Who the hell actually expands and upgrades their PCs these days, though? This isn't 1997, you can't just buy a computer and just replace the motherboard and CPU every 2 years. Unless you play a lot of video games (in which case Macs are not really an option), I do not see why you would need to upgrade a machine if it had decent specs when you bought it. It's a pain to even add RAM these days, since by the time you get around to it, the type required will already be obsolete and expensive. And really, just about everything you might need to add is available as a USB device.
Why the hell would you want a higher resolution on a 15" laptop? 1440x900 is about the highest resolution that's practical on a 15" display. Apple does have 1920x1200 on the 17" model.
Also, you do know the mouse is configurable? A two-finger tap does a right click. On Linux, 3 fingers do a middle click (although the Linux touchpad driver was written by monkeys and works extremely poorly with a multitouch touchpad).
And hey, enjoy the fast CPU (and ensuing infertility and 35-minute battery life).
Well, we are comparing a high-quality, professional-grade laptop with a cheap low-end Dell that's designed for college students. The Macbook Pro is designed for professionals -- people who use it to do their job. People who use a laptop to do their job generally don't care about the price all that much. $850 over 3 years comes out to 77 cents a day. If you actually use the laptop to do your job, $850 is a rounding error. The laptop will pay for itself the first time it saves you a few hours dealing with hardware and software problems (that the Dell will inevitably develop).
Besides, since when are processor/memory specs relevant for a laptop? I'd say quality, weight, reliability, and vendor support are far more important than gigahertz. Guess where Apple wins? Let's see: - solid aluminum case - backlit keyboard - magsafe connector - magnetic screen latch - ambient light sensor - great keyboard - superior warranty service - superior operating system
So yeah, feel free to spend $1900 on a laptop that's worth about $800. There's a reason Macbooks cost more.
Well, you used to be able to get a Yugo for $4000. It doesn't mean it was a good value. But yes, if you don't care about performance and quality, you can find slightly cheaper products. Another thing to consider is that Mac laptops hold their value extremely well, while $700 PC laptops tend to be worth $200 after about a year. But really, you can get a refurbished Macbook for $850, and it's a far better value than any Windows laptop for $700.
OK, I'll bite. I actually got a Sansa c250 for $15 on clearance somewhere. Sure, the features sound great on paper, but it's pretty much the biggest piece of shit I've ever used. After using it, I can definitely understand how Apple has 75% of the MP3 player market. Let's see: - the user interface is awful. A retarded 5-year-old could design a better interface. It's slow, buggy, confusing, featureless, and incredibly ugly. Buttons will randomly get pushed in your pocket, causing bad things to happen. - the hardware sucks. It's large, chintzy, and really cheap-feeling. - you pretty much have to look at the display to use it. Great if you are sitting at a desk. Not so great if you are say, running, or snowboarding, or whatever. - the firmware sucks. The battery indicator doesn't work properly. The MP3 decoding sucks. ID3 tags do not get properly displayed. It takes 5 minutes to rebuild the database every time you plug it in the USB port to charge. - the much-hyped FM tuner barely has any reception. If you walk around the room, you'll probably lose reception a few times.
Even with all of the iPod shuffle's shortcomings, there just isn't a price point at which the Sansa wins. I pretty much just threw the thing in the trash after playing with it for a couple of hours. If you paid the original price for it, you got seriously ripped off.
Yeah, they really care about Rockbox. That's why they encrypted the firmware. Right. It has nothing to do with people trying to crack Fairplay, pirate iPhone applications, and hack/clone/jailbreak the iPhone. Seriously, dude. There are about a million reasons why Apple would want to protect its products from hacking, and I seriously doubt Rockbox is anywhere on that list. Seriously, the DIY Altoids-can MP3 players are more of a competitive threat to apple than Rockbox.
The EFF needs to lay off this crap if it wants to retain credibility. This is rather silly. If you want to make iPod-compatible accessories, you can either license the relevant information or buy the chips from Apple, or you can reverse engineer it. If you reverse engineer it, you could potentially get sued due to patent violations. I have no idea how they think the DMCA comes into the picture -- I am thinking they just put it there as a red herring.
