What kind of crappy journal are you publishing in? Almost every one I've even considered submitting a paper to explicitly allows you to place a copy of the preprint on your web page. It's a pretty standard clause in the copyright assignment for any reputable journal. The only exception I've encountered was a journal that asks you to link to their (publicly available) hosted copy of the paper so that they could see how many people were reading it.
I got an email a little while ago saying that it was now a requirement for any papers written on EPSRC grants, meaning most science and engineering papers from UK universities. It always seemed to be more of a problem with individuals than institutions though. Pretty much all journals allow you to put the preprint (same content, just without the journal's formatting) online on your own web site, so it doesn't matter if the journal is open access or not as long as you bother to put the PDF on your web site. For some strange reason, a lot of academics - whose reputation is based largely on how many people read and cite their papers - choose not to do this simple step.
There were lots of fun ones. The Killer Quake Patch was fun for deathmatch - insanely overpowered guns, from the chaingun that could kill anyone almost instantly (and use 100 shotgun shells in the process) up to the guided nuke. Made a nice change from the tactical thinking required by TF. AirQuake and Quake Rally were also fun. Quake Horrorshow was very atmospheric - everyone starts as a civilian and after a minute one person becomes a chainsaw murderer and has to get 25 kills before a timer expires. Playing this in the dark at a LAN party was great fun - everyone's trying to hide, and then you hear the sound of a chainsaw starting up...
Is it sold to consumers as a game? I always got the impression that Id games from Quake onwards were sold as engines with a demo game attached. If you want to create a game for their engine, you have two options. You either pay them a huge pile of money and get access to everything including redistribution rights, or you make your game require the end user to buy the engine and call it a mod. For Quake 1, the initial install was about 50MB, and my quake directory ended up being about 500MB from all of the mods. Aside from a little occasional deathmatch, I rarely played the game that Id shipped. Things like Team Fortress were much more fun.
Doesn't sound too bad. When Quake 1 came out, compiling a map was typically an overnight job on a typical machine of the era. Even the simple toy levels that I put together took over an hour to run vis and bsp on. It sounds like a machine with 16GB of RAM would get similar performance. Of course, with the Internet being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with a distributed map compiler. Once you've done the top level of spacial subdivision, you can probably parcel off the work to remote nodes that can then run to completion. If people who want new maps make their machines available for this then you could get the rendering time down quite a lot. This wasn't feasible with Quake 1, when most users were on 14.4kbps modems (if they were online at all).
This is more a GPGPU competitor. Tilera is designed for things like big web apps where you have lots of not particularly computationally strenuous tasks that need handling with relatively low latency. This is designed for the kind task where you want to use a GPU, but your algorithm doesn't fit. It would probably also be good at things like ray tracing.
I don't see this anywhere in the ThinkPad, and having worked in military R&D I've never seen ThinkPads recommended for battlefield deployment either - things like the Toshiba ToughBook go there.
Vastly superior graphics
I checked the benchmarks, and the GPU in the MBP did slightly better than the one in the ThinkPad.
Doesn't support a proprietary and generally useless connector (Thunderbolt)
I guess you won't be buying any laptops after this year then, since most of the major manufacturers have said that they're going to start shipping ThunderBolt.
Has no backlit keyboard (of course if your screen isn't bright enough to light the keyboard, I'd argue the user isn't bright enough to type)
When the ambient light is low, you want to reduce screen brightness to reduce eyestrain (and improve battery life)
Doesn't have a largely proprietary horribly expensive connector (Firewire)
IEEE 1394 is proprietary now?
has a removable optical drive instead of a proprietary horribly expensive to replace one
Just replaced the optical drive in my old MBP. The replacement cost £30 and I installed it myself using directions from the Apple service manual.
has the quickly becoming standard unified headphone/mic combination plug
How is this a good thing? It doesn't support digital audio I/O, and it only lets you connect headphones or microphones, not both - no hands-free headset for you...
offers vastly superior cpu availability
Okay, now I know you're talking shit. Both machines had exactly the same CPU model
has builtin cellular/mobile connectivity
I'll give you that one, although I've never seen the advantage of having it built in since it means you have to get a separate data plan, rather than just using your phone.
up to 10.8 hours of battery life (MBP offers only 7)
Having owned a ThinkPad, I'd be surprised if a machine with a quoted 10.8 hours actually gets more than 5.
a warranty that goes as much as 3 times the length of the Apple warranty
It comes with a 9 year warranty? Nice!
