. God Bless America!
Federal Tax Cuts == ((Local Tax + State Tax) * 3) - ((Funding Cut) * (Libraries + Road Improvment + Schools + Police + Fire + Teachers + Public Works + Art + Culture + Museums + Research into things that don't polute + Environmental Protection +...).
Step in what direction?
Why am I only getting $13 back when I probably lost $500 or more to this illegal garbage?
Why is it that I could rob a 7-11 of $100 and get jail time, but companies can rob the populus of MILLIONS of dollars and they are immune to everything?
How abotu when the government finds out that 5 major labels have been colluding to fix the prices on CDs, they make them all give $13 to whoever signs up, and then shake hands and say "All in a day's work," and nothing changes? That is paltry in response for how long it went on before we found out. Is that promoting capitalism or consumerism? Competition? Or the fleecing of America (and the world?!?) by people who have enough money to influence the government? When do the people wake up and realize it's not fair, and they keep voting along party lines for people that are only harming them?
I looked at the site you mentioned, and did a quick comparison between the front-page advertised CDs, and iTunes Music Store. I was kind of surprised, but almost all of those CDs were available for $9.99 a CD over iTunes instead of $13 or $14 at deepdiscountcd.com. Of course, I don't pay shipping, but I also don't have the physical CD. Pick your poison I guess...And the Windows iTunes will be available soon.
The music I listen to isn't sold at Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, or any other soul-sucking mega-super-happy-future-Marts.
$13 is crap compared to how much I know I must have lost over the last 10 years on hundreds of overpriced CDs. If this is capitalism, sign me up for socialism.
Was anyone suggesting prank calling? I think the article was just pointing out a funny coincidence, and that is all. We know it is a charitable org. and it does good the world over...
Personally I don't think not giving the user the option of defining any settings which could cause malfunction to be the answer. The reason? Well it's pretty simple, when set properly those same settings give flexibility, added functionality, and performance (at least one, sometimes two, often all three of the above).
See, that's the thing. I like Apple's OS because at surface level, you can't get access to those features that could really break things if you screwed with them too much. If you really want to muck around with those settings, they are there and ready to be played with through various means (Terminal -- it's a freaking BSD system, Third-Party, and power-user know-how). I would like to respectfully disagree with your statment and say that by default they don't offer the option of defining settings that may cause malfunction, but in OS X they have left almost complete wiggle-room to in fact screw EVERYTHING up; if you know what you're doing. I think it's more genius than anything...
Transcoding (AAC -> OGG, for instance) is lossy. Whether or not it is acceptably lossy is a matter of personal taste. However, it is ridiculous that there should be *any* loss at all; I've paid for the music, so I should be able to listen to it with any software I choose, without losing quality.
Besides, burning to CD and re-importing is a pain. Is there a good, technological reason why I shouldn't be able to download music directly into my server's/usr/local/media tree? I'm an engineer. That sort of artificial inefficiency bugs me, especially when it doesn't even accomplish its intended purpose.
You have a point that going AAC -> OGG is lossy, but so is CD -> MP3, and no one has been complaining about that this whole time.
A an engineer myself, I know that none of my projets, research, or designs have ever started from a concrete idea that wasn't altered, changed, added to, subtracted from, or re-engineered to be better, safer, cheaper, of more feature filled. This music store has been open for 3 or 4 days. Give it some time. The idea is novel, and the implementation is easily changed or made more robust.
AAC is a good introductory step toward getting people away from MP3 and toward MP4 or OGG. Wait and see what comes from iMusic v. 2.0...
At the self-check out lane at my grocery store, the conveyor belt actually detects an object passing through (there is a scanner halfway down the belt). If you haven't scanned it, and it detects more objects than you scanned, it stops, backs up and calls an employee.
Apple's DRM only makes it more difficult for the masses to share the music after purchase. What Apple and the Music industry is banking on is the impulse buy. They have priced these songs at such a level that people don't think twice before just purchasing a $.99 song. The impulse buy is the entire concept behind this store. It's just as easy now to acquire the song for "pennies" as it is to go download it over your favorite P2P.
Apple is betting that they can watch the actions of the people who are using the service, and figure out how to make it even better. Right now they're tracking customer tendency, and with the customer data being completely real-time and digital, they can analyze and react. They're banking on making it easier and more attractive than P2P sources.