Besides, it's not like Apple is the only company making MP3 players. If you don't like their policies, buy another MP3 player, or make your own. I'm not sure when the EFF became the whiny Ralph Nader-style consumer watchdog, but I'm sure most consumers are quite capable of assessing whether or not they like a given product.
Hahhahaha, seriously. Rockbox is the biggest piece of shit I've ever used. Let's see, tons of useless, buggy, poorly-implemented features, a horrible UI, and poor hardware support. Who the hell needs FLAC support on a portable device, anyway? It's good for killing battery life and disk space, and that's about it. Between the terrible UI, countless bugs, and "features" such as reduced battery life, you'd have to be out of your mind to use that POS. I understand how it came about (replacement FW for horrible Archos players), but why would you put it on an iPod?
Also, I've never had any problems with any of my iPods. When I tried out rockbox, it would hang whenever I tried to generate the database. I promptly wiped it. Maybe the developers should think about fixing some of the bugs before they add more useless crap to the features list.
I'm curious. Did you actually read the article? The product he was trying to install was a desktop antivirus. It doesn't come on a boot disk, and it's not intended for cleaning heavily infected systems.
Obviously, most products that are actually intended for cleaning heavily-infected systems are self-booting. I'm sure Symantec can license some sort of command-line version of Windows in a way that's cost effective, or use a different NTFS implementation. It's just not what this product is intended for.
Not sure what planet you live on where resellers have a 50% profit margin. Places like Newegg have a margin that's somewhere in the single digits. If they sell a drive for $50, they are probably paying $45 or so for it. Also, a lot of cheap drives are clearance items -- the manufacturer is discontinuing the drive model, and they are selling excess inventory below cost.
I think you need to read up on how operating systems work. The whole idea of a protected-mode operating system is that programs are not allowed to access the hardware directly. As long as this is the case, an antivirus program cannot be guaranteed to run on a corrupted OS installation. In any case, the primary purpose of an antivirus is to prevent infection, rather than repair it.
You can't make a hard drive for $25. Cost does not depend on capacity, and you can't just do a process shrink and make everything cheaper. Even if you could get a hard drive for $25, it's still too expensive for a $100 console. The PS1 had a bill of materials that added up to maybe $15 towards the end of its life. When you can just integrate everything on one chip and use a $3.00 CDROM reader, things are cheap. When you need hard drives, BD readers, and fancy silicon, things are much more expensive.
Well, he didn't really succeed at it. I think he folded up shop after a couple of years.
Also, I don't understand your attitude. For the most part, owning your own business is harder, less rewarding, and less productive than working for an established company. Unless you are an exceptional businessman, starting a company is difficult, risky, and a ton of work. If you have some new technology you are commercializing, at least there is a chance that someone will buy the company down the road. Otherwise, you are pretty much stuck fighting for a scrap of market share in what is probably an oversaturated market.
As far as freedom goes, you are much better off working for somebody. If you run a company, you will pretty much be putting in 16-hour days 7 days a week with no vacation time, ever. Sure, you could go on vacation, if you don't mind the company collapsing in the meantime.
Anyway, I would suggest you actually talk to some business owners before you decide that it's something you like. Chances are, you won't like it.
Huh? The SNES was not powerful. It had the worst processor of its generation, very little RAM, and not much else. It did have a pretty nice graphics chip that supported a lot of colors, but that was its only advantage. The Genesis was a much more powerful console, but it had a slightly crappier graphics chip, which meant that the best games on the SNES looked better. On average, though, there are very few third-party SNES games worth playing. Nintendo's real advantage with that console was a superb development team.
Well, that's all nice when you have crappy competition like the N64, which was pretty much a complete bitch to program for. Unfortunately for Sony, Microsoft is extremely well positioned to compete with the PS3. They have excellent dev tools, a lot of experience with game APIs, and an understanding of what it takes to actually write games. Sony is fundamentally a hardware company that has no understanding of software development. The problem is, hardware is now a commodity. That is what bit them in the ass with music players, and it will bite them in the ass with consoles, too.