Now I don't know where you pulled your thought that these are similar specced, but you are clearly wrong.
Uh, by comparing the specs that both list. Your contradiction seems to be by stating that all of the places where the MBP has better specs than the TP are somehow disadvantages. Which smells strongly of fanboyism. I won both ThinkPad and Mac laptops, and in terms of build quality there's little difference. The ThinkPad is more modular, largely to save costs when shipping customised models, but that also comes at the cost of reliability - I'm glad my ThinkPad is so modular because I've had to replace most of the modular components...
How did this borderline racist shit get modded up? Two of the biggest open source projects that I work on (LLVM and FreeBSD) have a lot of Russian contributors. You are almost certainly using code (at least partially) written by Russians on a daily basis.
The problem is the definition of copy, and this is where we get into the mess of EULAs. You should not need a copyright license to use a product that you purchased for its intended purpose. OS X does not run from the install DVD, it needs to be copied onto a hard disk to run. This technicality is what allows the EULA to exist. The court found that this is not a misuse of copyright, which means that it's a strong legal precedent saying that you can put any term in the EULA that you want. This is a problem.
I'm struggling to think of how this could apply to something like the GPL. If you buy some GPL'd software and install it, then violate the GPL post-installation, then you might have a problem, but the GPL only ever restricts your ability to make copies (because it's a distribution license, not an EULA), so it doesn't really fall into the same category. I suppose the closest analogy would be selling a Linux laptop with nVidia drivers preinstalled, which would be violating the GPL. Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with it being found that the GPL couldn't enforce this restriction, but I suspect a lot of FSF types would...
It sounds exactly like the ARM port of Xen that Samsung demoed at the XenSummit in 2007. Basically, the thing that made it different from normal virtualisation was the driver model that allowed each guest to have exclusive access to devices for a time. You could switch between multiple operating systems, but when each was active it would have direct access to the display, audio and input devices, but shared access to things like the network and storage.
That said, they list four operating systems that run in this mode: Linux, Linux, Linux, and Linux. So, it could just be using whatever the Linux equivalent of a FreeBSD jail or a Solaris zone is. Or even just a chroot for each userland...
No one seems to realize that you can also with Apple's blessing and the right micro tools pop open your Mac Book Pro and upgraded the memory to 8GB for under $50 from Amazon saving a $150 plus you can upgrade the HD to 750 GB or better at 7200 RPM for about $100 from Amazon saving another bunch of money.
I bought 8GB of RAM for less than the cost of getting Apple to upgrade the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, but the cheapest 256GB SSD I could find at the time was more than Apple was charging, so I let them install that. That said, RAM upgrades have got a lot harder with the unibody machines. My old PowerBook and MacBook Pro just had a cover over the RAM and you could unscrew it and add more. The new machine required removing 10 screws and taking off the bottom of the case. Not for the faint of heart...
You clearly didn't serve on any of the standards committees
Damn straight. If I had, neither spec would have had my vote for counting as a standard. ODF 1.0 was fine as a first draft. As a standard, it was an embarrassment and most of the problems were met with 'we'll fix this in a later version'.
wasn't a complete mess, perhaps you could enlighten us to where it was a mess?
It's been a couple of years, but as I recall the table format was horrible, the spreadsheet description was basically missing. The spec itself was far too short to do what it claimed. I looked at implementing some bits, but basically the only thing to do when you got to some ambiguity was to see what OpenOffice.org did and make something compatible with it - an experience that the AbiWord developers shared. I doubt anyone who did not have a copy of OO.o could have implemented even a moderately compatible ODF parser or generator. With a decent spec, you would need nothing other than the specification. Contrast it with the W3C specifications, where each element is documented in detail.
Unlike the OOXML I read, and I did read a lot of it, ODF was not broken
Then why was even OO.o, which was supposedly the reference implementation, able to fully implement the spec? The entire point of something like ODF is interoperability between applications. A requirement for passing it as a specification should have been two, complete, independent, compatible implementations. It was passed with no complete implementations.
Exactly. The ODF specification was a complete mess last time I read it (1.0) and was rushed through ISO. OOXML then got rushed through ISO with the justification that ODF had been allowed in its crappy incomplete state (with 0 fully compliant implementations), so why shouldn't OOXML (also with 0 fully compliant implementations)? It would have been a lot easier to block OOXML if ODF hadn't been rushed through by the 'anything but Microsoft' crowd (IBM, Novell, Sun, etc).
