I know people who use it by default in OS X. It's actually great that it's the default browser. If you're too computer illiterate to go get Firefox or Opera, Safari is right up your alley. You're not the sort of person who needs powerful features.
I call bullshit. This is like someone sneaking up to a house (or downloading a public beta of it), trying all the doors and finding one unlocked. Then this person goes on their blog and posts a public notice saying that 1 Infinite Loop has a door unlocked, so you should go look for it. Do with it what you will. I am only looking for unlocked doors as a public service.
Bullshit. You're looking for unlocked doors because you dislike the residents of 1 Infinite Loop. You're not helping _anyone_ make their homes more secure.
I don't have any numbers metrics, but the 15" matte MBP I got yesterday did calibrate well with my Colorvision Spyder2. The only complaint I have is that if you're not sitting perpendicular to the screen, the color temperature changes. IE, it gets warmer if you slouch or colder if you stand up. NOT cool, IMO, but I do any color correcting of photos in front of a nicer LCD and I'm not making my money on color. Otherwise it's fine and super duper bright w/ seemingly good black levels and no hot spots.
If your life absolutely depends on 3D work, the Macbook isn't the best choice. If you can tolerate slightly slower motion, I think it's ok. I've used my macbook for a variety of 3d apps, and although it's not nearly smooth enough to go playing 3d games on, it's fine for most stuff. Complex Sketchup models on my Macbook don't feel THAT much harder to work with than on my iMac at work or my (new as of yesterday) Macbook Pro. Google Earth works fine as well. Even AutoCAD 3d stuff in bootcamp works fairly well on the macbook. Yeah, as apps get more complex, the GMA950 will start to feel slower and slower, but so goes the march of technology.
Since 10.1, the minimum RAM requirements have only gone from 128 to 256mb. Not that that was EVER enough, but I think they've done a pretty good job of keeping people with even G3's still going. My old iBook with 768mb _never_ ran photoshop very well, nor did my win2k box with the same amount. RAM has gotten so cheap, though, that I think the bitching over Vista was kind of misplaced as well, except that there are a lot more people limping along on old PCs than on old Macs.
For a lot of reasons, some of us like to have just one computer that can be used for everything. I'd rather have a macbook pro that can play games/do 3d work AND be useful as a mobile computer, than have a macbook that I have to sync up with a gaming PC at home and a desktop at work. To me, the bet thing about laptop is how much it simplifies things to have all my crap in one place. I'm willing to sacrifice a few frames per second for that.
And it's true, there's a huge lack of freeware. The only "free" software I can think of is stuff like firefox, open office (now X11 free!), the gimp, any of those thousands of fink applications, the free dashboard widgets, iphoto/itunes/garageband/whatever else comes with the mac, etc. What about minesweeper? Solitaire?
Oh, and of that 'free' software for windows, what percentage comes pre-packaged with spyware? 80%?
As far as upgrading hardware goes, yeah it's crappy that you can't swap out a motherboard on your iMac or laptop very easily. So sell the iMac. Did he price used macs on ebay? Doesn't he realize that even crappy old G4 iBooks are still worth real money? That does a lot to help keep upgrade costs semi-reasonable.
I think what's sad is that the amount of money correlates much more to how much your parents made than to how hard you work. If I had started out poor and worked as hard as I have? I'd be nowhere close to where I am now, that's for sure. It's possible to go up the social ladder, but it's _really_ hard compared to just maintaining your position. How many disaffected rich white kids do I know that haven't graduated from college or ever held a real job down? A lot. How many of them will probably always have more money than I do? Almost all of them.
What's sad is that class inherited almost the same way today as it has been for most of history.
I own a BMW from the 80's and have had another 9 or 10 German cars. I love them. HOWEVER:
The iDrive is typical German engineering BS. Some asshole in Munich decided that the hundred year old system of analogue controls wasn't the "right" way to do it, and decided to invent a "right" way. What they came up with was a beautifully thought out, near-perfect solution. Problem? IT ONLY MAKES SENSE TO A GERMAN ENGINEER. Anyone who has worked on a VW/Audi/Porsche/MB/BMW knows what I'm talking about. Anyone who has worked on German industrial equipment (leistritz, anyone?) also knows what I'm talking about.