The PS3 will never be $100. Just like the Xbox was never $100, just like the 360 will never be $100. That's not possible when you need to have a hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, a fairly advanced processor that you don't manufacture, and expensive high-speed RAM. The only console that is cheap enough for this is the Wii -- it could already be sold for $100 if Nintendo wanted to do that.
Besides, the PS3 is seriously lagging behind the 360 as far as games go. For the most part, the 360 has better games, better graphics, and better online play. Of course, some people buy both, simply because the 360 is a good console and the PS3 is a good Blu-ray player.
Well, apart from having a great UI, great features, iTunes, the app store, and so on... I guess this just reflects different priorities. I don't give a flying fuck how many megapixels the camera has, but the user interface is incredibly important. I suppose Japanese consumers see it as the opposite, which might explain why pretty much every Japanese product has tons of useless features and an incredibly poor UI. The fact remains, it's a lot harder to make something that is pretty, well-made, and has a good UI than it is to just cram it with useless features. That's really what Apple, Bose, Bang & Olufsen, and similar companies are good at.
I guess the best analogy is a Swiss watch. A Swiss watch costs at least 100 times more than a cheap digital sports watch, has lower accuracy, is more fragile, and doesn't really have any features. Yet, I'm pretty sure most people would choose a Rolex over a Timex, even if they were the same price.
Um.... is it really that hard to run WinXP inside Virtualbox or something? I mean come on. Linux is a non-entity as far as desktop computing goes. It's also rather difficult to develop stuff for, given that there is no standard version of anything, multiple incompatible libraries and kernel versions and desktop environments and so on. For Apple, there is absolutely no business case for developing it, given that it would cost a few million bucks, and maybe a thousand people would use it (while bitching about closed-source binaries and DRM).
The fact is, the desktop Linux demographic is very small and pretty much impossible to please. Just look at how much shit Nvidia gets, despite having full-featured and easy-to-use Linux drivers.
I'm sure there is plenty of corruption and all that. That's the case in every developing country. That was the case in the US when the US was at the same stage of development. What I'm saying is, you are probably not going to make things better by acting externally. Change has to come from within. Right now, China has hundreds of millions of young, healthy, eager workers who are willing to work long hours for low pay to try to build a life for themselves. That's why you have these types of working conditions. By trying to help the workers, you'll just be making them unemployed. If they could find a better job, they probably would have found it.
OK, so go to System->Preferences->Appearance, click Fonts, then Details. Make sure you have subpixel turned on with hinting set to full. Also make sure the subpixel order is right. You can check that using one of the LCD test websites, like this one. It definitely looks just as good as XP with Cleartext for me.
You are retarded. The reason prices are higher in the US is because US workers get paid about 100x more. The only way prices are going to come down is if you pay them less or employ fewer of them. Employing fewer workers means you need more robots, which are generally very expensive. The only things that can be profitably made in the US are those for which manufacturing is completely automated, such as alkaline batteries, bullets, chemicals, and so on. What exactly does innovation have to do with any of this?
I think one of the reasons everything shifted to China is because the quality of most of that MADE IN USA stuff was pathetic. When it comes to consumer products, US manufacturers have always been good at one thing -- cost reducing the hell out of everything. Making the stuff in China kept the quality level the same, it just reduced the prices by a factor of 10.
Why? This makes pretty much no sense. This is a company that is owned and run by Chinese citizens in China. First, hitting their customers with heavy penalties would probably be illegal under WTO rules. Second, labor conditions in China are the sole problem of the Chinese people and their government. This attitude that the US should get involved in other countries' affairs is ludicrous. I am sure the Chinese government is more than capable of dealing with these issues.
I am also sure that if the people that plant employs were better off being unemployed, they wouldn't be working there. Working in a factory for 10 hours a day is better than working in a coal mine for 14. Living in a crowded dormitory probably beats living in a shantytown. Working conditions are relative, not absolute.