Not to mention that the other complaints are all about how underpowered the MacBook Air is in comparison to other laptops. No shit - it's an ultraportable, or whatever Intel's new buzzword is. The complaint makes about as much sense as complaining that a Mac Pro doesn't fit in his bag and work on the train.
Even when not pirating things, the bandwidth can be eaten up quite quickly. My ISP limits me to 1500MB per day between 4pm and 9pm. This sounded like a lot, until I tried watching a film on iPlayer in the early evening. The HD streams are 3.6Mb/s, so I use up the total allowance in 55 minutes and then get throttled back to 2.5Mb/s and the stream dies. I bought a game on GoG.com this afternoon, which was a 1.1GB download - and that was a relatively old game. The biggest game I've bought from them was about 5GB, but some of the ones they sell are over 10GB. 40GB/month is not very much if you're streaming video or downloading games...
I'm not sure Ron Paul would be such a bad idea. Sure, he has a complete lack of understanding of economics, but he also has no chance of actually passing 90% of what he advocates. He'd probably be able to cut some government spending and close some of the more unpopular government departments before getting kicked out...
MagSafe is patented and other manufacturers can't license either the connector or the technology. So much for stupid manufacturers, eh?
The exact implementation of MagSafe is patented, but any other manufacturer could come up with a magnetic power supply connector - they just don't.
You're also comparing the MacBook Pro 15" with the optional 1680x1050 screen; default is 1440x900
I'm also comparing prices. Even with the optional screen, the Mac worked out cheaper.
Thunderbolt? Intel's been working with Apple to get it in their machine.
And Intel is shipping the controller chips to anyone who wants them. Apple is the only company to be shipping them now, although other manufacturers have said that they will.
Firewire? Meh, it has USB3 and eSATA, which are far more common standards;
Really? I've not yet seen a single USB3 peripheral, and the only eSATA drives I've seen also have other connectors, so it can't be that common - and it's only for drives. Meanwhile, I have two LaCie drives that have USB2, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 interfaces, so eSATA would be no use and USB3 would run at USB2 speeds which are slower than FireWire 400.
daisy chaining is of such a limited interest I don't think 99.99% of Apple users know what you're talking about.
Not sure about other manufacturers, but LaCie disks come with two FireWire 800 ports so you can plug them into each other. It's only of limited interest if plugging in more than one external drive is of limited interest, but I'd suggest that the set of people who want to connect exactly one external drive is probably quite small...
Multitouch? Nah, it's only got a TrackPoint, one of the best input devices on the market.
Bullshit. I have a ThinkPad, and the TrackPoint is horrible to use. It needs acceleration to move around the screen at a sensible speed and then you lose accuracy. The button placement is horrible, so you really need two hands to do basic pointing operations. Meanwhile, on the Mac I can point, select, scroll in two dimensions and zoom with one hand.
SSD? I wouldn't buy an SSD from either of them; you'll get OEM crap.
Performance seems fine with mine. I rarely find the disk speed a bottleneck anymore. For typical use, it's fairly common for it to hit 20-30MB/s random read and write speeds, and it peaks at about 200MB/s if I really tax it.
Lower res? Not if you pick the optional screen, which you did for the MacBook.
The ThinkPad was already £100 more expensive. If I pick the optional screen, it's £250 more expensive.
Thickness and heaviness are expected, this laptop is a tank and built like one. If you want sleek and thin, you don't shop ThinkPad.
The optical drive is probably far sturdier than you'd think and I'm pretty sure they're still user-replaceable, unlike Apple's.
I guess I imagined the part in the instructions telling me how to replace the optical drive in my MBP...
And then what you're not saying: this laptop has a fingerprint reader (useful to some, especially businesses),
No it doesn't. That's an optional extra, for another £10. And it is insanely easy to fake (I occasionally do some work for defence contractors and they find those hilarious).
2.2GHz CPU is a *quad core*, which Apple does not have
Yes it does. I compared identical CPU models. The MBP that I am typing this on has 4 real cores, 8 with hyperthreading.
it's got freaking *Quadro* graphics, which are in a whole other class. Just look for Quadro desktop GPUs versus GeForce desktop GPUs of the same category, you'll see. Whether you need Quadro is irrelevant, the car
Started? ISPs started dropping usenet well before then. My first ISP gave new subscribers a floppy disk with web, mail, news, FTP, and telnet programs on it. By the late '90s, most people only cared about the first two, so ISPs stopped advertising NNTP and FTP, and eventually dropped them. My ISP still has NNTP servers that sometimes work - they periodically turn them off, then notice that their external bandwidth bill has gone up a lot as people turn to third-party NNTP servers, and turn them back on again...
