If it automatically played a theme song after every head shot, this would be the coolest rifle accessory ever.
This must be among the most ignorant and stupid things I've EVER read in a summary.
My dear friend samzenpus, you are cordially invited to join a sniper into war territory and witness some of your beloved head shots in real life. Hint: No, you're never going to forget that sound of a head exploding and brain splatting against a wall. Yes, you'll dream of it for the rest of your life.
You know, a friend of mine was in Kosovo as a sniper for the UN troops back in the 90's. Seeing what that war did with him rid me of most of my "war humor".
as a handheld calculator would produces, as it calculates 3 + 2 when you press *
I don't know how ancient (or cheap) your "standard" calculator is, but I haven't owned or used a calculator that would compute that to 10 since the mid-80's, and I think the guys who wrote calc.exe should just drop dead from shame. You learn "Punkt vor Strich" (German phrase to memorize operator priorities) in your first year at school.
Oh boy do I hope you're kidding. I guess either you don't have any children, or they are very young, otherwise you'd have a clue of the normal state of development at the age of 2. If they're not inquisitive enough already and show interest in learning to read by themselves, please do them the favour of *not* making circus attractions out of them. Each kid has its own learning speed and interests.
You know, I've spoken complete phrases before I could walk (at 12 months) and could read at the age of 3, but it was *me*, not my parents trying to teach me something that normal kids learn at age 5 or 6.
I say this as a father of three, the oldest being 6, the youngest 2 years old. They're amazingly different and each is interested in completely different things (speaking/communicating, physical activities, logic/puzzles, music/rhythm, drawing, mathematics...), and trying to "feed" them things they don't want to learn themselves would be an exercise in frustration - for you *and* for them. Each one has one or more fields where s/he is very advanced, and others in which s/he isn't interested at all, and that's the way it *should* be. Teach them what they're interested in, not what you think they should learn - you'll have enough to do to keep up with *that* already.;)
May I ask how old your children are, or are you talking about your future? If so, you're in for quite some surprises. Hint: Life is what your children do while you're busy making plans.;)
I've encountered many a company that didn't force their X through SSH, let alone using compression
You have my heartfelt sympathy for having to deal with such security idiots. They're probably also still running telnet and have anonymous FTP access to their servers open, and their workstations run Windows 98 and are connected directly to the Internet without any firewall whatsoever using routers with default passwords. Because, that's all in the same league, security-wise.
OTOH, if you're a consultant, such geniuses are a neverending source of revenue, because they *always* manage to buy or reconfigure something without asking you which, again, plays in the same league. Just make sure they pay at least half up front, because those also happen to 'forget' paying your bills after you help them out of the inevitable emergency./rant
Yeah, and said monitor configuration tool failed to display *any* set of usable or even standard resolutions for me on any machine on Ubuntu *ever*. Usually it has only one weird setting, that being 864 x 472 or something to this effect, at a whopping 60 Hz. I have no idea why this is the case, Kubuntu works just fine on the same machines.
Coming from FreeBSD I use hand-written Xorg.conf files anyway, but I always wondered if I was the only one and why such an obvious bug won't get fixed. That's what Mr. Shuttlewise should be working on, instead of plagiarizing Growl and acting as if it were a novel idea.
Point taken, fair enough. I disagree on ADB, Floppies (never heard of anyone who still used them when Apple dropped them given the availibility of Zip and Jaz drives and CD-RWs) and Classic, which has only been dropped in 10.5 after six years of obsolescence, because all of them have IMHO been supported longer than needed. (Somehow Adobe managed to *still* use the old OS 9 APIs therefore the CS4 suite is incomplete on the Mac while they started rewriting stuff to at least make CS5 complete again.)
But you're correct, dropping FireWire and standard DVI on their notebooks sucks donkey balls for those with the need. OTOH, the pro users with the FW peripherals are the target audience of the Mac Pro, which will have FW for quite a long time, so I figure they're just trying to reduce costs. Having only notebooks in the EUR 1000+ category doesn't make for a huge market segment when you can get good-enough PC notebooks for around EUR 400.