I wouldn't be surprised to see AAC at 160kbps, a Windows version of iTunes 4 (it's already being worked on), and a slightly lower price per song, in the near future.
This is a serious assault on the idea that you couldn't use online music distribution. Take it serious, stop judging it, and see if it works. Even if it fails, it's bound to show us the path to making it effective and viable.
If you haven't noticed, you can burn the AAC files to CD. Then, pop the CD back in and rip the MP3s off.
AAC sounds fantastic. I usually rip MP3s at 160-192 kbps, using VBR. This makes very nice sounding MP3 files, and I can't tell the difference between the MP3 and the CD. The only draw back, is that they are kinda large, but with a 20 Gig iPod, I'm not too worried.
AAC actually sounds as good, as far as I can tell, as my MP3s do. So all this talk of "low bit-rate" and "DRM-sUckS!" is ridiculous. If you don't like the DRM, burn a CD (or 10 before changing the playlist), and re-import it as MP3s and never think about AAC again.
I'm going to surmise that your Graphics card is not compatible with Quartz Extreme. All the newer cards are, and it off-loads all the CPU crunching that creates the nice font smoothing, slick effects, and general beauty of the OS, all to the GPU and lets your CPU work on all the real computing tasks.
I have a 1Ghz TiBook, and it beats the pants off my girlfriends Dell Laptop purchased roughly at the same time as mine, same price range, and running XP. I can't stand to use her's for more than 10 minutes at the snails pace it compares to.
Re:"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws...
on
Energy From Vibrations
·
· Score: 1
That is wholely incorrect:
The energy you expend to create the vibration can never be wholely reclaimed, not even in this fashion. Therefore, you'd lose energy with every call to vibrate() you made.
This technology is great for increasing your overall battery life by reclaiming a small portion of the energy expended to make your phone ring/vibrate, but periodic calls to vibrate() would be, well, stupid.
I see this as having the greatest impact in home appliances, and their relation to your gigantic electric bill.
Conservation of energy is really what we are talking about here, and the submitter doesn't seem to have a grasp on that...
What a stupid statement too make. Any person that is not a newbiew or stupid luser knows that the only secure computer is a computer that is off and unplugged. It doesn't matter what the OS is. It could be Unix, Linux, MS Windows, Amiga, Mac OS, etc. As long as people are writing the code, there will always be bugs, and security holes problems
Your response, though heartfelt, is misguided. I asked why people don't mind running a "completely insecure" OS. I never argued that all OS are made equally insecure, and I never doubted that the inherant vice of an OS on a network is security.
What I did say, is that Windows security is arguably (we do it here and elsewhere all the time) the least secure major OS available, and why it seems fine to people.
Even Microsoft fans should be asking questions of the mighty Redmond giant, and questioning the quality of their product.
As for all the people who yell and jump around that their XP boxes are stable and they never have to worry about anything, I say that's garbage. I've seen XP boxes everywhere on this campus (dorms, classrooms, administrative), and the OS is remarkably good at breaking.
I'm not saying that Linux is the end-all-be-all of MS alternatives. What I am saying:
1) There are a variety of choices emerging, and I think people (businesses, educators, etc.) should start exploring this issue.
2) The arguement you all make is this: MS is a monopoly providing us with sub-par service, security, standards, and features.
3) I believe that there are viable, if not better, alternatives to abotu 95% of the non-game software found in any Windows environment.
4) The different, in my mind, between Windows security issues and any other major OS (Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, etc.) is that the majority of the MS issues are not found in extensible pieces of the OS such as SendMail, Samba, and a variety of other extensions of the core functionality. Almost everyone uses Java even if they don't know it, and this exploit is not something you have to "enable" in order to be vulnerable for all intents and purposes. This is like leaving all your windows in your house unlocked, and saying that everyone has windows in their house so they are just as insecure. No, that argument sucks. If my mail application automatically installs virus software from emails in the standard configuration, that is terrible engineering. Period.
So I pose the real question, why do we follow along, when it is clear that the solution is not Microsoft? Why is the answer to my last question: "We're screwed, MS is a monopoly, except it?" That seems like terrible logic to me...