Lots of people add an aluminium case. They just don't add the rest. For example, my last 3 Mac laptops have all had a backlit keyboard - if I use it in low light, I can still see the keys. The last two came with MagSafe power connectors. I managed to kick the power cable on my ThinkPad and drop it from the top of a chest of drawers (to its credit, it survived). I kick the power cable of my MacBook Pro regularly, and it doesn't have a problem. The screen on this machine is the best I've seen on any laptop. It's bright enough to use in direct sunlight and isn't one of the horrible glossy screens that seem so popular elsewhere. FireWire 800 means that I can daisy-chain a couple of external hard drives and still get good performance from them - when I was doing video editing I had one for the source material and one for scratch renders, and even my G4 PowerBook was pretty fast in that configuration. ThunderBolt means that I don't have to worry so much about expandability - I can plug in PCIe devices externally, and I can even drive two external displays if I'm going to be in the same place for a while. The trackpad can simultaneously track 4 fingers, so multitouch gestures work nicely.
My last MacBook Pro had four years of daily use before being retired to less strenuous uses and I expect the new one to last as long. My ageing PowerBook still works, although it doesn't get much use anymore.
As to the 50% markup, let's see what a similar spec machine costs from Lenovo. The ThinkPad W520 seems to be about the same spec as the one I bought. I need to bump the CPU up to 2.2GHz from the stock 2GHz to make that the same. The display is only 1600x900, while mine is 1680x1050, but it has an option of 1920x1080 for £144 more. We'll go with the cheaper one since it has an nVidia GPU with 2GB of RAM while the Mac has an ATI GPU with 1GB of RAM. I'll leave it with the stock 4GB of RAM, since I upgraded mine to 8GB with third-party RAM (buying RAM from laptop makers seems expensive from anyone, but Apple is probably the worst in this regard). The ThinkPad doesn't have the option of a 256GB SSD, so I'll go with the 128GB SSD for now. The price is now £100 more than I paid for my MacBook Pro, yet:
Lacks Thunderbolt.
Has no backlit keyboard.
Has no FireWire 800
Has no multitouch trackpad.
128GB SSD instead of 256GB
Has a lower-res screen
Is 50% thicker and 10% heavier.
Can only drive two external displays if one has a VGA connector (how quaint).
Has a flimsy drive-pops-out optical drive, not a slot-loading drive.
Has a combined headphone / microphone port, while the MBP has a separate analogue/digital line in/out ports.
Doesn't have that aluminium case you thought was so important.
If Apple is adding a 50% markup, then Lenovo must be adding at least 75%. On the plus side for the ThinkPad, it does have ExpressCard (my last MBP did as well - I never used it) and eSATA (less useful to me than FW800, because I can't daisy chain external disks with it, I can only plug one in at a time). It also has USB3, which may become useful at some point in the future, .
Apple's strategy for the last decade has been to ride the cusp of the wave of commoditisation. They identify a market that is about to be overrun by commodity products, enter it at the point when they can get commodity prices from their suppliers but still charge premium prices to their customers, and then move on to a new market while keeping a small share at the expensive end of the newly commoditised market. Home computers, laptops, portable media player, smartphones and tablets have all followed this trend. The problem that Apple now has - and the reason that they're resorting to lawsuits to slow down other tablet makers - is that they don't have the next market identified and they don't have a product ready for it.
This strategy is very profitable, but only as long as they keep moving forward. Apple's market cap is based on the fact that their net income has increased by a huge amount year on year. As soon as it stops increasing, or the rate of increase slows, it will collapse.
It remains to be seen whether post-Jobs Apple can keep this going. Steve Jobs was always good at identifying this kind of market (look at PDO and WebObjects, for example), but it wasn't until he returned to Apple that he was really good at exploiting them, and I suspect that this was largely due to other people on the management team. I'm not sure that Apple still has the expertise to both identify and exploit a new market.
