I think the stupid part is that when you log into Facebook, it sends your password in the clear without encryption. Same with most (all?) of the popular instant messenger clients. Anyone could be there sniffing your traffic, or the access point itself might be run by a hostile party.
The point of advertising is to get me to want something I don't need (because if I needed it, I could not wait around for an advertiser to "educate me about his valuable product/service"). That is, by definition, a waste of my time.
That's not always the case, because you have to know that something, or at least surmise that it might exist before you go seek it out. The iPod is a good example - it was a new type of product that the market was ready for (a portable MP3 player), but without Apple's advertising, I doubt many people would have discovered it on their own. You would have had to of guessed that such a device is possible (if you were not one of the geeky types that already knew about the iPod's precedessors), then figured out that Apple (yes, that Apple, the computer company) was making them. Of course, by word of mouth we'd likely be in a similar spot today, but I'm sure Apple's advertising benefitted both sides - Apple made a pile of money, and people were delighted by a cool device that they wished they could have bought even sooner.
Another example would be something like a 2TB harddrive. I want one, but at this time they don't exist (that I'm aware of). Once they hit the market, a well placed ad will get me to click on it and check it out and possibly even make a purchase. I would discover them on my own eventually, but I already want one, and the ad would be doing me a service by letting me know about them quicker that I would have found them otherwise.
Of course, I do agree that the vast majority of advertising is useless, particularly the "branding" types of ads by huge companies everyone has heard of.
An aluminum iMac dissassembled shortly after released. The model number of the LCD can be found on a sticker on the back. A quick Google search of the model number will reveal exactly what it is.
If anyone has a bias, it's you and your far-fetched story trying to defend Apple here. The Cinema displays have 16.7 million colors in their specs, which is correct for an 8-bit panel (which they are). The 20" iMac uses the more vague "Millions of colors" in the specs. Sorry, but Apple knows exactly what they are selling.
Nope, the trend is towards 6 bit. A few years ago, almost everyone had a monitor capable of displaying 8bit (And higher!) color, a CRT. Then LCDs started becoming popular, but since they were still a premium product at a premium price, they tended to have better quality panels. Now that they are mainstream, there are piles and piles of cheap and nasty LCDs out there, and they driving the higher quality displays from the market (there aren't many monitors under 20" left that aren't 6 bit TN panels, and non-TN panels are pretty much dead as laptops go). It's pretty much the same thing with DPI (should be going up given how sharp LCDs are in comparison to CRTs, but the trend is down) but that's another rant.
But I have never seen Dell actually try to make this argument - I have never seen them argue that colors on their monitors are more vibrant and true-to-life (to use the marketing-speak that they'd probably go with), even though they could.
The reason they don't is so they can play their bait-n-switch game. They like to introduce a new model with a high quality panel, which of course gets good reviews. Later, they'll switch to a cheaper panel without changing the model number or saying anything at all. With Dell, oftentimes you have no idea what you're going to get.
He's essentially correct though, as development stopped once they could do multi-tasking better, rendering it obsolete. The only reason they kept it around until OSX was for backwards compatibility.
The problem with that is with most designs I have seen for a space elevator, if you were to unhook the elevator from the counterweight (say, to tether the elevator to a new spot on the counterweight), the counterweight would get flung away from the Earth due to inertia, meanwhile the elevator would fall back to the Earth due to gravity. Or are you proposinng something where the elevator would be attached to something like a car on train tracks on the counterweight, allowing for the end point to move as needed?
Well, if you rearrange the numbers, you'll see that 67% of the time there's a fatal accident, and some of the occupants wore seatbelts and some didn't, those that didn't were the one's that died. In other words, you are roughly twice as likely to be killed in an accident if you don't wear your seatbelt. That's probably more like the statistic we're used to hearing. It seems consistent with studies like this one:
"Research has found that lap/shoulder seat belts, when used, reduce the risk of fatal injury to front-seat passenger car occupants by 45 percent and the risk of moderate-to-critical injury by 50 percent."
Actually, it makes sense in a way. If you fall into a swimming pool, you can't just walk out of it and you could end up over your head - a dangerous situation if you can't swim and panic. If you fall into a lake (from the shoreline) you'll just get a little wet.
You mean like when your airplane flight is cancelled and the airline offers you a free ticket. Or when the food at a restaurant is crappy and they give you a coupon to eat there again.
Well, the Macbook Air can presumably run both Ubuntu and Vista, so it's not like he couldn't put a secure OS on it:)
You'll note that in this contest, the way the Mac was hacked was by user intervention (someone went to a malicious website on the Mac). The key to not getting owned is education. Once malicious sites start targetting the Mac, users like your son are going to get owned on the Mac just like on Windows, and the superior security "in practice" argument is just going to melt away. Security by obscurity is only going to work for so long.