I can honestly say that it baffles me as to why Microsoft continues to hold such a huge stake in most of the computing world. I don't understand why people continue to digest what is carelessly tossed out of Redmond, WA.
I can understand the need for an array of software unavailable on any other platform (though, what percentage of that software is actually GOOD software?), and the platform standardization issues, maybe even "ease" of use, but honestly, the security and ridiculousness of the MS platform, ideology, and disregard of standards make me sick.
What is the continuing allure? Do you really not mind running machines that are completely insecure? And how can they not fix their own NT 4.0 code? That's absurd. They pitch this solution for years, and bail when the cost to fix their crap gets too high.
I'm not trolling, I'm baffled. Someone tell me why this continues?
You are completely wrong. Sorry to barge into your conversation, but you were assuming that the supply of Apple branded used systems had the same size market as Intel machines.
When you compare supply and demand between the two platforms, you are looking at a supply relative to the demand or market size. You aren't taking into account that they are separate markets when you look at the whole system and not components. The size of the supply and demand in the Apple market is a similar ratio to the Intel market.
The guy was correct. The Apple's have a better resale value due mainly to the components used in the machines (check out one of the companies that keeps track of such data).
If Apple is making the high end G4 Machines dual-processor G4s, it sounds like they are trying to "catch-up" in Mhz war.
It's widely known that Mhz for Mhz, CISC and RISC (G4 and X86) are completely different beasts, but I think Apple is trying to play the game by sporting two 1.0 Ghz G4s.
If this is the case, and maybe even if it isn't, why not bill the high end as "2.0 Ghz G4 - Dual Processor." I know it is somewhat misleading, but then again, so is the Mhz rating between a Pentium and a G4. I think someone looking for a new computer that isn't as aware of the difference, would see a 2.0 Ghz Mac as a very comparable alternative to a 2.0 Ghz Pentium machine.
If you still think Mhz matters across chip architecture, you should not be posting anything in this "arguement." The MHz does not matter when comparing the Motorolla/IBM RISC chips and the Intel clones. Your arguments are weak at best.
The absolute worst thing which could happen is 'porting' OpenOffice in some way whereby it adopts the Aqua appearance without the mac behavior.
If you port the application with the correct APIs in Carbon or Cocoa, I don't believe there would be any way for it to behave differently. The OS X services are built in when ported to the correct APIs, this affectively grants a level of similarity between all applications that are OS X native. If you have Aqua, you have the OS X behavior as well...
The story just posted here on Slashdot yesterday about a guy running RC-5 and getting sued for bandwidth usage may apply to Spammers. What if ISPs sued spammers for the cost of the bandwidth wasted on the frivelous email crap sent to millions of their users. I hope the guy in Georgia doesn't get punished, but if it goes through it could be applicable to anything people don't want on their network...like Spam.
Questions for you and your BEST laptop from an unbiased source comparing your Dell and that iBook over there:
1) What is your battery life? If I'm flying from Newark to Seattle and I need about 5 hours of battery life, can I get it from that Dell?
2) That Dell is pretty big. It's probably heavy. Nice big screen though. I'm going to have to lug an extra battery or two along, so I'm hoping that the Dell isn't too heavy. How heavy is it? (The Dell is over 7 lbs with the 15 inch screen and a CD-ROM might make it 8 lbs)
3) Do you really expect the sound to not work on that iBook for long? It's not like it's impossible to get sound working. I works in OS X based on a FreeBSD kernel, so it can't be impossible to get it workign with something else.
4) Why is a network card optional? Why is this thing WAY more expensive with all those frills than the iBook.
I'm a college student with negative income ($31,000 a year in the red). If I wanted to get a linux laptop, that iBook would be great. I wouldn't mind working on sound drivers in my spare time either...
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I would strongly disagree that there is an absurd invariance in strike zones across different home plate umpires. If anything, the fact that there is a little over 1% difference in the machine and the actual human strike zone recognition proves this point. In general, umpires working in MLB have worked very hard through A, AA, AAA leagues to get where they are, and they are there for a reason.
From a baseball purist standpoint, MLB has become a Home Run Derby of sorts, but that has VERY little to do with strike zone, and much more to do with performance enhancing drugs, different composition used in the actual ball, expansion thinning out pitching talent, and the general change in the makeup of ballparks (read: home run alleys as found in PacBell Park, and the new Great American Ballpark in Cinncinati).
