Somewhat offtopic; sorry about that - but...
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 1
... why does Slashdot not have a Lord of the Rings / Middle-Earth topic? Surely it gets discussed here at least as much as Star Wars (or at least with more enthusiasm these days, at any rate). Isn't it easily one of the most avidly followed, beloved fantasy / SF creations among Slashdot readers?
The number of sites that can be researched in 100 years depends totally on the allocation of resources to research, doesn't it? Anyway, that's beside the point. If a site holds legitimate archaeological value, why should it be opened up to looters?
When an archaeological site is excavated by anyone, even archaeologists, it's effectively damaged or destroyed as an archeological site. Archaeology is an inherently destructive science, alas; it destroys data even as it gathers and records it. The idea, then, is to gather and record as much data as possible in the process of excavation, something salvors and looters tend not to do. If someone loots a site, the information on provenience, deposition, etc. is lost forever.
Having a finite list of "off-limits" sites from which one had to drop a site before adding another would be disastrous for research. Any archaeological site preserves unique information that cannot be gleaned from other sites; many sites contain information of immeasureable value, but one can't always know which sites will be most useful in advance. Forcing archaeologists to pick their sites from such a list while other sites go plundered by anyone with the wherewithal to do so would be a devastating blow to archaeology.
As far as looting for "museum pieces" goes, just because something is in a museum doesn't mean one can gather all the useful data from it one could have if it had been recovered in an archaeological project rather than a salvage or looting one. The full informational value of artifacts doesn't come from just having the objects to hold and look at, it comes from information about deposition, soil conditions in which it was buried, etc. If a salvor brings up a trinket without exhaustively recording as much information as possible about its depostion, a huge part of the archaeological significance has been irrevocably destroyed (not to mention the fact that salvors and looters tend to go for "treasure"-type items - the pretty stuff - while ignoring more "ordinary" objects, which are of as much archaeological value as the gold pieces and jewelry, if not more).
Too many finds of tremendous historical value have had that value annihilated by pothunters interested solely in the monetary value to be had from looting. It's truly sad that so many looters either don't know the real value of what they plunder, or judge it to be unimportant next to their own desire for pretty pieces they can exploit for profit or just use to decorate their homes.
All jokes aside, what makes you think all that stuff was bought by Slashdot readers? Why do you link nonuse of Microsoft products to a belief in entitlement to free software, etc., when attacks on M$ here are usually over its business practices and/or the quality of its products? And what makes you think all sci-fi fans/collectors are in families scraping by on $30k a year? Do you have any facts to support any of this at all?
... the original story got duped also. It's only fitting that the follow-up should be duped as well.:)
Besides, honestly... even if one's seen it before, doesn't seeing it a second time (spam king Ralsky getting his just desserts) bring a smile to one's face? I could wake up to a story like this every day.:)
I know you were kidding, but since the question came up I thought I'd mention that although Apple will engrave a custom message on your iPod if you want it, they won't engrave profanities. Of course, the solution for this if you want cursing or pr0n on your 'Pod is to get it engraved somewhere yourself after you buy it.:)
You can go to the online Apple Store and try various phrases you'd like engraved on one; it turns out Apple will engrave the phrase I intend to put on mine (if and when I can scrape together the bucks for the 20 GB model):
Dear RIAA,
Bite me.
;-)
Re:This is covered with red flags...
on
New Mad Max Film
·
· Score: 3, Informative
$25m = Can you name a single movie where the lead made that kind of $$ that was actually any good? I'd rather see Guy Pearce (Memento) or Bruce Campbell get paid $1m to play Max.
The Sixth Sense. Bruce Willis made a hell of a lot of money on that film, and it was an amazing piece of work. I think that's from having a percentage of the gross, though.
I really don't know whether this will be any good or not, but I'm certainly willing to give it a chance. We'll see...
49 or not, 49 and looking it or not, Brosnan looks great. Frankly, I think he's too good to lower himself to playing Bond, but hey, he seems to like it, so more power to him. But seriously, if you think he's too old... yeesh.
