I just Googled "DSM-520", and apparently the actual name is the "D-Link® MediaLounge Wireless HD Media Player", which is quite wordy and does not roll off the tongue like AppleTV, but is actually quite descriptive. Probably the reason that "DSM-520" gets thrown around is that it's actually easier to say.
Case in point: AppleTV vs. D-link DSM-520. Which sounds sexier? Why do manufacturers keep insisting on using freaking SKUs for product names? It does not work! Especially when your brand name has no style cachet in existence!
Because it makes things clear. AppleTV doesn't have this problem yet, as there is only one AppleTV, but an "Apple iMac" can refer to any one of many different computers that Apple has been manufacturing for nearly 9 years now. Of course, "Thinkpad" can also refer to any number of IBM/Lenovo computers manufactured for over a decade, but a "Thinkpad R60" is a lot more specific, and a "Thinkpad R60 9461-U7E" is a very specific configuration. Sure is a lot easier than "iMac with a G3 and a grey case and a slot loading drive but no firewire", and similar.
Another huge help is to get one of those "happy hacker" layout keyboards (essentially, a keyboard without the numpad, like most laptops). That usually will give you another nice chunk of prime real estate on your desk back. Of course, if you rely heavily on the numpad this may not be for you.
Sorry, but anyone with experience with older machines has noticed the crunch. OSX, like Windows (and many Linux distrobutions) likes 1GB of ram, and runs pretty shitty if it has less than 512MB. The days of the huge improvements that stemmed from optomizing the steaming pile of crap that was OSX 10.0 are over. Of course, people with newer machines can see speed increases as the newer OSes can take better advantage of the hardware, but that doesn't apply accross the board like you want it to.
With your 768MB of memory, your system is has probably been upgraded along the way, and a 2000-era PC upgraded to that amount of memory will also run XP just fine, and maybe could squeak by on Vista (in 2000, PCs were already cruising along at 1Ghz). Try 256MB of memory, and watch OS X crawl, especially if you don't have a 7200 RPM drive. Heck, Tiger even crawled on the stock, original Mac Mini back in 2005 with it's slow 4200 RPM drive.
I was under the impression that Dashboard can't be disabled, but I just looked it up, and apparently you can do it from the command line. Not something I would expect the typical Mac user to know how to do.
Both Mac and PC hardware lasts a long time, and the service life boils down to just how long you want to keep them running. Which is his point, PCs are dirt cheap, especially used PCs, so why bother with old PC systems running when a replacement is cheap?
And last time I checked, OSX has been getting slower over the last couple of years. You probably don't notice it on newer systems, but the added bloat of features like Spotlight and Dashboard have really been putting the crunch on older systems, especially if they have low memory and/or slow harddrives.
Likely they need enough Mac labs that everyone who needs a Mac can find one when they need it, and they need enough PC labs that anyone who needs a PC can find one when they need it. Given that most students need both kinds available, and depending on what projects are due the demand could fluctuate heavily between PC and Mac. They could even end up in a situation where they have more total computers (PC and Mac combined) than they have students. By having computers that can switch easily between being a Windows PC and Mac, they could easily end up needing to buy less computers.
A 3 year old computer is outdated, no matter how you look at it. That doesn't mean it's not useable, but all the major college computer labs I have seen don't keep the computers more than 3 years (though often the used, but still useful lab computers then get dispersed into secondary labs and other less visible places where they can stick around a long time).
Besides, the Mac hardware lasts longer than PCs is not true. Good PC hardware lasts just as long, and I have some PCs that are that old and older plugging around just fine. When I graduated in 2005 from the school I went to, some of the lessor used labs were finally getting rid of their Pentium 133 - 233Mhz hardware (9-10 year old computers at the time, most of which still worked fine by the way).
Oh, and since they are Macs , they can, through Parallels, even designate some or all of the machines to run nearly any other OS on the planet.
No other hardware vendor can offer that (at least not legally).
Let's be real here. There is only a single OS that an Intel Mac can run (legally) that a PC can't, and that's OSX. Every other OS that the Mac can run, the PC can run too. And the PC, due to all the legacy stuff still lingering around, can also run a lot of stuff the Mac can't natively, like Dos or Windows 98/ME.