Personally, and I believe many die-hard baseball fans feel similarly, this new machine ruins the game. Pitching and hitting are arts, and the ability of a good pitcher to locate pitches just on the corners is something that is special to the game, and makes a great pitcher amazing. This machine has served it's purpose: it has proven that the Umpires are doing a very good job dealing with a highly subjective condition. Leave the subjectivity to the humans, and the web serving to the machines.
Oh jeez:
From Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary:
Law: the felonious taking of the property of another from his or her persion
or
in his or her immediate presence, against his or her will, by violence or intimidation.
How does this analogy not fit? If I steal, I get prosecuted/jailed. The record industry colluded, which took money from the populus, and you argue this is NOT stealing? You're being ridiculous. They took our money by anti-competitive practices and they aren't found at fault. If I stole/robbed/took I would face the letter of the law.
If you want to argue the dictionary, look up larceny (which you used in your definition) and tell me that doesn't fit.
No, you dont get it. Of course they didn't hold a gun to my head and make me buy their CDs, but I also had NO IDEA they were colluding to fix prices. That is illegal, anti-competitive, and quite frankly, robbery. Now that I know the cost of the CD I want to buy is grossly overpriced, I think twice before buying a CD. My point is, they are doing something illegal. Collusion and price fixing are illegal, and they took billions of dollars from people before we found out about it. Now that we know, buyer beware, but before, they were stealing.
The analogy fits. They stole from all of us and we had no idea. Reprecusions? None. God Bless America!
Federal Tax Cuts == ((Local Tax + State Tax) * 3) - ((Funding Cut) * (Libraries + Road Improvment + Schools + Police + Fire + Teachers + Public Works + Art + Culture + Museums + Research into things that don't polute + Environmental Protection + ...).
Step in what direction?
Why am I only getting $13 back when I probably lost $500 or more to this illegal garbage?
Why is it that I could rob a 7-11 of $100 and get jail time, but companies can rob the populus of MILLIONS of dollars and they are immune to everything?
Or....
How abotu when the government finds out that 5 major labels have been colluding to fix the prices on CDs, they make them all give $13 to whoever signs up, and then shake hands and say "All in a day's work," and nothing changes? That is paltry in response for how long it went on before we found out. Is that promoting capitalism or consumerism? Competition? Or the fleecing of America (and the world?!?) by people who have enough money to influence the government? When do the people wake up and realize it's not fair, and they keep voting along party lines for people that are only harming them?
I looked at the site you mentioned, and did a quick comparison between the front-page advertised CDs, and iTunes Music Store. I was kind of surprised, but almost all of those CDs were available for $9.99 a CD over iTunes instead of $13 or $14 at deepdiscountcd.com. Of course, I don't pay shipping, but I also don't have the physical CD. Pick your poison I guess...And the Windows iTunes will be available soon.
The music I listen to isn't sold at Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, or any other soul-sucking mega-super-happy-future-Marts.
$13 is crap compared to how much I know I must have lost over the last 10 years on hundreds of overpriced CDs. If this is capitalism, sign me up for socialism.
Was anyone suggesting prank calling? I think the article was just pointing out a funny coincidence, and that is all. We know it is a charitable org. and it does good the world over...
See, that's the thing. I like Apple's OS because at surface level, you can't get access to those features that could really break things if you screwed with them too much. If you really want to muck around with those settings, they are there and ready to be played with through various means (Terminal -- it's a freaking BSD system, Third-Party, and power-user know-how). I would like to respectfully disagree with your statment and say that by default they don't offer the option of defining settings that may cause malfunction, but in OS X they have left almost complete wiggle-room to in fact screw EVERYTHING up; if you know what you're doing. I think it's more genius than anything...
Transcoding (AAC -> OGG, for instance) is lossy. Whether or not it is acceptably lossy is a matter of personal taste. However, it is ridiculous that there should be *any* loss at all; I've paid for the music, so I should be able to listen to it with any software I choose, without losing quality.
/usr/local/media tree? I'm an engineer. That sort of artificial inefficiency bugs me, especially when it doesn't even accomplish its intended purpose.
