so when Apple switched to unix, they instantly became the #1 desktop unix brand. You're swapping cause and effect.
Hardly instantly. I seem to remember the uptake on OSX was pretty slow, with a good portion of the Mac user base sticking to OS9 until 10.2 came out. Heck, I bet there is still a sizable chunk of classic Macs out there.
You know, I wonder(and we will see) if HD-DVD might win by default if the so called rom-mark has issues.
I wonder if both Blu-ray and HD-DVD are destined to fail. For many people, DVD quality is good enough, and the restrictive DRM on both formats is going to be a huge turnoff for even the Joe Sixpacks of the world. If the studios keep producing standard DVDs and price them cheaper than the HD/Blu-ray disks, I would say their fate is sealed for sure.
On a simular note, I've been buying computers/components online for quite a while, but always bought monitors locally. The reason was quite simple: The cost of shipping a big, heavy CRT usually put the local stores ahead in price. But LCD monitors changed this, all the LCDs I have bought, I purchased online. The two LCDs that I advised others to buy this Christmas were ordered online.
As for your survey, no flatscreen TV for me. I really don't have a use for one.
If that isn't potential incentive, I don't know what is.
It could also be a disaster if Mac users find themselves spending a lot of time in Windows. If a lot of Apple customers start dual booting, what incentive is there for companies to port their Windows software over to OSX-86? And if a lot of Mac users find themselves in Windows more, then why pay the Apple tax?
4) having Apple on x86 CPUs can only help vendors deciding to port their software on MacOS X, it lowers the bar not increase it.
I disagree. If Windows will boot on a Mac like so many think it will, and if Wine for OSX really takes off amonst Mac users, a lot of companies aren't going to bother with an OSX-86 version of their software. Especially with OSX-86 having a tiny marketshare for its first couple of years. They'll just tell the Mac users to boot into Windows or run it under emulation. It could very well kill MacOS just like it killed OS/2.
The process to get hardware working on a Mac, in my experience, is far easier and less troublesome. It smees to be far better controlled and thought out. Less ad-hoc.
Of course, on the other hand there are very few Macs out there where you could even install a new video card. You don't have to support all kinds of strange hardware when most of your computers come with everything integrated and very little expandability. I'll take the upgrade woes and inexpensive commodity hardware over a disposable computer appliance.
Unless you NEED to run Autocad or something along those lines, there are very few people anymore who really cannot switch to a Mac.
How about the (atleast) $500 you'll spend switching to the Mac? Not to mention the costs of repurchasing software like Office and Photoshop if you use those sorts of programs.
If you already got a Windows PC, switching to Linux costs next to nothing and there is little risk involved. Switching to Apple is expensive.
Commercial DVD players (PowerDVD, WinDVD, etc) ask the DVD drive to hand over the keys to decrypt the DVD. A drive that respects region encoding will only do this if region encoding on the disk matches that of the drive. OSS DVD players don't do this, they just use DeCSS to decrypt the DVD, bypassing all of that region encoding crap. That's why you can play all your disks just fine in Linux.
It won't affect VLC at all, as well as most (all?) OSS DVD players. The reason is that VLC and other OSS players just use DeCSS to decrypt the DVD and play it. No decryption key needed, no need to bother with that region crap.
It will only affect commercial DVD players like PowerDVD, which rely on the DVD drive to get the keys to decrypt the data off of the DVD disk. In this scenario, if the DVD drive sees that the disk is of a different region, it refuses to hand over the keys to the DVD application and the disk won't play. Older and hacked DVD drives that hand over the keys regardless of the disk's region encoding are the ones that Vista won't work with.
I don't see how getting a Mac will help you either. Apple's iDVD program respects region encoding and DRM just like the Windows equilvents. Sure, you can install VLC on OSX, but you can do that in Windows too (and Linux). If you manage to install Vista on your Mac, it's going to treat the hardware EXACTLY the same as if it was some generic PC. Sure, OSX may work with your RPC1 drive while Vista won't, but Linux will work with your RPC1 drive for sure. And we're still assuming that you can even install Windows on a x86 Mac.
I've found that DVD drives have a lot shorter lifetimes than CD drives. I think it's an alignment thing, I have quite a few DVD drives that long ago stopped being able to reliably read DVD's but are perfectly good CD readers.
I've had very few CD readers fail. Most of the failures were due to extremely heavy use and/or very cheap (Dell OEM) drives.
I don't understand the market for these sort of laptops.
