Exactly, I've watched Xvid DVD rips on a computer where the movie was stored on an external harddrive using USB 1.1. No problem at all playing. A 4200RPM drive will do fine. However, 40GB may be a bit small after loading a few rips onto the Mini.
Of course it's not. You can't run software compiled for the G5 on this "AMD64" blah-blah whatever, nor can you drop an AMD64 whoozit into place behind an Apple system controller. Saying the two compete is like saying that PAL competes with NTSC. The two things never intersect.
By your logic, I guess you would say that the Gamecube does not compete with the PS2 which does not compete with the X-Box? Of course they compete with each other!
Way to totally miss the point. What's so standard about propriety cases with propriety motherboards that take propriety chips and are powered by propriety power supplies? If you want to see standard try here.
Sure, you can connect standard USB and firewire devices to your Mac, and even throw in a PCI card too (except on the Mini). Yeah, I can do that to my pile of crap, non-standard Dell too. But upgrade the motherboard? Replace a broken power supply with an off-the-shelf part? Forget about it!
But if you use Mac Mini, you can setup all the services described above with a few clicks on intuitive icons ("Enable Web Sharing", "Enable Firewall", "Share iTunes Music Library", "Share Printer" etc)
Other than iTunes, it is not difficult to set up any of those services on Windows or Linux (with distros like Mandrake). While Apple may market the Mini in the way, it's nothing new.
The ghosting problem has a lot to with the quality of the VGA cable you use. The best cable I have found so far is one I swiped off of an older Mitsubishi CRT. It's even better than the one that came with my LCD. I had some cheap ass ones I got from eBay for real cheap - I tried several of them. They all had bad ghosting, and some of them were so bad the LCD couldn't even lock onto the signal, making them useless.
Is it true that DVI is limited to 60hz, and so that even if LCD refresh times improve, DVI always will be limited?
I can tell you that some video cards I have used have no problem with setting the output on the DVI port to something other than 60Hz. It pisses off my DVI LCD panel too. I had to dump my otherwise perfectly fine Radeon 8500 because of this (it would actually run at a different refresh rate than I told it on some resolutions, even when I told it specifically to use 60hz - both in Windows and Linux, very annoying). The Radeon 9600 I replaced it with can drive the DVI port at higher than 60hz, but atleast it behaves itself - which keeps my LCD happy.
Most people I know have considerably more time on their hands than money. Or in other words, they can spend some time getting the computer they want, rather than what they can get the fastest.
This is seriously offtopic, but there is some dating website that also results in some funny google ads. For example, try searching for diseased. Now there are some girls even the typical lonely slashdotter wouldn't touch!
The problem with the Flash based market is that everyone seems to think that they can make a player, and thus is a lot of crappy ones out there. The fact that some pretty big manufacturers such as Creative have made some duds doesn't help any. There are some nice ones, like the iRiver players, but you'll pay a little more for them.
Really, I see Apple's attempt as something different than what they are doing with the HDD iPods - they are trying to compete on cost ($149 for 1GB is a good deal), but they do this by offering a cut-rate MP3 player with practically no features, even ones found on virtually every other player on the market - like a screen.
Really, if any other company tried this, it would be a pretty big flop. But since Apple did it, it will probably be a huge hit.
I posted at length about this on my blog after OGG and iPod were mentioned in the same thread a while back. It goes back to the "so few people that they cumulatively round down to zero" point again. No-one, save the militant/obstinate few, gives a shit about OGG, and, moreover, the only reason that Creative, etc. include OGG support is to try to capture some of the statistically minute militant/obstinate market. That's how marginalised they are - like a pack of mangy stray dogs fighting over scraps.
The thing is with OGG, is why not support it? If the decoder chip can handle it, once you've done the work to put it into the firmware, it's practically free. Unlike formats like WMA, MP3, AAC, RM, and others where you have to pay licensing fees for every unit you sell, which is a good incentive to not include those formats. Sure, OGG is a nitch market, but if adding support for OGG costs next to nothing, why not add the support to chase after the niche market?
The TI-86 can be upgraded with the stats package from the TI-83, at the cost of about 25k of ram IIRC. However, I will admit the TI-85's stat package blows.
TI seems to be catering now to the same crowd that puts neon lights in their computer cases. TI has stopped creating new calculators with new features, and instead continues to rehash their old models. They have gone through several iterations of their lower end model (which started as the TI-81). Now they are up to the TI-84 Plus Silver edition, or something silly like that -which has a fast processor, a ton of memory, a flashy case, USB ports, but retains the same size screen as the TI-81 (96x64 pixels), and lacks many features that are found on the long since discontinued TI-85 (such as polynomial solver, linear system solver, complex numbers, built in constant library, string support, etc.)