That's about $1300 of revenue per PC for a whole year. I guess individual computing projects would require much less time (that's part of the point of distributed computing, right?), so it might be just, say, a couple hundred bucks per computer for a given problem that takes them a couple months. If a customer has just one or two problems requiring this kind of processing power, or at any rate doesn't have such problems regularly, this model might make a lot of sense, though perhaps there's something I'm overlooking (it is still early for me;)...
They perhaps are already filmed, but there's almost certainly still tons of work left to do on them. Movies aren't finished as soon as principal photography is completed. Undoubtedly the majority of the editing, effects work, sound work, scoring, etc. for [i]The Return of the King[/i] remains to be done. They probably won't have it finished until less than a month before release.
Just FYI: No assistance from the LEGO Company whatsoever. I think they even sued the artist, but please do your own google search on that.
Notice however, that his packages have no LEGO logo.
Actually, his packages do have the LEGO logo (just look at the pictures), and according to articles at the site, he got support in the form of free pieces from LEGO at the beginning of the project (before they knew what it would be); once they found out, they tried to get him to reconsider and did all they could to distance themselves from it, but didn't actually sue him:
When Libera requested the LEGOs from the company's Warsaw representative, he planned to create sets for a prison and a hospital, but the project evolved into a concentration camp. According to a press release issued by the LEGO Group, "If the had described his ultimate project to us in advance, he naturally would not have received a single LEGOelement from us!"
From another article on the page:
Libera created his piece by assembling Lego blocks into replicas of death camp facilities, photographing them and then using the photos to adorn authentic-looking Lego cardboard packages, complete with the disassembled pieces, the company logo and multi-language safety warnings.
Another quote:
The display is so unsettling in its playful simplicity that the Lego Group, which sponsors Lego art contests and donates thousands of plastic pieces to artists around the world, tried to persuade Libera to withdraw it from public view. Only when lawyers became involved did the company give up.
"It is a theme that is so sensitive to so many people in so many countries," said Peter Ambeck-Madsen, Lego's director of public relations at the company headquarters in Billund, Denmark. "If we had known before what he was going to do, we never would have given him the bricks. But we talked about it and decided [that] to make a big thing about it now would only draw more attention."
And another:
Danish art critics raved about the display. But Lego officials feared a public relations disaster. They fretted in particular over a statement on each of the imitation Lego packages explicitly linking Libera and Lego." This work of Zbigniew Libera has been sponsored by Lego System," it states.
Libera maintains that donated supplies amount to sponsorship, but the company says it never gave him the authority to use its name or logo as an implied endorsement. Ambeck-Madsen, the Lego executive, said the faux packaging is so realistic that a Jewish organization in Sweden threatened to organize a boycott of Lego because offended members believed the company had manufactured the boxes.
There's more, but I trust you get the idea. The packages quite clearly do feature the LEGO logo, and look like real LEGO set boxes, and he apparently received free pieces from the company before they knew what he'd do with them.
Normally I don't think I'd mention something like the following in a story like this one, but I came across it almost immediately before finding this article on slashdot, and found my timing in learning of both almost simultaneously (without one actually leading to the other) pretty bizarre. I'll share it here since although it's not amusing in the way "Legodeath" is, it's certainly interesting and worthy of notice/discussion:
Apparently a while back an artist, with the unknowing assistance of the LEGO Company itself, created a mock series of LEGO Holocaust sets. The story is quite interesting, and the sets are easily the most disturbing LEGO creations I've ever seen...
Yes, Bill's given a hell of a lot of money to charity - more than probably any of us ever will. However, I have to point out two things:
1) (as I mentioned in a previous post in another thread; forgive the reposting;) It's also known that many of Bill's & Microsoft's "charitable" donations are in fact calculated exercises to buy good PR. It's certainly true that it does in fact do a lot of good as well, but as yet, all indications are they've never done anything they didn't perceive to be in their own interests, and that includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and all its "good works" (so yes, that $50M to Botswana probably was a wise business investment).
