I noted that it was compromised compared to a whitebox, but you're trying to argue that it's not upgradeable because you can swap out the GPU, CPU, RAM, HD, optical drive... that's clearly not a factual arguing position. It may not be *as* upgradable as a whitebox/tower PC where the aim from the start is the ability to customise, but then it makes sacrifices in portability that the iMac has.
Just because the iMac is much more portable an a whitebox PC doesn't mean I'm going to say that the white box is "far from portable".
People say this, and I have to wonder where they get that idea, because it's totally untrue.
You can change out the RAM, HD (x2 in the bigger one), optical drive, CPU, graphics card. The only "fixed" bits are the logic board and the PSU - which you pretty much have to switch with identical parts. You can replace the LCD screen too of course, but again with one of the same size.
It certainly won't be cheap for things like the GPU (MXM cards are much more expensive than their 'normal' equivalents) but it's possible. The CPU is a standard socketed Intel i5/i7.
I've done a couple of HD swaps in iMacs now (and Time Machine really is handy for that - back up and running in no time).
The current crop of machines will take drop-in replacement Ivy Bridge CPUs when Intel releases them this year, so you can upgrade if you like. Similarly you can drop in a new GPU when AMD releases them. (Unsure on NVidia - depends on drivers, but given they run just find in Mac Pros I would assume that it would be just fine, but I haven't personally confirmed it).
I'm not saying anything is a suitable rebuttal, just noting that your situation is not an ideal way to handle enterprise support to begin with (a range of OS versions spanning many years).
Also, you can drop the "250% markup" nonsense - it's not helpful, or accurate.
I'm also not "IT folk", so I guess I'm not qualified to comment anyway.
If there's no budget to get everyone onto hardware that supports the extremely specific set of criteria that make up the security and IT policy, then either those machines simply do not get onto the network, or you change the policy if it's vital that they do (or learn a little bit more about OS X since you seem to be missing some key bits of information about it, eg, automator, apple script, remote admin etc).
What did you honestly expect when the Mac platform went through an architecture change and a move to fully 64 bit across the span of machines you had to work with? If you had PPC hardware in the mix then we're talking pre-2005 machines. I'm no "IT pro" but I'm guessing that 2005-era PCs are similarly not all that hot on running Windows 7.
I'm not trying to make excuses for the Mac platform, simply offering up an opinion that your task as described was doomed to fail from the start, or at the very least be a huge support nightmare due to generational differences between hardware and software - OS X is not the only OS to be affected by this.
Or simply get it from the App Store for $29 then burn the installer to a CD or USB drive of your own choosing. Volume licences are left up to you - not going to do *all* the legwork for you.
All of the "upgrade" versions of OS X are full-blown installers. There's no difference between them. In terms of the EULA, an upgrade can be sold for less, but there's physically no difference in the installer compared to a "full" one.
You can check this by doing a nuke and pave - any Lion installer will happily put a full and fresh copy of Lion onto a virgin partition. There's no need to go up through earlier versions of the OS and then upgrade. There are also no serial numbers or activation, so no step asking for a legit proof of ownership of the earlier OS.
Not really "super clever" when you've posted things that have been debunked in single line replies, like seemingly being ignorant of Apple Script and Automator, for example.
It sounds like the biggest problem was that you weren't in a homogeneous environment (for each OS, I mean), so you ended up with a mix of Lion, SL, Leopard and (possibly Tiger) machines. That's going to be a support nightmare on any OS if you're dealing with software spanning several generations, including a CPU architecture change.
The oldest machines that will run Lion have Core 2 Duos - so pretty much any Intel Mac released, with the exception of some of the very earliest ones that have Core Solo and Core Duo chips. That rules out some of the base, early white Macbooks, early intel Minis and revision 1 of the Macbook Pro (early 2006 stuff). Anything else made by Apple from mid to late 2006 onwards will run Lion. Whether they'll want to is another matter entirely (Preview.app in Lion is a step backwards in speed and stability over SL, for example).
Everyone *says* that they can find a cheaper "equivalent" laptop, but they always ignore the case it comes in. An all-aluminium body is not cheap, but it does make the thing much more rigid, and helps to cut down on "the flex of death" as the machine ages.
If you are building a whitebox PC, remember to factor in the cost of your time too.
It's a good way to save money, but it's no secret that a hand-built PC put together on your own time is going to be cheaper than an equivalent spec machine off the shelf from Dell/Lenovo/Apple/HP etc.
