Bandwidth is the size of the pipe. No one is advertising unlimited bandwidth, because there is no such thing as an infinite speed modem. They don't really advertise unlimited data transfer either, because the maximum data transfer would be the (speed of the modem)*(length of the billing period). What they do advertise is that you have unlimited access to the pipe, in the sense that it is always on at the speed you paid for, and you can send stuff accross it 24/7. However, ISPs are running into trouble since they oversold the lines on the assumptions that most people would not use their high speed connecion to transfer huge amounts of data - so that's why they are trying to back down from the unlimited access claims.
I guess it depends on what metric you want to use to measure speed. I've been using Opera for quite a while, and what really annoys me about just every other browser is how they like to redraw/reload the page when you use the back and forward buttons. Opera doesn't do that - rather the back and forward buttons are instant because Opera has the rendered page still in memory. Because of this, Opera overall seems a lot faster to me than the other browsers, despite the fact that is a bit slower to load, and it really isn't any faster when it comes to rendering pages.
Apple has released 4 distinct versions of OS X, Microsoft has released 1, and it looks like the next one is going to be another year still. Apple keeping up with Microsoft? What a joke.
Actually, by my count, Apple has released 5 distinct versions of OSX. That would be 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. You can even make the arguement that 10.4 PPC and 10.4 Intel should be counted seperately, making it 6.
On the other hand, I count exactly 0 releases of OSX by Microsoft.
It's not that hard if you know what you're doing and most importantly, use your common sense. I can't make the claim that the parent did, as I did get a virus from a floppy disk back when Windows 3.1 was all the rage, but I can say I have managed 10 years without anything nastier than a tracking cookie on my Windows boxes.
Yes. Europeans have far more freedom of speech and other liberties than Americans.
I wouldn't count on that. The UK seems to be more and more like Orwell's 1984 everyday. CCTV cameras everywhere, national ID cards, a system to track vehicles, etc.
I would rig it to go off when the radio is hooked back up to power. That way, you don't have to worry about the battery dying, plus you have a chance of damaging the nitwit's car.
It's not like you have to constantly muck around with the thing if I do it right. My built PCs usually require a good part of a day to assemble and muck around with to get running - then they usually Just Work for a long time. Probably the number one reason I end up having to muck around with them after the initial build is that I don't follow the rule 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' (hey I like to tinker), then followed by when I upgrade something which sometimes doesn't go smoothly. To me, the money saved is well worth the extara amount of time I have to spend getting it running.
Maybe the Mac Mini is cheap enough to qualify as cheap and disposable, but the rest of Apple's line up is certainly not that cheap unless you've got a lot of money to burn.
Actually, back then you could see a 20% difference. I could easily tell the difference between a 486/25 and a 486/33 by how fast it listed the files when doing a DIR command, all other things being equal. But now give me a 2500Mhz system and a 3300Mhz system and I would hard pressed to tell them apart without resorting to benchmarks of some kind.
Of course, just because I could tell a difference didn't mean I immediately upgraded my hardware.
In the 90's and maybe even the early 00's you could build your own machine cheaper, but I no longer believe this to be true. Lately I've found that it would cost me about the same amount of $$ to build a PC versus buying one from Dell. Especially when you're bundling monitors and such, there is no possible way to save hundreds of dollars rolling your own, sorry.
It's pretty much true that you can take any random Dell, and so long as it isn't a high end machine, the comprable machine built out of components is going to cost about the same or more. If it's a low end machine, you aren't even going to get close to matching Dell. On the other hand, when I build a machine that does what I want it to do, I find that the Dell that will allow me to do the same thing costs a bit more - usually due to me having to buy stuff I don't want or need just to get the stuff I do want. For example, you actually have to move quite a bit up Dell's line up to get a computer that uses a DVI connection to the included monitor, whereas DVI out on a computer I build would only add $0-$40* to the cost.
It was ridiculous at the time he said it too. Apple had $6 billion in cash on the books at the time. Only Mac haters thought it was +5 Insightful.
With all that cash in the bank, that's all the more reason to cash out rather than piss all that money away on some failed business venture. Apple is actually pretty lucky to be around today. If everyone else had thought that the original iMac was as ridiculous as I thought it was, it probably would of been the end of the line for the Macintosh.