And no software updates and no anti-virus? How do you know that computer isn't owned already?
That may not work on a Mac, given that they use EFI and only fake the BIOS for Windows in Boot Camp. On the other hand, the fact that the computer has EFI and not a true BIOS is a pretty good indication it's a Mac, atleast for now.
The problem with older x86 machines is who wants to mess around with older, slower hardware when you can get newer 3-5 year hardware extremely cheap or free? Most x86 machines I have retired have worked perfectly fine, it's just that the computer was too slow and/or I got something significantly better for free (almost every PC I've pulled from the trash has had nothing wrong with the actual hardware, no matter the age).
With that said, I have a PIII 600Mhz running as a router (serious overkill, but the PIII 600E chip uses less than 16W which meant that it was the most efficient of all the computers I had to do the job), and a Celeron 800 and a P3 1Ghz that would also just make the cut.
We saw a viable 3rd party canidate in 1992, Ross Perot. He pulled in almost 19% of the vote, and probably could have done better if he ran his campaign better. As it was, he almost certainly threw the election in Bill Clinton's favor. Though now it seems that both parties have done such an effective job of polarizing the country that people feel that they can't "afford" to "throw away" their vote on anything but the party that opposes the one they hate the most.
Fundamentally, they are the same: "something really bad happened". But atleast with Windows you had a chance to do something with it. You could try to search the error string, or ask someone who knew Windows. Even if that turned up empty, you often got a memory address and/or the file name of the module. If the memory addresses were always changing, it might be bad memory or a hardware problem. With the file name, you could try renaming the offending file and seeing what happened (it would break something, but hopefully it would just be some random application or something non-critical like sound). You could also search your harddrive for that file to see if you had multiple versions of it present (very common problem back in the day) then try getting rid of all but one version until you found one that everything was happy with, or dropping specific versions into specific application directories as needed to attempt to prevent the application from using the c:\windows\system version.
On the Mac you pretty much just rebooted it and hoped it didn't happen again.
Guess what, they aren't losing potential customers, they're pissing off haters. Big difference.
That's the amazing part I find with those ads. The Mac users love them, the anti-Mac crowd hate them... for pretty much the same reasons. It's almost like Apple was intentionally going out of their way to further polarize things on the PC/Mac spectrum.
I don't really follow. Despite both being x86 machines, Intel Macs and Windows PCs are very different, and it's not like Adobe was able to just quickly port the Windows version of their products over to the Intel Macs with little effort. Actually, it looks to be quite the opposite - the Intel Mac versions of their products appear to be derived from the PPC Mac versions and not the Windows versions. I figured the Intel switch would have the opposite effect - Adobe wouldn't bother to make with the expense of native Intel Mac versions of a lot of their software, especially if they tell the Mac users to just use the Windows version. As it was, it seemed Adobe dragged their feet on it anyway.
I've never had a problem with "large ticket" items. Computers, monitors, laptops, things like that tend to stay put. My problem is the smaller stuff like basic tools. Screwdrivers, pliers, hex wrenches, staplers, and things like that have an extremely low vapor pressure. I'm sure a lot of it is not malicious, in the sense that they need a Philip's and "Oh look, there's one there I can use sitting on that table!", and then they forget to put it back when they are done. Though on the other hand, for some people the word "borrow" might as well mean "have" when they ask if they could "borrow" something because it goes straight into their stash when they are done using it and it's up to you to ask for it back.
The amazing thing though is that some stuff just constantly vanishes, resulting in the company purchasing more tools every so often because there simply aren't any around anymore. I know that somewhere in the company there is a drawer with about 150 sets of hex wrenches in it, it's the only explaination.
I may be a bit rusty on my Mac jargon, but SystemUIServer is a process that's responsible for the ever-present top menu bar, plus a few misc tasks. I think you want WindowServer there, as that is what is responsible for most of the GUI, like actually drawing things to the screen.
To be fair, the $599 Mac Mini doesn't do you much good if you want to actually interact with your computer (requires a monitor, keyboard, and mouse). But if it'll boot OSX and run completely headless, I guess it counts:)
On the other hand, more and more people are moving to laptops. XP will probably be the most "power hungry" OS, as it's popularity peaked along with the old-school Athlons and the Pentium 4's, along with leaf-blower GPU's and big CRTs.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the stupid part is that when you log into Facebook, it sends your password in the clear without encryption. Same with most (all?) of the popular instant messenger clients. Anyone could be there sniffing your traffic, or the access point itself might be run by a hostile party.