German engineers are arrogant bastards. They know what's best and don't give a crap about what anyone else thinks. Nothing is designed around the user, who probably doesn't want to use the product in the right way after all. "Cupholders in a car?! PSHHHHH! You shouldn't be eating in the car!" It's all designed around some magical ideal existing in some engineer's brain. It leads to some very nice products that are _awful_ to work with. When JD Powers (or consumer reports?) came out with the latest reliability ratings, BMW was tied with Toyota for fewest initial defects in their products. But, because their cars were so insanely confusing for the car buying public, BMW had more dealership visits than just about any other car company. People would bring in their cars thinking their radios were broken, only to find out that no, everything is working correctly, but they hadn't gotten to page 267 of the manual where it describes how to change stations.
In my mind, new features are pointless if they're not highly usable. My mom, god bless her technophobic soul, can pick up an iPod and use it right away. Put her in front of an iDrive and she'd spend two weeks trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, she could jump into just about any car made before the 00's and be perfectly at home. Sure, there might be a new button or two, but for gods sake, she'd at least be able to turn on the radio! "The users are ignorant and should read the manual" is no excuse. If 90% of your customers are horribly confused, you have NOT done your job.
Have you ever worked for government? Because in my city government, people bust their asses for less money than they'd make in private industry. As for healthcare, the last time I looked, we lived shorter lives and paid more for our health care than most or all of the western world.
Yes, there are certain inefficiencies associated with government, but just off the top of my head there are a few things it has going for it that private industry doesn't:
A) It doesn't have as much of a short term profit motive. Good government can take a longer view. It can also do things that would be next to impossible to make money on.
B) It pays it's employees less money. Around here, it gets maybe 2x the employees for the money.
C) It doesn't waste huge chunks of its money on advertising.
D) Government employees, while perhaps more apathetic than their private industry counterparts, stick around for so long that their institutional knowledge is _incredible_. And it's not like large corporations don't have their share of slackers.
Has anyone else tried to reach a CompUSA on the telephone? I can't count the number of times I've needed something same-day, looked it up on CompUSA's site, seen that it was in stock and gone to the store to find out actually out of stock. If you try to call them, you're bumped to a central call center where they're looking at the same out of date inventory database.
As far as I can tell, it's _impossible_ to reach a local CompUSA on the phone and find someone who can say "Yes, we have that. I'm looking at it right now."
They'll probably assume they're police and hide under the bed. People are _usually_ very reluctant to open fire while there are cameras pointed at them.
I've used both SMB and NFS to share folders over the internet between my freebsd and macbook at home and my iMac at work. Both of them seem to fail rather ungracefully compared to AFP. AFP doesn't seem to lock up OS X every time a share goes missing--especially annoying on a laptop that goes in and out of network range--and freebsd's support of it is just peachy in my book.
Why not bitch? Because obviously the services and contibution you're providing is not worth the amount you are asking for.
This is based on the assumption that people earning $150K and people earning $5.15/hr are both being paid a fair market value for their work and that the labor market operates freely. Guess what? They aren't and it doesn't...for a looooong list of reasons.
I realize many here would happily take an ass-ugly black brick if it ran linux, had a full array of ports (USB and serial, oh yeah!). However, unless you've been asleep since the iPod rolled out, you may have noticed that people seem to really dig the simple interface and gorgeous industrial design. People don't want whizzy features. They want a phone that makes a good status symbol, and this will fit the bill nicely.
I dunno. I think it's the smart ones that get in the most trouble. Inquisitive kids are the ones who try to figure out exactly how combustion works and what makes things go boom. Or who figure out how to get their c02 cars to take a model rocket engine. Or who tear apart electronic devices containing powerful capacitors. Who here hasn't done their fair share of learning through second degree burning?
Um, last time I installed FreeBSD (two days ago), locatedb wasn't populated either. So that's another example of what a half-assed job FreeBSD does of utilizing the underlying toolkit.
It's not really a trifecta of failure. Both electric and hydrogen power have a big advantage: a staged move away from fossil fuels. Yes, right now they both require us to get our power from dinosaurs. However, in some hypothetical future, we all have solar panels floating out in the ocean making us hydrogen from seawater, or we all have solar cells on our houses charging our batteries, or we've moved to nuclear power. In all those cases, we can semi-gracefully make a switch from making our hydrogen from natural gas to making it from clean electricity. However, if we stick with gasoline, we're kinda screwed when it runs out.
Alcohol is one answer, but it's not exactly perfect either.
We don't build new houses to replace houses that are being torn down. Cheap houses last a long time, too. In fact, there are _tons_ of houses in my city that were built of relatively cheap materials, using department store plans, back in the early 1900's.