Was it the chip itself, or something else? I've seen many dead Socket A boards (most were not even overclocked), but no problem with the chips themselves. Not to mention quite a few problems with power supplies too.
...PCs today still ship with floppy drives. I know people who will tell me, with a straight face no less, that there are times that having a 3.5 floppy drive is handy.
Maybe because they DO come in handy every once and a while? Though I do admit, I very rarely use the floppy drive on my home machine.
What games have you been playing that chose 6 CD over DVD in a platform that would support either?
I think he's refering to PC games. For some reason, it seems that game makers prefer to send games as a stack of CDs rather than a DVD, despite the fact that a DVD drive has been pretty much standard equipment on any computer that someone would buy to play games on for atleast a couple of years. I'm not sure why they do this, but due to the harddrive in the PC you usually don't have to swap disks that much.
Maybe, or just put the video card behind the display screen, and have a firewire connection to the computer.
Have you looked at the specs for PCI-Express and AGP? The bandwidth between the video card and the rest of the computer is measured in GB/s. Firewire isn't nearly that fast. Even Firewire 800 would have trouble keeping up with an old PCI video card (at 133MB/s IIRC). Sure you might get away with it for Powerpoint at 42", but games would unplayable. Video would be impossible unless you did all the decoding on the video card itself.
This is just an engineering tradeoff, it wasn't an accident or a mistake.
The laptop still has to dissipate the same amount of heat regardless of how you apply the thermal grease. By keeping the heat in the chip, you'll be able to keep the fans from kicking in right away when you turn it on, but eventually after things have had time to stabalize it's still got to dissipate the same amount of heat somehow - there is simply no way around it. So unless you really think that Apple intentionally wanted to use the entire metal shell as an inefficient heatsink while dramatically shortening the life of the components in the laptop, this is certainly an accident*.
*Then again, Apple does have a history of making sacrafices that caused their computers to run hot (G4 Cube, Apple III, fanless iMacs that had to continiously run their CRTs to stay cool via convection) so who knows.
2.) all other vendors are worse in all categories, if you accept Consumer Reports' rating processes.
That's not true. I was just looking at the latest Consumer Reports, and while for desktops Apple computers were ranked as needing service the least, on the laptop front they were in the middle of the pack.
Right now we are in the beginning of the 2007 educational purchasing season. This is when school districts/universities/etc all over the U.S. are putting together their orders for the next school year. Getting the MacBook to market as soon as possible is extremely important to Apple's bottom line.
Why? How many schools buy Mac laptops? How many of them buy them in any kind of sizable quanitity? I can see trying to push a new iMac/Mini/eMac out of the door, but this arguement really doesn't make sense to me in terms of laptops.
You can get away without Windows update for quite some time, depending on what the machine does. A server can ignore the updates for holes in IE, and stuff like that because no one should be using the computer to browse the internet or check their email. A computer that is firewalled doesn't have to worry so much about remote exploits and worms. If your computer doesn't crash, it probably doesn't need the general bug fix ones that bad either. A computer that isn't on a network at all probably never needs to run Windows update.
And for the record, I have a Windows XP machine with 121 days of uptime and counting.
Anyone who has paid any attention to the news from the Middle East the last couple of years would know that they exist, as I'm sure the videos of various terror groups beheading their prisoners would certainly qualify as a snuff film.
Since you've clearly thought this "large-vehicle" tax out completely, what is your solution for people, like me, who are 6'6" tall? Under your propsal, I would pay nearly a 2x penalty for being tall, since the only truly comfortable vehicle for me is an SUV or large-ish vehicle, and most likely not going to get 25 mpg+.
I'm 6'5" and I have found you can't judge how well you are going to fit into a car just by what type of vehicle it is. There are plenty of compacts I'm quite comfortable in, as well as a good number of trucks and SUVs that I find cramped. The only way to really know is to look around some, and try getting into a few vehicles.