2) While I acknowledge the right of an individual to do whatever one wants to do with one's hard-earned income (we'll put aside for a moment the issue of whether or not Bill came by his billions fairly;) ), just what kind of person who had Bill's kind of money wouldn't use lots of it to try to do some kind of good? Yeesh... you mean he donated only $45.5 billion? He still has more than that. I don't know about you, but if I had that kind of money (yeah, right;)), I'd give away a hell of a lot more than that. Of course it's easy for me to say, and that I don't currently give away even a twentieth of my money, but that's only because I have about what I need; I can say with some confidence I'd give away more than 46% of my net worth if I were even a lowly millionaire. Honestly, what individual human being needs even one billion dollars? The fact that Gates has given away more than anyone else (simply because he can) doesn't mean he's really so much more magnanimous; many people with far less wealth have given away far larger percentages of what they have. Yes, it's his money, but the fact that he's kept as much of his money as he has doesn't reflect particularly well on him as a person.
(In fact, the article you linked to said he's "said to be worth more than $98 billion"; it doesn't give any indication that was before the $45.5 billion in donations - might he have given away closer to a third of his money than half?).
Other members of the Grand Alliance cited the Dolby system's American roots and its technical superiority over Musicam, not MIT's financial interest in Musicam's rejection, as the likely reasons for Lim's vote.
Philips' Musicam system, also known as "MPEG," is related to the technology used in MP3 audio compression, and is the standard for digital television audio in Europe.
"Jae Lim, independently of any deal, did not want the Philips system to win," said Robert Rast, the leader of the Grand Alliance's Technical Oversight Group, and then a vice president of a firm that was both an MIT partner and competitor, General Instrument Corp.
"Jae was very pro-American," he said. "He would naturally favor an American system over a foreign system."
"Jae knew he supported American solutions, so that deal was consistent with that," Rast said. "If it hadn't been consistent, I don't think Jae would have made the deal."
Putting aside the more worrying issue of conflict of interest, why should whether the standard originated in America be a factor? I do understand the debate is over setting a standard for television in this country, but even so, shouldn't the only important considerations be the technical merits of the proposed standards? Why should it matter where a standard arose? Good grief, are they all suffering from "not invented here?"
As far as I can tell, there's a big hole in the RIAA's official line, though, in that cassettes are sold for less than CDs, despite costing more to produce and not selling as well. If they're still making and selling cassettes at all, obviously they continue to be profitable; therefore CDs must be generating huge profits, since the per-unit cost is lower, the sale price is higher, and more units are sold. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the only reason CD prices are so high is because people simply got used to paying more for CDs back when they were new (and really did cost more to make than cassettes and vinyl), and the industry has simply continued to inch the price up since (as opposed to allowing CD prices to fall, as it was promised would happen).
Really, shouldn't the things cost less now than they did in 1983? Not only has inflation in cost of raw materials been more than offset by the combined effects of advancing technology and economies of scale, but they've even eliminated altogether certain costs CDs used to have (does anyone else here remember those long cardboard boxes most CDs used to come in? Those things added a dollar or so to the cost of CDs all by themselves. When they were discontinued around '93 or '94 many people assumed CD prices would immediately drop by a dollar or so across the board... yeah, right).
There are some very significant costs associated with making CDs, but a lot of the price of a new CD has to simply be going to line the pockets of some suit at the label or the RIAA.
Re: ABM, objectivity, and irrationality
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 1
Since when does an ABM attitude = irrationality?;)
No, I don't think you're a troll; it sounds like you're posing honest, legitimate questions. As a Mac person, I hope I can answer some of them to your satisfaction.
I just can't help but wonder why everyone seems to be so excited about Macs. If you ever want to run the latest game on that "other" OS, you can't really do it on Mac without paying a premium and/or having to wait forever for it to come out. And not just games, but other software too.