Please note that I'm from the whatever-is-best-for-the-job crowd, being responsible for around 100 machines, both servers and desktops, running OSX, Windows, several flavors of Linux and, of course, FreeBSD for those critical services you *never* want to see go down such as DNS and mail. Let's just say that I like "my" ~60 Macs for needing only 10% of my support time while the 10 Windows desktops eat around 80%. I couldn't care less if the PHB doesn't have FW in his AirBook.;)
We have a lot of old machines, however, which happily run year after year, so my experience is to the contrary of what you said. The Macs virtually burn out after ~8-10 years while the PCs have to be replaced every three years or so. YMMV, of course. I'm in advertising, so I know I'm not representative in *many* ways.;)
Oh, and yes, the old Macs have around 1 GB RAM, too. The G4 I'm typing this from (at home) however only has 512 MB RAM and works well enough, too. It's a bit loud, however, so I guess I'll replace it sometime next year.
To add a last nitpick to the discussion - my wife has a Celeron 400 MHz notebook with 256 MB RAM and runs (Ubuntu) Linux on it just fine. So old hardware *can* be of good use with a modern OS, still, as long as it's no recent version of Windows.;)
Right because Apple's so good about offering support for anything legacy? Give me a break.
What are you talking about? I'm running Mac OS X 10.5 on 8 years old hardware just fine, and it works better than the OS which came with the box. (Given it was OS 9, that's also a very low bar to pass.) Admittedly 10.6 won't probably run on said G4's any more because Apple stops supporting PowerPC hardware, but for comparison try to run Vista (or even XP if you like) on 8 years old hardware and compare that to the performance of my Macs of the same age.
You have one good photo editing application -- the GIMP. And it lacks a lot of Photoshops really slick 3rd party plugins and the ability to modify photos in CMYK mode. -- But note that it does do CMYK seps, which is really all you need.
No, "it does CMYK seps" is actually far from "all you need", it doesn't even touch the surface. How do you do UCR? How do you apply ICC profiles? How do you do e.g. consistent skin tone correction on a huge bunch of widely differently lit fashion shots without trial & error? How do you generate and preflight standards-compliant PDF X/3 with embedded ICC information, and have them printed consistently on whatever offset or digital printing press the printer has?
Basically: How do you guarantee standards-conform, color-proof output without even knowing where your data will be produced?
I know that PDF generation isn't the domain of the GIMP, but when we're talking image manipulation, we talk output, and if we talk output, we talk *at least* X/3. Good luck implementing a color proof workflow with the GIMP. If you can do it, let me know how you pull this off. I like Linux and all, but there's a reason why there's Macs everywhere in pre-press. And it's not "ooooh shiny".
We've got Macs here, but there are Windows shops who deliver high quality output, too. They just tend to have difficulties finding able employees, as the good ones reject fighting with Windows instead of getting stuff done.;)
I actually LOLed, but Microsoft launching such an ad would be pure genius. Why? Microsoft isn't interested in selling PC's, it's a software company. It couldn't care less if its software is run on a Mac or a PC. Apple, OTOH, wouldn't have much to counter such a strategy.
If it's my boss, easy. He knows we have a Femtocell on site:(
And how does he know you're at home? Because you know, unfortunately you were just shopping groceries when a call came in, but you couldn't hear what was being spoken, and because there was no caller ID you couldn't call back.
I do that, too, only saying "hello". But it wouldn't work for me at all as a work-avoider, as my boss, clients and coworkers know my voice so I can't act as if I were somebody else. I can see, however, how this could work for client support where people don't know you.
there's no way to tell from the caller id if it's some annoying luser or somebody you should actually talk to until you answer the call and then it's too late
No, it's not. You're on a mobile phone. You can always start asking "Hello? Hello? Is there anybody? HELLO!" two or three seconds after picking up the call and then hang up. If they call again, do the same thing. How are they to prove that you weren't in an area with bad reception?