Same here, back when I was still in college a couple of years ago. No one used the Macs, unless you absolutely could not find an open PC in the lab, and I couldn't blame them. They were slow compared to the PCs (PPC machines vs. P4's), and they locked them down so you couldn't use any of the underlying BSD stuff, and when you are stuck with just the Apple stuff, OSX is nothing special.
Not exactly. A Mac isn't as bad as a typical OEM Windows install, but you still get a version of Quicktime that annoys you to upgrade constantly. And you also get 30 day trials of iWork and MS Office on some (all?) models.
Heck, I'm still waiting for desktop LCDS with greater resolution than 1024x768 in a 15", 1280x1024 in a 17", and 1600x1200 in a 20". They simply do not exist, from what I have found. All that a manufacturer would have to do is put some of their laptop panels into a normal LCD case with a seperate power supply and they would be done.
Though you're right about most people. I've had a hard time explaining that there isn't really any benefit of a 19" LCD over a 17" LCD (unless your eyesight isn't the best) as they all have the same number of pixels, but it doesn't seem to stick. Same with why 20" LCDs and considerably more expensive than 19" LCDs.
No kidding -- I just googled "man shred" (as in, looking up the man page for the "shred" secure deletion program) while replying to another post in this thread. I'd be screwed if somebody accused me of murdering somebody with a wood chipper!
And just think of how much more screwed you would be when they seize your computers, only to find that the drives had been securely wiped!
We need stupid people. Stupid people do what they are told to do by their society. Most of the time, this is what has worked for their ancestors and will still work for them. This provides a surplus upon which all innovation and excellence is based. Without stupid people, you'd have everyone innovating all the time and not doing what works. The problem with innovation is that, much of the time, it fails.
A smart person is going to go with the best way of doing something. A smart person won't just do something different just for the sake of being different, because that's stupid. There is a tried-and-true way, and they understand this, and they'll have no problems using it if they see it as the best solution. Even better, they'll understand the reasons for using it (and not using it) - which puts them at an advantage over the "we've always done it this way" crowd. Sure, the stupid people provide a base for the smart people, but the dumber they are, the harder it is to steer them in the right direction when they start to go astray (for example, take a look at where America seems to be headed).
Besides, dumb people still try to innovate. Haven't you've ever heard any stupid criminal stories?
I think that's why the poster said "semi-dormant". You only have to use the trademark, but it doesn't mean that it has to be used widely. For example, most people think Surge cola is no more, however, Coke still sells it a few select areas - that way they can hold their trademark on the word "Surge", even if you can't buy it.
My mother doesn't even know what the phone number is !!
That would be one way for them to offer service very cheaply for people who only need it for emergencies - don't give them a phone number, and make it an outbound phone only. Of the people I know who doo se cell phones for emergencies, they never have it on unless they are making a call so it's not like they use it for taking calls anyway. It would be a bit annoying for those "I'll have to call you back in five minutes" scenarios, but it would be better than nothing.
Maybe I should be able to play my CDs in my tape player too though?
You can. You put the CD in the CD player, put a tape in the tape recorder, and you record the song directly to a tape. It's not so easy with iTunes, thanks to the DRM.
Because most people don't stay hunched over a relatively small computer screen when they get home. I know many people that work with computers all day and they say "When I get home, the LAST thing I want to do, is get in front of a computer."
You could always tell them "You've stared at a screen all day at work, and now you want to stare at a screen all evening?". I kind of think this is strange, as I don't see work "using the computer" the same as "home using the computer". They may both be computers, but they are set up completely different and I use them for (mostly) different things.
Along the same lines, Hypersonic PC also sells dual HDD/RAID laptops. They are large, and the battery life is short, but it might be just what you need.
On the other hand, given that a CF card is smaller than a laptop harddrive, and many laptop PATA controllers seem fully functional in the sense that they'll support both a master and slave drive, I wonder if you could hack two CF cards to fit into a regular laptop where the harddrive would usually fit, and then use software raid? (though I imagine you would lose a lot of the speed benefits doing that)
MTTF is not MTBF. In the world of metrics, they're different. While they both measure failures, time to fail and time between failures are different measurements for a reason, they tell us different things about the product we're testing.