Besides, burning to CD and re-importing is a pain. Is there a good, technological reason why I shouldn't be able to download music directly into my server's
You have a point that going AAC -> OGG is lossy, but so is CD -> MP3, and no one has been complaining about that this whole time.
A an engineer myself, I know that none of my projets, research, or designs have ever started from a concrete idea that wasn't altered, changed, added to, subtracted from, or re-engineered to be better, safer, cheaper, of more feature filled. This music store has been open for 3 or 4 days. Give it some time. The idea is novel, and the implementation is easily changed or made more robust.
AAC is a good introductory step toward getting people away from MP3 and toward MP4 or OGG. Wait and see what comes from iMusic v. 2.0...
At the self-check out lane at my grocery store, the conveyor belt actually detects an object passing through (there is a scanner halfway down the belt). If you haven't scanned it, and it detects more objects than you scanned, it stops, backs up and calls an employee.
Apple's DRM only makes it more difficult for the masses to share the music after purchase. What Apple and the Music industry is banking on is the impulse buy. They have priced these songs at such a level that people don't think twice before just purchasing a $.99 song. The impulse buy is the entire concept behind this store. It's just as easy now to acquire the song for "pennies" as it is to go download it over your favorite P2P.
Apple is betting that they can watch the actions of the people who are using the service, and figure out how to make it even better. Right now they're tracking customer tendency, and with the customer data being completely real-time and digital, they can analyze and react. They're banking on making it easier and more attractive than P2P sources.
I wouldn't be surprised to see AAC at 160kbps, a Windows version of iTunes 4 (it's already being worked on), and a slightly lower price per song, in the near future.
This is a serious assault on the idea that you couldn't use online music distribution. Take it serious, stop judging it, and see if it works. Even if it fails, it's bound to show us the path to making it effective and viable.
If you haven't noticed, you can burn the AAC files to CD. Then, pop the CD back in and rip the MP3s off.
AAC sounds fantastic. I usually rip MP3s at 160-192 kbps, using VBR. This makes very nice sounding MP3 files, and I can't tell the difference between the MP3 and the CD. The only draw back, is that they are kinda large, but with a 20 Gig iPod, I'm not too worried.
AAC actually sounds as good, as far as I can tell, as my MP3s do. So all this talk of "low bit-rate" and "DRM-sUckS!" is ridiculous. If you don't like the DRM, burn a CD (or 10 before changing the playlist), and re-import it as MP3s and never think about AAC again.
I'm going to surmise that your Graphics card is not compatible with Quartz Extreme. All the newer cards are, and it off-loads all the CPU crunching that creates the nice font smoothing, slick effects, and general beauty of the OS, all to the GPU and lets your CPU work on all the real computing tasks.
I have a 1Ghz TiBook, and it beats the pants off my girlfriends Dell Laptop purchased roughly at the same time as mine, same price range, and running XP. I can't stand to use her's for more than 10 minutes at the snails pace it compares to.
That is wholely incorrect:
The energy you expend to create the vibration can never be wholely reclaimed, not even in this fashion. Therefore, you'd lose energy with every call to vibrate() you made.
This technology is great for increasing your overall battery life by reclaiming a small portion of the energy expended to make your phone ring/vibrate, but periodic calls to vibrate() would be, well, stupid.
I see this as having the greatest impact in home appliances, and their relation to your gigantic electric bill.
Conservation of energy is really what we are talking about here, and the submitter doesn't seem to have a grasp on that...
Or you can look at it this way: Mac OS X was the 10th revision of the Mac OS.
Therefore, none of the items on your list is the 10th anything...
What's in a name anyway? Google, Yahoo?
I'm not saying that Linux is the end-all-be-all of MS alternatives. What I am saying:
1) There are a variety of choices emerging, and I think people (businesses, educators, etc.) should start exploring this issue.
2) The arguement you all make is this: MS is a monopoly providing us with sub-par service, security, standards, and features.
3) I believe that there are viable, if not better, alternatives to abotu 95% of the non-game software found in any Windows environment.
4) The different, in my mind, between Windows security issues and any other major OS (Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, etc.) is that the majority of the MS issues are not found in extensible pieces of the OS such as SendMail, Samba, and a variety of other extensions of the core functionality. Almost everyone uses Java even if they don't know it, and this exploit is not something you have to "enable" in order to be vulnerable for all intents and purposes. This is like leaving all your windows in your house unlocked, and saying that everyone has windows in their house so they are just as insecure. No, that argument sucks. If my mail application automatically installs virus software from emails in the standard configuration, that is terrible engineering. Period.