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Bandwidth is the size of the pipe. No one is advertising unlimited bandwidth, because there is no such thing as an infinite speed modem. They don't really advertise unlimited data transfer either, because the maximum data transfer would be the (speed of the modem)*(length of the billing period). What they do advertise is that you have unlimited access to the pipe, in the sense that it is always on at the speed you paid for, and you can send stuff accross it 24/7. However, ISPs are running into trouble since they oversold the lines on the assumptions that most people would not use their high speed connecion to transfer huge amounts of data - so that's why they are trying to back down from the unlimited access claims.
I guess it depends on what metric you want to use to measure speed. I've been using Opera for quite a while, and what really annoys me about just every other browser is how they like to redraw/reload the page when you use the back and forward buttons. Opera doesn't do that - rather the back and forward buttons are instant because Opera has the rendered page still in memory. Because of this, Opera overall seems a lot faster to me than the other browsers, despite the fact that is a bit slower to load, and it really isn't any faster when it comes to rendering pages.
Apple has released 4 distinct versions of OS X, Microsoft has released 1, and it looks like the next one is going to be another year still. Apple keeping up with Microsoft? What a joke.
Actually, by my count, Apple has released 5 distinct versions of OSX. That would be 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. You can even make the arguement that 10.4 PPC and 10.4 Intel should be counted seperately, making it 6.
On the other hand, I count exactly 0 releases of OSX by Microsoft.
It's not that hard if you know what you're doing and most importantly, use your common sense. I can't make the claim that the parent did, as I did get a virus from a floppy disk back when Windows 3.1 was all the rage, but I can say I have managed 10 years without anything nastier than a tracking cookie on my Windows boxes.
Yes. Europeans have far more freedom of speech and other liberties than Americans.
I wouldn't count on that. The UK seems to be more and more like Orwell's 1984 everyday. CCTV cameras everywhere, national ID cards, a system to track vehicles, etc.
I would rig it to go off when the radio is hooked back up to power. That way, you don't have to worry about the battery dying, plus you have a chance of damaging the nitwit's car.
It's not like you have to constantly muck around with the thing if I do it right. My built PCs usually require a good part of a day to assemble and muck around with to get running - then they usually Just Work for a long time. Probably the number one reason I end up having to muck around with them after the initial build is that I don't follow the rule 'If it ain't broke don't fix it' (hey I like to tinker), then followed by when I upgrade something which sometimes doesn't go smoothly. To me, the money saved is well worth the extara amount of time I have to spend getting it running.
You don't have to worry about the CPU overheating and frying the motherboard.
Unless you buy a Macbook Pro, of course.
Computers are cheap and disposable.
Maybe the Mac Mini is cheap enough to qualify as cheap and disposable, but the rest of Apple's line up is certainly not that cheap unless you've got a lot of money to burn.
Actually, back then you could see a 20% difference. I could easily tell the difference between a 486/25 and a 486/33 by how fast it listed the files when doing a DIR command, all other things being equal. But now give me a 2500Mhz system and a 3300Mhz system and I would hard pressed to tell them apart without resorting to benchmarks of some kind.
Of course, just because I could tell a difference didn't mean I immediately upgraded my hardware.
In the 90's and maybe even the early 00's you could build your own machine cheaper, but I no longer believe this to be true. Lately I've found that it would cost me about the same amount of $$ to build a PC versus buying one from Dell. Especially when you're bundling monitors and such, there is no possible way to save hundreds of dollars rolling your own, sorry.
It's pretty much true that you can take any random Dell, and so long as it isn't a high end machine, the comprable machine built out of components is going to cost about the same or more. If it's a low end machine, you aren't even going to get close to matching Dell. On the other hand, when I build a machine that does what I want it to do, I find that the Dell that will allow me to do the same thing costs a bit more - usually due to me having to buy stuff I don't want or need just to get the stuff I do want. For example, you actually have to move quite a bit up Dell's line up to get a computer that uses a DVI connection to the included monitor, whereas DVI out on a computer I build would only add $0-$40* to the cost.
It was ridiculous at the time he said it too. Apple had $6 billion in cash on the books at the time. Only Mac haters thought it was +5 Insightful.
With all that cash in the bank, that's all the more reason to cash out rather than piss all that money away on some failed business venture. Apple is actually pretty lucky to be around today. If everyone else had thought that the original iMac was as ridiculous as I thought it was, it probably would of been the end of the line for the Macintosh.