Lamentably, games are indeed one of the big areas of lag. Even so, there are plenty of games out there for the Mac - far more than any normal person could find time to play. How many games do you need? The delay associated with some games (not all - there are some simultaneous releases, and even a tiny number of Mac-firsts) can be a drag at times, but it also has silver linings - sometimes our first release of a game is of the "gold edition" with extra maps and whatnot, so people who buy the game right away still get all the extra trimmings without paying extra or rebuying the game down the road; also, sometimes the initial PC releases are deeply bug-ridden, but by the time they make it to us the bugs have been squashed. Neither of these is a reason to game on the Mac, to be sure, but they do at least illustrate it's not all bad. For what it's worth, I can personally attest that the Mac gaming scene is substantial enough to be satisfying. Others do disagree, but I think the worst problem with the Mac gaming scene is that certain specific genres of games (like sports games, which I don't play but I'm aware many love) are sorely underrepresented. Unless you're into a type of game that isn't well-represented on the Mac, though, I think you can find your gaming fix here.
As for other software, pretty much every kind of thing you'd want to do with a computer can be done on a Mac, and frequently with the same software you'd use on a Wintel machine. There are even lots of Mac-only releases, and there are plenty of general tasks that are almost certainly easier on the Mac than on any PC (DVD authoring, for example).
Dell has a comparable deal [dell.com] that is $999 for an Inspiron 2650, comes with a free hard drive upgrade and a CD-burner (or DVD) upgrade. Not only that, but you get some really great tech support. And no, I don't work for dell. I just can't understand what all this jazz about getting an Apple is.
Well, it's certainly true that despite Apple's best efforts there is a price delta between Macs and PCs, and one can usually get a PC for less money than a Mac of identical or near-identical specs, but that gap is probably narrower than one would think, and many of us feel it's justified by the ease-of-use alone, not to mention other arguments I'll mention at the end of this post. You also mention tech support; for what it's worth, some would argue Apple's support beats Dell's, and most other vendors' for that matter.
Sure the Mac has cool looking hardware, but beyond that is there really a compelling reason for techies/nerds to switch from Intel/AMD based machines?? I can't think of any real good reasons.
Ok, here are a few of those other reasons I mentioned earlier:
- it's not Windows, and one can be as free of M$ as one wants on a Mac (yet at the same time, one can use lots of M$ apps if one really wants to, for some ungodly reason)
- the most games of any non-M$ platform
- software and hardware integration, ease-of-use, and intuitiveness that (arguably) surpasses all other platforms
And if they want to make it even easier still to switch, all they have to do is drop the price some more. I bet if they dropped it 90%, that'd be even better. Better still, why not drop it 100%, and give Macs away for free? Oh, wait, idea - they could pay people to take them!!!!
Oh, and they could also send someone out to the switcher's house / business to personally switch all the files! And they could foot the bill to provide Mac copies of all the user's software, or functional equivalents! And hey, as long as they're dishing out iPods, they could offer 1000 free CDs of the switcher's choice to fill it up with (and a CD rack to put them in, of course, and then a new closet to put that in, since they'll only need the CDs once, to rip them). And they should provide free internet service in perpetuity!
And while they're at it, why don't they send someone to wash the car and walk the dog? Jeeze, they don't even give you a lousy fruit basket. Bah. Stupid lousy cheapskate Apple.
Actually, comparisons between the old AT&T and MS are a bit absurd. If MS was like the old AT&T, all computer hardware and software would be owned by MS (which you couldn't buy, only lease) as well as the Internet infrastructure.
Well, just give M$ time, and I'm sure they'll rectify that...
It doesn't change the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does an enormous amount of good in Africa and the rest of the world. Look it up if you don't believe me.
Bill Gates is the biggest philanthropist in the history of the world, and while critics can talk about soft donations of things like software licenses, in reality he does a lot of stuff like vaccinations and grants to develop basic infrastructure in the developing world.
Of course, it's also known that many of Bill's & Microsoft's "charitable" donations are in fact calculated exercises to buy good PR. It's certainly true that it does in fact do some good, but as yet, all indications are they've never done anything they didn't perceive to be in their own interests, and that includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and all its "good works."