I have a 770 running Maemo and a TouchPad, and I'd take exception to two things with your comment. First, Maemo didn't have a taskbar, it had a NeXT-style dock. Secondly, it didn't 'work fine'. Finding the window you want with the card interface is a lot easier. You had a small row of tiny icons in the dock with Maemo, and each one then expanded to a menu if you had multiple running instances.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it's not legal for them to do this
What kind of crappy journal are you publishing in? Almost every one I've even considered submitting a paper to explicitly allows you to place a copy of the preprint on your web page. It's a pretty standard clause in the copyright assignment for any reputable journal. The only exception I've encountered was a journal that asks you to link to their (publicly available) hosted copy of the paper so that they could see how many people were reading it.
I got an email a little while ago saying that it was now a requirement for any papers written on EPSRC grants, meaning most science and engineering papers from UK universities. It always seemed to be more of a problem with individuals than institutions though. Pretty much all journals allow you to put the preprint (same content, just without the journal's formatting) online on your own web site, so it doesn't matter if the journal is open access or not as long as you bother to put the PDF on your web site. For some strange reason, a lot of academics - whose reputation is based largely on how many people read and cite their papers - choose not to do this simple step.
I plan to live forever. Or die trying...
There were lots of fun ones. The Killer Quake Patch was fun for deathmatch - insanely overpowered guns, from the chaingun that could kill anyone almost instantly (and use 100 shotgun shells in the process) up to the guided nuke. Made a nice change from the tactical thinking required by TF. AirQuake and Quake Rally were also fun. Quake Horrorshow was very atmospheric - everyone starts as a civilian and after a minute one person becomes a chainsaw murderer and has to get 25 kills before a timer expires. Playing this in the dark at a LAN party was great fun - everyone's trying to hide, and then you hear the sound of a chainsaw starting up...
Is it sold to consumers as a game? I always got the impression that Id games from Quake onwards were sold as engines with a demo game attached. If you want to create a game for their engine, you have two options. You either pay them a huge pile of money and get access to everything including redistribution rights, or you make your game require the end user to buy the engine and call it a mod. For Quake 1, the initial install was about 50MB, and my quake directory ended up being about 500MB from all of the mods. Aside from a little occasional deathmatch, I rarely played the game that Id shipped. Things like Team Fortress were much more fun.
Doesn't sound too bad. When Quake 1 came out, compiling a map was typically an overnight job on a typical machine of the era. Even the simple toy levels that I put together took over an hour to run vis and bsp on. It sounds like a machine with 16GB of RAM would get similar performance. Of course, with the Internet being what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with a distributed map compiler. Once you've done the top level of spacial subdivision, you can probably parcel off the work to remote nodes that can then run to completion. If people who want new maps make their machines available for this then you could get the rendering time down quite a lot. This wasn't feasible with Quake 1, when most users were on 14.4kbps modems (if they were online at all).
This is more a GPGPU competitor. Tilera is designed for things like big web apps where you have lots of not particularly computationally strenuous tasks that need handling with relatively low latency. This is designed for the kind task where you want to use a GPU, but your algorithm doesn't fit. It would probably also be good at things like ray tracing.
Many of them probably would, if not for the fact that they're owned by the same four companies that consider suing themselves to be bad for business.
Ireland is just trying to prop-up part of the EU, which is having problems staying together
Guess what the I in PIGS (the group of European countries with problematic economies) stands for...
MIL-SPEC ruggedness (Apple has nothing on this)
I don't see this anywhere in the ThinkPad, and having worked in military R&D I've never seen ThinkPads recommended for battlefield deployment either - things like the Toshiba ToughBook go there.
Vastly superior graphics
I checked the benchmarks, and the GPU in the MBP did slightly better than the one in the ThinkPad.
Doesn't support a proprietary and generally useless connector (Thunderbolt)
I guess you won't be buying any laptops after this year then, since most of the major manufacturers have said that they're going to start shipping ThunderBolt.
Has no backlit keyboard (of course if your screen isn't bright enough to light the keyboard, I'd argue the user isn't bright enough to type)
When the ambient light is low, you want to reduce screen brightness to reduce eyestrain (and improve battery life)
Doesn't have a largely proprietary horribly expensive connector (Firewire)
IEEE 1394 is proprietary now?
has a removable optical drive instead of a proprietary horribly expensive to replace one
Just replaced the optical drive in my old MBP. The replacement cost £30 and I installed it myself using directions from the Apple service manual.
has the quickly becoming standard unified headphone/mic combination plug
How is this a good thing? It doesn't support digital audio I/O, and it only lets you connect headphones or microphones, not both - no hands-free headset for you...
offers vastly superior cpu availability
Okay, now I know you're talking shit. Both machines had exactly the same CPU model
has builtin cellular/mobile connectivity
I'll give you that one, although I've never seen the advantage of having it built in since it means you have to get a separate data plan, rather than just using your phone.
up to 10.8 hours of battery life (MBP offers only 7)
Having owned a ThinkPad, I'd be surprised if a machine with a quoted 10.8 hours actually gets more than 5.
a warranty that goes as much as 3 times the length of the Apple warranty
It comes with a 9 year warranty? Nice!
