cheapest display apple offers is $999 20". no matter the discount, i doubt there'll be much demand to pay almost twice as much for the display as for the computer.
Oddly enough, this thing works with non-Apple displays. Apple isn't interested in the low-end screen market, though their stuff is compatible.
if someone wanted a bundle including a mouse/kb/monitor, there's a perfectly good (and more powerful) alternative called iMac. (and it's not much more expensive that buying a mini with all the accessories from apple, as you suggested.)
Different market. Lots of people already have mouse, keyboard, and monitor laying around. Me, for example. Or other PC users, who are much of the target audience for this thing. Another target market is for use as something of a home entertainment center - so this thing could be hooked up to a TV, and no monitor. This thing would also look great with and fit in a component rack, which helps in that regard.
The new iMac, meanwhile, is meant as a great one-piece desktop, and does quite well from everything I can tell. But the missions of the iMac, and the Mini, are quite different.
Yes, but you are using an example of a notorious memory hog (Photoshop). For people using every day productivity apps, 256 is perfectly workable, if not particularly snappy.
Read the anandtech review. 256MB OK for one app, not great for two, and more than that is basically impossible. And I'm talking Mail and Safari here, not Photoshop.
That's kind of the point of the computer these days - it's not acceptable to have a situation where the OS doesn't respond when more than one low-memory program is running. When you also consider that 512MB (a not-so-expensive upgrade) is quite acceptable for running almost anything, the decision is easy. 256BM should never be used for OS X.
Basically, which would you rather have: a computer that can do pretty much anything for $569 (with memory upgrade), or one that can barely run two small applications for $499? Come on. And as anandtech points out, does Apple really want that to be the first OS X experience to people it's trying to win over? That is the point of the Mac mini, after all.
I've said this before, but I have to disagree. I've worked with Macs with 256MB of RAM, and they were fine. I wouldn't want to run Photoshop with 256MB RAM, but I wouldn't want to run Photoshop on one of these anyway!
I've used Macs with 256MB that ran fine too. 5 years ago. Not now, no way.
You're granting that you can't run anything on these things (like photoshop), then say "why would you want to?" Well, why not? You should be able to. The guts of the Mac mini is pretty similar to a powerbook (comparable chip, graphics, etc). I have 512MB in my powerbook, and THAT is often too little.
As to the people saying you need 1GB, what for? I've got a flatmate that does graphical work on a PowerMac with 512MB, and it's fine for everything except Photoshop
Answered your own question, photoshop for one. Also games, and people who multitask heavily (ie, me) or work with memory intensive apps for work (also me).
Why do you call it re-inventing?
Refining is a much better word.
If you don't add any significant functionality - or even remake a less functional more buggy program than those available - I call it reinventing. A successful fork, perhaps, would deserve the term "refinement."
Noone makes a similar product without giving it a couple of extra features. Exept when there is a marketing departement to back up the shoddy product of course.
Then you're not familiar with many FOSS projects. First, a couple of extra features isn't worth the trouble. Second, people will do it for the ego gratification of doing it or for other reasons. See the current mangled state of Office software for linux. And to sum up, it's just too easy for stagnant FOSS projects to keep treading water when they would die if they had to actually make money.
How long have you been working with your data? I've seen data formats come and go in my 28 years in computing, mostly "come" - not so much "go". And converters stick around, too. If you're content with your proprietary data ghetto, I envy you. I'm one who likes mungers, and even stomachs XML for exactly this kind of cross-app data transfer. My world is getting better, while the proprietary data world is staying the same.
Don't know what your point is - my "proprietary format" is ASCII. Don't think that's come OR gone in a lot longer than your 28 years.
Glad your world is getting better, but that still has nothing to do with expecting people who perform a free public service to additionally do your work for you. And it still has nothing to do with expecting all data and all programs to natively interact. Even if they all used open formats - or even your lovely XML - it wouldn't be exactly the same format and would certainly require a translator. Even if they were all ASCII, they might have headers that need stripping, for one example.
So ultimately, if you want to put data and analysis tools together that weren't meant for each other, some work will actually be required on your part.
Nowhere did I suggest that dvorak was universally superior to qwerty. I guess sometimes on Slashdot we all have a tendency to be overly combatitive.
Not combative, but that keyboard story is absolutely filled with anecdotal stories that don't amount to evidence. And it's not exactly scientific, changing random variables and if there's any improvement claiming causality.
Differing ideas compete, and the strong ones survive. Forks are just a different way of getting there.
Yes and no. There are fewer external factors in most FOSS projects that will kill it (like making money) - basically, as long as the developers are having a good time, projects continue to exist. It also means ego is more of a component, relatively, since profit doesn't play. As such, it's much more likely that a viable product will fork over personal difference, which in the corporate world is rare.
