Sauerbraten wins this one by far. The gameplay is addictive and the graphics are actually very good, which is something that isn't quite common in FLOSS games. God knows how many hours I've lost to this piece of software alone.
You live in a fairy tale world. You fail to understand that we, humans, are social beings. We form social groups that have structure and organize individuals in social hierarchies. The members of those groups always wish to "move up" in those hierarchies because being on the bottom sucks.
The fast food business is seen as the most demeaning work in today's society because you are placed in the very bottom of your society's hierarchy. You earn minimum wage, you are forced to take orders from everyone that crosses your path, you are forced to wear demeaning uniforms and, to make matters worse, you have virtually zero prospects of being promoted. You are the sad sack of human flesh that was desperate enough to apply to the job that the entire society views as the lowest common denominator. Heck, it's so demeaning that that kind of job has a demeaning nickname and the companies behind that spend their money fighting the negative connotation that the nickname gives them.
But you can pretend that the entire world is something other than reality just to fit your pristine, idealized view all you want. Nonetheless, that won't make it real, will it?
It's only a myth if you don't understand the basics behind decision theory and you fail to understand the most basic economic fact of all which is: money isn't the end all, be all element in economy, let alone life.
Re:At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi
on
FreeBSD 7.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.
Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code".
Oh yes, what a charming little statement. Absolutely nobody from BSD land cares if companies like Cisco run away with BSD's code and never give anything back in return. Not a single grudge at all. Well, except from people like Theo de Raadt. From a Theo de Raadt interview from 2006:
NF: Lots of hardware vendors use OpenSSH. Have you got anything back from them?
TdR: If I add up everything we have ever gotten in exchange for our efforts with OpenSSH, it might amount to $1,000. This all came from individuals. For our work on OpenSSH, companies using OpenSSH have never given us a cent. What about companies that incorporate OpenSSH directly into their products, saving themselves millions of dollars? Companies such as Cisco, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM, Siemens, a raft of medium-sized firewall companies -- we have not received a cent. Or from Linux vendors? Not a cent.
Of course we did not set out to create OpenSSH for the money -- we purposely made it completely free so that the "telnet infrastructure" of the 1980s would die. But it sure is sad that none of these companies return even a fraction of value in kind.
If you want to judge any entity particularly harshly, judge Sun. Yearly they hold interoperability events, for NFS and other protocols, and they include SSH implementation tests as well. Twice we asked them to cover the travel and accommodation costs for a developer to come to their event, and they refused. Considering that their SunSSH is directly based on our code, that is just flat out insulting. Shame on you Sun, shame, shame, shame.
That does sound like somebody in the BSD camp does give a shit. In fact, it sounds like the BSD camp does get right out pissed off from the lack of contributions. So, care to retract your statement?
Is there some sort of benchmark comparing FreeBSD 7.1 with other operating systems and distributions? I would be more than happy to run it on a couple of systems that I have hanging around but the user experience needs to be at least comparable to what I'm already running (kubuntu 8.10)
Don't believe Microsoft did that marketing gimmick just because they think you are a great guy and they love your beautiful smile. Their objective is to get a hold of Apple's iPod market share no matter what it takes. And as they are trying to compete with a god-awful mess of a product that even goes through a mass breakdown episode that no other product as ever experienced before... Well, they have to tweak their marketing mix.
The problem is they can't bring the prices any lower, they are unable to improve the quality of their product, their product is already everywhere and is heavily promoted. Yet no one buys their crap. What else can they do? Microsoft can always give them away for free. Well, dispense upgrades for free... Which in essence it's the same thing.
Well, using the desktop suite means that you fully control the access to your documents. On the other hand, a "server-based suite" like Google's forces you to relinquish the control of your documents to a third party, which means that you explicitly give vital information on your business to an external party subject to the control of a foreign country. Having economicespionage fresh in the collective memory, including ECHELON, that is a very dumb thing to do.
So yes, users do really need an open source desktop suite, no matter how cheap broadband is at the moment. It's all about control.
Indeed that is a problem that affects OpenOffice since it's inception. To make matters worse, it's recent migration from a 2.0 to 3.0 was apparently made with a conscious decision to keep the code as unlearnable and unwriteable as it was. You can't have a flourishing developer community if your project purposely obscures the code.
Moreover, you don't make many friends or any inroads if you manage a project in such a way that you expect volunteers to contribute their work for free in such a way that a company keeps the rights to that code and incorporates it in a proprietary product while the original developer gets squat.
Having said that, let's not forget other FLOSS MS-Office clones out there such as KOffice. It would be nice to compare the community participation.
Well, Amarok has a config menu entry with a big old icon with the label "last.fm" on it. Everyone who ever used Amarok had to pass his's cursor over the label "last.fm", which has been there for a few years, mind you. Other media players also support last.fm, whether through a plugin or even built in. So you may have not been living under a rock but you sure were quite a bit distracted. For at least the last 6 years or so.