Now I don't know where you pulled your thought that these are similar specced, but you are clearly wrong.
Uh, by comparing the specs that both list. Your contradiction seems to be by stating that all of the places where the MBP has better specs than the TP are somehow disadvantages. Which smells strongly of fanboyism. I won both ThinkPad and Mac laptops, and in terms of build quality there's little difference. The ThinkPad is more modular, largely to save costs when shipping customised models, but that also comes at the cost of reliability - I'm glad my ThinkPad is so modular because I've had to replace most of the modular components...
How did this borderline racist shit get modded up? Two of the biggest open source projects that I work on (LLVM and FreeBSD) have a lot of Russian contributors. You are almost certainly using code (at least partially) written by Russians on a daily basis.
The problem is the definition of copy, and this is where we get into the mess of EULAs. You should not need a copyright license to use a product that you purchased for its intended purpose. OS X does not run from the install DVD, it needs to be copied onto a hard disk to run. This technicality is what allows the EULA to exist. The court found that this is not a misuse of copyright, which means that it's a strong legal precedent saying that you can put any term in the EULA that you want. This is a problem.
I'm struggling to think of how this could apply to something like the GPL. If you buy some GPL'd software and install it, then violate the GPL post-installation, then you might have a problem, but the GPL only ever restricts your ability to make copies (because it's a distribution license, not an EULA), so it doesn't really fall into the same category. I suppose the closest analogy would be selling a Linux laptop with nVidia drivers preinstalled, which would be violating the GPL. Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with it being found that the GPL couldn't enforce this restriction, but I suspect a lot of FSF types would...
It sounds exactly like the ARM port of Xen that Samsung demoed at the XenSummit in 2007. Basically, the thing that made it different from normal virtualisation was the driver model that allowed each guest to have exclusive access to devices for a time. You could switch between multiple operating systems, but when each was active it would have direct access to the display, audio and input devices, but shared access to things like the network and storage.
That said, they list four operating systems that run in this mode: Linux, Linux, Linux, and Linux. So, it could just be using whatever the Linux equivalent of a FreeBSD jail or a Solaris zone is. Or even just a chroot for each userland...
No one seems to realize that you can also with Apple's blessing and the right micro tools pop open your Mac Book Pro and upgraded the memory to 8GB for under $50 from Amazon saving a $150 plus you can upgrade the HD to 750 GB or better at 7200 RPM for about $100 from Amazon saving another bunch of money.
I bought 8GB of RAM for less than the cost of getting Apple to upgrade the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, but the cheapest 256GB SSD I could find at the time was more than Apple was charging, so I let them install that. That said, RAM upgrades have got a lot harder with the unibody machines. My old PowerBook and MacBook Pro just had a cover over the RAM and you could unscrew it and add more. The new machine required removing 10 screws and taking off the bottom of the case. Not for the faint of heart...
You clearly didn't serve on any of the standards committees
Damn straight. If I had, neither spec would have had my vote for counting as a standard. ODF 1.0 was fine as a first draft. As a standard, it was an embarrassment and most of the problems were met with 'we'll fix this in a later version'.
wasn't a complete mess, perhaps you could enlighten us to where it was a mess?
It's been a couple of years, but as I recall the table format was horrible, the spreadsheet description was basically missing. The spec itself was far too short to do what it claimed. I looked at implementing some bits, but basically the only thing to do when you got to some ambiguity was to see what OpenOffice.org did and make something compatible with it - an experience that the AbiWord developers shared. I doubt anyone who did not have a copy of OO.o could have implemented even a moderately compatible ODF parser or generator. With a decent spec, you would need nothing other than the specification. Contrast it with the W3C specifications, where each element is documented in detail.
Unlike the OOXML I read, and I did read a lot of it, ODF was not broken
Then why was even OO.o, which was supposedly the reference implementation, able to fully implement the spec? The entire point of something like ODF is interoperability between applications. A requirement for passing it as a specification should have been two, complete, independent, compatible implementations. It was passed with no complete implementations.