You know, I'm not American and I didn't know said speech, but wow, is that a great one. As a father of three, I whole-heartedly agree that missing parenting is one of the greatest problems in the Western societies these days, and Cosby's observations on the consequences are spot-on. I see it in the lower social classes here in Germany, and it's sad that you can exactly tell the social status of the parents if you hear the classmates of my children speak.
I wrote several paragraphs and deleted them again, as they all basically were about how today's society needs "classic" values, and frankly that makes me feel old, but as I see my kids grow up among children who don't get any parenting (or attention) at all, I feel that it's really time to make a difference.
That is, rather than storing the files somewhere on a server where things can get lost or moved, sometimes having a physical CD is just a better option.
Because we all know that a server getting lost and moved is so many times more probable than a CD being... oh, wait.
And I guess having the people back up the data themselves after downloading is out of the question, if the data is so important to them? That would also let them choose their favourite backup strategy.
I'm just asking, because I'm not getting at all what you're saying. If you're responsible for availability of the data, leave it online at the same URI eternally, and if you're not, why bother? Do they pay your time and expenses (CD's don't grow on trees)?
To sum it up, I don't see any scenario where delivering CD's would be preferable to putting things onto a server. Do you have an example?
Have you ever looked at what itunes does when you tell it to organize your library for you? When you just keep your hands off?
songs/artist/album/song.mp3
if its part of a compilation its: songs/compilations/album/song.mp3
You must have a different iTunes. If I let iTunes organize my music and feed it the imaginary album "The Great Tunes Of I" from the artist "Da Man", and said album has some tracks where "Da Man" features other artists (as expressed by the ID3 tags), I will get:
/Da Man/The Great Tunes Of I/most songs of the album /Da Man feat. One Artist/The Great Tunes Of I/the one song /Da Man feat. Another Artist/The Great Tunes Of I/the other song
... and so on, completely ripping apart the album.
It's even worse with compilations, because for something like a "Space Night" compilation, ripped with iTunes to avoid "wrong" ID3 tags, where every one of the 20 or so tracks has a different artist, it generates, you guess it, the 20 or so directories which contain exactly one song.
No, I'm not talking about an old version of iTunes, because just this week just for fun I ripped a Nicola Conte compilation via iTunes, and it fucked up exactly in the way I described above.
And this is, why the first thing I do with every new installation of iTunes is disable the "organization" feature which turns my fine ~Music/mp3/artist/album/song file structure into a steaming pile of never-find-the-files-again.
You are of course welcome to tell me how to set iTunes up that it won't fuck up like that, and I'll admit I was obviously too stupid to find the obvious setting for non-suckage.
Oh, and while we're ranting, why the FUCK iTunes won't recognize that it already ripped a CD and rip it time and time again, creating duplicates upon duplicates, is beyond me. As you can guess, I had the (nice!) auto-rip feature enabled and my old-fashioned wife insisted on playing music from the CDs. Well, duh.
how did you do the install without booting the LiveCD?
Using the Alternate Install CD which has a text installer.
On old hardware, that saves the 5-10 minutes you spend listening to the ages-old CD-ROM while the machine loads and loads and loads to bring up the GUI you don't need for an installation.
You fail it. (Unless you were solely aiming for a +1, Funny, of course.)
IPv6 may well not be the last protocol on the web, but it won't be for lack of addresses.
O RLY? 640k should be enough for anybody, right? (And no, Bill Gates never said that, I know.)
Let's consider e.g. all household items getting IP addresses, IP addresses used like EAN or ISBN... even without imagining billions of medical nanites with unique IP addresses one can guess that wasteful use of IP addresses (or assignment thereof) can exhaust the address pool pretty quickly. Just imagine what would happen if the IP6 address space were so mindboggingly stupidly partitioned as is the IP4 address space. Given that everybody seems to think IP6 addresses are "infinite", that's actually quite a probability.
