I broke three of SRAM's top of the line nine speed mountain chains this year. If you do a lot of off-read riding, two chains a year is not uncommon. As most nine speed mountain chains are repackaged road chains, they're not as strong as seven and eight speed chains. Seven speed chains are nearly indestructible.
You do realize that iTunes is a forced download. Any time you get quicktime you are now forced to install iTunes. Although it can be removed after, I don't think counting the number of iTunes downloads is an indication of anything.
WTF are you talking about? Last time I installed Quicktime, I installed Quicktime and nothing else.
The big difference is that while MS offers improvements, they don't really force the upgrade the way Apple does.
No one is forced to upgrade on the Apple side. There are people still using 10.2.x and 10.1.x. I know people still happily using variations of the classic Mac OS, from 8.1 to 9.2.2. A good friend of mine is still running 9.2.2. It does everything she needs. She will probably upgrade when she buys a new machine, but she's in no hurry.
In the early 70s, when Lamborghini released the Countach, the testers who drove it were absolutely amazed at the performance of the thing. It was, by far, the most powerful road car they had ever driven - much more so than anything by Lamborghini's main rival, Ferrari - and various car mags had no problem proclaiming it as the fastest production car ever made.
Eventually it came out that the cars Lamborghini provided to the testers were about two hundred pounds lighter than the production cars, and developed something like 150 more horsepower than stock. Since then, car magazines have become much more circumspect about which cars they test.
You're not restricted from burning a song only x times. You are not permitted to burn the same playlist of songs more than ten times, but the way around this is trivial: after ten burns, nuke the playlist and make a new one which is identical. . .
It's to prevent people from easily making 100x copies of a CD, but it shouldn't be a problem for your average home user. Alternatively, burn the CD from iTunes once, then fire up your favorite CD copying software and go crazy.
I hope to God your people don't need CMYK support, or multi-channel operations with separate masking layers, or cross-channel math, or professional level color support, or any of the things Photoshop offers which makes it the amazingly powerful program it is.
In my opinion, Adobe's been on a slow, downward spiral for several years. Each new "upgrade" brings a few new features and countless bugs and problems. I can't remember an Illustrator release since 5.0 that didn't add some new, serious problems, including problems to the color model and handling. It's no wonder that most large organizations wait six months to a year to upgrade their Adobe products - let other people guinea pig them.
At the same time, each release gets more and more bloated and takes an increasing severe performance penalty. I have spent a lot of time in Photoshop, but it looks like 7.0 may be my last upgrade.
I did a lot of test riding prior to purchasing my last bicycle. I had ridden aluminum for years and steel in the past. I could tell a difference between aluminum, carbon fiber, steel, and titanium. I bought a titanium frame because I could feel both the smoothness and the efficiency. I can see how each material has its place though. Also, if you were to make a steel frame with big tubes (a la aluminum frames) it would have most of the charecteristics of an aluminum frame.
Actually, I can tell the difference between carbon and aluminum and steel. In my post I was thinking more about the hysteria one can see when comparing these materials and contrasting that to the hysteria I have seen in audiophile posts; these $4000 speaker cables make my stereo sound so much better! is about the same as any frame built out of anything other than carbon is crap!
My dad is an aerospace engineer. I will often email him when some new wonder material comes into the cycling world and ask him what the truth his. He usually debunks most of the marketing crap and points out more important things; carbon fiber is prone to notch failure, aluminum doesn't like stress risers, etc. What I have taken away from his info is the thing marketing people don't like to hear: if have the choice between spending an extra $500 on a bike or training harder, take the latter.
Yes, there are people with this skill. However, they are extremely rare - maybe 1 in a 1000 professional sommeliers can do this. Sit 1000 of your average audiophiles down in a room and none of them probably have the fabled "golden ear," although they will make a noise like a herd of constipated Canadian Geese.
Sit 1000 professional audio engineers down in a room, and you'll have your one.
To my eyes (and ears) arguments like this exist in every subculture, and most of it is crap. I know cyclists who will only ride titanium, or steel, or carbon, because they claim they can tell the difference. I guarantee them they couldn't tell the difference without all the "3.2/5" and "monocoque" stickers on the frame.
There needs to be a Slashdot Troll Hall of Fame, and this needs to be there. I mean, it just keeps going and going. . .
Perhaps it needs to be rewritten, tho:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I have recently upgraded from a Mac 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM to a new G6 quad 4GHz with AGP 16X and PCI-X to help me at my freelance gig where I needed to copy a 17 Meg file from my home network to a desktop folder. On the G6 it took almost 14 days. At home, on my Ti99/4A, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 4 nanoseconds. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, my iPod will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this. My cat has been run over, the dog is pregnant, my toilet is backed up and I am having shooting pains up and down my right arm. None of this happened before I got the G6!
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Ti99/4a with 16k of ram running an OS I programmed myself from the back pages of old Byte magazines is faster than this G6 quad 4GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
because of memory bandwidth, and the thing was about half the speed of our dual 2.4GHz Dell machines.
This makes no sense: the dual G5 has PC3200 with two dedicated 1GHz buses, faster than anything you're likely to find from Dell. So how does a machine with better throughput have worse performance?
