I know quite a few people who bought a laptop because they thought they needed the portability - only to have the laptop sit in the same place on their desk ever since. My guess is that many of those people are now upgrading and buying cheaper/faster desktops as replacements.
You've been running windows for 8 years with no anti-virus software and you've not gotten a virus in that time? Yeah, nice story but slightly unbelievable.
I've run Windows for a long time with virus protection, and the last virus I caught I got from a floppy disk, and I ended up having to kiss my Windows 3.1 install goodbye. It's not that hard to keep malware off of Windows - don't use IE and Outlook, use a firewall (software and/or hardware), keep up with the patches, and mostly importanty use your common sense.
Yeah, because heatsinks coming unlatched all by themselves and falling off has been shown to be a common occurence.
The first Athlon's had no protection whatsoever. Sure, the heatsink coming off would produce smoke, but something as simple as the CPU fan dying would cause the CPU to slowly cook itself to death. My Athlon system was like that, and as a result I was a little leery about leaving it running unattended. Later, due to the crappiness of the Via chipset, I replaced the motherboard with one of the later ones with the thermal protection built into the motherboard. This protection would protect against something like a dead fan, but supposedly isn't quick enough to kill the power if a heatsink falls off so you can still get smoke.
I don't know what the newer Athlon 64's do, but I suspect that AMD learned their lesson.
So in conclusion, your "equilivent" PC contains atleast four pieces of pricy Apple hardware, a pro level video card, a stick of laptop memory(???), and a PCI sound card to compete with Apple's integrated sound, and you wonder why it is more expensive than the iMac? I could build a pretty decent little system around the AMD Athlon X2 3800 for quite a bit less.
Not even the Power Mac has room for mulitple optical drives and a bunch of harddrives either. Well, unless you want to chain them all off of USB/Firewire. You want a PC for that kind of thing.
I don't know if you would blame the slashdotters so much. We know a lot about computers, and we are the ones who know how to keep older hardware going. We are the ones that know how to take a 5 year old PIII system and set it up for family members and or a friend. We are the ones that know how to pop in a quick memory upgrade to squeeze a bit more life out of that PII system. We are the ones that can troubleshoot that misbehaving out-of-warrenty computer and repair it instead of replacing it. We are the ones that are more likely to keep that older PC around to dabble in other OSes rather than dumpstering it as soon as it is percieved to be "obsolete".
The ones I would blame would be large corporations and schools, which seem to like to upgrade just for the sake of it. I see lots of companies right now replacing PIII and lower end P4 systems that do nothing other than office, email, internet browsing, and solitiare with brand spanking new machines that offer nothing over the older systems. That, and the tons of home users out there that don't know any better than to replace their computer when something goes wrong with the old one.
The solution would not be an auction like eBay, but more of a silent auction. You would tell the auctioneer what domain name you want, and how much you are willing to pay for it. You would not be told who else (if anyone) has put in a bid for the domain name, nor would there be any way to find out what domain names people are bidding on. At the end of the auction, the highest bidder wins. In cases where there was only one bid for a domain, then the bidder gets the domain name for the minimum price.
So for your example, you would put in a bid for pinkfluffybunny.eu, for say, $15. Domain Squatters Inc would not know anyone had put any interest in pinkfluffybunny.eu, nor would they likely choose that domain name to squat on when they could go after ones like bukkake.eu. Since no else is likely to want pinkfluffybunny.eu, you would get it for about $8. The only problem I see is that megacorps would complain about having to outbid everyone else and having to pay through the nose to get at domains that they feel are "rightfully theirs" like microsoft.eu, sony.eu, etc. You would also have to make in clear that the bid is a contract, so you don't have Domain Spuatters Inc. bidding on many domain names, only to back out of the ones that no one else showed interest in.
The problem with anti-virus software is that it is 100% reactionary. The anti-virus companies don't release updates for viruses that they haven't seen yet.
I have seen anti-virus software that does things like monitor the partition table, important system files, the boot sector, and stuff like that in an attempt to keep viruses from messing with them. Granted, it's not perfect, but keeping watch over things that viruses might try to attack or modify is a proactive move.