Macs can also be hooked to eachother (as can PCs and Linux boxes) via crossover ethernet
But you're missing the most important aspect, which is the Target Mode which (currently) only works via Firewire. If you've got a hosed (non-booting) Mac, you can still boot it up holding the T key on your keyboard, and it will boot into said Target Mode, operating as a simple Firewire HDD that can be connected to any other machine. You can then copy over any data from the machine, or even use the great Migration Assistant to migrate the complete user account to the other machine in a matter of minutes, reinstall OSX on the hosed machine and tell it to migrate said user account, data and settings back onto the machine. Oh, and the Migration Assistant can also migrate the installed applications and settings, if you wish.
If you need another example - I'm on a MBP at work, and when the PHB needed some machine to display our 3D-fu in a pitch, I simply migrated my software and accounts to a Mac Pro which was free that day, then migrated the co-workers account and software (3D, the Adobe stuff I don't need) to the MBP, and handed the MBP to the PHB. They went to the client, I worked on the Mac Pro, everything worked perfectly, they handed me the MBP back, I used the Migration Assistant the other way around, and was back without even noticing I've been on a different machine. All this took a handful of mouse clicks (and of course the time it took to copy the data over Firewire, some minutes). Everything included in OSX, out of the box. Do that with a Windows or Linux machine.
Target Mode is teh GOD. As the CTO of a media production company which is almost completely on Macs, I won't buy any machine which comes without Target Mode capability.
And I guess your $999 PC you're comparing to the "expensive" Apple also has eight cores, a very cleanly designed and case optimized for low noise and all the other stuff you get for those $2K, right? Right?
Unless you're talking video editing or retouching large images (in the multi-GB range), 2 GB of RAM are quite okay. OSX 10.5 needs a mere 180 MB or so of RAM when booted, not the GB or so Vista needs (or so I heard), so there's more space for applications on OSX. I agree that more RAM is always better, but the 2 GB in the minimal configuration are OK. If you're doing bad-ass stuff, you're reconfiguring the machine anyway.
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If it automatically played a theme song after every head shot, this would be the coolest rifle accessory ever.
This must be among the most ignorant and stupid things I've EVER read in a summary.
My dear friend samzenpus, you are cordially invited to join a sniper into war territory and witness some of your beloved head shots in real life. Hint: No, you're never going to forget that sound of a head exploding and brain splatting against a wall. Yes, you'll dream of it for the rest of your life.
You know, a friend of mine was in Kosovo as a sniper for the UN troops back in the 90's. Seeing what that war did with him rid me of most of my "war humor".
I don't know how ancient (or cheap) your "standard" calculator is, but I haven't owned or used a calculator that would compute that to 10 since the mid-80's, and I think the guys who wrote calc.exe should just drop dead from shame. You learn "Punkt vor Strich" (German phrase to memorize operator priorities) in your first year at school.
Oh boy do I hope you're kidding. I guess either you don't have any children, or they are very young, otherwise you'd have a clue of the normal state of development at the age of 2. If they're not inquisitive enough already and show interest in learning to read by themselves, please do them the favour of *not* making circus attractions out of them. Each kid has its own learning speed and interests.
You know, I've spoken complete phrases before I could walk (at 12 months) and could read at the age of 3, but it was *me*, not my parents trying to teach me something that normal kids learn at age 5 or 6.
