Nobody cares. Really. Well, maybe the other 4 people using ogg.
Only when it comes to Apple will people bash an open format over a closed one. Come on, how many other music players can play AAC?
While some people obviously don't care about OGG, other people have a significant investment in it (it terms of time spent ripping all those CDs), and thus OGG playback capabilities becomes important.
No, if I get passed by a Corvette that is anything newer than a mid-60's model, I point and laugh.
Corvettes are really not as well made as their price point suggests. In fact, most people do not buy a Corvette because they have actively researched the performance of the vehicle- they buy them for the prestige of the name.
I'm not saying the guy in the Honda is any better, if anything they both deserve a bit of scorn.
The consumer gets raped when you look at the price of a Corvette vs. what you get for it, though, so they deserve to be laughed at. Repeatedly.
If you take a look at the latest auto issue of Consumer Reports, the Corvette was the *only* American car to get an owner's satisfaction rating of over 80% (the Toyota Prius topped the list at over 90%). This is despite the terrible reliabilty the Corvette has. So Chevy has to be doing something right.
So while you may point and laugh at the iPod users (like I do), it appears that Apple is doing something right.
it's so easy to use that ANYBODY (and I mean anybody - my grandfather included) can just pick up an iPod and get down. That's user-friendly, and that's Apple. Until somebody else comes up with a better idea (and so far, no luck), the iPod is going to continue its dominance.
The iPod's interface, where you move your finger in a circle to scroll - is not intuitive at all. I agree it's pretty cool, and works fairly well once you are used to it. But the first time I picked up an iPod I was confused as hell until someone showed me how to use it.
That's hardly true today. Pretty much all of the heavy hitter software has version for both PC and Mac platforms.
That wasn't true a few years ago. The only reason the Mac is so strong in this market is inertia, or the fact that some of these places haven't upgraded yet (it's not uncommon to see OS9 still in use!). But I suspect that a lot of them are changing over to the PC because they can get more powerful hardware at a cheaper price that can run the same software.
The only good thing I can say IBM Deathstars is that I have never lost any data to them. Always could tell when the drive was about to go, and was able to copy everything off.
On the other hand, Western Digital drives just fail without warning. Stay away from Western Digital, they are useless junk.
Changing the screen resolution in Windows does not require admin privileges.
It depends on how the computer is set up. By default, a Windows user account can do all kinds of mostly harmless stuff like changing the resolution. But I've seen Windows locked down to the point where the user couldn't. I've even had to use Windows that was locked down so hard I couldn't even access the Display Properties window. Which meant, much to my annoyance, that I couldn't even turn off the default Fisher Price Windows XP theme. Ugh.
Windows XP runs ok in 128MB of ram, if it's just the base system and you only run 1-2 applications at a time. But install something like a virus scanner, and the poor machine will start grinding like crazy. That's my experience.
I don't know if it would be a good idea to do that. There is the possibility of the harddrive seizing up or something along those lines if it just sits there for years without being powered up. I would turn on the harddrive every once and a while just to be sure. With that said though, I have quite a few old 1GB and under drives that have been sitting around, some of them for years. So far, whenever I grabbed one for some project, everyone of them has still worked just fine.
Another thought I have is that since computer hardware tends to either fail right away or last a while, it may not be a bad idea to stick potential backup harddrives in a system for a month or so to weed out the bad ones.
That means that you can't use a CDROM drive, since all IDE ports are used, but you can do a network install using either a boot floppy disk or a USB key.
I've done stuff like this. The best thing to do is to get a 5.25" USB 2.0 external drive enclosure, and put the CD/DVD/CD-RW/whatever drive of your choice in it. The enclosure usually only runs about $25-$30. Many computers can boot from USB now, and modern Linux distros have no problems with USB drives. As a bonus, after you are done installing, you can use the drive elsewhere - USB CD drives are almost essential if you have to deal with broken laptops.