Or some more modern examples of harder to work on Macs include the most of the iMacs (the earlier G5's being an exception), and the Mac Mini. A non-computer example is also the iPod, which needs to be pried open to change the battery.
Well, never underestimate the stupidity of some theives. At my old school, a couple of guys walked into a lesser used computer lab in broad daylight with some maintance-looking clothes, disconnected a couple of computers, and walked out with them. No one paid them any attention, and thus the police and security didn't have a good description of the criminals to go off of. It took a lot of guts, but they probably would have gotten away with it - if they weren't stupid enough to plug the computers into the ethernet jacks in the dorms.
Re:At last: small systems hardware for WinXP users
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
I've been eyeing Mac Minis since they were introduced, wondering just why the hell some PC builder didn't sell something similar.
Actually, AOpen does sell something simular to the Mini. And by simular, I mean almost identical looking.
The danger is that will set up a dual boot machine, and end up spending most of their time in Windows for whatever reason. Then, the next time they are ready to buy a computer, they'll opt for a cheaper Windows PC over the Mac.
The only explaination that I can think of is that Microsoft is entering the digital whiteboard market with their own product next year. Remember, you heard it from me first!
Of course, then there is the other side. When I took Spanish in Jr. High, the students from Mexico almost always did the worst in class! I always thought it was a little weird, especially since it was basic Spanish.
Probably for the same reason that my Spanish teacher in high school gave lectures in English about the English language in Spanish class more than once. How was she supposed to teach us what a past participle was in Spanish if we didn't know what one was in English? (the fact that you can be fluent in English and not know what a past participle actually is seems mostly irrelevant to the people who design high school language programs).
Strikes me as a safety feature. That way Windows viruses and spyware can't touch the Mac partition.
Not really. It's unlikely that a virus or spyware could read from the OSX partition or put files on it, but there isn't any protection from malware simply blowing the whole partition away or corrupting it beyond repair.
Valid point, but not against Explorer, Explorer often totally locks up for minutes at a time for stupid shit like not being able to find some network share or something. It just doesn't have a beachball, but the problem is really the locking up, not the beach ball itself. (To it's no-credit, Finder doesn't do much better with network shares.)
In Tools, Folder options, you can select "Launch Explorer Windows in a Seperate Process". I think this is XP only but it may exist in Windows 2000. While this really doesn't fix the problem, it does stop one non-responsive Explorer window from affecting the whole operating system, as regularly seen in Windows 95/98. I really don't know why isn't set to default as enabled, as the only real reason not to enable it would be a very low memory system. But then again, I don't understand many of the default settings in XP.
My theory is that Apple secretly helped fund that contest. It would have been incredibly cheap R&D and they'd have nothing to lose. In the meantime they could have been working on the installer, bootloader, and partitioner on the off chance someone got it to work. Then they cut a deal with Microsoft to make it all legal and boom-instant stock price increase.
Or possibly they've had it for a long time, and have sat on it until now? They had OSX running on Intel machines for years before anyone outside of Apple had any idea.
Microsoft has consistently sacrificed technological relevance and actual innovation on the altar of backwards compatibility purely for the sake of maintaining a monopoly position.
Feel free to continue getting teabagged by Redmond if you like, but don't get sand in your gigantic asshole just because some of us think there are better ways to spend our money.
Nice try, though.
And you completely dodged the question: What is wrong with the BIOS? And no, the fact that 1980's computers also had a BIOS is not an answer. The BIOS on any of my computers doesn't in any way stop from doing what I want to do. In my eyes, getting rid of the BIOS is just screwing with things for the sake of it. Why fix something if it isn't broken?
Slashdot Mirror
Your point?
Yes, but India's president wasn't elected by Americans.
I know quite a few people who bought a laptop because they thought they needed the portability - only to have the laptop sit in the same place on their desk ever since. My guess is that many of those people are now upgrading and buying cheaper/faster desktops as replacements.
If Best Buy goes out of business, I don't think many people here would be shedding tears.
Duh. What do you expect?
I dunno, what is that line I'm always hearing from the Apple fanboys again? Something to do with only having to support a limited set of hardware...