They are essentially the same for many pieces of computer hardware, since things like a disk drive or a flash chip generally aren't repaired when they fail. Which means that the MTTF is the same as the MTBF, as the first failure is the only failure of the device, as it is then replaced.
Why not RAID0 two 8GB compact flash cards? You would end up with 16GB of fast flash storage with a convienent interface, and I don't think it would be any less reliable than a single mechanical HDD.
For that reason alone, recycling is a lie. And I happen to live within 20 miles of a large landfill site. It's very clean, well managed, and no danger whatsoever to the environment. Stuff that used to go there is now winding up rotting on the surface being picked over by poor people, go on, tell me that's good for the environment.
That's not recycling at all, that's just finding another place to dump the garbage. Though you did touch upon another reason for recycling that people tend to forget - that is, to keep toxins out of the ground water. Even though it costs money to recycle things like electronics vs. simply dumping them, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be recycling them.
Liberalism simply removes that choice from you in favor of whatever THEIR notion is of the greater good, and if you disagree, well that is just too damn bad.
In a democratic republic (which is what the US considers itself), assuming that it works correctly, there would still be a choice. That's because you would also be electing the people who decides how the money gets spent. In a direct democracy, you would (in theory atleast) be voting directly on things like spending bills. I don't think that the direct approach, which it sounds like you favor, would work well. A lot of less visibile things, (say, maintance on locks and dams system in our waterways and rivers) would not be funded well, as people wouldn't realize how important they are.
I wouldn't mind paying higher local (city/county/state) taxes so much, in the sense that I would feel that I have a voice in how it is spent, and I would be able to see the results of my tax money getting spent on local projects and services, even if I disagreed with some of it. However, the US federal government is just too big and powerful, people don't feel represented, they don't feel that their money is being distributed well, and that's why they resent paying the taxes - they don't feel they have a choice in the matter.
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I just Googled "DSM-520", and apparently the actual name is the "D-Link® MediaLounge Wireless HD Media Player", which is quite wordy and does not roll off the tongue like AppleTV, but is actually quite descriptive. Probably the reason that "DSM-520" gets thrown around is that it's actually easier to say.
Case in point: AppleTV vs. D-link DSM-520. Which sounds sexier? Why do manufacturers keep insisting on using freaking SKUs for product names? It does not work! Especially when your brand name has no style cachet in existence!
Because it makes things clear. AppleTV doesn't have this problem yet, as there is only one AppleTV, but an "Apple iMac" can refer to any one of many different computers that Apple has been manufacturing for nearly 9 years now. Of course, "Thinkpad" can also refer to any number of IBM/Lenovo computers manufactured for over a decade, but a "Thinkpad R60" is a lot more specific, and a "Thinkpad R60 9461-U7E" is a very specific configuration. Sure is a lot easier than "iMac with a G3 and a grey case and a slot loading drive but no firewire", and similar.
Another huge help is to get one of those "happy hacker" layout keyboards (essentially, a keyboard without the numpad, like most laptops). That usually will give you another nice chunk of prime real estate on your desk back. Of course, if you rely heavily on the numpad this may not be for you.
Sorry, but anyone with experience with older machines has noticed the crunch. OSX, like Windows (and many Linux distrobutions) likes 1GB of ram, and runs pretty shitty if it has less than 512MB. The days of the huge improvements that stemmed from optomizing the steaming pile of crap that was OSX 10.0 are over. Of course, people with newer machines can see speed increases as the newer OSes can take better advantage of the hardware, but that doesn't apply accross the board like you want it to.
With your 768MB of memory, your system is has probably been upgraded along the way, and a 2000-era PC upgraded to that amount of memory will also run XP just fine, and maybe could squeak by on Vista (in 2000, PCs were already cruising along at 1Ghz). Try 256MB of memory, and watch OS X crawl, especially if you don't have a 7200 RPM drive. Heck, Tiger even crawled on the stock, original Mac Mini back in 2005 with it's slow 4200 RPM drive.
I was under the impression that Dashboard can't be disabled, but I just looked it up, and apparently you can do it from the command line. Not something I would expect the typical Mac user to know how to do.