On the other hand, if you are building a big RAID array, you can probably deal with a few drives failing. $70 for fourteen 50.1GB drives is a hell of a deal, though if I was him I'd try to get a few more of them so he can deal with failures when they crop up.
Buy Seagate. Some people swear by them, others think they are OK. But I don't know anyone who hates them. (...now watch all the Seagate haters come out of the woodwork)
I've also had good luck with Samsung, though I believe their biggest drive is only 160GB.
Hypersonic PC sells laptops with multiple harddrives. I know someone who has one of the models that has a Pentium 4. You can run them as either RAID 0 or RAID 1, and I believe JBOD. Granted, the laptops are huge, but you atleast get a numeric keypad on them, unlike most other large laptops where they just waste all the space by using the same crappy, limited keyboard as the smaller models.
What will happen is Apple will put these drives into computers, and stop using HDDs. They will cost more and have issues, and generally piss people off. A few years later when the technology is more mature and competitive, the PC manufacturers will start using them. A few years after that when they are pretty much universal, people will hail Apple for being so "innovative" by using them before everyone else.
Damn small Linux fits really nicely on my 128MB thumbdrive. While it's pretty basic, it's a lot more modern than Windows 3.1 (for example, it runs Firefox. There is no 16bit Firefox AFAIK). It would even fit on a 64MB drive, but that wouldn't leave much room for files. The only problem is finding a computer that's willing to boot from a thumbdrive.
If you reread his story, this was the era when Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament were the hot games, and the fastest computers came preloaded with Windows 9x. If the computers even had USB ports, they were certainly USB1.1 speeds and the OS may not of even had drivers. And 60GB drives didn't even exist.
I've had ONE cookie from a pr0n site (How many/.'ers dont' visit pr0n sites? That's what I thought, at least 85% of you do.) set to immediately open my browser to another page that forces more crap onto your computer upon loadup.
That's not a cookie. That's some kind of malware on your computer. Try running Spybot, Adaware, MS Anti-spyware, or simular to try to get rid of it.
The fix to your proposed solution would be to have the browser download the ad, but Adblock would make it so the ad is not displayed in the browser window. That way, the content providers would have no way to know who is actually seeing the ads. This would actually put the advertisers in a worse position, because a significant portion of their bandwidth would now be completly wasted, making their margins even slimmer (though I'm sure quite a few people would see this as a good thing).
Certain companies do little to no advertising and are outrageously successful, Abercrombie & Fitch is the first company to spring to mind.
Actually, A&F get a lot of advertising out of the people who buy their clothes with their logo on them, and wear them like a big banner ad accross their chest. I've never figured out why people fall for that.
Also, there was that stupid song from a few years back.
AMD do not have the shipping volumes of CPUs to cope with Apple's demands.
I don't believe that. Look at how many machines Apple sells. Now look at how many AMD based machines eMachines/Gateway sells. No comparison.
The main reasons I see to go with Intel is the Pentium M (which is clearly superior to any of AMD's laptop chips), and the fact that Intel has been flirting with putting DRM in their chips.
Something that many people seem to miss is - why didn't Apple go with both AMD and Intel? Most PC manufacturers sell both Intel and AMD systems (the only major players in the PC market that I can think of that don't is Dell and IBM), so why not Apple?
Mainstream is the millions of generic looking boxes sold to people who, for the most part, just want to browse the internet, use email, and type something up every once and a while. Most of these people care about price more than anything else. That's why all th pretty, novelty boxes the PC manufacturers have come up with has either sunk or has been a niche product.
I use Opera, and I know other people who use Opera. The problem Opera seems to have is that most of their user base seems to have been with them since version 5 or before. Way before Firemumble, and even as far back to when Mozilla was still the mess they inherited from Netscape. Opera just isn't converting that many new users, and seems to be slowly losing the ones it still has.
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Nobody cares. Really. Well, maybe the other 4 people using ogg.
Only when it comes to Apple will people bash an open format over a closed one. Come on, how many other music players can play AAC?