There are also various anomalies to factor in - the Mac Pro, for example, *is* ridiculously overpriced at the moment (and is usually the thing people go to when setting up an "objective" price comparison because it really is long in the tooth and expensive, while ignoring the laptops, mini and iMac). Similarly, the Air is actually pretty price competitive for its size and form factor. Everything else is somewhere in the middle.
Precision is important. If exchanging ideas is all that is important then why not simply grunt and point at what you want, for example.
It's not "small minded" to place importance on communication skills where going too far in the other direction is equally bad, and leads to atrocious constructions like "If you have any questions direct then ask myself" or non-words like "irregardless" in an attempt to sound important.
Obviously there are going to be people who use their ability to write correct English as a way to feel superior to someone else (that's human nature and happens in every situation where some people are better at a thing than other people (games, sports, literacy, art, music....), but that in itself is not a reason to say "screw the whole thing, you understood me!". (There are whole communities on the web who could argue about the punctuation at the end of that last sentence).
Like I said before; people make small slips here and there, but correcting them is not rude or anal or small minded (depending on the attitude of the corrector, or course). However, when an entire post is littered with repeated, basic errors then there are really very few excuses if someone says "I'm sorry, you need to work on that if you want me to take you seriously" - if that's the level of care and attention they put into communicating with other people, then what sort of care and attention do they pay to other things?
You understood it, but it took longer to parse in your brain.
It's not "douchey" to want to converse using correct spelling and grammar. For one thing, it immediately tells you something about the person you are talking to. If they really can't be bothered to learn to write properly, what makes you think they have anything worth saying?
Everyone makes the odd grammar and spelling mistake, and more frequently the odd typo, but consistently poor spelling and grammar is just laziness. I correct my friends' spelling and grammar (politely), and I get the same in return when I make errors.
That's my point - people talk about the "supermajority" as if it was something Obama had and wasted, but it was only so if all of the Dems (and "dems" who are just not republicans) voted in lockstep and on a large, complex bill such as healthcare or changing the tax code, it's not a guarantee.
There's nothing wrong with being "at odds" with your party - that's the point of a Democracy with elected representatives. The President is not an emperor, even with a majority.
The republicans *were* invited to the table on healthcare. More than invited in fact - since they spent their entire time just saying "no" to everything, as is their normal mode of operation when dealing with bipartisan stuff, even rejecting copperplate-copied-from-republican-manifesto stuff just because it was proposed by a Democrat. It would have been really quite amusing to watch if it wasn't so depressingly crippling to the US.
There are certainly things Obama could have done differently, and he probably should have decided to cut out the Republicans more than he did and attempt to force things through. As it turns out, going the bipartisan route just allowed the repubs to gut everything and still say no at every turn.
I know - I'm a chemist. The question was hypothetical, since the parent to my post was questioning the OP's intelligence that gasoline has primarily gaseous reaction products. He seemed incredulous at the idea of "a gallon of gasoline going into the air" when burned.
I didn't post anything of the sort - maybe check the user IDs on the posts before you comment. It's very handy when you log in so you can tell who's posting what.
Yes, I'm a chemist. The question was hypothetical, since the parent post was questioning the intelligence of the OP because he said that gasoline turns into gaseous reaction products (at least, the bulk of it).
You can wish it really hard, but that doesn't make it so - your first sentence is simply not a fact.
There's also no one in the scientific community trying to say that climate change as a process is not natural, just that it has taken a large artificial turn for the first time, since we are the first species who were able to have a serious impact on it. The data on that is not in doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
You're trying too hard.
Good effort though.
Whoooooooooooooosh!
Sorry, I almost got sucked into the low pressure void there.
I guess I'll have to go back to putting giant "disclaimer: this is joke, cupcake" on my obviously satirical posts.
Seriously, you just have no sense of humour.
DISCLAIMER: I think Apple's patent lawsuits against Samsung are silly.
It's going to be a major problem for Samsung if Apple stops innovating. I mean, Samsung might actually have to do some R&D!
Can't tell if trolling or just....
Well played sir.
I'm also not aware of any i3 Mac laptops.
I assume those HP laptops had metal cases? Either way, $2000 is not 250% bigger than $1000. Are you in charge of purchasing?
I noted that it was compromised compared to a whitebox, but you're trying to argue that it's not upgradeable because you can swap out the GPU, CPU, RAM, HD, optical drive... that's clearly not a factual arguing position. It may not be *as* upgradable as a whitebox/tower PC where the aim from the start is the ability to customise, but then it makes sacrifices in portability that the iMac has.
