I'm not quite sure of your point, If a regular user is fed up with spyware, adware, hardware probels because they bought that "cheaper" PC.
That's not really solving the problem. The problem is that the user does not know how to operate a computer connected to the internet. For Windows, this means the computer gets worms, viruses, spyware, and whatever. For a Mac, this means fairly little, as the Mac has not been widely targetted. But the instant spyware and viruses come out for the Mac - the clueless user is going to get own3d just like they did in Windows. And where does this leave them? In the same place as before, but with a computer that cost 3 times as much.
They just tend to get really defensive when "outsiders"(meaning windows users) start criticising the mac. Partially because windows has been such a POS operating system. It's like someone driving an old rusty noisy car driving up to my cleaner, well kept vehicle and giving me crap because he doesn't like my hubcaps. Maybe my hubcaps could be better, but if you're not offering me something superior, then you're wasting my time.
Why is every "outsider" who criticizes a Mac automatically a Windows user, (and quite often, a buyer of Dell computers)? And so what if Windows is a POS, does that automatically make OS X above all criticisms?
Here's a car analogy for you: I used to drive an 18 year old, rusty, and not very fast Nissan. Yet I would still give all the ricers crap about their slow and ugly cars. Almost always, when they found out what I drove, I would always get the "Yeah, well my car will still smoke yours!" (usually true), but I would always come back with "Atleast my car isn't claiming to be something its not."
...but Intel processors are the suck. If processors weren't a prime example of market lock-in there would be no reason to use any x86 (even AMD) over Power, or over 68k back in the day. Check sandpile.org and see if you can made any sense in the instruction set.
x86 isn't on top because it's faster or easier to program for. It's on top because it's cheap and [for most people] good enough.
When applying for a credit card, what would we use as personal identification if the SSN was omitted. Wouldn't that then mean that anyone who know my address, name and phone number, i.e. anyone who has access to the white pages would be able to take out a credit card in my name?
And how exactly is that different from the current situation?
Worms and drive-by spyware installs are one thing. But a lot of spyware relies on social engineering to get itself installed (run this to get your free br1tney spears screen saver!), and there isn't anything that can be done about that. The last couple major email viruses worked the same way - they relied on people running the attachment rather than exploiting some hole in a Microsoft program. It just seems that so far, non-Windows OSes just haven't been tempting enough targets.
The later ones were all made by Lexmark. I even have one that has a Lexmark logo where the IBM logo usually resides above the Esc and F1 keys. So far, it's the only Lexmark branded device I've seen that hasn't fallen apart.
The way an optical mouse works is there is a camera that takes consecutive pictures of the mousing surface and compares them. If they are offsetted, the mouse then knows it has been moved.
Now, every single wireless optical mouse I have ever seen will go into a power saving state, where it starts blinking its LED. Every time it blinks, its taking a picture to see if it has been moved. Quite simply, the time between blinks (upto 1 second on some mice, most are lower) there is no way for the mouse to know it has been moved! That's the delay that people complain about.
Now, every corded optical mouse I have ever seen just leaves its LED on all the time, and thus it pretty much instantly (usually within 1/60 sec) knows when it has been moved.
In order for a cordless mouse to perform as well as its corded cousins, it would have to leave the LED on all the time. This would kill the batteries. However, by doing things like shortening the blinking interval, and having it blink faster right after use, the latency has been greatly reduced vs. older wireless mice. But the latency is still there.
While Winamp 3 was a mess, what Winamp 5 does is based upon what plugins you have installed. Try Winamp Lite. The download is less than 1MB, and it's pretty much the basic music player that Winamp 2 was. Though, Winamp Lite does not come bundled with the OGG plugin if I remember right.
The only real format that the ipod doesn't support is WMA, I don't count ogg as a real format because so few people use it, except for their own personal music.
I always find it amusing how the Apple fans belittle OGG for being out there in the fringe. Yet at the same time, the market share of the Apple Macintosh is in the single digits. I mean, c'mon - get a real computer!
Winamp has a great video player. It's nothing more than another front end for DirectX, but it has great dual head support, and all the goodness of Winamp's playlist support. Not to mention things like global hotkeys and visualizations. Nothing like one monitor playing music videos full screen and the other doing Milkdrop full screen.
Though, it does appear that Nullsoft broke the video player in Winamp 5.09 pretty good. Thus, I'm sticking to 5.08 for the time.