I say this as a father of three, the oldest being 6, the youngest 2 years old. They're amazingly different and each is interested in completely different things (speaking/communicating, physical activities, logic/puzzles, music/rhythm, drawing, mathematics...), and trying to "feed" them things they don't want to learn themselves would be an exercise in frustration - for you *and* for them. Each one has one or more fields where s/he is very advanced, and others in which s/he isn't interested at all, and that's the way it *should* be. Teach them what they're interested in, not what you think they should learn - you'll have enough to do to keep up with *that* already. ;)
May I ask how old your children are, or are you talking about your future? If so, you're in for quite some surprises. Hint: Life is what your children do while you're busy making plans. ;)
You have my heartfelt sympathy for having to deal with such security idiots. They're probably also still running telnet and have anonymous FTP access to their servers open, and their workstations run Windows 98 and are connected directly to the Internet without any firewall whatsoever using routers with default passwords. Because, that's all in the same league, security-wise.
OTOH, if you're a consultant, such geniuses are a neverending source of revenue, because they *always* manage to buy or reconfigure something without asking you which, again, plays in the same league. Just make sure they pay at least half up front, because those also happen to 'forget' paying your bills after you help them out of the inevitable emergency. /rant
You mean ssh -CX, which everyone is using? You sound as if security and compression were unavailable for X, and the opposite is true.
Yeah, and said monitor configuration tool failed to display *any* set of usable or even standard resolutions for me on any machine on Ubuntu *ever*. Usually it has only one weird setting, that being 864 x 472 or something to this effect, at a whopping 60 Hz. I have no idea why this is the case, Kubuntu works just fine on the same machines.
Coming from FreeBSD I use hand-written Xorg.conf files anyway, but I always wondered if I was the only one and why such an obvious bug won't get fixed. That's what Mr. Shuttlewise should be working on, instead of plagiarizing Growl and acting as if it were a novel idea.
*facepalm*
You're doing it wrong.
Nor on G5's sold as recently as 2006.
Point taken, fair enough. I disagree on ADB, Floppies (never heard of anyone who still used them when Apple dropped them given the availibility of Zip and Jaz drives and CD-RWs) and Classic, which has only been dropped in 10.5 after six years of obsolescence, because all of them have IMHO been supported longer than needed. (Somehow Adobe managed to *still* use the old OS 9 APIs therefore the CS4 suite is incomplete on the Mac while they started rewriting stuff to at least make CS5 complete again.)
But you're correct, dropping FireWire and standard DVI on their notebooks sucks donkey balls for those with the need. OTOH, the pro users with the FW peripherals are the target audience of the Mac Pro, which will have FW for quite a long time, so I figure they're just trying to reduce costs. Having only notebooks in the EUR 1000+ category doesn't make for a huge market segment when you can get good-enough PC notebooks for around EUR 400.
Please note that I'm from the whatever-is-best-for-the-job crowd, being responsible for around 100 machines, both servers and desktops, running OSX, Windows, several flavors of Linux and, of course, FreeBSD for those critical services you *never* want to see go down such as DNS and mail. Let's just say that I like "my" ~60 Macs for needing only 10% of my support time while the 10 Windows desktops eat around 80%. I couldn't care less if the PHB doesn't have FW in his AirBook. ;)
We have a lot of old machines, however, which happily run year after year, so my experience is to the contrary of what you said. The Macs virtually burn out after ~8-10 years while the PCs have to be replaced every three years or so. YMMV, of course. I'm in advertising, so I know I'm not representative in *many* ways. ;)
Oh, and yes, the old Macs have around 1 GB RAM, too. The G4 I'm typing this from (at home) however only has 512 MB RAM and works well enough, too. It's a bit loud, however, so I guess I'll replace it sometime next year.
To add a last nitpick to the discussion - my wife has a Celeron 400 MHz notebook with 256 MB RAM and runs (Ubuntu) Linux on it just fine. So old hardware *can* be of good use with a modern OS, still, as long as it's no recent version of Windows. ;)
What are you talking about? I'm running Mac OS X 10.5 on 8 years old hardware just fine, and it works better than the OS which came with the box. (Given it was OS 9, that's also a very low bar to pass.) Admittedly 10.6 won't probably run on said G4's any more because Apple stops supporting PowerPC hardware, but for comparison try to run Vista (or even XP if you like) on 8 years old hardware and compare that to the performance of my Macs of the same age.