Just because the iMac is much more portable an a whitebox PC doesn't mean I'm going to say that the white box is "far from portable".
The iMac is a desktop with zero upgrade ability.
People say this, and I have to wonder where they get that idea, because it's totally untrue.
You can change out the RAM, HD (x2 in the bigger one), optical drive, CPU, graphics card. The only "fixed" bits are the logic board and the PSU - which you pretty much have to switch with identical parts. You can replace the LCD screen too of course, but again with one of the same size.
It certainly won't be cheap for things like the GPU (MXM cards are much more expensive than their 'normal' equivalents) but it's possible. The CPU is a standard socketed Intel i5/i7.
I've done a couple of HD swaps in iMacs now (and Time Machine really is handy for that - back up and running in no time).
The current crop of machines will take drop-in replacement Ivy Bridge CPUs when Intel releases them this year, so you can upgrade if you like. Similarly you can drop in a new GPU when AMD releases them. (Unsure on NVidia - depends on drivers, but given they run just find in Mac Pros I would assume that it would be just fine, but I haven't personally confirmed it).
I'm not saying anything is a suitable rebuttal, just noting that your situation is not an ideal way to handle enterprise support to begin with (a range of OS versions spanning many years).
Also, you can drop the "250% markup" nonsense - it's not helpful, or accurate.
I'm also not "IT folk", so I guess I'm not qualified to comment anyway.
If there's no budget to get everyone onto hardware that supports the extremely specific set of criteria that make up the security and IT policy, then either those machines simply do not get onto the network, or you change the policy if it's vital that they do (or learn a little bit more about OS X since you seem to be missing some key bits of information about it, eg, automator, apple script, remote admin etc).
What did you honestly expect when the Mac platform went through an architecture change and a move to fully 64 bit across the span of machines you had to work with? If you had PPC hardware in the mix then we're talking pre-2005 machines. I'm no "IT pro" but I'm guessing that 2005-era PCs are similarly not all that hot on running Windows 7.
I'm not trying to make excuses for the Mac platform, simply offering up an opinion that your task as described was doomed to fail from the start, or at the very least be a huge support nightmare due to generational differences between hardware and software - OS X is not the only OS to be affected by this.
If your $1000 budget rig wasn't more powerful than a machine released 9 years ago then I'd have been very surprised.
Apple will sell you Lion from the Apple Store. No need for the App Store.
Have you heard of Google before? Also, you forgot to log in.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD256Z/A?fnode=MTY1NDAzOA
Or simply get it from the App Store for $29 then burn the installer to a CD or USB drive of your own choosing. Volume licences are left up to you - not going to do *all* the legwork for you.
All of the "upgrade" versions of OS X are full-blown installers. There's no difference between them. In terms of the EULA, an upgrade can be sold for less, but there's physically no difference in the installer compared to a "full" one.
You can check this by doing a nuke and pave - any Lion installer will happily put a full and fresh copy of Lion onto a virgin partition. There's no need to go up through earlier versions of the OS and then upgrade. There are also no serial numbers or activation, so no step asking for a legit proof of ownership of the earlier OS.
All of those things are well supported too.
There's very little difference between the major OSes now - using one over the other is mainly a matter of preference.
Not really "super clever" when you've posted things that have been debunked in single line replies, like seemingly being ignorant of Apple Script and Automator, for example.
It sounds like the biggest problem was that you weren't in a homogeneous environment (for each OS, I mean), so you ended up with a mix of Lion, SL, Leopard and (possibly Tiger) machines. That's going to be a support nightmare on any OS if you're dealing with software spanning several generations, including a CPU architecture change.
The oldest machines that will run Lion have Core 2 Duos - so pretty much any Intel Mac released, with the exception of some of the very earliest ones that have Core Solo and Core Duo chips. That rules out some of the base, early white Macbooks, early intel Minis and revision 1 of the Macbook Pro (early 2006 stuff). Anything else made by Apple from mid to late 2006 onwards will run Lion. Whether they'll want to is another matter entirely (Preview.app in Lion is a step backwards in speed and stability over SL, for example).
Does that equivalence include the case?
Everyone *says* that they can find a cheaper "equivalent" laptop, but they always ignore the case it comes in. An all-aluminium body is not cheap, but it does make the thing much more rigid, and helps to cut down on "the flex of death" as the machine ages.