Exactly. The ODF specification was a complete mess last time I read it (1.0) and was rushed through ISO. OOXML then got rushed through ISO with the justification that ODF had been allowed in its crappy incomplete state (with 0 fully compliant implementations), so why shouldn't OOXML (also with 0 fully compliant implementations)? It would have been a lot easier to block OOXML if ODF hadn't been rushed through by the 'anything but Microsoft' crowd (IBM, Novell, Sun, etc).
Not to mention that the other complaints are all about how underpowered the MacBook Air is in comparison to other laptops. No shit - it's an ultraportable, or whatever Intel's new buzzword is. The complaint makes about as much sense as complaining that a Mac Pro doesn't fit in his bag and work on the train.
Even when not pirating things, the bandwidth can be eaten up quite quickly. My ISP limits me to 1500MB per day between 4pm and 9pm. This sounded like a lot, until I tried watching a film on iPlayer in the early evening. The HD streams are 3.6Mb/s, so I use up the total allowance in 55 minutes and then get throttled back to 2.5Mb/s and the stream dies. I bought a game on GoG.com this afternoon, which was a 1.1GB download - and that was a relatively old game. The biggest game I've bought from them was about 5GB, but some of the ones they sell are over 10GB. 40GB/month is not very much if you're streaming video or downloading games...
I'm not sure Ron Paul would be such a bad idea. Sure, he has a complete lack of understanding of economics, but he also has no chance of actually passing 90% of what he advocates. He'd probably be able to cut some government spending and close some of the more unpopular government departments before getting kicked out...
If a confederate general had been killed by a drone attack in 1864, then you're probably trapped in a Michael Crichton novel.
MagSafe is patented and other manufacturers can't license either the connector or the technology. So much for stupid manufacturers, eh?
The exact implementation of MagSafe is patented, but any other manufacturer could come up with a magnetic power supply connector - they just don't.
You're also comparing the MacBook Pro 15" with the optional 1680x1050 screen; default is 1440x900
I'm also comparing prices. Even with the optional screen, the Mac worked out cheaper.
Thunderbolt? Intel's been working with Apple to get it in their machine.
And Intel is shipping the controller chips to anyone who wants them. Apple is the only company to be shipping them now, although other manufacturers have said that they will.
Firewire? Meh, it has USB3 and eSATA, which are far more common standards;
Really? I've not yet seen a single USB3 peripheral, and the only eSATA drives I've seen also have other connectors, so it can't be that common - and it's only for drives. Meanwhile, I have two LaCie drives that have USB2, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 interfaces, so eSATA would be no use and USB3 would run at USB2 speeds which are slower than FireWire 400.
daisy chaining is of such a limited interest I don't think 99.99% of Apple users know what you're talking about.
Not sure about other manufacturers, but LaCie disks come with two FireWire 800 ports so you can plug them into each other. It's only of limited interest if plugging in more than one external drive is of limited interest, but I'd suggest that the set of people who want to connect exactly one external drive is probably quite small...
Multitouch? Nah, it's only got a TrackPoint, one of the best input devices on the market.
Bullshit. I have a ThinkPad, and the TrackPoint is horrible to use. It needs acceleration to move around the screen at a sensible speed and then you lose accuracy. The button placement is horrible, so you really need two hands to do basic pointing operations. Meanwhile, on the Mac I can point, select, scroll in two dimensions and zoom with one hand.
SSD? I wouldn't buy an SSD from either of them; you'll get OEM crap.
Performance seems fine with mine. I rarely find the disk speed a bottleneck anymore. For typical use, it's fairly common for it to hit 20-30MB/s random read and write speeds, and it peaks at about 200MB/s if I really tax it.
Lower res? Not if you pick the optional screen, which you did for the MacBook.
The ThinkPad was already £100 more expensive. If I pick the optional screen, it's £250 more expensive.
Thickness and heaviness are expected, this laptop is a tank and built like one. If you want sleek and thin, you don't shop ThinkPad.
The optical drive is probably far sturdier than you'd think and I'm pretty sure they're still user-replaceable, unlike Apple's.
I guess I imagined the part in the instructions telling me how to replace the optical drive in my MBP...
And then what you're not saying: this laptop has a fingerprint reader (useful to some, especially businesses),
No it doesn't. That's an optional extra, for another £10. And it is insanely easy to fake (I occasionally do some work for defence contractors and they find those hilarious).