To go with your evolution allegory, the FOSS environment isn't as harsh and competitive as the coporate world, since one of the major stressors - profitability - is often absent. Same thing works with life - evolution has been shown to progress much more quickly in harsher environments.
Overall, I'd say there are way too many forks and wheel-reinventing in FOSS.
Umm.. this is a good point, and an entirely do-able one, if you accept redirecting mails to a new address as a form of portability. What's it modded funny for?
Umm.. because it's a troll and a nice one. I'd really love to have an ISP and provide free forwarding forever to a bunch of dipshits.
You do realize, don't you, that touch phones are actually relatively new? That original phones were rotary? Adding machines are a lot older than touch phones.
Much of the arguments about dvorak versus qwerty have to do with typing speed--as a dvorak user, I must contend that the greatest advantage is that my fingers don't hurt after 30 minutes of solid typing.
Is that evidence? I use qwerty, and my fingers don't hurt after a solid day.
I don't know if it's a "gripe", but yeah, of course I want it to be open and conveniently packaged - in an open data format, with a program to use it. What else would I want? Something hard or impossible to use? As for "everything", it's not like I asked for Exxon's seafloor soundings data, or the DoE nuclear test data.
These are unrelated programs you're asking for. You want a toolkit developed by one school to work with a database from another organization. As someone who works woth data, that ain't going to happen. I mean, what, you think all databases in the world should be the same format? That's ridiculous. And if you think there's a reason these disparate products should work together, do it yourself. Actually contribute something to the community instead of complaining.
As for an open data format, how about some comma-delimited ASCII for you?
While I still believe in 2600, they really need to get back to their roots. Who cares if we alienate some newbies? If they are truely hackers as they claim to be (that title is so easy to come by these days), maybe it'll inspire them to do something other than read a how-to.
As someone who's read 2600 on and off for going on 15 years, I like that they haven't felt the need so much to prove their l33t-ness by insulting newbies and making the material out of the reach of intermediate and even beginning hackers. What and when were 2600's "roots" to you? I don't recall a time when it was overly "stuffy," and it's always kept truer to the so-called "underground" - which if you don't recall was significantly populated by what we'd call "script kiddies" today.
Put another way, if everyone has that attitude, then there are no new hackers. Some proportion of script kiddies actually grow up to be good hackers. Now that doesn't mean that the material has to be of the "where can I find a perl script to do X" nature, but making concepts understandable isn't a bad thing.
Of course, 2600's increasingly political bent technologically irrelevant matters is another issue...
Looking at the visualizations is cool, even when it's just for fun. And all of that data that I mentioned (except maybe the CAT/MRI) belongs to the public. We just need tools, like the Internet and this toolkit, to use it.
Then the entire gripe is what, that you want everything to not only be open, but conveniently packaged for you?
One thing that always disappoints me is the lack of involvement of Academia in helping OSS
Don't know what you're talking about, really. Check the sciences, almost all OSS is academic. The OSS tools I use for research were all made my students or profs or multi-university collabortations. If you mean big projects that solve non-academic problems, like spreadsheets and word processors - well, why should researchers (outside of CS people perhaps) involve themselves with that?
Where is the repository for open scientific data for visualization? The NASA website of raw data decoded from the streams sent by our probes? The USGS GPS models? CAT/MRI scan files from dead people? X-ray crystallography data from public research institutions? Their CD distro is a good start, with models from their Turkish dig site. Without data, this tool is just a toy.
I'd agree with the last statement - if you have data, like me, this is damned cool. If you don't, why would you need it anyway?
X.org is an implementation of the X11 protocol. X11R6 is the 6th revision of the X11 protocol. There was supposedly an X10 protocol before X11. What people have begun abandoning is XFree86, and not everyone is leaving it. I think NetBSD still uses it.
Will this be the first instance of a Netcraft-confirmed double suicide? XFree86 and NetBSD are definitely dying.
There is something truly wrong if Apple can get this kid to divulge the source of his "leaker" when comparatively, Robert Novak can leak the name of an undercover CIA agent any not have to divulge his source? Tell me if I'm wrong here.
How about...you're incorrect. The name of the undercover agent wasn't a trade secret, since the CIA isn't a corporation and they don't officially have a "trade." Therefore, the name of the spy wasn't officially protected under this law, and they guy didn't break that law. The kid did, because he was in possession of trade secret information. Apple has the right to learn his source so they can sue and fire them.