Both Mac and PC hardware lasts a long time, and the service life boils down to just how long you want to keep them running. Which is his point, PCs are dirt cheap, especially used PCs, so why bother with old PC systems running when a replacement is cheap?
And last time I checked, OSX has been getting slower over the last couple of years. You probably don't notice it on newer systems, but the added bloat of features like Spotlight and Dashboard have really been putting the crunch on older systems, especially if they have low memory and/or slow harddrives.
Likely they need enough Mac labs that everyone who needs a Mac can find one when they need it, and they need enough PC labs that anyone who needs a PC can find one when they need it. Given that most students need both kinds available, and depending on what projects are due the demand could fluctuate heavily between PC and Mac. They could even end up in a situation where they have more total computers (PC and Mac combined) than they have students. By having computers that can switch easily between being a Windows PC and Mac, they could easily end up needing to buy less computers.
I fully expect the Mac G3 to be able to run MacOS X 10.5, due out shortly, also without hardware upgrades.
Rumor has it that 10.5 is cutting support for all G3 machines. Though likely it be just another software check that can be bypassed.
Unlike Windows, Mac OS X gets FASTER with every version.
Hardly the case, with Dashboard, Spotlight, and other new features hogging resources. 10.3 is the fastest version of OSX, and will likely always be.
A 3 year old computer is outdated, no matter how you look at it. That doesn't mean it's not useable, but all the major college computer labs I have seen don't keep the computers more than 3 years (though often the used, but still useful lab computers then get dispersed into secondary labs and other less visible places where they can stick around a long time).
Besides, the Mac hardware lasts longer than PCs is not true. Good PC hardware lasts just as long, and I have some PCs that are that old and older plugging around just fine. When I graduated in 2005 from the school I went to, some of the lessor used labs were finally getting rid of their Pentium 133 - 233Mhz hardware (9-10 year old computers at the time, most of which still worked fine by the way).
Oh, and since they are Macs , they can, through Parallels, even designate some or all of the machines to run nearly any other OS on the planet.
No other hardware vendor can offer that (at least not legally).
Let's be real here. There is only a single OS that an Intel Mac can run (legally) that a PC can't, and that's OSX. Every other OS that the Mac can run, the PC can run too. And the PC, due to all the legacy stuff still lingering around, can also run a lot of stuff the Mac can't natively, like Dos or Windows 98/ME.
Same here, back when I was still in college a couple of years ago. No one used the Macs, unless you absolutely could not find an open PC in the lab, and I couldn't blame them. They were slow compared to the PCs (PPC machines vs. P4's), and they locked them down so you couldn't use any of the underlying BSD stuff, and when you are stuck with just the Apple stuff, OSX is nothing special.
Not exactly. A Mac isn't as bad as a typical OEM Windows install, but you still get a version of Quicktime that annoys you to upgrade constantly. And you also get 30 day trials of iWork and MS Office on some (all?) models.
Heck, I'm still waiting for desktop LCDS with greater resolution than 1024x768 in a 15", 1280x1024 in a 17", and 1600x1200 in a 20". They simply do not exist, from what I have found. All that a manufacturer would have to do is put some of their laptop panels into a normal LCD case with a seperate power supply and they would be done.
Though you're right about most people. I've had a hard time explaining that there isn't really any benefit of a 19" LCD over a 17" LCD (unless your eyesight isn't the best) as they all have the same number of pixels, but it doesn't seem to stick. Same with why 20" LCDs and considerably more expensive than 19" LCDs.
No kidding -- I just googled "man shred" (as in, looking up the man page for the "shred" secure deletion program) while replying to another post in this thread. I'd be screwed if somebody accused me of murdering somebody with a wood chipper!
And just think of how much more screwed you would be when they seize your computers, only to find that the drives had been securely wiped!
We need stupid people. Stupid people do what they are told to do by their society. Most of the time, this is what has worked for their ancestors and will still work for them. This provides a surplus upon which all innovation and excellence is based. Without stupid people, you'd have everyone innovating all the time and not doing what works. The problem with innovation is that, much of the time, it fails.