It would of been great in college. All the power of a good desktop, but still have the ability to grab it and take it home on the weekends, or to a LAN party. I had no desire to take a laptop to class on a daily basis (pen and paper is simplier and easier 99% of the time), so I wouldn't of been hauling it around that much.
Though in reality, I would of never been able to afford it in college. I got by with my decent but inexpensive AMD desktop computer I put together myself. I ferried data around on a USB stick, CD's, and eventually I got a USB harddrive.
It's also expensive out here, train tickets often cost as much as plane tickets, unless you want the scenery who wants to spend as much and take 10x as long to get where you're going?
People who don't want to deal with all the hassle and crap you have to put up with just to get onto a commercial airliner nowadays? Though really, I would just drive.
Has anyone even seen any parallel port peripherals in the last 10 years?
10 years ago was the end of 1995. USB did not exist, Firewire did not exist. You would be pretty hard pressed to find a computer or a printer that DID NOT have a parallel port in 1996. The only exception would of been Apple, who were using some propriety connection back then for printers. Until USB became popular (around 1998-1999), there lots of parallel accessories - the Zip drive, some rare external harddrives. Until ethernet, USB, and CD-RWs became ubiquitous on PCs, often the easiest way to move a lot of data between two computers was a direct connection between the parallel ports. And parallel port printers really didn't die out until about 2002-2003. My guess that if you went to Best Buy right now you could find atleast one printer model with a parallel port. Probably several.
Though I would agree - a parallel port on a 2006 laptop is kind of a waste of space though.
Actually Intel never had a 586, iirc Cyrix and maybe AMD did,
AMD had a 586 chip (I think it might of been called 5x86) Anyway, it ran at 133Mhz and was designed for a 486 motherboard. It was the fastest socket 3 chip ever made, and I have heard reports of people successfully running them at 160Mhz and even 200Mhz.
Ahhh, here's an education for you then... Sony CDRW drives are made by... wait for it... Lite-On. Oh, and they are not made to Sony specification or design, they are Lite-On designed and built, with slightly modified firmware to pretend to be a Sony, complete with Sony top sticker and Sony faceplate. I'm not sure how many Sony DVDRW drives are made by Lite-On, but I beleive I have seen at least one laptop Sony DVDRW drive with, oddly enough, a Lite-On sticker on top.
Well, I guess that would explain why I consider Sony and Lite-On to be the best two types of optical drives out there. With Lite-On usually being within a few dollars of the cheapest brand, why get anything else?
You do realise that in reality, most consumers just buy a PC without a Windows licence and just copy it from their neighbour, a colleague or some family member?
You do realize that in the real world, most consumers buy a computer with the Windows preinstalled and just use it? I'm sure in your circle of geek friends, most of them probably run a pirated version of Windows if they run Windows. But remember, the Joe Sixpacks of the world far outnumber the geeks.
Out of curiousity, were you browsing in Internet Explorer or some other browser? I'm half tempted to click on those links in Opera to see what happens, but I don't particularly feel like rebuilding my Windows install at the moment.
I don't believe the GameCube was a failure. It certainly didn't sell as many units as the PS2, but I'm pretty darn sure Nintendo still pulled a profit with the GameCube. They certainly haven't been losing money at the rate Microsoft has with the XBox, that's for sure.
By Windows 95, pretty much all new optical drives were standardized by then. It's certainly true that plenty of 386-486 era computers ran Windows 95 that had older propriety drives, and a few people probably frankenstiened an old CD drive a newer computer back then too. Most propriety drives never had Windows 95 drivers either. Usually you just installed the old DOS drivers into config.sys and autoexec.bat and hoped for the best. By the time Windows 98 came out, we were to the point where most new computers could boot from the CD drive, which was a huge improvement.
You may be thinking of SCSI CD drives. Windows didn't have native support for those. SCSI CD drives are pretty uncommon nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
video internet = Web TV. We already got there. It sucked.
Do you even know what a WebTV is? It's just an internet appliance that uses the TV as a screen. Same old internet, different hardware. That's all.
There is an exception to Rule #1. The original Xbox was nearly universally praised here, if only for its hackability.
At the same time, it was almost universally hated for it's controller.
Probably a better example is Microsoft mice & keyboards. Those are pretty much universally liked, especially the mice.
That's just your workaround for explaining Apple's more elegant solution to the problem...