So I pose the real question, why do we follow along, when it is clear that the solution is not Microsoft? Why is the answer to my last question: "We're screwed, MS is a monopoly, except it?" That seems like terrible logic to me...
I can honestly say that it baffles me as to why Microsoft continues to hold such a huge stake in most of the computing world. I don't understand why people continue to digest what is carelessly tossed out of Redmond, WA.
I can understand the need for an array of software unavailable on any other platform (though, what percentage of that software is actually GOOD software?), and the platform standardization issues, maybe even "ease" of use, but honestly, the security and ridiculousness of the MS platform, ideology, and disregard of standards make me sick.
What is the continuing allure? Do you really not mind running machines that are completely insecure? And how can they not fix their own NT 4.0 code? That's absurd. They pitch this solution for years, and bail when the cost to fix their crap gets too high.
I'm not trolling, I'm baffled. Someone tell me why this continues?
Document Posted 11-07-2002.
This is five months old.
You are completely wrong. Sorry to barge into your conversation, but you were assuming that the supply of Apple branded used systems had the same size market as Intel machines.
When you compare supply and demand between the two platforms, you are looking at a supply relative to the demand or market size. You aren't taking into account that they are separate markets when you look at the whole system and not components. The size of the supply and demand in the Apple market is a similar ratio to the Intel market.
The guy was correct. The Apple's have a better resale value due mainly to the components used in the machines (check out one of the companies that keeps track of such data).
If Apple is making the high end G4 Machines dual-processor G4s, it sounds like they are trying to "catch-up" in Mhz war.
It's widely known that Mhz for Mhz, CISC and RISC (G4 and X86) are completely different beasts, but I think Apple is trying to play the game by sporting two 1.0 Ghz G4s.
If this is the case, and maybe even if it isn't, why not bill the high end as "2.0 Ghz G4 - Dual Processor." I know it is somewhat misleading, but then again, so is the Mhz rating between a Pentium and a G4. I think someone looking for a new computer that isn't as aware of the difference, would see a 2.0 Ghz Mac as a very comparable alternative to a 2.0 Ghz Pentium machine.
If you still think Mhz matters across chip architecture, you should not be posting anything in this "arguement." The MHz does not matter when comparing the Motorolla/IBM RISC chips and the Intel clones. Your arguments are weak at best.
The absolute worst thing which could happen is 'porting' OpenOffice in some way whereby it adopts the Aqua appearance without the mac behavior.
If you port the application with the correct APIs in Carbon or Cocoa, I don't believe there would be any way for it to behave differently. The OS X services are built in when ported to the correct APIs, this affectively grants a level of similarity between all applications that are OS X native. If you have Aqua, you have the OS X behavior as well...
The story just posted here on Slashdot yesterday about a guy running RC-5 and getting sued for bandwidth usage may apply to Spammers. What if ISPs sued spammers for the cost of the bandwidth wasted on the frivelous email crap sent to millions of their users. I hope the guy in Georgia doesn't get punished, but if it goes through it could be applicable to anything people don't want on their network...like Spam.
Questions for you and your BEST laptop from an unbiased source comparing your Dell and that iBook over there:
1) What is your battery life? If I'm flying from Newark to Seattle and I need about 5 hours of battery life, can I get it from that Dell?
2) That Dell is pretty big. It's probably heavy. Nice big screen though. I'm going to have to lug an extra battery or two along, so I'm hoping that the Dell isn't too heavy. How heavy is it? (The Dell is over 7 lbs with the 15 inch screen and a CD-ROM might make it 8 lbs)
3) Do you really expect the sound to not work on that iBook for long? It's not like it's impossible to get sound working. I works in OS X based on a FreeBSD kernel, so it can't be impossible to get it workign with something else.
4) Why is a network card optional? Why is this thing WAY more expensive with all those frills than the iBook.
I'm a college student with negative income ($31,000 a year in the red). If I wanted to get a linux laptop, that iBook would be great. I wouldn't mind working on sound drivers in my spare time either...
I guess it's all about your perspective isn't it?