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Who the hell actually expands and upgrades their PCs these days, though? This isn't 1997, you can't just buy a computer and just replace the motherboard and CPU every 2 years. Unless you play a lot of video games (in which case Macs are not really an option), I do not see why you would need to upgrade a machine if it had decent specs when you bought it. It's a pain to even add RAM these days, since by the time you get around to it, the type required will already be obsolete and expensive. And really, just about everything you might need to add is available as a USB device.
Why the hell would you want a higher resolution on a 15" laptop? 1440x900 is about the highest resolution that's practical on a 15" display. Apple does have 1920x1200 on the 17" model.
Also, you do know the mouse is configurable? A two-finger tap does a right click. On Linux, 3 fingers do a middle click (although the Linux touchpad driver was written by monkeys and works extremely poorly with a multitouch touchpad).
And hey, enjoy the fast CPU (and ensuing infertility and 35-minute battery life).
Well, we are comparing a high-quality, professional-grade laptop with a cheap low-end Dell that's designed for college students. The Macbook Pro is designed for professionals -- people who use it to do their job. People who use a laptop to do their job generally don't care about the price all that much. $850 over 3 years comes out to 77 cents a day. If you actually use the laptop to do your job, $850 is a rounding error. The laptop will pay for itself the first time it saves you a few hours dealing with hardware and software problems (that the Dell will inevitably develop).
Besides, since when are processor/memory specs relevant for a laptop? I'd say quality, weight, reliability, and vendor support are far more important than gigahertz. Guess where Apple wins? Let's see:
- solid aluminum case
- backlit keyboard
- magsafe connector
- magnetic screen latch
- ambient light sensor
- great keyboard
- superior warranty service
- superior operating system
So yeah, feel free to spend $1900 on a laptop that's worth about $800. There's a reason Macbooks cost more.
Well, you used to be able to get a Yugo for $4000. It doesn't mean it was a good value. But yes, if you don't care about performance and quality, you can find slightly cheaper products. Another thing to consider is that Mac laptops hold their value extremely well, while $700 PC laptops tend to be worth $200 after about a year. But really, you can get a refurbished Macbook for $850, and it's a far better value than any Windows laptop for $700.
OK, I'll bite. I actually got a Sansa c250 for $15 on clearance somewhere. Sure, the features sound great on paper, but it's pretty much the biggest piece of shit I've ever used. After using it, I can definitely understand how Apple has 75% of the MP3 player market. Let's see:
- the user interface is awful. A retarded 5-year-old could design a better interface. It's slow, buggy, confusing, featureless, and incredibly ugly. Buttons will randomly get pushed in your pocket, causing bad things to happen.
- the hardware sucks. It's large, chintzy, and really cheap-feeling.
- you pretty much have to look at the display to use it. Great if you are sitting at a desk. Not so great if you are say, running, or snowboarding, or whatever.
- the firmware sucks. The battery indicator doesn't work properly. The MP3 decoding sucks. ID3 tags do not get properly displayed. It takes 5 minutes to rebuild the database every time you plug it in the USB port to charge.
- the much-hyped FM tuner barely has any reception. If you walk around the room, you'll probably lose reception a few times.
Even with all of the iPod shuffle's shortcomings, there just isn't a price point at which the Sansa wins. I pretty much just threw the thing in the trash after playing with it for a couple of hours. If you paid the original price for it, you got seriously ripped off.
Yeah, they really care about Rockbox. That's why they encrypted the firmware. Right. It has nothing to do with people trying to crack Fairplay, pirate iPhone applications, and hack/clone/jailbreak the iPhone. Seriously, dude. There are about a million reasons why Apple would want to protect its products from hacking, and I seriously doubt Rockbox is anywhere on that list. Seriously, the DIY Altoids-can MP3 players are more of a competitive threat to apple than Rockbox.
The EFF needs to lay off this crap if it wants to retain credibility. This is rather silly. If you want to make iPod-compatible accessories, you can either license the relevant information or buy the chips from Apple, or you can reverse engineer it. If you reverse engineer it, you could potentially get sued due to patent violations. I have no idea how they think the DMCA comes into the picture -- I am thinking they just put it there as a red herring.