You would think with only having to support three different Mactel models, that it would Just Work(tm).
It's not, no 3d excludes ones computer from being useful for a number of applications.
And there is a good number of people who do not need 3D for what they need to do, or atleast for what they need to do in Windows.
You've been running windows for 8 years with no anti-virus software and you've not gotten a virus in that time? Yeah, nice story but slightly unbelievable.
I've run Windows for a long time with virus protection, and the last virus I caught I got from a floppy disk, and I ended up having to kiss my Windows 3.1 install goodbye. It's not that hard to keep malware off of Windows - don't use IE and Outlook, use a firewall (software and/or hardware), keep up with the patches, and mostly importanty use your common sense.
Yeah, because heatsinks coming unlatched all by themselves and falling off has been shown to be a common occurence.
The first Athlon's had no protection whatsoever. Sure, the heatsink coming off would produce smoke, but something as simple as the CPU fan dying would cause the CPU to slowly cook itself to death. My Athlon system was like that, and as a result I was a little leery about leaving it running unattended. Later, due to the crappiness of the Via chipset, I replaced the motherboard with one of the later ones with the thermal protection built into the motherboard. This protection would protect against something like a dead fan, but supposedly isn't quick enough to kill the power if a heatsink falls off so you can still get smoke.
I don't know what the newer Athlon 64's do, but I suspect that AMD learned their lesson.
So in conclusion, your "equilivent" PC contains atleast four pieces of pricy Apple hardware, a pro level video card, a stick of laptop memory(???), and a PCI sound card to compete with Apple's integrated sound, and you wonder why it is more expensive than the iMac? I could build a pretty decent little system around the AMD Athlon X2 3800 for quite a bit less.
Not even the Power Mac has room for mulitple optical drives and a bunch of harddrives either. Well, unless you want to chain them all off of USB/Firewire. You want a PC for that kind of thing.
I don't know if you would blame the slashdotters so much. We know a lot about computers, and we are the ones who know how to keep older hardware going. We are the ones that know how to take a 5 year old PIII system and set it up for family members and or a friend. We are the ones that know how to pop in a quick memory upgrade to squeeze a bit more life out of that PII system. We are the ones that can troubleshoot that misbehaving out-of-warrenty computer and repair it instead of replacing it. We are the ones that are more likely to keep that older PC around to dabble in other OSes rather than dumpstering it as soon as it is percieved to be "obsolete".
The ones I would blame would be large corporations and schools, which seem to like to upgrade just for the sake of it. I see lots of companies right now replacing PIII and lower end P4 systems that do nothing other than office, email, internet browsing, and solitiare with brand spanking new machines that offer nothing over the older systems. That, and the tons of home users out there that don't know any better than to replace their computer when something goes wrong with the old one.
What's the problem?
The problem is that the people taking apart the trash don't have any idea that what they are doing is toxic to both them and their community.
United Domains of Starnberg, Germany, e.g. is using plant names ( peach-europe Ltd ).
Looking at the list, it looks like they were atleast smart enough to stay away from apple-europe Ltd.
The solution would not be an auction like eBay, but more of a silent auction. You would tell the auctioneer what domain name you want, and how much you are willing to pay for it. You would not be told who else (if anyone) has put in a bid for the domain name, nor would there be any way to find out what domain names people are bidding on. At the end of the auction, the highest bidder wins. In cases where there was only one bid for a domain, then the bidder gets the domain name for the minimum price.
So for your example, you would put in a bid for pinkfluffybunny.eu, for say, $15. Domain Squatters Inc would not know anyone had put any interest in pinkfluffybunny.eu, nor would they likely choose that domain name to squat on when they could go after ones like bukkake.eu. Since no else is likely to want pinkfluffybunny.eu, you would get it for about $8. The only problem I see is that megacorps would complain about having to outbid everyone else and having to pay through the nose to get at domains that they feel are "rightfully theirs" like microsoft.eu, sony.eu, etc. You would also have to make in clear that the bid is a contract, so you don't have Domain Spuatters Inc. bidding on many domain names, only to back out of the ones that no one else showed interest in.