I'm a writer, so I have a bit of a pen fetish. I have used all sorts of pens, including some ver' expensive Waterman fountain pens, and nothing writes for me like the Sheaffer. It has a very smooth, very precise action and nice ink flow.
Considering this shows the iPod at #1 in dollar market share and within 1.5% of #1 in total numbers sold, I'd say Apple's marketing ability is pretty good.
And how well are Dell's various non-computer consumer products selling? From the numbers I've seen, not to well. A lot of people I know won't even use Dell's PCs for fear of quality concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
I broke three of SRAM's top of the line nine speed mountain chains this year. If you do a lot of off-read riding, two chains a year is not uncommon. As most nine speed mountain chains are repackaged road chains, they're not as strong as seven and eight speed chains. Seven speed chains are nearly indestructible.
I expect to see a story tomorrow saying Rabid Mac zealot proclaims 7.6.1 the best OS evuh!
WTF are you talking about? Last time I installed Quicktime, I installed Quicktime and nothing else.
No one is forced to upgrade on the Apple side. There are people still using 10.2.x and 10.1.x. I know people still happily using variations of the classic Mac OS, from 8.1 to 9.2.2. A good friend of mine is still running 9.2.2. It does everything she needs. She will probably upgrade when she buys a new machine, but she's in no hurry.
Eventually it came out that the cars Lamborghini provided to the testers were about two hundred pounds lighter than the production cars, and developed something like 150 more horsepower than stock. Since then, car magazines have become much more circumspect about which cars they test.
I laughed, but I don't know why.
FYI: The M16 and M4 are to be replaced by the M8 within a year or two.
It's to prevent people from easily making 100x copies of a CD, but it shouldn't be a problem for your average home user. Alternatively, burn the CD from iTunes once, then fire up your favorite CD copying software and go crazy.
This sounds like more IT arrogance to me.
In my opinion, Adobe's been on a slow, downward spiral for several years. Each new "upgrade" brings a few new features and countless bugs and problems. I can't remember an Illustrator release since 5.0 that didn't add some new, serious problems, including problems to the color model and handling. It's no wonder that most large organizations wait six months to a year to upgrade their Adobe products - let other people guinea pig them.
At the same time, each release gets more and more bloated and takes an increasing severe performance penalty. I have spent a lot of time in Photoshop, but it looks like 7.0 may be my last upgrade.
Actually, I can tell the difference between carbon and aluminum and steel. In my post I was thinking more about the hysteria one can see when comparing these materials and contrasting that to the hysteria I have seen in audiophile posts; these $4000 speaker cables make my stereo sound so much better! is about the same as any frame built out of anything other than carbon is crap!
My dad is an aerospace engineer. I will often email him when some new wonder material comes into the cycling world and ask him what the truth his. He usually debunks most of the marketing crap and points out more important things; carbon fiber is prone to notch failure, aluminum doesn't like stress risers, etc. What I have taken away from his info is the thing marketing people don't like to hear: if have the choice between spending an extra $500 on a bike or training harder, take the latter.
Sit 1000 professional audio engineers down in a room, and you'll have your one.
To my eyes (and ears) arguments like this exist in every subculture, and most of it is crap. I know cyclists who will only ride titanium, or steel, or carbon, because they claim they can tell the difference. I guarantee them they couldn't tell the difference without all the "3.2/5" and "monocoque" stickers on the frame.
Perhaps it needs to be rewritten, tho:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I have recently upgraded from a Mac 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM to a new G6 quad 4GHz with AGP 16X and PCI-X to help me at my freelance gig where I needed to copy a 17 Meg file from my home network to a desktop folder. On the G6 it took almost 14 days. At home, on my Ti99/4A, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 4 nanoseconds. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, my iPod will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this. My cat has been run over, the dog is pregnant, my toilet is backed up and I am having shooting pains up and down my right arm. None of this happened before I got the G6!
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My Ti99/4a with 16k of ram running an OS I programmed myself from the back pages of old Byte magazines is faster than this G6 quad 4GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
This makes no sense: the dual G5 has PC3200 with two dedicated 1GHz buses, faster than anything you're likely to find from Dell. So how does a machine with better throughput have worse performance?
Methinks PEBCAK.
I'm a writer, so I have a bit of a pen fetish. I have used all sorts of pens, including some ver' expensive Waterman fountain pens, and nothing writes for me like the Sheaffer. It has a very smooth, very precise action and nice ink flow.
For other purposes I use fine-point Sharpies.
1) I am the only person with physical access to my machine; 2) SSH is turned off; 3) SSH is also blocked at the firewall; 4) I am lazy.
Calling Apple a "bit" player is wrong. Apple still has major market share. The big news was when Apple's market share in education dropped below 70%.
Since I don't use ssh, I don't care.
So I ain't toucing this. If it ain't broke. . .
I know. I can't seem to find any recent sales numbers, tho.
Considering this shows the iPod at #1 in dollar market share and within 1.5% of #1 in total numbers sold, I'd say Apple's marketing ability is pretty good.
And how well are Dell's various non-computer consumer products selling? From the numbers I've seen, not to well. A lot of people I know won't even use Dell's PCs for fear of quality concerns.
I think the iTMS - or something very similar - is about as close as we will get.
In more serious news, Dell will need to have Apple's marketing savvy to have Apple's success, and I don't think they do.