Besides, it's not like Apple is the only company making MP3 players. If you don't like their policies, buy another MP3 player, or make your own. I'm not sure when the EFF became the whiny Ralph Nader-style consumer watchdog, but I'm sure most consumers are quite capable of assessing whether or not they like a given product.
Hahhahaha, seriously. Rockbox is the biggest piece of shit I've ever used. Let's see, tons of useless, buggy, poorly-implemented features, a horrible UI, and poor hardware support. Who the hell needs FLAC support on a portable device, anyway? It's good for killing battery life and disk space, and that's about it. Between the terrible UI, countless bugs, and "features" such as reduced battery life, you'd have to be out of your mind to use that POS. I understand how it came about (replacement FW for horrible Archos players), but why would you put it on an iPod?
Also, I've never had any problems with any of my iPods. When I tried out rockbox, it would hang whenever I tried to generate the database. I promptly wiped it. Maybe the developers should think about fixing some of the bugs before they add more useless crap to the features list.
Um, are you retarded?
I'm curious. Did you actually read the article? The product he was trying to install was a desktop antivirus. It doesn't come on a boot disk, and it's not intended for cleaning heavily infected systems.
Obviously, most products that are actually intended for cleaning heavily-infected systems are self-booting. I'm sure Symantec can license some sort of command-line version of Windows in a way that's cost effective, or use a different NTFS implementation. It's just not what this product is intended for.
Not sure what planet you live on where resellers have a 50% profit margin. Places like Newegg have a margin that's somewhere in the single digits. If they sell a drive for $50, they are probably paying $45 or so for it. Also, a lot of cheap drives are clearance items -- the manufacturer is discontinuing the drive model, and they are selling excess inventory below cost.
Um, we are talking about used/surplus drives. They cost way more from the manufacturer.
I think you need to read up on how operating systems work. The whole idea of a protected-mode operating system is that programs are not allowed to access the hardware directly. As long as this is the case, an antivirus program cannot be guaranteed to run on a corrupted OS installation. In any case, the primary purpose of an antivirus is to prevent infection, rather than repair it.
You can't make a hard drive for $25. Cost does not depend on capacity, and you can't just do a process shrink and make everything cheaper. Even if you could get a hard drive for $25, it's still too expensive for a $100 console. The PS1 had a bill of materials that added up to maybe $15 towards the end of its life. When you can just integrate everything on one chip and use a $3.00 CDROM reader, things are cheap. When you need hard drives, BD readers, and fancy silicon, things are much more expensive.
Well, he didn't really succeed at it. I think he folded up shop after a couple of years.
Also, I don't understand your attitude. For the most part, owning your own business is harder, less rewarding, and less productive than working for an established company. Unless you are an exceptional businessman, starting a company is difficult, risky, and a ton of work. If you have some new technology you are commercializing, at least there is a chance that someone will buy the company down the road. Otherwise, you are pretty much stuck fighting for a scrap of market share in what is probably an oversaturated market.
As far as freedom goes, you are much better off working for somebody. If you run a company, you will pretty much be putting in 16-hour days 7 days a week with no vacation time, ever. Sure, you could go on vacation, if you don't mind the company collapsing in the meantime.
Anyway, I would suggest you actually talk to some business owners before you decide that it's something you like. Chances are, you won't like it.
Huh? The SNES was not powerful. It had the worst processor of its generation, very little RAM, and not much else. It did have a pretty nice graphics chip that supported a lot of colors, but that was its only advantage. The Genesis was a much more powerful console, but it had a slightly crappier graphics chip, which meant that the best games on the SNES looked better. On average, though, there are very few third-party SNES games worth playing. Nintendo's real advantage with that console was a superb development team.
Well, that's all nice when you have crappy competition like the N64, which was pretty much a complete bitch to program for. Unfortunately for Sony, Microsoft is extremely well positioned to compete with the PS3. They have excellent dev tools, a lot of experience with game APIs, and an understanding of what it takes to actually write games. Sony is fundamentally a hardware company that has no understanding of software development. The problem is, hardware is now a commodity. That is what bit them in the ass with music players, and it will bite them in the ass with consoles, too.