"The author of the page -- who never identifies herself, and who could very easily be fictional or a composite sketch"
IIRC, Microsoft targeted such an ad campaign at Mac people a couple years ago, albeit to get them to use IE & Office for Mac, not switch altogether. The campaign featured what were purported to be testimonials from satisfied customers, but M$ tipped its hand when it launched the ads too quickly, and had "customers" discussing their experience with the latest versions of M$ wares a few days before said versions actually shipped.
Interestingly, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has in fact been shown in IMAX already. I don't know how many theaters had it, but I do know the IMAX theater in Tampa, Florida had it this past spring. Sadly, I found out about it on the last day of exhibition, and couldn't go.:( It was supposedly quite a treat, from what I've read - none of the graininess one would expect from blowing up the image, apparently. I don't know whether it used the process described here, though.
Slashdot Mirror
... why does Slashdot not have a Lord of the Rings / Middle-Earth topic? Surely it gets discussed here at least as much as Star Wars (or at least with more enthusiasm these days, at any rate). Isn't it easily one of the most avidly followed, beloved fantasy / SF creations among Slashdot readers?
When an archaeological site is excavated by anyone, even archaeologists, it's effectively damaged or destroyed as an archeological site. Archaeology is an inherently destructive science, alas; it destroys data even as it gathers and records it. The idea, then, is to gather and record as much data as possible in the process of excavation, something salvors and looters tend not to do. If someone loots a site, the information on provenience, deposition, etc. is lost forever.
Having a finite list of "off-limits" sites from which one had to drop a site before adding another would be disastrous for research. Any archaeological site preserves unique information that cannot be gleaned from other sites; many sites contain information of immeasureable value, but one can't always know which sites will be most useful in advance. Forcing archaeologists to pick their sites from such a list while other sites go plundered by anyone with the wherewithal to do so would be a devastating blow to archaeology.
As far as looting for "museum pieces" goes, just because something is in a museum doesn't mean one can gather all the useful data from it one could have if it had been recovered in an archaeological project rather than a salvage or looting one. The full informational value of artifacts doesn't come from just having the objects to hold and look at, it comes from information about deposition, soil conditions in which it was buried, etc. If a salvor brings up a trinket without exhaustively recording as much information as possible about its depostion, a huge part of the archaeological significance has been irrevocably destroyed (not to mention the fact that salvors and looters tend to go for "treasure"-type items - the pretty stuff - while ignoring more "ordinary" objects, which are of as much archaeological value as the gold pieces and jewelry, if not more).
Too many finds of tremendous historical value have had that value annihilated by pothunters interested solely in the monetary value to be had from looting. It's truly sad that so many looters either don't know the real value of what they plunder, or judge it to be unimportant next to their own desire for pretty pieces they can exploit for profit or just use to decorate their homes.
All jokes aside, what makes you think all that stuff was bought by Slashdot readers? Why do you link nonuse of Microsoft products to a belief in entitlement to free software, etc., when attacks on M$ here are usually over its business practices and/or the quality of its products? And what makes you think all sci-fi fans/collectors are in families scraping by on $30k a year? Do you have any facts to support any of this at all?
Besides, honestly... even if one's seen it before, doesn't seeing it a second time (spam king Ralsky getting his just desserts) bring a smile to one's face? I could wake up to a story like this every day. :)
You can go to the online Apple Store and try various phrases you'd like engraved on one; it turns out Apple will engrave the phrase I intend to put on mine (if and when I can scrape together the bucks for the 20 GB model):
Dear RIAA,
Bite me.
;-)
The Sixth Sense. Bruce Willis made a hell of a lot of money on that film, and it was an amazing piece of work. I think that's from having a percentage of the gross, though.
I really don't know whether this will be any good or not, but I'm certainly willing to give it a chance. We'll see...
49 or not, 49 and looking it or not, Brosnan looks great. Frankly, I think he's too good to lower himself to playing Bond, but hey, he seems to like it, so more power to him. But seriously, if you think he's too old... yeesh.
That's about $1300 of revenue per PC for a whole year. I guess individual computing projects would require much less time (that's part of the point of distributed computing, right?), so it might be just, say, a couple hundred bucks per computer for a given problem that takes them a couple months. If a customer has just one or two problems requiring this kind of processing power, or at any rate doesn't have such problems regularly, this model might make a lot of sense, though perhaps there's something I'm overlooking (it is still early for me ;)...