It seems that TI has moved from making calculators to making Gameboys.
Having to bookmark all the pages I have open every night so I can close down FF is a real pain
Sounds like you need Opera, where you can save sessions, and sessions are saved automatically - so if the browser does crash, you can start it up where you left off.
Besides, I have found Opera's tabbed browsing much better thought out than Firefox's, where you can do things like drag and drop tabs to move them around, and easily re-open tabs you previously closed.
I'm not so sure it would be so useful if you plan on running Windows. From my experience, Linux seems to be a bit more tolerant of flakey hardware, and a system that's stable in Linux may not run Windows reliably at all.
Built-in XP firewall - Pretty much everyone disabled it and installed another.
Windows XP firewall does have its uses. I always turn it off and install something else, but for someone who doesn't even know what a firewall is, the built in one does a pretty good job. The built in one basically stays out of the way, with no complicated options, but still protects the computer from nasties like worms. So no phone calls from my Mom along the lines of "What is this Zonealarm thing and why is it asking me questions... "
I'd say $.20 for the CD (I buy name brand blanks), and another $.20 in electricity to leave the computer on overnight instead of shutting it down. Sending and recieving the packets is free.
On the otherhand, I can buy used PCs for next to nothing, which is a huge advantage. Just before Christmas, I bought a used HP Vectra box with a 1.5Ghz P4, 1GB of ram, DVD and CD-RW, and a GeForce2 for just over $200. That's a nice computer for cheap, and it can run just about anything, including newer games (though, I admit, not that well). Spend $200 on a used Mac and you'd be lucky to get something that can even run OSX.
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2.4GHz-equivalent machine
Equivalent to what? A 2.4Ghz P4? 2.4Ghz Athlon XP? 2.4Ghz G5? 2.4Ghz 8088?
Exactly, I've watched Xvid DVD rips on a computer where the movie was stored on an external harddrive using USB 1.1. No problem at all playing. A 4200RPM drive will do fine. However, 40GB may be a bit small after loading a few rips onto the Mini.
Of course it's not. You can't run software compiled for the G5 on this "AMD64" blah-blah whatever, nor can you drop an AMD64 whoozit into place behind an Apple system controller. Saying the two compete is like saying that PAL competes with NTSC. The two things never intersect.
By your logic, I guess you would say that the Gamecube does not compete with the PS2 which does not compete with the X-Box? Of course they compete with each other!
Way to totally miss the point. What's so standard about propriety cases with propriety motherboards that take propriety chips and are powered by propriety power supplies? If you want to see standard try here.
Sure, you can connect standard USB and firewire devices to your Mac, and even throw in a PCI card too (except on the Mini). Yeah, I can do that to my pile of crap, non-standard Dell too. But upgrade the motherboard? Replace a broken power supply with an off-the-shelf part? Forget about it!
But if you use Mac Mini, you can setup all the services described above with a few clicks on intuitive icons ("Enable Web Sharing", "Enable Firewall", "Share iTunes Music Library", "Share Printer" etc)
Other than iTunes, it is not difficult to set up any of those services on Windows or Linux (with distros like Mandrake). While Apple may market the Mini in the way, it's nothing new.
The ghosting problem has a lot to with the quality of the VGA cable you use. The best cable I have found so far is one I swiped off of an older Mitsubishi CRT. It's even better than the one that came with my LCD. I had some cheap ass ones I got from eBay for real cheap - I tried several of them. They all had bad ghosting, and some of them were so bad the LCD couldn't even lock onto the signal, making them useless.
But if at all possible, just use the DVI input.
Is it true that DVI is limited to 60hz, and so that even if LCD refresh times improve, DVI always will be limited?
I can tell you that some video cards I have used have no problem with setting the output on the DVI port to something other than 60Hz. It pisses off my DVI LCD panel too. I had to dump my otherwise perfectly fine Radeon 8500 because of this (it would actually run at a different refresh rate than I told it on some resolutions, even when I told it specifically to use 60hz - both in Windows and Linux, very annoying). The Radeon 9600 I replaced it with can drive the DVI port at higher than 60hz, but atleast it behaves itself - which keeps my LCD happy.
but monitors that support DVI are still too expensive.
That's something I don't get - those analog to digital converters have to be expensive. Where is my cheap DVI-only LCD?