The point of advertising is to get me to want something I don't need (because if I needed it, I could not wait around for an advertiser to "educate me about his valuable product/service"). That is, by definition, a waste of my time.
That's not always the case, because you have to know that something, or at least surmise that it might exist before you go seek it out. The iPod is a good example - it was a new type of product that the market was ready for (a portable MP3 player), but without Apple's advertising, I doubt many people would have discovered it on their own. You would have had to of guessed that such a device is possible (if you were not one of the geeky types that already knew about the iPod's precedessors), then figured out that Apple (yes, that Apple, the computer company) was making them. Of course, by word of mouth we'd likely be in a similar spot today, but I'm sure Apple's advertising benefitted both sides - Apple made a pile of money, and people were delighted by a cool device that they wished they could have bought even sooner.
Another example would be something like a 2TB harddrive. I want one, but at this time they don't exist (that I'm aware of). Once they hit the market, a well placed ad will get me to click on it and check it out and possibly even make a purchase. I would discover them on my own eventually, but I already want one, and the ad would be doing me a service by letting me know about them quicker that I would have found them otherwise.
Of course, I do agree that the vast majority of advertising is useless, particularly the "branding" types of ads by huge companies everyone has heard of.
http://www.kodawarisan.com/k2007_02/archives/2007/08/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa_3.html
An aluminum iMac dissassembled shortly after released. The model number of the LCD can be found on a sticker on the back. A quick Google search of the model number will reveal exactly what it is.
If anyone has a bias, it's you and your far-fetched story trying to defend Apple here. The Cinema displays have 16.7 million colors in their specs, which is correct for an 8-bit panel (which they are). The 20" iMac uses the more vague "Millions of colors" in the specs. Sorry, but Apple knows exactly what they are selling.
Nope, the trend is towards 6 bit. A few years ago, almost everyone had a monitor capable of displaying 8bit (And higher!) color, a CRT. Then LCDs started becoming popular, but since they were still a premium product at a premium price, they tended to have better quality panels. Now that they are mainstream, there are piles and piles of cheap and nasty LCDs out there, and they driving the higher quality displays from the market (there aren't many monitors under 20" left that aren't 6 bit TN panels, and non-TN panels are pretty much dead as laptops go). It's pretty much the same thing with DPI (should be going up given how sharp LCDs are in comparison to CRTs, but the trend is down) but that's another rant.
But I have never seen Dell actually try to make this argument - I have never seen them argue that colors on their monitors are more vibrant and true-to-life (to use the marketing-speak that they'd probably go with), even though they could.
The reason they don't is so they can play their bait-n-switch game. They like to introduce a new model with a high quality panel, which of course gets good reviews. Later, they'll switch to a cheaper panel without changing the model number or saying anything at all. With Dell, oftentimes you have no idea what you're going to get.
He's essentially correct though, as development stopped once they could do multi-tasking better, rendering it obsolete. The only reason they kept it around until OSX was for backwards compatibility.
The problem with that is with most designs I have seen for a space elevator, if you were to unhook the elevator from the counterweight (say, to tether the elevator to a new spot on the counterweight), the counterweight would get flung away from the Earth due to inertia, meanwhile the elevator would fall back to the Earth due to gravity. Or are you proposinng something where the elevator would be attached to something like a car on train tracks on the counterweight, allowing for the end point to move as needed?
Citation please
Well, if you rearrange the numbers, you'll see that 67% of the time there's a fatal accident, and some of the occupants wore seatbelts and some didn't, those that didn't were the one's that died. In other words, you are roughly twice as likely to be killed in an accident if you don't wear your seatbelt. That's probably more like the statistic we're used to hearing. It seems consistent with studies like this one:
"Research has found that lap/shoulder seat belts, when used, reduce the risk of fatal injury to front-seat passenger car occupants by 45 percent and the risk of moderate-to-critical injury by 50 percent."
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/TSFLaws/PDFs/810729W.pdf
Actually, it makes sense in a way. If you fall into a swimming pool, you can't just walk out of it and you could end up over your head - a dangerous situation if you can't swim and panic. If you fall into a lake (from the shoreline) you'll just get a little wet.
Who says you must be stupid in order to do manual labor?
You mean like when your airplane flight is cancelled and the airline offers you a free ticket. Or when the food at a restaurant is crappy and they give you a coupon to eat there again.
:)
Well, the Macbook Air can presumably run both Ubuntu and Vista, so it's not like he couldn't put a secure OS on it
No patch is out yet. If the someone else out there that found it was malicious, then it could matter.