Just like Expose is Apple's more elegant solution for not having something as basic as a taskbar?
so when Apple switched to unix, they instantly became the #1 desktop unix brand. You're swapping cause and effect.
Hardly instantly. I seem to remember the uptake on OSX was pretty slow, with a good portion of the Mac user base sticking to OS9 until 10.2 came out. Heck, I bet there is still a sizable chunk of classic Macs out there.
...I could fuck up things as often as Micro$oft and still pull in metric tons of money...
Actually, Microsoft has been losing money like crazy with their XBox division.
Of course, you still have a point when it comes to Windows and Office.
You know, I wonder(and we will see) if HD-DVD might win by default if the so called rom-mark has issues.
I wonder if both Blu-ray and HD-DVD are destined to fail. For many people, DVD quality is good enough, and the restrictive DRM on both formats is going to be a huge turnoff for even the Joe Sixpacks of the world. If the studios keep producing standard DVDs and price them cheaper than the HD/Blu-ray disks, I would say their fate is sealed for sure.
It could just be a headphone jack too, being that some people do put music on their PDAs.
On a simular note, I've been buying computers/components online for quite a while, but always bought monitors locally. The reason was quite simple: The cost of shipping a big, heavy CRT usually put the local stores ahead in price. But LCD monitors changed this, all the LCDs I have bought, I purchased online. The two LCDs that I advised others to buy this Christmas were ordered online.
As for your survey, no flatscreen TV for me. I really don't have a use for one.
If that isn't potential incentive, I don't know what is.
It could also be a disaster if Mac users find themselves spending a lot of time in Windows. If a lot of Apple customers start dual booting, what incentive is there for companies to port their Windows software over to OSX-86? And if a lot of Mac users find themselves in Windows more, then why pay the Apple tax?
4) having Apple on x86 CPUs can only help vendors deciding to port their software on MacOS X, it lowers the bar not increase it.
I disagree. If Windows will boot on a Mac like so many think it will, and if Wine for OSX really takes off amonst Mac users, a lot of companies aren't going to bother with an OSX-86 version of their software. Especially with OSX-86 having a tiny marketshare for its first couple of years. They'll just tell the Mac users to boot into Windows or run it under emulation. It could very well kill MacOS just like it killed OS/2.
The process to get hardware working on a Mac, in my experience, is far easier and less troublesome. It smees to be far better controlled and thought out. Less ad-hoc.
Of course, on the other hand there are very few Macs out there where you could even install a new video card. You don't have to support all kinds of strange hardware when most of your computers come with everything integrated and very little expandability. I'll take the upgrade woes and inexpensive commodity hardware over a disposable computer appliance.
Unless you NEED to run Autocad or something along those lines, there are very few people anymore who really cannot switch to a Mac.
How about the (atleast) $500 you'll spend switching to the Mac? Not to mention the costs of repurchasing software like Office and Photoshop if you use those sorts of programs.
If you already got a Windows PC, switching to Linux costs next to nothing and there is little risk involved. Switching to Apple is expensive.
Commercial DVD players (PowerDVD, WinDVD, etc) ask the DVD drive to hand over the keys to decrypt the DVD. A drive that respects region encoding will only do this if region encoding on the disk matches that of the drive. OSS DVD players don't do this, they just use DeCSS to decrypt the DVD, bypassing all of that region encoding crap. That's why you can play all your disks just fine in Linux.
So no, don't throw out your laptop.
It won't affect VLC at all, as well as most (all?) OSS DVD players. The reason is that VLC and other OSS players just use DeCSS to decrypt the DVD and play it. No decryption key needed, no need to bother with that region crap.
It will only affect commercial DVD players like PowerDVD, which rely on the DVD drive to get the keys to decrypt the data off of the DVD disk. In this scenario, if the DVD drive sees that the disk is of a different region, it refuses to hand over the keys to the DVD application and the disk won't play. Older and hacked DVD drives that hand over the keys regardless of the disk's region encoding are the ones that Vista won't work with.
I don't see how getting a Mac will help you either. Apple's iDVD program respects region encoding and DRM just like the Windows equilvents. Sure, you can install VLC on OSX, but you can do that in Windows too (and Linux). If you manage to install Vista on your Mac, it's going to treat the hardware EXACTLY the same as if it was some generic PC. Sure, OSX may work with your RPC1 drive while Vista won't, but Linux will work with your RPC1 drive for sure. And we're still assuming that you can even install Windows on a x86 Mac.