Hell, I can run Linux on my 10 year old PCs too, though you do have a point - as few to no exploits are ever going to target older Macs running Linux.
They're simply not taking into account that the Mac has a 10 year USEFUL lifespan.
I would consider any Mac that can't run some flavor of OSX to be useless. How many Macs made 1995 and prior can run OSX?
Sounds to me like they have been slipping you some of the Apple Kool-aid.
Most people I know have considerably more time on their hands than money. Or in other words, they can spend some time getting the computer they want, rather than what they can get the fastest.
This is seriously offtopic, but there is some dating website that also results in some funny google ads. For example, try searching for diseased. Now there are some girls even the typical lonely slashdotter wouldn't touch!
The problem with the Flash based market is that everyone seems to think that they can make a player, and thus is a lot of crappy ones out there. The fact that some pretty big manufacturers such as Creative have made some duds doesn't help any. There are some nice ones, like the iRiver players, but you'll pay a little more for them.
Really, I see Apple's attempt as something different than what they are doing with the HDD iPods - they are trying to compete on cost ($149 for 1GB is a good deal), but they do this by offering a cut-rate MP3 player with practically no features, even ones found on virtually every other player on the market - like a screen.
Really, if any other company tried this, it would be a pretty big flop. But since Apple did it, it will probably be a huge hit.
I posted at length about this on my blog after OGG and iPod were mentioned in the same thread a while back. It goes back to the "so few people that they cumulatively round down to zero" point again. No-one, save the militant/obstinate few, gives a shit about OGG, and, moreover, the only reason that Creative, etc. include OGG support is to try to capture some of the statistically minute militant/obstinate market. That's how marginalised they are - like a pack of mangy stray dogs fighting over scraps.
The thing is with OGG, is why not support it? If the decoder chip can handle it, once you've done the work to put it into the firmware, it's practically free. Unlike formats like WMA, MP3, AAC, RM, and others where you have to pay licensing fees for every unit you sell, which is a good incentive to not include those formats. Sure, OGG is a nitch market, but if adding support for OGG costs next to nothing, why not add the support to chase after the niche market?
The thing is, every iPod out there is going to need a new battery sometime. The quesion is, when?
The TI-86 can be upgraded with the stats package from the TI-83, at the cost of about 25k of ram IIRC. However, I will admit the TI-85's stat package blows.
TI seems to be catering now to the same crowd that puts neon lights in their computer cases. TI has stopped creating new calculators with new features, and instead continues to rehash their old models. They have gone through several iterations of their lower end model (which started as the TI-81). Now they are up to the TI-84 Plus Silver edition, or something silly like that -which has a fast processor, a ton of memory, a flashy case, USB ports, but retains the same size screen as the TI-81 (96x64 pixels), and lacks many features that are found on the long since discontinued TI-85 (such as polynomial solver, linear system solver, complex numbers, built in constant library, string support, etc.)
It seems that TI has moved from making calculators to making Gameboys.
Having to bookmark all the pages I have open every night so I can close down FF is a real pain
Sounds like you need Opera, where you can save sessions, and sessions are saved automatically - so if the browser does crash, you can start it up where you left off.
Besides, I have found Opera's tabbed browsing much better thought out than Firefox's, where you can do things like drag and drop tabs to move them around, and easily re-open tabs you previously closed.
Is it wrong to judge a school by some of the people it graduates?
I'm not so sure it would be so useful if you plan on running Windows. From my experience, Linux seems to be a bit more tolerant of flakey hardware, and a system that's stable in Linux may not run Windows reliably at all.
Built-in XP firewall - Pretty much everyone disabled it and installed another.
Windows XP firewall does have its uses. I always turn it off and install something else, but for someone who doesn't even know what a firewall is, the built in one does a pretty good job. The built in one basically stays out of the way, with no complicated options, but still protects the computer from nasties like worms. So no phone calls from my Mom along the lines of "What is this Zonealarm thing and why is it asking me questions... "
Just tell him they are all fake. Every single one.
That's some expensive bandwidth!
I'd say $.20 for the CD (I buy name brand blanks), and another $.20 in electricity to leave the computer on overnight instead of shutting it down. Sending and recieving the packets is free.
On the otherhand, I can buy used PCs for next to nothing, which is a huge advantage. Just before Christmas, I bought a used HP Vectra box with a 1.5Ghz P4, 1GB of ram, DVD and CD-RW, and a GeForce2 for just over $200. That's a nice computer for cheap, and it can run just about anything, including newer games (though, I admit, not that well). Spend $200 on a used Mac and you'd be lucky to get something that can even run OSX.