The problem with anti-virus software is that it is 100% reactionary. The anti-virus companies don't release updates for viruses that they haven't seen yet.
I have seen anti-virus software that does things like monitor the partition table, important system files, the boot sector, and stuff like that in an attempt to keep viruses from messing with them. Granted, it's not perfect, but keeping watch over things that viruses might try to attack or modify is a proactive move.
Or some more modern examples of harder to work on Macs include the most of the iMacs (the earlier G5's being an exception), and the Mac Mini. A non-computer example is also the iPod, which needs to be pried open to change the battery.
Well, never underestimate the stupidity of some theives. At my old school, a couple of guys walked into a lesser used computer lab in broad daylight with some maintance-looking clothes, disconnected a couple of computers, and walked out with them. No one paid them any attention, and thus the police and security didn't have a good description of the criminals to go off of. It took a lot of guts, but they probably would have gotten away with it - if they weren't stupid enough to plug the computers into the ethernet jacks in the dorms.
I've been eyeing Mac Minis since they were introduced, wondering just why the hell some PC builder didn't sell something similar.
Actually, AOpen does sell something simular to the Mini. And by simular, I mean almost identical looking.
Check it out here.
The danger is that will set up a dual boot machine, and end up spending most of their time in Windows for whatever reason. Then, the next time they are ready to buy a computer, they'll opt for a cheaper Windows PC over the Mac.
The only explaination that I can think of is that Microsoft is entering the digital whiteboard market with their own product next year. Remember, you heard it from me first!
What a waste of all the millions of fine engineering man-hours spent at AMD and Intel...
But think of all the disk space saved!
Of course, then there is the other side. When I took Spanish in Jr. High, the students from Mexico almost always did the worst in class! I always thought it was a little weird, especially since it was basic Spanish.
Probably for the same reason that my Spanish teacher in high school gave lectures in English about the English language in Spanish class more than once. How was she supposed to teach us what a past participle was in Spanish if we didn't know what one was in English? (the fact that you can be fluent in English and not know what a past participle actually is seems mostly irrelevant to the people who design high school language programs).
Strikes me as a safety feature. That way Windows viruses and spyware can't touch the Mac partition.
Not really. It's unlikely that a virus or spyware could read from the OSX partition or put files on it, but there isn't any protection from malware simply blowing the whole partition away or corrupting it beyond repair.
Valid point, but not against Explorer, Explorer often totally locks up for minutes at a time for stupid shit like not being able to find some network share or something. It just doesn't have a beachball, but the problem is really the locking up, not the beach ball itself. (To it's no-credit, Finder doesn't do much better with network shares.)
In Tools, Folder options, you can select "Launch Explorer Windows in a Seperate Process". I think this is XP only but it may exist in Windows 2000. While this really doesn't fix the problem, it does stop one non-responsive Explorer window from affecting the whole operating system, as regularly seen in Windows 95/98. I really don't know why isn't set to default as enabled, as the only real reason not to enable it would be a very low memory system. But then again, I don't understand many of the default settings in XP.
My theory is that Apple secretly helped fund that contest. It would have been incredibly cheap R&D and they'd have nothing to lose. In the meantime they could have been working on the installer, bootloader, and partitioner on the off chance someone got it to work. Then they cut a deal with Microsoft to make it all legal and boom-instant stock price increase.
Or possibly they've had it for a long time, and have sat on it until now? They had OSX running on Intel machines for years before anyone outside of Apple had any idea.
Microsoft has consistently sacrificed technological relevance and actual innovation on the altar of backwards compatibility purely for the sake of maintaining a monopoly position.
Feel free to continue getting teabagged by Redmond if you like, but don't get sand in your gigantic asshole just because some of us think there are better ways to spend our money.
Nice try, though.
And you completely dodged the question: What is wrong with the BIOS? And no, the fact that 1980's computers also had a BIOS is not an answer. The BIOS on any of my computers doesn't in any way stop from doing what I want to do. In my eyes, getting rid of the BIOS is just screwing with things for the sake of it. Why fix something if it isn't broken?