No, "it does CMYK seps" is actually far from "all you need", it doesn't even touch the surface. How do you do UCR? How do you apply ICC profiles? How do you do e.g. consistent skin tone correction on a huge bunch of widely differently lit fashion shots without trial & error? How do you generate and preflight standards-compliant PDF X/3 with embedded ICC information, and have them printed consistently on whatever offset or digital printing press the printer has?
Basically: How do you guarantee standards-conform, color-proof output without even knowing where your data will be produced?
I know that PDF generation isn't the domain of the GIMP, but when we're talking image manipulation, we talk output, and if we talk output, we talk *at least* X/3. Good luck implementing a color proof workflow with the GIMP. If you can do it, let me know how you pull this off. I like Linux and all, but there's a reason why there's Macs everywhere in pre-press. And it's not "ooooh shiny".
We've got Macs here, but there are Windows shops who deliver high quality output, too. They just tend to have difficulties finding able employees, as the good ones reject fighting with Windows instead of getting stuff done. ;)
Oh, we have a plan, too.
I actually LOLed, but Microsoft launching such an ad would be pure genius. Why? Microsoft isn't interested in selling PC's, it's a software company. It couldn't care less if its software is run on a Mac or a PC. Apple, OTOH, wouldn't have much to counter such a strategy.
If it's my boss, easy. He knows we have a Femtocell on site :(
And how does he know you're at home? Because you know, unfortunately you were just shopping groceries when a call came in, but you couldn't hear what was being spoken, and because there was no caller ID you couldn't call back.
I do that, too, only saying "hello". But it wouldn't work for me at all as a work-avoider, as my boss, clients and coworkers know my voice so I can't act as if I were somebody else. I can see, however, how this could work for client support where people don't know you.
there's no way to tell from the caller id if it's some annoying luser or somebody you should actually talk to until you answer the call and then it's too late
No, it's not. You're on a mobile phone. You can always start asking "Hello? Hello? Is there anybody? HELLO!" two or three seconds after picking up the call and then hang up. If they call again, do the same thing. How are they to prove that you weren't in an area with bad reception?
How is this news? AFAIK TomTom uses this technique for their traffic services for *ages*.
You know, I'm not American and I didn't know said speech, but wow, is that a great one. As a father of three, I whole-heartedly agree that missing parenting is one of the greatest problems in the Western societies these days, and Cosby's observations on the consequences are spot-on. I see it in the lower social classes here in Germany, and it's sad that you can exactly tell the social status of the parents if you hear the classmates of my children speak.
I wrote several paragraphs and deleted them again, as they all basically were about how today's society needs "classic" values, and frankly that makes me feel old, but as I see my kids grow up among children who don't get any parenting (or attention) at all, I feel that it's really time to make a difference.
That is, rather than storing the files somewhere on a server where things can get lost or moved, sometimes having a physical CD is just a better option.
Because we all know that a server getting lost and moved is so many times more probable than a CD being... oh, wait.
And I guess having the people back up the data themselves after downloading is out of the question, if the data is so important to them? That would also let them choose their favourite backup strategy.
I'm just asking, because I'm not getting at all what you're saying. If you're responsible for availability of the data, leave it online at the same URI eternally, and if you're not, why bother? Do they pay your time and expenses (CD's don't grow on trees)?
To sum it up, I don't see any scenario where delivering CD's would be preferable to putting things onto a server. Do you have an example?
You must have a different iTunes. If I let iTunes organize my music and feed it the imaginary album "The Great Tunes Of I" from the artist "Da Man", and said album has some tracks where "Da Man" features other artists (as expressed by the ID3 tags), I will get:
... and so on, completely ripping apart the album.
It's even worse with compilations, because for something like a "Space Night" compilation, ripped with iTunes to avoid "wrong" ID3 tags, where every one of the 20 or so tracks has a different artist, it generates, you guess it, the 20 or so directories which contain exactly one song.