I've found that DVD drives have a lot shorter lifetimes than CD drives. I think it's an alignment thing, I have quite a few DVD drives that long ago stopped being able to reliably read DVD's but are perfectly good CD readers.
I've had very few CD readers fail. Most of the failures were due to extremely heavy use and/or very cheap (Dell OEM) drives.
I don't understand the market for these sort of laptops.
It would of been great in college. All the power of a good desktop, but still have the ability to grab it and take it home on the weekends, or to a LAN party. I had no desire to take a laptop to class on a daily basis (pen and paper is simplier and easier 99% of the time), so I wouldn't of been hauling it around that much.
Though in reality, I would of never been able to afford it in college. I got by with my decent but inexpensive AMD desktop computer I put together myself. I ferried data around on a USB stick, CD's, and eventually I got a USB harddrive.
It's also expensive out here, train tickets often cost as much as plane tickets, unless you want the scenery who wants to spend as much and take 10x as long to get where you're going?
People who don't want to deal with all the hassle and crap you have to put up with just to get onto a commercial airliner nowadays? Though really, I would just drive.
Has anyone even seen any parallel port peripherals in the last 10 years?
10 years ago was the end of 1995. USB did not exist, Firewire did not exist. You would be pretty hard pressed to find a computer or a printer that DID NOT have a parallel port in 1996. The only exception would of been Apple, who were using some propriety connection back then for printers. Until USB became popular (around 1998-1999), there lots of parallel accessories - the Zip drive, some rare external harddrives. Until ethernet, USB, and CD-RWs became ubiquitous on PCs, often the easiest way to move a lot of data between two computers was a direct connection between the parallel ports. And parallel port printers really didn't die out until about 2002-2003. My guess that if you went to Best Buy right now you could find atleast one printer model with a parallel port. Probably several.
Though I would agree - a parallel port on a 2006 laptop is kind of a waste of space though.
Actually Intel never had a 586, iirc Cyrix and maybe AMD did,
AMD had a 586 chip (I think it might of been called 5x86) Anyway, it ran at 133Mhz and was designed for a 486 motherboard. It was the fastest socket 3 chip ever made, and I have heard reports of people successfully running them at 160Mhz and even 200Mhz.
I know Slashdot is all about going with the groupthink, but what is with all these AMD fanboys and their awful wordplay on "Leap Ahead"?
What? Just because we make fun of a marketing slogan makes us AMD fanboys? Maybe we are all just making fun of it because it's just plain stupid?
Ahhh, here's an education for you then... Sony CDRW drives are made by... wait for it... Lite-On. Oh, and they are not made to Sony specification or design, they are Lite-On designed and built, with slightly modified firmware to pretend to be a Sony, complete with Sony top sticker and Sony faceplate. I'm not sure how many Sony DVDRW drives are made by Lite-On, but I beleive I have seen at least one laptop Sony DVDRW drive with, oddly enough, a Lite-On sticker on top.
Well, I guess that would explain why I consider Sony and Lite-On to be the best two types of optical drives out there. With Lite-On usually being within a few dollars of the cheapest brand, why get anything else?
You do realise that in reality, most consumers just buy a PC without a Windows licence and just copy it from their neighbour, a colleague or some family member?
You do realize that in the real world, most consumers buy a computer with the Windows preinstalled and just use it? I'm sure in your circle of geek friends, most of them probably run a pirated version of Windows if they run Windows. But remember, the Joe Sixpacks of the world far outnumber the geeks.
Out of curiousity, were you browsing in Internet Explorer or some other browser? I'm half tempted to click on those links in Opera to see what happens, but I don't particularly feel like rebuilding my Windows install at the moment.
I don't believe the GameCube was a failure. It certainly didn't sell as many units as the PS2, but I'm pretty darn sure Nintendo still pulled a profit with the GameCube. They certainly haven't been losing money at the rate Microsoft has with the XBox, that's for sure.
By Windows 95, pretty much all new optical drives were standardized by then. It's certainly true that plenty of 386-486 era computers ran Windows 95 that had older propriety drives, and a few people probably frankenstiened an old CD drive a newer computer back then too. Most propriety drives never had Windows 95 drivers either. Usually you just installed the old DOS drivers into config.sys and autoexec.bat and hoped for the best. By the time Windows 98 came out, we were to the point where most new computers could boot from the CD drive, which was a huge improvement.
You may be thinking of SCSI CD drives. Windows didn't have native support for those. SCSI CD drives are pretty uncommon nowadays.