A smart person is going to go with the best way of doing something. A smart person won't just do something different just for the sake of being different, because that's stupid. There is a tried-and-true way, and they understand this, and they'll have no problems using it if they see it as the best solution. Even better, they'll understand the reasons for using it (and not using it) - which puts them at an advantage over the "we've always done it this way" crowd. Sure, the stupid people provide a base for the smart people, but the dumber they are, the harder it is to steer them in the right direction when they start to go astray (for example, take a look at where America seems to be headed).
Besides, dumb people still try to innovate. Haven't you've ever heard any stupid criminal stories?
I think that's why the poster said "semi-dormant". You only have to use the trademark, but it doesn't mean that it has to be used widely. For example, most people think Surge cola is no more, however, Coke still sells it a few select areas - that way they can hold their trademark on the word "Surge", even if you can't buy it.
My mother doesn't even know what the phone number is !!
That would be one way for them to offer service very cheaply for people who only need it for emergencies - don't give them a phone number, and make it an outbound phone only. Of the people I know who doo se cell phones for emergencies, they never have it on unless they are making a call so it's not like they use it for taking calls anyway. It would be a bit annoying for those "I'll have to call you back in five minutes" scenarios, but it would be better than nothing.
Maybe I should be able to play my CDs in my tape player too though?
You can. You put the CD in the CD player, put a tape in the tape recorder, and you record the song directly to a tape. It's not so easy with iTunes, thanks to the DRM.
Because most people don't stay hunched over a relatively small computer screen when they get home. I know many people that work with computers all day and they say "When I get home, the LAST thing I want to do, is get in front of a computer."
You could always tell them "You've stared at a screen all day at work, and now you want to stare at a screen all evening?". I kind of think this is strange, as I don't see work "using the computer" the same as "home using the computer". They may both be computers, but they are set up completely different and I use them for (mostly) different things.
Along the same lines, Hypersonic PC also sells dual HDD/RAID laptops. They are large, and the battery life is short, but it might be just what you need.
On the other hand, given that a CF card is smaller than a laptop harddrive, and many laptop PATA controllers seem fully functional in the sense that they'll support both a master and slave drive, I wonder if you could hack two CF cards to fit into a regular laptop where the harddrive would usually fit, and then use software raid? (though I imagine you would lose a lot of the speed benefits doing that)
MTTF is not MTBF. In the world of metrics, they're different. While they both measure failures, time to fail and time between failures are different measurements for a reason, they tell us different things about the product we're testing.
They are essentially the same for many pieces of computer hardware, since things like a disk drive or a flash chip generally aren't repaired when they fail. Which means that the MTTF is the same as the MTBF, as the first failure is the only failure of the device, as it is then replaced.
Why not RAID0 two 8GB compact flash cards? You would end up with 16GB of fast flash storage with a convienent interface, and I don't think it would be any less reliable than a single mechanical HDD.
For that reason alone, recycling is a lie. And I happen to live within 20 miles of a large landfill site. It's very clean, well managed, and no danger whatsoever to the environment.
Stuff that used to go there is now winding up rotting on the surface being picked over by poor people, go on, tell me that's good for the environment.
That's not recycling at all, that's just finding another place to dump the garbage. Though you did touch upon another reason for recycling that people tend to forget - that is, to keep toxins out of the ground water. Even though it costs money to recycle things like electronics vs. simply dumping them, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be recycling them.
Liberalism simply removes that choice from you in favor of whatever THEIR notion is of the greater good, and if you disagree, well that is just too damn bad.
In a democratic republic (which is what the US considers itself), assuming that it works correctly, there would still be a choice. That's because you would also be electing the people who decides how the money gets spent. In a direct democracy, you would (in theory atleast) be voting directly on things like spending bills. I don't think that the direct approach, which it sounds like you favor, would work well. A lot of less visibile things, (say, maintance on locks and dams system in our waterways and rivers) would not be funded well, as people wouldn't realize how important they are.
I wouldn't mind paying higher local (city/county/state) taxes so much, in the sense that I would feel that I have a voice in how it is spent, and I would be able to see the results of my tax money getting spent on local projects and services, even if I disagreed with some of it. However, the US federal government is just too big and powerful, people don't feel represented, they don't feel that their money is being distributed well, and that's why they resent paying the taxes - they don't feel they have a choice in the matter.