Was it the chip itself, or something else? I've seen many dead Socket A boards (most were not even overclocked), but no problem with the chips themselves. Not to mention quite a few problems with power supplies too.
...PCs today still ship with floppy drives. I know people who will tell me, with a straight face no less, that there are times that having a 3.5 floppy drive is handy.
Maybe because they DO come in handy every once and a while? Though I do admit, I very rarely use the floppy drive on my home machine.
What games have you been playing that chose 6 CD over DVD in a platform that would support either?
I think he's refering to PC games. For some reason, it seems that game makers prefer to send games as a stack of CDs rather than a DVD, despite the fact that a DVD drive has been pretty much standard equipment on any computer that someone would buy to play games on for atleast a couple of years. I'm not sure why they do this, but due to the harddrive in the PC you usually don't have to swap disks that much.
Maybe, or just put the video card behind the display screen, and have a firewire connection to the computer.
Have you looked at the specs for PCI-Express and AGP? The bandwidth between the video card and the rest of the computer is measured in GB/s. Firewire isn't nearly that fast. Even Firewire 800 would have trouble keeping up with an old PCI video card (at 133MB/s IIRC). Sure you might get away with it for Powerpoint at 42", but games would unplayable. Video would be impossible unless you did all the decoding on the video card itself.
This is just an engineering tradeoff, it wasn't an accident or a mistake.
The laptop still has to dissipate the same amount of heat regardless of how you apply the thermal grease. By keeping the heat in the chip, you'll be able to keep the fans from kicking in right away when you turn it on, but eventually after things have had time to stabalize it's still got to dissipate the same amount of heat somehow - there is simply no way around it. So unless you really think that Apple intentionally wanted to use the entire metal shell as an inefficient heatsink while dramatically shortening the life of the components in the laptop, this is certainly an accident*.
*Then again, Apple does have a history of making sacrafices that caused their computers to run hot (G4 Cube, Apple III, fanless iMacs that had to continiously run their CRTs to stay cool via convection) so who knows.
2.) all other vendors are worse in all categories, if you accept Consumer Reports' rating processes.
That's not true. I was just looking at the latest Consumer Reports, and while for desktops Apple computers were ranked as needing service the least, on the laptop front they were in the middle of the pack.
It's called control clicking on a Mac and it's almost as fast as using a two button mouse.
Which is purely a software feature in OSX, and nothing more. Control clicking in Windows XP is NOT the same as right clicking.
And then there are the normal people: "Oh that thing? That's just my computer."
Right now we are in the beginning of the 2007 educational purchasing season. This is when school districts/universities/etc all over the U.S. are putting together their orders for the next school year. Getting the MacBook to market as soon as possible is extremely important to Apple's bottom line.
Why? How many schools buy Mac laptops? How many of them buy them in any kind of sizable quanitity? I can see trying to push a new iMac/Mini/eMac out of the door, but this arguement really doesn't make sense to me in terms of laptops.
If you want to game, buy a Dell.
You're joking, right?
You don't do Windows Update very often, do you?
You can get away without Windows update for quite some time, depending on what the machine does. A server can ignore the updates for holes in IE, and stuff like that because no one should be using the computer to browse the internet or check their email. A computer that is firewalled doesn't have to worry so much about remote exploits and worms. If your computer doesn't crash, it probably doesn't need the general bug fix ones that bad either. A computer that isn't on a network at all probably never needs to run Windows update.
And for the record, I have a Windows XP machine with 121 days of uptime and counting.
Anyone who has paid any attention to the news from the Middle East the last couple of years would know that they exist, as I'm sure the videos of various terror groups beheading their prisoners would certainly qualify as a snuff film.
Since you've clearly thought this "large-vehicle" tax out completely, what is your solution for people, like me, who are 6'6" tall? Under your propsal, I would pay nearly a 2x penalty for being tall, since the only truly comfortable vehicle for me is an SUV or large-ish vehicle, and most likely not going to get 25 mpg+.
I'm 6'5" and I have found you can't judge how well you are going to fit into a car just by what type of vehicle it is. There are plenty of compacts I'm quite comfortable in, as well as a good number of trucks and SUVs that I find cramped. The only way to really know is to look around some, and try getting into a few vehicles.