While some people obviously don't care about OGG, other people have a significant investment in it (it terms of time spent ripping all those CDs), and thus OGG playback capabilities becomes important.
No, if I get passed by a Corvette that is anything newer than a mid-60's model, I point and laugh.
Corvettes are really not as well made as their price point suggests. In fact, most people do not buy a Corvette because they have actively researched the performance of the vehicle- they buy them for the prestige of the name.
I'm not saying the guy in the Honda is any better, if anything they both deserve a bit of scorn.
The consumer gets raped when you look at the price of a Corvette vs. what you get for it, though, so they deserve to be laughed at. Repeatedly.
If you take a look at the latest auto issue of Consumer Reports, the Corvette was the *only* American car to get an owner's satisfaction rating of over 80% (the Toyota Prius topped the list at over 90%). This is despite the terrible reliabilty the Corvette has. So Chevy has to be doing something right.
So while you may point and laugh at the iPod users (like I do), it appears that Apple is doing something right.
it's so easy to use that ANYBODY (and I mean anybody - my grandfather included) can just pick up an iPod and get down. That's user-friendly, and that's Apple. Until somebody else comes up with a better idea (and so far, no luck), the iPod is going to continue its dominance.
The iPod's interface, where you move your finger in a circle to scroll - is not intuitive at all. I agree it's pretty cool, and works fairly well once you are used to it. But the first time I picked up an iPod I was confused as hell until someone showed me how to use it.
That's hardly true today. Pretty much all of the heavy hitter software has version for both PC and Mac platforms.
That wasn't true a few years ago. The only reason the Mac is so strong in this market is inertia, or the fact that some of these places haven't upgraded yet (it's not uncommon to see OS9 still in use!). But I suspect that a lot of them are changing over to the PC because they can get more powerful hardware at a cheaper price that can run the same software.
The only good thing I can say IBM Deathstars is that I have never lost any data to them. Always could tell when the drive was about to go, and was able to copy everything off.
On the other hand, Western Digital drives just fail without warning. Stay away from Western Digital, they are useless junk.
Changing the screen resolution in Windows does not require admin privileges.
It depends on how the computer is set up. By default, a Windows user account can do all kinds of mostly harmless stuff like changing the resolution. But I've seen Windows locked down to the point where the user couldn't. I've even had to use Windows that was locked down so hard I couldn't even access the Display Properties window. Which meant, much to my annoyance, that I couldn't even turn off the default Fisher Price Windows XP theme. Ugh.
How long until someone figures a way to make it point to Google's search engine?
It'll probably be a while. Anyone who would care enough to hack IE7 to use Google is already using another browser.
Is it a Dell, by chance?
Windows XP runs ok in 128MB of ram, if it's just the base system and you only run 1-2 applications at a time. But install something like a virus scanner, and the poor machine will start grinding like crazy. That's my experience.
I don't know if it would be a good idea to do that. There is the possibility of the harddrive seizing up or something along those lines if it just sits there for years without being powered up. I would turn on the harddrive every once and a while just to be sure. With that said though, I have quite a few old 1GB and under drives that have been sitting around, some of them for years. So far, whenever I grabbed one for some project, everyone of them has still worked just fine.
Another thought I have is that since computer hardware tends to either fail right away or last a while, it may not be a bad idea to stick potential backup harddrives in a system for a month or so to weed out the bad ones.
That means that you can't use a CDROM drive, since all IDE ports are used, but you can do a network install using either a boot floppy disk or a USB key.
I've done stuff like this. The best thing to do is to get a 5.25" USB 2.0 external drive enclosure, and put the CD/DVD/CD-RW/whatever drive of your choice in it. The enclosure usually only runs about $25-$30. Many computers can boot from USB now, and modern Linux distros have no problems with USB drives. As a bonus, after you are done installing, you can use the drive elsewhere - USB CD drives are almost essential if you have to deal with broken laptops.
On the other hand, if you are building a big RAID array, you can probably deal with a few drives failing. $70 for fourteen 50.1GB drives is a hell of a deal, though if I was him I'd try to get a few more of them so he can deal with failures when they crop up.