That's not a bad idea. Back in High school I got pretty good at typing on the TI-85. Even better would be a HP-48, as there are some pretty powerful editing program for the HP's. I've had one called MinWrt on my 48G for as long as I can remember.
I agree that Linux is lacking somewhat on the software side, but that's what dual boot is for. I've run many Windows since the 3.0 days, and have only gotten one virus. And I caught it from a floppy disk and almost lost my Windows 3.1 install. Really, running Windows without viruses and worms is pretty easy. Don't use IE, don't use Outlook, use a firewall, and most importantly use common sense. I have a virus scanner installed, but they only thing it seems to catch is the occasional file from my internet cache - probably designed to trip up an IE user but harmless to me.
Macs are pretty nice, but whenever I look at what I can get in the PC world vs. what I can get in the Mac world for the same money, the PC has won everytime.
You mean engineer mothers who eat pizza are healthier than nurse mothers who eat rabbit food?
Nursing is a high stress job. Being the wife of an engineer who probably makes quite of bit of money is likely a lot less stressful. Perhaps this has to do more with their health than their diet?
But hey, atleast you can get P4 in a notebook in the x86 world! In the world of Apple, you guys are stuck with the G4. Which, like the PIII, is still a nice CPU - just dated.
The thing with x86 is that there is a huge amount of choice. There are:
*Gaming notebooks with the fastest processors and graphics out there *Sub compact notebooks, some are VHS tape sized and smaller *Cool, quiet, small Pentium M based notebooks with long battery life *Tablets *Rugged laptops (like the Panasonic toughbook) that are designed to take incredible amounts of abuse *Laptops with huge screens (didn't Dell just make a 19" laptop?) *Desktop replacement systems, with all the things you would expect in a full blown PC *Inexpensive laptops based upon desktop components with the main goal of being cheap (this is apparently what you think all x86 laptops are)
But, I'm sure as an Apple zealot you'll be pleased with whatever piece of pricy hardware Steve Jobs tells you that you need to have.
Other than iLife, a cheaper and faster x86 box can fullfill your other requirements. Besides, for $1000 the base model iBook would be a better value anyway.
The extra money you spend on buying new good equipment , will more than pay for itself in comparison , to the amount of frustration you get from buying old used slow computers. My $.2
I would agree that in many cases for clusters, you want high quality new computers. Why deal with a bunch of used P3 class computers, when a cluster of AMD64 computers could get more done with 1/4 the units.
However, if someone wants an inexpensive computer to browse the internet and do email, I do recommend getting a used computer. The used computer to get is an ex-coporate workstation by a company like HP, Compaq, IBM, etc. There are many resellers of these systems out there, and they will guarantee them. These computers are reliable, easy to work on, and very cheap (High end P3 systems are less than $200). They will give less problems and are overall better systems than the low end $400 eMachines and Dells out there.
Halflife 2 plays pretty nicely on my Athlon XP 2000 with 1024MB Ram, 128MB ATI 9600Pro at 1600x1200 resolution. Should be even better since I had to replace the VIA KT333 board with a NForce2 400, but haven't tried it yet.
The problem I have with overclocking is that everytime I had an issue with the computer, there was that little voice that said "It's the overclocking". Eventually, that voice would drive me crazy to the point where I was running stock again.
Besides, even when I had overclocked my Athlon XP system, I couldn't really notice any difference between the overclocked and stock set up anywap.
I remember when the excuse was that paying $18 for an album or $3 for a single was too much and unfair, but if only, (IF ONLY!) some benevolent content distribution god were to swoop down from the Heavens and offer music for a reasonable price like, say, $1 a song, it would grind piracy to a halt because everyone downloading illegal songs is doing it in protest of outrageous prices.
While I wouldn't call it outrageous, I would say that a DRM encumbered file encoded at a low, crappy bitrate is not worth $1.
How much Ram? The hardest part of getting XP running smoothly on old machines is that they have 128MB or less. Get that up to 512MB (ideally, atleast get 256MB), and things run pretty smooth.
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I'm not quite sure of your point, If a regular user is fed up with spyware, adware, hardware probels because they bought that "cheaper" PC.
That's not really solving the problem. The problem is that the user does not know how to operate a computer connected to the internet. For Windows, this means the computer gets worms, viruses, spyware, and whatever. For a Mac, this means fairly little, as the Mac has not been widely targetted. But the instant spyware and viruses come out for the Mac - the clueless user is going to get own3d just like they did in Windows. And where does this leave them? In the same place as before, but with a computer that cost 3 times as much.