We build new houses because: A) we have more people B) people are leaving cities C) people are moving to the south and west D) average household size is decreasing
If you look at the abandoned houses in my neck of the woods (southeast michigan) you'll see that a huge number of them are high quality homes from the early 1900's...not the 'cheap' houses from the 50's.
If you sleep 80% of the time, and use half the energy as a result, can't your environment support more of your offspring? There's a limited amount of energy out there, especially for predators, so energy conservation might make sense. Also pertaining to predators is the fact that most of them are specialized to either hunt at night or during the day, so it makes sense to go into hibernation in those off-peak hunting hours.
Speaking out of my ass, since I'm no biologist, it seems that while all higher life forms sleep, the amount they sleep is strongly correlated with how often they eat, how long it takes to digest their primary food source (meat vs. grasses vs. sugary stuff) and how much food is available in their environment.
Meanwhile, the games that have seen the most play time on my PS2 are Rez and Katamari Damacy, neither of which had shiny graphics or awesome physics models. Again, novelty seems like the key to making a good game. I don't buy new games so I can relive the same plot and game play over and over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
Best advertisement for OS X I've seen all day. :P
I know people who use it by default in OS X. It's actually great that it's the default browser. If you're too computer illiterate to go get Firefox or Opera, Safari is right up your alley. You're not the sort of person who needs powerful features.
I call bullshit. This is like someone sneaking up to a house (or downloading a public beta of it), trying all the doors and finding one unlocked. Then this person goes on their blog and posts a public notice saying that 1 Infinite Loop has a door unlocked, so you should go look for it. Do with it what you will. I am only looking for unlocked doors as a public service. Bullshit. You're looking for unlocked doors because you dislike the residents of 1 Infinite Loop. You're not helping _anyone_ make their homes more secure.
I don't have any numbers metrics, but the 15" matte MBP I got yesterday did calibrate well with my Colorvision Spyder2. The only complaint I have is that if you're not sitting perpendicular to the screen, the color temperature changes. IE, it gets warmer if you slouch or colder if you stand up. NOT cool, IMO, but I do any color correcting of photos in front of a nicer LCD and I'm not making my money on color. Otherwise it's fine and super duper bright w/ seemingly good black levels and no hot spots.
If your life absolutely depends on 3D work, the Macbook isn't the best choice. If you can tolerate slightly slower motion, I think it's ok. I've used my macbook for a variety of 3d apps, and although it's not nearly smooth enough to go playing 3d games on, it's fine for most stuff. Complex Sketchup models on my Macbook don't feel THAT much harder to work with than on my iMac at work or my (new as of yesterday) Macbook Pro. Google Earth works fine as well. Even AutoCAD 3d stuff in bootcamp works fairly well on the macbook. Yeah, as apps get more complex, the GMA950 will start to feel slower and slower, but so goes the march of technology.
Since 10.1, the minimum RAM requirements have only gone from 128 to 256mb. Not that that was EVER enough, but I think they've done a pretty good job of keeping people with even G3's still going. My old iBook with 768mb _never_ ran photoshop very well, nor did my win2k box with the same amount. RAM has gotten so cheap, though, that I think the bitching over Vista was kind of misplaced as well, except that there are a lot more people limping along on old PCs than on old Macs.
For a lot of reasons, some of us like to have just one computer that can be used for everything. I'd rather have a macbook pro that can play games/do 3d work AND be useful as a mobile computer, than have a macbook that I have to sync up with a gaming PC at home and a desktop at work. To me, the bet thing about laptop is how much it simplifies things to have all my crap in one place. I'm willing to sacrifice a few frames per second for that.
Oh, and of that 'free' software for windows, what percentage comes pre-packaged with spyware? 80%?
As far as upgrading hardware goes, yeah it's crappy that you can't swap out a motherboard on your iMac or laptop very easily. So sell the iMac. Did he price used macs on ebay? Doesn't he realize that even crappy old G4 iBooks are still worth real money? That does a lot to help keep upgrade costs semi-reasonable.
What's sad is that class inherited almost the same way today as it has been for most of history.
The iDrive is typical German engineering BS. Some asshole in Munich decided that the hundred year old system of analogue controls wasn't the "right" way to do it, and decided to invent a "right" way. What they came up with was a beautifully thought out, near-perfect solution. Problem? IT ONLY MAKES SENSE TO A GERMAN ENGINEER. Anyone who has worked on a VW/Audi/Porsche/MB/BMW knows what I'm talking about. Anyone who has worked on German industrial equipment (leistritz, anyone?) also knows what I'm talking about.