Now, is what Novak did right? I say hell no. I say if that isn't treason, it should be. I think it should be an executable offense, publishing the identity of an American operative in the field. It's pretty much implicit that's a death warrant. If you can do something like that and live with yourself, you are a piece of human filth.
IANAL, far from, actually, but shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't SCO be releasing code to an independent party to determine if its copyright has been breeched? Or will they keep requesting more code and fish around for something they can 'try to claim' is a copyright violation?
Well, no, since that's not how the court system works. What you've described is called arbitration, and can be used if both sides are amenable.
This "requirement" suddenly dissapeared when they found out he was a platinum club member. This either suggests that they believe no terrorist would bother becoming a platinum club member or they just harass people who aren't.
So I forget - are we back to blaming AA, or are we still going to try to put this - like all other evils - on the US government?
You know, there's a simple explanation - maybe they ran out of the forms, and since nobody reads the damned things anyway, the guy working the counter figured screw it when Corey made a fuss.
But that's not as much fun as blaming an evil corporation and the new Evil Empire.
I'm not saying I wouldn't have been a little skittish at something like that - I'd just probably have made something up and went on with my life.
Open BIOS? Of course you want an open, standardised BIOS. If you've ever run large server parks with loads of different hardware, you would know to appreciate them.
That's a tad different than hobbyists tinkering with their digital cameras for fun. Obviously, when you have 1000 machines, then the effort/machine scales down linearly while the headaches from supporting multiple architectures probably scales as factorial of the number of different systems, so clearly you want the same bios.
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Oddly enough, this thing works with non-Apple displays. Apple isn't interested in the low-end screen market, though their stuff is compatible.
if someone wanted a bundle including a mouse/kb/monitor, there's a perfectly good (and more powerful) alternative called iMac. (and it's not much more expensive that buying a mini with all the accessories from apple, as you suggested.)
Different market. Lots of people already have mouse, keyboard, and monitor laying around. Me, for example. Or other PC users, who are much of the target audience for this thing. Another target market is for use as something of a home entertainment center - so this thing could be hooked up to a TV, and no monitor. This thing would also look great with and fit in a component rack, which helps in that regard.
The new iMac, meanwhile, is meant as a great one-piece desktop, and does quite well from everything I can tell. But the missions of the iMac, and the Mini, are quite different.
Read the anandtech review. 256MB OK for one app, not great for two, and more than that is basically impossible. And I'm talking Mail and Safari here, not Photoshop.
That's kind of the point of the computer these days - it's not acceptable to have a situation where the OS doesn't respond when more than one low-memory program is running. When you also consider that 512MB (a not-so-expensive upgrade) is quite acceptable for running almost anything, the decision is easy. 256BM should never be used for OS X.
Basically, which would you rather have: a computer that can do pretty much anything for $569 (with memory upgrade), or one that can barely run two small applications for $499? Come on. And as anandtech points out, does Apple really want that to be the first OS X experience to people it's trying to win over? That is the point of the Mac mini, after all.
I've used Macs with 256MB that ran fine too. 5 years ago. Not now, no way.
You're granting that you can't run anything on these things (like photoshop), then say "why would you want to?" Well, why not? You should be able to. The guts of the Mac mini is pretty similar to a powerbook (comparable chip, graphics, etc). I have 512MB in my powerbook, and THAT is often too little.
As to the people saying you need 1GB, what for? I've got a flatmate that does graphical work on a PowerMac with 512MB, and it's fine for everything except Photoshop
Answered your own question, photoshop for one. Also games, and people who multitask heavily (ie, me) or work with memory intensive apps for work (also me).
"Anecdotal evidence" is pretty much an oxymoron. Considering dvorak's been around for decades and that's the best anyone has, I'm pretty skeptical.
Someone should really comission a scientific study to see if it's true.
There have been a lot of unscientific studies, does that count?
If you don't add any significant functionality - or even remake a less functional more buggy program than those available - I call it reinventing. A successful fork, perhaps, would deserve the term "refinement."
Noone makes a similar product without giving it a couple of extra features. Exept when there is a marketing departement to back up the shoddy product of course.
Then you're not familiar with many FOSS projects. First, a couple of extra features isn't worth the trouble. Second, people will do it for the ego gratification of doing it or for other reasons. See the current mangled state of Office software for linux. And to sum up, it's just too easy for stagnant FOSS projects to keep treading water when they would die if they had to actually make money.
Don't know what your point is - my "proprietary format" is ASCII. Don't think that's come OR gone in a lot longer than your 28 years.
Glad your world is getting better, but that still has nothing to do with expecting people who perform a free public service to additionally do your work for you. And it still has nothing to do with expecting all data and all programs to natively interact. Even if they all used open formats - or even your lovely XML - it wouldn't be exactly the same format and would certainly require a translator. Even if they were all ASCII, they might have headers that need stripping, for one example.