They just tend to get really defensive when "outsiders"(meaning windows users) start criticising the mac. Partially because windows has been such a POS operating system. It's like someone driving an old rusty noisy car driving up to my cleaner, well kept vehicle and giving me crap because he doesn't like my hubcaps. Maybe my hubcaps could be better, but if you're not offering me something superior, then you're wasting my time.
Why is every "outsider" who criticizes a Mac automatically a Windows user, (and quite often, a buyer of Dell computers)? And so what if Windows is a POS, does that automatically make OS X above all criticisms?
Here's a car analogy for you: I used to drive an 18 year old, rusty, and not very fast Nissan. Yet I would still give all the ricers crap about their slow and ugly cars. Almost always, when they found out what I drove, I would always get the "Yeah, well my car will still smoke yours!" (usually true), but I would always come back with "Atleast my car isn't claiming to be something its not."
...but Intel processors are the suck. If processors weren't a prime example of market lock-in there would be no reason to use any x86 (even AMD) over Power, or over 68k back in the day. Check sandpile.org and see if you can made any sense in the instruction set.
x86 isn't on top because it's faster or easier to program for. It's on top because it's cheap and [for most people] good enough.
Can anyone prove me wrong? Have you heard someone actually say "I think windows is great" who didn't have MS stock options?
If Microsoft really wants people to say "Windows is Great!", they are going to have to innovate their own version of the Reality Distortion Field(tm).
When applying for a credit card, what would we use as personal identification if the SSN was omitted. Wouldn't that then mean that anyone who know my address, name and phone number, i.e. anyone who has access to the white pages would be able to take out a credit card in my name?
And how exactly is that different from the current situation?
For my webbrowser under OSX all I had to do is right click on this text dialog box, and enable spell checking as I type.
[mac user]
What's this "right-click" you speak of?
[/mac user]
Worms and drive-by spyware installs are one thing. But a lot of spyware relies on social engineering to get itself installed (run this to get your free br1tney spears screen saver!), and there isn't anything that can be done about that. The last couple major email viruses worked the same way - they relied on people running the attachment rather than exploiting some hole in a Microsoft program. It just seems that so far, non-Windows OSes just haven't been tempting enough targets.
The later ones were all made by Lexmark. I even have one that has a Lexmark logo where the IBM logo usually resides above the Esc and F1 keys. So far, it's the only Lexmark branded device I've seen that hasn't fallen apart.
The way an optical mouse works is there is a camera that takes consecutive pictures of the mousing surface and compares them. If they are offsetted, the mouse then knows it has been moved.
Now, every single wireless optical mouse I have ever seen will go into a power saving state, where it starts blinking its LED. Every time it blinks, its taking a picture to see if it has been moved. Quite simply, the time between blinks (upto 1 second on some mice, most are lower) there is no way for the mouse to know it has been moved! That's the delay that people complain about.
Now, every corded optical mouse I have ever seen just leaves its LED on all the time, and thus it pretty much instantly (usually within 1/60 sec) knows when it has been moved.
In order for a cordless mouse to perform as well as its corded cousins, it would have to leave the LED on all the time. This would kill the batteries. However, by doing things like shortening the blinking interval, and having it blink faster right after use, the latency has been greatly reduced vs. older wireless mice. But the latency is still there.
While Winamp 3 was a mess, what Winamp 5 does is based upon what plugins you have installed. Try Winamp Lite. The download is less than 1MB, and it's pretty much the basic music player that Winamp 2 was. Though, Winamp Lite does not come bundled with the OGG plugin if I remember right.
The only real format that the ipod doesn't support is WMA, I don't count ogg as a real format because so few people use it, except for their own personal music.
I always find it amusing how the Apple fans belittle OGG for being out there in the fringe. Yet at the same time, the market share of the Apple Macintosh is in the single digits. I mean, c'mon - get a real computer!
Winamp has a great video player. It's nothing more than another front end for DirectX, but it has great dual head support, and all the goodness of Winamp's playlist support. Not to mention things like global hotkeys and visualizations. Nothing like one monitor playing music videos full screen and the other doing Milkdrop full screen.
Though, it does appear that Nullsoft broke the video player in Winamp 5.09 pretty good. Thus, I'm sticking to 5.08 for the time.