No, I'm not talking about an old version of iTunes, because just this week just for fun I ripped a Nicola Conte compilation via iTunes, and it fucked up exactly in the way I described above.
And this is, why the first thing I do with every new installation of iTunes is disable the "organization" feature which turns my fine ~Music/mp3/artist/album/song file structure into a steaming pile of never-find-the-files-again.
You are of course welcome to tell me how to set iTunes up that it won't fuck up like that, and I'll admit I was obviously too stupid to find the obvious setting for non-suckage.
Oh, and while we're ranting, why the FUCK iTunes won't recognize that it already ripped a CD and rip it time and time again, creating duplicates upon duplicates, is beyond me. As you can guess, I had the (nice!) auto-rip feature enabled and my old-fashioned wife insisted on playing music from the CDs. Well, duh.
Using the Alternate Install CD which has a text installer.
On old hardware, that saves the 5-10 minutes you spend listening to the ages-old CD-ROM while the machine loads and loads and loads to bring up the GUI you don't need for an installation.
You fail it. (Unless you were solely aiming for a +1, Funny, of course.)
O RLY? 640k should be enough for anybody, right? (And no, Bill Gates never said that, I know.)
Let's consider e.g. all household items getting IP addresses, IP addresses used like EAN or ISBN... even without imagining billions of medical nanites with unique IP addresses one can guess that wasteful use of IP addresses (or assignment thereof) can exhaust the address pool pretty quickly. Just imagine what would happen if the IP6 address space were so mindboggingly stupidly partitioned as is the IP4 address space. Given that everybody seems to think IP6 addresses are "infinite", that's actually quite a probability.
Agreed about the fist.
I knew one day this bookmark would serve me well.
But you're missing the most important aspect, which is the Target Mode which (currently) only works via Firewire. If you've got a hosed (non-booting) Mac, you can still boot it up holding the T key on your keyboard, and it will boot into said Target Mode, operating as a simple Firewire HDD that can be connected to any other machine. You can then copy over any data from the machine, or even use the great Migration Assistant to migrate the complete user account to the other machine in a matter of minutes, reinstall OSX on the hosed machine and tell it to migrate said user account, data and settings back onto the machine. Oh, and the Migration Assistant can also migrate the installed applications and settings, if you wish.
If you need another example - I'm on a MBP at work, and when the PHB needed some machine to display our 3D-fu in a pitch, I simply migrated my software and accounts to a Mac Pro which was free that day, then migrated the co-workers account and software (3D, the Adobe stuff I don't need) to the MBP, and handed the MBP to the PHB. They went to the client, I worked on the Mac Pro, everything worked perfectly, they handed me the MBP back, I used the Migration Assistant the other way around, and was back without even noticing I've been on a different machine. All this took a handful of mouse clicks (and of course the time it took to copy the data over Firewire, some minutes). Everything included in OSX, out of the box. Do that with a Windows or Linux machine.
Target Mode is teh GOD. As the CTO of a media production company which is almost completely on Macs, I won't buy any machine which comes without Target Mode capability.
The best thing is that despite being posted by an AC it's not only funny but actually true.
I'm going to introduce Bacula at work immediately. That will be the first IDIFTL meeting in company history.
And I guess your $999 PC you're comparing to the "expensive" Apple also has eight cores, a very cleanly designed and case optimized for low noise and all the other stuff you get for those $2K, right? Right?
Unless you're talking video editing or retouching large images (in the multi-GB range), 2 GB of RAM are quite okay. OSX 10.5 needs a mere 180 MB or so of RAM when booted, not the GB or so Vista needs (or so I heard), so there's more space for applications on OSX. I agree that more RAM is always better, but the 2 GB in the minimal configuration are OK. If you're doing bad-ass stuff, you're reconfiguring the machine anyway.