"should've used that preview button," I know...
They perhaps are already filmed, but there's almost certainly still tons of work left to do on them. Movies aren't finished as soon as principal photography is completed. Undoubtedly the majority of the editing, effects work, sound work, scoring, etc. for [i]The Return of the King[/i] remains to be done. They probably won't have it finished until less than a month before release.
Actually, his packages do have the LEGO logo (just look at the pictures), and according to articles at the site, he got support in the form of free pieces from LEGO at the beginning of the project (before they knew what it would be); once they found out, they tried to get him to reconsider and did all they could to distance themselves from it, but didn't actually sue him:
From another article on the page:
Another quote:
And another:
There's more, but I trust you get the idea. The packages quite clearly do feature the LEGO logo, and look like real LEGO set boxes, and he apparently received free pieces from the company before they knew what he'd do with them.
Apparently a while back an artist, with the unknowing assistance of the LEGO Company itself, created a mock series of LEGO Holocaust sets. The story is quite interesting, and the sets are easily the most disturbing LEGO creations I've ever seen...
1) (as I mentioned in a previous post in another thread; forgive the reposting ;) It's also known that many of Bill's & Microsoft's "charitable" donations are in fact calculated exercises to buy good PR. It's certainly true that it does in fact do a lot of good as well, but as yet, all indications are they've never done anything they didn't perceive to be in their own interests, and that includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and all its "good works" (so yes, that $50M to Botswana probably was a wise business investment).
2) While I acknowledge the right of an individual to do whatever one wants to do with one's hard-earned income (we'll put aside for a moment the issue of whether or not Bill came by his billions fairly ;) ), just what kind of person who had Bill's kind of money wouldn't use lots of it to try to do some kind of good? Yeesh... you mean he donated only $45.5 billion? He still has more than that. I don't know about you, but if I had that kind of money (yeah, right ;)), I'd give away a hell of a lot more than that. Of course it's easy for me to say, and that I don't currently give away even a twentieth of my money, but that's only because I have about what I need; I can say with some confidence I'd give away more than 46% of my net worth if I were even a lowly millionaire. Honestly, what individual human being needs even one billion dollars? The fact that Gates has given away more than anyone else (simply because he can) doesn't mean he's really so much more magnanimous; many people with far less wealth have given away far larger percentages of what they have. Yes, it's his money, but the fact that he's kept as much of his money as he has doesn't reflect particularly well on him as a person.
(In fact, the article you linked to said he's "said to be worth more than $98 billion"; it doesn't give any indication that was before the $45.5 billion in donations - might he have given away closer to a third of his money than half?).
Yes - hate the RIAA, MPAA *AND* Microsoft!!! ;-)
Really, shouldn't the things cost less now than they did in 1983? Not only has inflation in cost of raw materials been more than offset by the combined effects of advancing technology and economies of scale, but they've even eliminated altogether certain costs CDs used to have (does anyone else here remember those long cardboard boxes most CDs used to come in? Those things added a dollar or so to the cost of CDs all by themselves. When they were discontinued around '93 or '94 many people assumed CD prices would immediately drop by a dollar or so across the board... yeah, right).
There are some very significant costs associated with making CDs, but a lot of the price of a new CD has to simply be going to line the pockets of some suit at the label or the RIAA.
Since when does an ABM attitude = irrationality? ;)
Lamentably, games are indeed one of the big areas of lag. Even so, there are plenty of games out there for the Mac - far more than any normal person could find time to play. How many games do you need? The delay associated with some games (not all - there are some simultaneous releases, and even a tiny number of Mac-firsts) can be a drag at times, but it also has silver linings - sometimes our first release of a game is of the "gold edition" with extra maps and whatnot, so people who buy the game right away still get all the extra trimmings without paying extra or rebuying the game down the road; also, sometimes the initial PC releases are deeply bug-ridden, but by the time they make it to us the bugs have been squashed. Neither of these is a reason to game on the Mac, to be sure, but they do at least illustrate it's not all bad. For what it's worth, I can personally attest that the Mac gaming scene is substantial enough to be satisfying. Others do disagree, but I think the worst problem with the Mac gaming scene is that certain specific genres of games (like sports games, which I don't play but I'm aware many love) are sorely underrepresented. Unless you're into a type of game that isn't well-represented on the Mac, though, I think you can find your gaming fix here.