Buy Seagate. Some people swear by them, others think they are OK. But I don't know anyone who hates them. (...now watch all the Seagate haters come out of the woodwork)
I've also had good luck with Samsung, though I believe their biggest drive is only 160GB.
Hypersonic PC sells laptops with multiple harddrives. I know someone who has one of the models that has a Pentium 4. You can run them as either RAID 0 or RAID 1, and I believe JBOD. Granted, the laptops are huge, but you atleast get a numeric keypad on them, unlike most other large laptops where they just waste all the space by using the same crappy, limited keyboard as the smaller models.
What will happen is Apple will put these drives into computers, and stop using HDDs. They will cost more and have issues, and generally piss people off. A few years later when the technology is more mature and competitive, the PC manufacturers will start using them. A few years after that when they are pretty much universal, people will hail Apple for being so "innovative" by using them before everyone else.
Damn small Linux fits really nicely on my 128MB thumbdrive. While it's pretty basic, it's a lot more modern than Windows 3.1 (for example, it runs Firefox. There is no 16bit Firefox AFAIK). It would even fit on a 64MB drive, but that wouldn't leave much room for files. The only problem is finding a computer that's willing to boot from a thumbdrive.
who is booting a Mac 1000 times?
The people who turn it off at night. 1,000 boots is a little less than 3 years if you use the computer every day.
If you reread his story, this was the era when Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament were the hot games, and the fastest computers came preloaded with Windows 9x. If the computers even had USB ports, they were certainly USB1.1 speeds and the OS may not of even had drivers. And 60GB drives didn't even exist.
I've had ONE cookie from a pr0n site (How many /.'ers dont' visit pr0n sites? That's what I thought, at least 85% of you do.) set to immediately open my browser to another page that forces more crap onto your computer upon loadup.
That's not a cookie. That's some kind of malware on your computer. Try running Spybot, Adaware, MS Anti-spyware, or simular to try to get rid of it.
The fix to your proposed solution would be to have the browser download the ad, but Adblock would make it so the ad is not displayed in the browser window. That way, the content providers would have no way to know who is actually seeing the ads. This would actually put the advertisers in a worse position, because a significant portion of their bandwidth would now be completly wasted, making their margins even slimmer (though I'm sure quite a few people would see this as a good thing).
Certain companies do little to no advertising and are outrageously successful, Abercrombie & Fitch is the first company to spring to mind.
Actually, A&F get a lot of advertising out of the people who buy their clothes with their logo on them, and wear them like a big banner ad accross their chest. I've never figured out why people fall for that.
Also, there was that stupid song from a few years back.
AMD do not have the shipping volumes of CPUs to cope with Apple's demands.
I don't believe that. Look at how many machines Apple sells. Now look at how many AMD based machines eMachines/Gateway sells. No comparison.
The main reasons I see to go with Intel is the Pentium M (which is clearly superior to any of AMD's laptop chips), and the fact that Intel has been flirting with putting DRM in their chips.
Something that many people seem to miss is - why didn't Apple go with both AMD and Intel? Most PC manufacturers sell both Intel and AMD systems (the only major players in the PC market that I can think of that don't is Dell and IBM), so why not Apple?
Mainstream is the millions of generic looking boxes sold to people who, for the most part, just want to browse the internet, use email, and type something up every once and a while. Most of these people care about price more than anything else. That's why all th pretty, novelty boxes the PC manufacturers have come up with has either sunk or has been a niche product.
Since we all know Linux has no UI problems whatsoever and is 100% easy to use.
And you have some operating system in mind that is?
Sorry Opera, you lose.
I use Opera, and I know other people who use Opera. The problem Opera seems to have is that most of their user base seems to have been with them since version 5 or before. Way before Firemumble, and even as far back to when Mozilla was still the mess they inherited from Netscape. Opera just isn't converting that many new users, and seems to be slowly losing the ones it still has.