2.2GHz CPU is a *quad core*, which Apple does not have
Yes it does. I compared identical CPU models. The MBP that I am typing this on has 4 real cores, 8 with hyperthreading.
it's got freaking *Quadro* graphics, which are in a whole other class. Just look for Quadro desktop GPUs versus GeForce desktop GPUs of the same category, you'll see. Whether you need Quadro is irrelevant, the car
Started? ISPs started dropping usenet well before then. My first ISP gave new subscribers a floppy disk with web, mail, news, FTP, and telnet programs on it. By the late '90s, most people only cared about the first two, so ISPs stopped advertising NNTP and FTP, and eventually dropped them. My ISP still has NNTP servers that sometimes work - they periodically turn them off, then notice that their external bandwidth bill has gone up a lot as people turn to third-party NNTP servers, and turn them back on again...
Lots of people add an aluminium case. They just don't add the rest. For example, my last 3 Mac laptops have all had a backlit keyboard - if I use it in low light, I can still see the keys. The last two came with MagSafe power connectors. I managed to kick the power cable on my ThinkPad and drop it from the top of a chest of drawers (to its credit, it survived). I kick the power cable of my MacBook Pro regularly, and it doesn't have a problem. The screen on this machine is the best I've seen on any laptop. It's bright enough to use in direct sunlight and isn't one of the horrible glossy screens that seem so popular elsewhere. FireWire 800 means that I can daisy-chain a couple of external hard drives and still get good performance from them - when I was doing video editing I had one for the source material and one for scratch renders, and even my G4 PowerBook was pretty fast in that configuration. ThunderBolt means that I don't have to worry so much about expandability - I can plug in PCIe devices externally, and I can even drive two external displays if I'm going to be in the same place for a while. The trackpad can simultaneously track 4 fingers, so multitouch gestures work nicely.
My last MacBook Pro had four years of daily use before being retired to less strenuous uses and I expect the new one to last as long. My ageing PowerBook still works, although it doesn't get much use anymore.
As to the 50% markup, let's see what a similar spec machine costs from Lenovo. The ThinkPad W520 seems to be about the same spec as the one I bought. I need to bump the CPU up to 2.2GHz from the stock 2GHz to make that the same. The display is only 1600x900, while mine is 1680x1050, but it has an option of 1920x1080 for £144 more. We'll go with the cheaper one since it has an nVidia GPU with 2GB of RAM while the Mac has an ATI GPU with 1GB of RAM. I'll leave it with the stock 4GB of RAM, since I upgraded mine to 8GB with third-party RAM (buying RAM from laptop makers seems expensive from anyone, but Apple is probably the worst in this regard). The ThinkPad doesn't have the option of a 256GB SSD, so I'll go with the 128GB SSD for now. The price is now £100 more than I paid for my MacBook Pro, yet:
If Apple is adding a 50% markup, then Lenovo must be adding at least 75%. On the plus side for the ThinkPad, it does have ExpressCard (my last MBP did as well - I never used it) and eSATA (less useful to me than FW800, because I can't daisy chain external disks with it, I can only plug one in at a time). It also has USB3, which may become useful at some point in the future, .
Apple's strategy for the last decade has been to ride the cusp of the wave of commoditisation. They identify a market that is about to be overrun by commodity products, enter it at the point when they can get commodity prices from their suppliers but still charge premium prices to their customers, and then move on to a new market while keeping a small share at the expensive end of the newly commoditised market. Home computers, laptops, portable media player, smartphones and tablets have all followed this trend. The problem that Apple now has - and the reason that they're resorting to lawsuits to slow down other tablet makers - is that they don't have the next market identified and they don't have a product ready for it.
This strategy is very profitable, but only as long as they keep moving forward. Apple's market cap is based on the fact that their net income has increased by a huge amount year on year. As soon as it stops increasing, or the rate of increase slows, it will collapse.
It remains to be seen whether post-Jobs Apple can keep this going. Steve Jobs was always good at identifying this kind of market (look at PDO and WebObjects, for example), but it wasn't until he returned to Apple that he was really good at exploiting them, and I suspect that this was largely due to other people on the management team. I'm not sure that Apple still has the expertise to both identify and exploit a new market.
I have a 770 running Maemo and a TouchPad, and I'd take exception to two things with your comment. First, Maemo didn't have a taskbar, it had a NeXT-style dock. Secondly, it didn't 'work fine'. Finding the window you want with the card interface is a lot easier. You had a small row of tiny icons in the dock with Maemo, and each one then expanded to a menu if you had multiple running instances.