As for other software, pretty much every kind of thing you'd want to do with a computer can be done on a Mac, and frequently with the same software you'd use on a Wintel machine. There are even lots of Mac-only releases, and there are plenty of general tasks that are almost certainly easier on the Mac than on any PC (DVD authoring, for example).
Well, it's certainly true that despite Apple's best efforts there is a price delta between Macs and PCs, and one can usually get a PC for less money than a Mac of identical or near-identical specs, but that gap is probably narrower than one would think, and many of us feel it's justified by the ease-of-use alone, not to mention other arguments I'll mention at the end of this post. You also mention tech support; for what it's worth, some would argue Apple's support beats Dell's, and most other vendors' for that matter.
Ok, here are a few of those other reasons I mentioned earlier:
- it's not Windows, and one can be as free of M$ as one wants on a Mac (yet at the same time, one can use lots of M$ apps if one really wants to, for some ungodly reason)
- the most games of any non-M$ platform
- software and hardware integration, ease-of-use, and intuitiveness that (arguably) surpasses all other platforms
- minimal DRM issues (so far, anyway - cross those fingers ;)
- friendly to average Joes and hardcore geeks alike
- yes, you said it... style
- strength / dominance in certain notable computing applications & markets (graphics & media, biotech, education)
- arguably the most enjoyable platform-specific trade shows in the industry ;) (Ok, reaching here, but I thought I'd mention it :)
- longevity / resale value of old hardware (less of a consideration than it used to be, it seems, but still notable)
There are more factors, I think, but I believe that should be enough to start with.
I hope this helps! :)
And if they want to make it even easier still to switch, all they have to do is drop the price some more. I bet if they dropped it 90%, that'd be even better. Better still, why not drop it 100%, and give Macs away for free? Oh, wait, idea - they could pay people to take them!!!!
Oh, and they could also send someone out to the switcher's house / business to personally switch all the files! And they could foot the bill to provide Mac copies of all the user's software, or functional equivalents! And hey, as long as they're dishing out iPods, they could offer 1000 free CDs of the switcher's choice to fill it up with (and a CD rack to put them in, of course, and then a new closet to put that in, since they'll only need the CDs once, to rip them). And they should provide free internet service in perpetuity!
And while they're at it, why don't they send someone to wash the car and walk the dog? Jeeze, they don't even give you a lousy fruit basket. Bah. Stupid lousy cheapskate Apple.
Well, just give M$ time, and I'm sure they'll rectify that...
Of course, it's also known that many of Bill's & Microsoft's "charitable" donations are in fact calculated exercises to buy good PR. It's certainly true that it does in fact do some good, but as yet, all indications are they've never done anything they didn't perceive to be in their own interests, and that includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and all its "good works."
IIRC, Microsoft targeted such an ad campaign at Mac people a couple years ago, albeit to get them to use IE & Office for Mac, not switch altogether. The campaign featured what were purported to be testimonials from satisfied customers, but M$ tipped its hand when it launched the ads too quickly, and had "customers" discussing their experience with the latest versions of M$ wares a few days before said versions actually shipped.
I despise the MPAA as much as the next Slashdotter, but there's no need to foist onto it every lament we have about movies today.
Interestingly, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has in fact been shown in IMAX already. I don't know how many theaters had it, but I do know the IMAX theater in Tampa, Florida had it this past spring. Sadly, I found out about it on the last day of exhibition, and couldn't go. :( It was supposedly quite a treat, from what I've read - none of the graininess one would expect from blowing up the image, apparently. I don't know whether it used the process described here, though.