That's not a bad idea. Back in High school I got pretty good at typing on the TI-85. Even better would be a HP-48, as there are some pretty powerful editing program for the HP's. I've had one called MinWrt on my 48G for as long as I can remember.
I agree that Linux is lacking somewhat on the software side, but that's what dual boot is for. I've run many Windows since the 3.0 days, and have only gotten one virus. And I caught it from a floppy disk and almost lost my Windows 3.1 install. Really, running Windows without viruses and worms is pretty easy. Don't use IE, don't use Outlook, use a firewall, and most importantly use common sense. I have a virus scanner installed, but they only thing it seems to catch is the occasional file from my internet cache - probably designed to trip up an IE user but harmless to me.
Macs are pretty nice, but whenever I look at what I can get in the PC world vs. what I can get in the Mac world for the same money, the PC has won everytime.
You mean engineer mothers who eat pizza are healthier than nurse mothers who eat rabbit food?
Nursing is a high stress job. Being the wife of an engineer who probably makes quite of bit of money is likely a lot less stressful. Perhaps this has to do more with their health than their diet?
But hey, atleast you can get P4 in a notebook in the x86 world! In the world of Apple, you guys are stuck with the G4. Which, like the PIII, is still a nice CPU - just dated.
The thing with x86 is that there is a huge amount of choice. There are:
*Gaming notebooks with the fastest processors and graphics out there
*Sub compact notebooks, some are VHS tape sized and smaller
*Cool, quiet, small Pentium M based notebooks with long battery life
*Tablets
*Rugged laptops (like the Panasonic toughbook) that are designed to take incredible amounts of abuse
*Laptops with huge screens (didn't Dell just make a 19" laptop?)
*Desktop replacement systems, with all the things you would expect in a full blown PC
*Inexpensive laptops based upon desktop components with the main goal of being cheap (this is apparently what you think all x86 laptops are)
But, I'm sure as an Apple zealot you'll be pleased with whatever piece of pricy hardware Steve Jobs tells you that you need to have.
500 bucks, about as much as buying Windows XP Pro, for the Mac Mini,
Since when has Windows XP cost $500? I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but atleast get your facts straight.
Other than iLife, a cheaper and faster x86 box can fullfill your other requirements. Besides, for $1000 the base model iBook would be a better value anyway.
The extra money you spend on buying new good equipment , will more than pay for itself in comparison , to the amount of frustration you get from buying old used slow computers. My $.2
I would agree that in many cases for clusters, you want high quality new computers. Why deal with a bunch of used P3 class computers, when a cluster of AMD64 computers could get more done with 1/4 the units.
However, if someone wants an inexpensive computer to browse the internet and do email, I do recommend getting a used computer. The used computer to get is an ex-coporate workstation by a company like HP, Compaq, IBM, etc. There are many resellers of these systems out there, and they will guarantee them. These computers are reliable, easy to work on, and very cheap (High end P3 systems are less than $200). They will give less problems and are overall better systems than the low end $400 eMachines and Dells out there.
Halflife 2 plays pretty nicely on my Athlon XP 2000 with 1024MB Ram, 128MB ATI 9600Pro at 1600x1200 resolution. Should be even better since I had to replace the VIA KT333 board with a NForce2 400, but haven't tried it yet.
With the cost of storage nowadays, the cheapest option by far is going to just buy more and more disk drives and keep everything.
The problem I have with overclocking is that everytime I had an issue with the computer, there was that little voice that said "It's the overclocking". Eventually, that voice would drive me crazy to the point where I was running stock again.
Besides, even when I had overclocked my Athlon XP system, I couldn't really notice any difference between the overclocked and stock set up anywap.
I remember when the excuse was that paying $18 for an album or $3 for a single was too much and unfair, but if only, (IF ONLY!) some benevolent content distribution god were to swoop down from the Heavens and offer music for a reasonable price like, say, $1 a song, it would grind piracy to a halt because everyone downloading illegal songs is doing it in protest of outrageous prices.
While I wouldn't call it outrageous, I would say that a DRM encumbered file encoded at a low, crappy bitrate is not worth $1.
How much Ram? The hardest part of getting XP running smoothly on old machines is that they have 128MB or less. Get that up to 512MB (ideally, atleast get 256MB), and things run pretty smooth.
Everyone knows that the US grows unlimited amounts of money on bio-engineered trees.
Shh! Don't tell people that! We don't need an even weaker dollar!