The PS3 will never be $100. Just like the Xbox was never $100, just like the 360 will never be $100. That's not possible when you need to have a hard drive, a Blu-ray drive, a fairly advanced processor that you don't manufacture, and expensive high-speed RAM. The only console that is cheap enough for this is the Wii -- it could already be sold for $100 if Nintendo wanted to do that.
Besides, the PS3 is seriously lagging behind the 360 as far as games go. For the most part, the 360 has better games, better graphics, and better online play. Of course, some people buy both, simply because the 360 is a good console and the PS3 is a good Blu-ray player.
Well, apart from having a great UI, great features, iTunes, the app store, and so on... I guess this just reflects different priorities. I don't give a flying fuck how many megapixels the camera has, but the user interface is incredibly important. I suppose Japanese consumers see it as the opposite, which might explain why pretty much every Japanese product has tons of useless features and an incredibly poor UI. The fact remains, it's a lot harder to make something that is pretty, well-made, and has a good UI than it is to just cram it with useless features. That's really what Apple, Bose, Bang & Olufsen, and similar companies are good at.
I guess the best analogy is a Swiss watch. A Swiss watch costs at least 100 times more than a cheap digital sports watch, has lower accuracy, is more fragile, and doesn't really have any features. Yet, I'm pretty sure most people would choose a Rolex over a Timex, even if they were the same price.
Um.... is it really that hard to run WinXP inside Virtualbox or something? I mean come on. Linux is a non-entity as far as desktop computing goes. It's also rather difficult to develop stuff for, given that there is no standard version of anything, multiple incompatible libraries and kernel versions and desktop environments and so on. For Apple, there is absolutely no business case for developing it, given that it would cost a few million bucks, and maybe a thousand people would use it (while bitching about closed-source binaries and DRM).
The fact is, the desktop Linux demographic is very small and pretty much impossible to please. Just look at how much shit Nvidia gets, despite having full-featured and easy-to-use Linux drivers.
I'm sure there is plenty of corruption and all that. That's the case in every developing country. That was the case in the US when the US was at the same stage of development. What I'm saying is, you are probably not going to make things better by acting externally. Change has to come from within. Right now, China has hundreds of millions of young, healthy, eager workers who are willing to work long hours for low pay to try to build a life for themselves. That's why you have these types of working conditions. By trying to help the workers, you'll just be making them unemployed. If they could find a better job, they probably would have found it.
OK, so go to System->Preferences->Appearance, click Fonts, then Details. Make sure you have subpixel turned on with hinting set to full. Also make sure the subpixel order is right. You can check that using one of the LCD test websites, like this one. It definitely looks just as good as XP with Cleartext for me.
You are retarded. The reason prices are higher in the US is because US workers get paid about 100x more. The only way prices are going to come down is if you pay them less or employ fewer of them. Employing fewer workers means you need more robots, which are generally very expensive. The only things that can be profitably made in the US are those for which manufacturing is completely automated, such as alkaline batteries, bullets, chemicals, and so on. What exactly does innovation have to do with any of this?
I think one of the reasons everything shifted to China is because the quality of most of that MADE IN USA stuff was pathetic. When it comes to consumer products, US manufacturers have always been good at one thing -- cost reducing the hell out of everything. Making the stuff in China kept the quality level the same, it just reduced the prices by a factor of 10.
Why? This makes pretty much no sense. This is a company that is owned and run by Chinese citizens in China. First, hitting their customers with heavy penalties would probably be illegal under WTO rules. Second, labor conditions in China are the sole problem of the Chinese people and their government. This attitude that the US should get involved in other countries' affairs is ludicrous. I am sure the Chinese government is more than capable of dealing with these issues.
I am also sure that if the people that plant employs were better off being unemployed, they wouldn't be working there. Working in a factory for 10 hours a day is better than working in a coal mine for 14. Living in a crowded dormitory probably beats living in a shantytown. Working conditions are relative, not absolute.