You'll note that in this contest, the way the Mac was hacked was by user intervention (someone went to a malicious website on the Mac). The key to not getting owned is education. Once malicious sites start targetting the Mac, users like your son are going to get owned on the Mac just like on Windows, and the superior security "in practice" argument is just going to melt away. Security by obscurity is only going to work for so long.
And no software updates and no anti-virus? How do you know that computer isn't owned already?
That may not work on a Mac, given that they use EFI and only fake the BIOS for Windows in Boot Camp. On the other hand, the fact that the computer has EFI and not a true BIOS is a pretty good indication it's a Mac, atleast for now.
I have a sister too, you insensitive clod!
The problem with older x86 machines is who wants to mess around with older, slower hardware when you can get newer 3-5 year hardware extremely cheap or free? Most x86 machines I have retired have worked perfectly fine, it's just that the computer was too slow and/or I got something significantly better for free (almost every PC I've pulled from the trash has had nothing wrong with the actual hardware, no matter the age).
With that said, I have a PIII 600Mhz running as a router (serious overkill, but the PIII 600E chip uses less than 16W which meant that it was the most efficient of all the computers I had to do the job), and a Celeron 800 and a P3 1Ghz that would also just make the cut.
We saw a viable 3rd party canidate in 1992, Ross Perot. He pulled in almost 19% of the vote, and probably could have done better if he ran his campaign better. As it was, he almost certainly threw the election in Bill Clinton's favor. Though now it seems that both parties have done such an effective job of polarizing the country that people feel that they can't "afford" to "throw away" their vote on anything but the party that opposes the one they hate the most.
Fundamentally, they are the same: "something really bad happened". But atleast with Windows you had a chance to do something with it. You could try to search the error string, or ask someone who knew Windows. Even if that turned up empty, you often got a memory address and/or the file name of the module. If the memory addresses were always changing, it might be bad memory or a hardware problem. With the file name, you could try renaming the offending file and seeing what happened (it would break something, but hopefully it would just be some random application or something non-critical like sound). You could also search your harddrive for that file to see if you had multiple versions of it present (very common problem back in the day) then try getting rid of all but one version until you found one that everything was happy with, or dropping specific versions into specific application directories as needed to attempt to prevent the application from using the c:\windows\system version.
On the Mac you pretty much just rebooted it and hoped it didn't happen again.
Sounds like they hit a nerve.
Guess what, they aren't losing potential customers, they're pissing off haters. Big difference.
That's the amazing part I find with those ads. The Mac users love them, the anti-Mac crowd hate them... for pretty much the same reasons. It's almost like Apple was intentionally going out of their way to further polarize things on the PC/Mac spectrum.
I don't really follow. Despite both being x86 machines, Intel Macs and Windows PCs are very different, and it's not like Adobe was able to just quickly port the Windows version of their products over to the Intel Macs with little effort. Actually, it looks to be quite the opposite - the Intel Mac versions of their products appear to be derived from the PPC Mac versions and not the Windows versions. I figured the Intel switch would have the opposite effect - Adobe wouldn't bother to make with the expense of native Intel Mac versions of a lot of their software, especially if they tell the Mac users to just use the Windows version. As it was, it seemed Adobe dragged their feet on it anyway.
I've never had a problem with "large ticket" items. Computers, monitors, laptops, things like that tend to stay put. My problem is the smaller stuff like basic tools. Screwdrivers, pliers, hex wrenches, staplers, and things like that have an extremely low vapor pressure. I'm sure a lot of it is not malicious, in the sense that they need a Philip's and "Oh look, there's one there I can use sitting on that table!", and then they forget to put it back when they are done. Though on the other hand, for some people the word "borrow" might as well mean "have" when they ask if they could "borrow" something because it goes straight into their stash when they are done using it and it's up to you to ask for it back.
The amazing thing though is that some stuff just constantly vanishes, resulting in the company purchasing more tools every so often because there simply aren't any around anymore. I know that somewhere in the company there is a drawer with about 150 sets of hex wrenches in it, it's the only explaination.
I may be a bit rusty on my Mac jargon, but SystemUIServer is a process that's responsible for the ever-present top menu bar, plus a few misc tasks. I think you want WindowServer there, as that is what is responsible for most of the GUI, like actually drawing things to the screen.
To be fair, the $599 Mac Mini doesn't do you much good if you want to actually interact with your computer (requires a monitor, keyboard, and mouse). But if it'll boot OSX and run completely headless, I guess it counts :)
On the other hand, more and more people are moving to laptops. XP will probably be the most "power hungry" OS, as it's popularity peaked along with the old-school Athlons and the Pentium 4's, along with leaf-blower GPU's and big CRTs.