So ultimately, if you want to put data and analysis tools together that weren't meant for each other, some work will actually be required on your part.
Not combative, but that keyboard story is absolutely filled with anecdotal stories that don't amount to evidence. And it's not exactly scientific, changing random variables and if there's any improvement claiming causality.
Yes and no. There are fewer external factors in most FOSS projects that will kill it (like making money) - basically, as long as the developers are having a good time, projects continue to exist. It also means ego is more of a component, relatively, since profit doesn't play. As such, it's much more likely that a viable product will fork over personal difference, which in the corporate world is rare.
To go with your evolution allegory, the FOSS environment isn't as harsh and competitive as the coporate world, since one of the major stressors - profitability - is often absent. Same thing works with life - evolution has been shown to progress much more quickly in harsher environments.
Overall, I'd say there are way too many forks and wheel-reinventing in FOSS.
Umm.. because it's a troll and a nice one. I'd really love to have an ISP and provide free forwarding forever to a bunch of dipshits.
Seriously. Good point? Christ on a crutch...
blah blah lameness filter blah blah
Damn kids these days.
I trust I need not explain the placebo effect to you?
Is that evidence? I use qwerty, and my fingers don't hurt after a solid day.
These are unrelated programs you're asking for. You want a toolkit developed by one school to work with a database from another organization. As someone who works woth data, that ain't going to happen. I mean, what, you think all databases in the world should be the same format? That's ridiculous. And if you think there's a reason these disparate products should work together, do it yourself. Actually contribute something to the community instead of complaining.
As for an open data format, how about some comma-delimited ASCII for you?
As someone who's read 2600 on and off for going on 15 years, I like that they haven't felt the need so much to prove their l33t-ness by insulting newbies and making the material out of the reach of intermediate and even beginning hackers. What and when were 2600's "roots" to you? I don't recall a time when it was overly "stuffy," and it's always kept truer to the so-called "underground" - which if you don't recall was significantly populated by what we'd call "script kiddies" today.
Put another way, if everyone has that attitude, then there are no new hackers. Some proportion of script kiddies actually grow up to be good hackers. Now that doesn't mean that the material has to be of the "where can I find a perl script to do X" nature, but making concepts understandable isn't a bad thing.
Of course, 2600's increasingly political bent technologically irrelevant matters is another issue...
Then the entire gripe is what, that you want everything to not only be open, but conveniently packaged for you?
Don't know what you're talking about, really. Check the sciences, almost all OSS is academic. The OSS tools I use for research were all made my students or profs or multi-university collabortations. If you mean big projects that solve non-academic problems, like spreadsheets and word processors - well, why should researchers (outside of CS people perhaps) involve themselves with that?
I'd agree with the last statement - if you have data, like me, this is damned cool. If you don't, why would you need it anyway?
Will this be the first instance of a Netcraft-confirmed double suicide? XFree86 and NetBSD are definitely dying.
How about...you're incorrect. The name of the undercover agent wasn't a trade secret, since the CIA isn't a corporation and they don't officially have a "trade." Therefore, the name of the spy wasn't officially protected under this law, and they guy didn't break that law. The kid did, because he was in possession of trade secret information. Apple has the right to learn his source so they can sue and fire them.
Now, is what Novak did right? I say hell no. I say if that isn't treason, it should be. I think it should be an executable offense, publishing the identity of an American operative in the field. It's pretty much implicit that's a death warrant. If you can do something like that and live with yourself, you are a piece of human filth.
You'll never get cirrhosis with a half-assed effort like that. Grab a case at least.
unix-*like* my ass...that's FreeBSD under there, probably closer to the original ATT/Berkeley Unix than anything around today.
Oh, and to respond to your advice, I already did ;)
Well, no, since that's not how the court system works. What you've described is called arbitration, and can be used if both sides are amenable.
So I forget - are we back to blaming AA, or are we still going to try to put this - like all other evils - on the US government?
You know, there's a simple explanation - maybe they ran out of the forms, and since nobody reads the damned things anyway, the guy working the counter figured screw it when Corey made a fuss.
But that's not as much fun as blaming an evil corporation and the new Evil Empire.
I'm not saying I wouldn't have been a little skittish at something like that - I'd just probably have made something up and went on with my life.
That's a tad different than hobbyists tinkering with their digital cameras for fun. Obviously, when you have 1000 machines, then the effort/machine scales down linearly while the headaches from supporting multiple architectures probably scales as factorial of the number of different systems, so clearly you want the same bios.