In the end it comes down to value vs cost.
If you are building a whitebox PC, remember to factor in the cost of your time too.
It's a good way to save money, but it's no secret that a hand-built PC put together on your own time is going to be cheaper than an equivalent spec machine off the shelf from Dell/Lenovo/Apple/HP etc.
There are also various anomalies to factor in - the Mac Pro, for example, *is* ridiculously overpriced at the moment (and is usually the thing people go to when setting up an "objective" price comparison because it really is long in the tooth and expensive, while ignoring the laptops, mini and iMac). Similarly, the Air is actually pretty price competitive for its size and form factor. Everything else is somewhere in the middle.
How was the OP picked on?
The full content of the correction by the AC was:
While I agree with you, it's "should have," not "should of."
I'm not seeing how that's picking on the original poster.
Also, you forgot to log in.
So rather than quietly letting you know that it's "per se" not "per say", or "could have" over "could of" is worse than ignoring it?
I don't know about you but I like to learn from my errors.
Precision is important. If exchanging ideas is all that is important then why not simply grunt and point at what you want, for example.
It's not "small minded" to place importance on communication skills where going too far in the other direction is equally bad, and leads to atrocious constructions like "If you have any questions direct then ask myself" or non-words like "irregardless" in an attempt to sound important.
Obviously there are going to be people who use their ability to write correct English as a way to feel superior to someone else (that's human nature and happens in every situation where some people are better at a thing than other people (games, sports, literacy, art, music....), but that in itself is not a reason to say "screw the whole thing, you understood me!". (There are whole communities on the web who could argue about the punctuation at the end of that last sentence).
Like I said before; people make small slips here and there, but correcting them is not rude or anal or small minded (depending on the attitude of the corrector, or course). However, when an entire post is littered with repeated, basic errors then there are really very few excuses if someone says "I'm sorry, you need to work on that if you want me to take you seriously" - if that's the level of care and attention they put into communicating with other people, then what sort of care and attention do they pay to other things?
You understood it, but it took longer to parse in your brain.
It's not "douchey" to want to converse using correct spelling and grammar. For one thing, it immediately tells you something about the person you are talking to. If they really can't be bothered to learn to write properly, what makes you think they have anything worth saying?
Everyone makes the odd grammar and spelling mistake, and more frequently the odd typo, but consistently poor spelling and grammar is just laziness. I correct my friends' spelling and grammar (politely), and I get the same in return when I make errors.
That's my point - people talk about the "supermajority" as if it was something Obama had and wasted, but it was only so if all of the Dems (and "dems" who are just not republicans) voted in lockstep and on a large, complex bill such as healthcare or changing the tax code, it's not a guarantee.
There's nothing wrong with being "at odds" with your party - that's the point of a Democracy with elected representatives. The President is not an emperor, even with a majority.
The republicans *were* invited to the table on healthcare. More than invited in fact - since they spent their entire time just saying "no" to everything, as is their normal mode of operation when dealing with bipartisan stuff, even rejecting copperplate-copied-from-republican-manifesto stuff just because it was proposed by a Democrat. It would have been really quite amusing to watch if it wasn't so depressingly crippling to the US.
There are certainly things Obama could have done differently, and he probably should have decided to cut out the Republicans more than he did and attempt to force things through. As it turns out, going the bipartisan route just allowed the repubs to gut everything and still say no at every turn.
I know - I'm a chemist. The question was hypothetical, since the parent to my post was questioning the OP's intelligence that gasoline has primarily gaseous reaction products. He seemed incredulous at the idea of "a gallon of gasoline going into the air" when burned.
I didn't post anything of the sort - maybe check the user IDs on the posts before you comment. It's very handy when you log in so you can tell who's posting what.
Yes, I'm a chemist. The question was hypothetical, since the parent post was questioning the intelligence of the OP because he said that gasoline turns into gaseous reaction products (at least, the bulk of it).
[citation needed]
You can wish it really hard, but that doesn't make it so - your first sentence is simply not a fact.
There's also no one in the scientific community trying to say that climate change as a process is not natural, just that it has taken a large artificial turn for the first time, since we are the first species who were able to have a serious impact on it. The data on that is not in doubt.
Liberal bias in the media... oh man, you kill me.
Man, that was a great joke!
Oh wait, you're serious! I'm not sure whether to laugh or say "I don't want to live on this planet any more".
Also, you forgot to log in.