German engineers are arrogant bastards. They know what's best and don't give a crap about what anyone else thinks. Nothing is designed around the user, who probably doesn't want to use the product in the right way after all. "Cupholders in a car?! PSHHHHH! You shouldn't be eating in the car!" It's all designed around some magical ideal existing in some engineer's brain. It leads to some very nice products that are _awful_ to work with. When JD Powers (or consumer reports?) came out with the latest reliability ratings, BMW was tied with Toyota for fewest initial defects in their products. But, because their cars were so insanely confusing for the car buying public, BMW had more dealership visits than just about any other car company. People would bring in their cars thinking their radios were broken, only to find out that no, everything is working correctly, but they hadn't gotten to page 267 of the manual where it describes how to change stations.
In my mind, new features are pointless if they're not highly usable. My mom, god bless her technophobic soul, can pick up an iPod and use it right away. Put her in front of an iDrive and she'd spend two weeks trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, she could jump into just about any car made before the 00's and be perfectly at home. Sure, there might be a new button or two, but for gods sake, she'd at least be able to turn on the radio! "The users are ignorant and should read the manual" is no excuse. If 90% of your customers are horribly confused, you have NOT done your job.
Yes, there are certain inefficiencies associated with government, but just off the top of my head there are a few things it has going for it that private industry doesn't:
A) It doesn't have as much of a short term profit motive. Good government can take a longer view. It can also do things that would be next to impossible to make money on.
B) It pays it's employees less money. Around here, it gets maybe 2x the employees for the money.
C) It doesn't waste huge chunks of its money on advertising.
D) Government employees, while perhaps more apathetic than their private industry counterparts, stick around for so long that their institutional knowledge is _incredible_. And it's not like large corporations don't have their share of slackers.
As far as I can tell, it's _impossible_ to reach a local CompUSA on the phone and find someone who can say "Yes, we have that. I'm looking at it right now."
The MM is great, except it won't let you use more than one mouse button at a time.
They'll probably assume they're police and hide under the bed. People are _usually_ very reluctant to open fire while there are cameras pointed at them.
I've used both SMB and NFS to share folders over the internet between my freebsd and macbook at home and my iMac at work. Both of them seem to fail rather ungracefully compared to AFP. AFP doesn't seem to lock up OS X every time a share goes missing--especially annoying on a laptop that goes in and out of network range--and freebsd's support of it is just peachy in my book.
This is based on the assumption that people earning $150K and people earning $5.15/hr are both being paid a fair market value for their work and that the labor market operates freely. Guess what? They aren't and it doesn't...for a looooong list of reasons.
I realize many here would happily take an ass-ugly black brick if it ran linux, had a full array of ports (USB and serial, oh yeah!). However, unless you've been asleep since the iPod rolled out, you may have noticed that people seem to really dig the simple interface and gorgeous industrial design. People don't want whizzy features. They want a phone that makes a good status symbol, and this will fit the bill nicely.
I dunno. I think it's the smart ones that get in the most trouble. Inquisitive kids are the ones who try to figure out exactly how combustion works and what makes things go boom. Or who figure out how to get their c02 cars to take a model rocket engine. Or who tear apart electronic devices containing powerful capacitors. Who here hasn't done their fair share of learning through second degree burning?
Um, last time I installed FreeBSD (two days ago), locatedb wasn't populated either. So that's another example of what a half-assed job FreeBSD does of utilizing the underlying toolkit.
Alcohol is one answer, but it's not exactly perfect either.
Word. It's a _lot_ harder to kill someone without a handgun.
Because the wallet makers association lobby is incredibly powerful.
We build new houses because:
A) we have more people
B) people are leaving cities
C) people are moving to the south and west
D) average household size is decreasing
If you look at the abandoned houses in my neck of the woods (southeast michigan) you'll see that a huge number of them are high quality homes from the early 1900's...not the 'cheap' houses from the 50's.
Speaking out of my ass, since I'm no biologist, it seems that while all higher life forms sleep, the amount they sleep is strongly correlated with how often they eat, how long it takes to digest their primary food source (meat vs. grasses vs. sugary stuff) and how much food is available in their environment.
Meanwhile, the games that have seen the most play time on my PS2 are Rez and Katamari Damacy, neither of which had shiny graphics or awesome physics models. Again, novelty seems like the key to making a good game. I don't buy new games so I can relive the same plot and game play over and over and over again.