On a side note, I've made a point of turning on the last.fm plugin for a simple reason: it build popularity charts directly from the user's preferences instead of some unscientific, corrupted, payola-based sales chart. It bugged me how some artists were put on the top of the charts although no one was really listening to them. With last.fm the charts were compiled directly from the user's input and that meant that bands like Queen and Pink Floyd are still topping the charts even though they don't come near the "official", record company-compiled charts. That was very refreshing.
But now that I've learnt that last.fm is not only tracking down contributors but also is owned by one of RIAA's record companies... Well, let's just say that the plugin is off and will never be turned on again.
Audioscrobbler, and now last.fm, is a beautiful concept. The 200 million they got from it is more than deserved. Too bad it's being corrupted by the RIAA's companies. Maybe the sudden appearance of trash like kayne west and britney spears on the top of last.fm's charts has something to do with it.
Your experience has been the complete opposite of mine. After my laptop died I looked into the market and did the math, which lead me to the conclusion that a 15'' laptop being sold for 900 euros would ended up with the same specs of a 190 euro desktop. I could add to that the 160 euros for a brand new 19'' monitor and voilÃ: the desktop would end up costing nearly half as the equivalent laptop. The choice was obvious.
But that's not all. My previous laptop, which costed me 1200 euros, died due to a burned out graphics card, a recurring problem that occurred twice and was repaired while the warranty lasted. After that the laptop was as good as garbage (thanks, acer). If that happened to my desktop then, even if I needed to purchase it all over, I would end up with a loss of less than 200 euros. Well, 200 euros is a heck of a lot less than 1200 euros.
And let's not talk about upgrades. Desktops nail that advantage firmly, both in cost and in flexibility. You simply can't pop in a ATI HD4870 on a 450 euro laptop but you can easily add a couple of those to a desktop.
So he was good enough to circumvent a system designed to prevent people like him from acheiving success and you say he wasn't successful? Just what exactly is your definition of success?!?
Pulling a fast one on the system's selection process so that it selects a clearly inferior and inapt candidate for the task is not by any way a definition of success. The character succeeded in stealing the identity of a qualifiable candidate and evading the selection process. Yet, the story doesn't approach the part that really matters: the part where the character does indeed needs to put his genetic traits to the test. Sure, myopia is no biggie but cardiac problems that result in a life expectancy of 30.2 years sure can cause a bit of trouble in long space travels.
And what happened if one of those "qualified" people tripped and broke their neck, or made a bad decision that led to mission failure, or a faulty part on the craft killed them all, etc.
One of the points of the movie that genes are not the sum of the person.
That isn't the point. The point is that the genetic testing was put in place in order to eliminate needless problems that could be caused by health problems arising from genetic defects. Indeed a "qualified" astronaut could break his/her neck but so does the unqualified astronaut, which means it's irrelevant. The point is that the unqualified astronaut suffers from a genetic-based cardiac defect. What if his heart craps up on him in the middle of the trip to Titan? What else then? Should the mission be forced to nurse a corpse through the entire mission and be chronically and maybe critically sub-manned through the entire mission? That problem, which is a massive problem, could be avoided. By genetic testing. That the character violated through identity theft. That's the point.
I don't get it. The corporations are asking for an investment. How exactly is it socialism if the potential investor demands a return from it's investment?
So the upgrade of a whole new OS at a cost of quite a lot of money is suddenly worth it due to the addition of a piece of functionality that, quite bluntly, is gained by a measly sudo apt-get install katapult ?
Was this real? The letter snippet reads as if the supposed teacher was ranting about drug use or some other evil of society. So much righteous indignation, so little understanding of the real world.
I pity the school system that relies on these characters to educate and "guide and discipline" any child.
How exactly could a market be described as "free" if a single market actor is able to force other market actors to not sell the goods at a price they see fit?
Obviously you're a PI, then. Most PIs seem to think that way. In my experience they are usually wrong, but that control is more important to them than results.
That shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, it's a known fact that PIs are irrational.
You seem to be a bit lost. This GPGPU deal is not a means to get the holy grail of multicore computing nor was it ever seen as such. It is just a means to enable the users, whether they are regular folks or scientists in computing-intensive fields like structural engineering and biomedical research, to harness the computing power of high power processors which happen to be very cheap and available in any store shelf in any computer store. It's a means to take advantage of the hardware that sits idle on your computer and a means to get the job done spending only a couple thousands of dollars on off-the-shelf parts instead of a multi-million dollar CPU cluster. It isn't a solution for tomorrow's computing needs that uses tomorrow's hardware. It's a solution for today's computing needs that takes advantage of yesterday's computing hardware.
And if you really believe that Intel and even AMD don't have a clue about making CPUs or even how the IT market is ran then you probably should just leave slashdot and never return, impostor.
Is the OP serious about Ubuntu's port to ARM causing Intel to worry and Microsoft to follow suit?
Well, a couple of years ago it also wouldn't make much sense to claim that this little operating system kernel called linux would worry a software giant like Microsoft. Lo and behold, at this very moment we are seeing multiple multi-national OEM selling flagship products with linux-based operating systems.
Silly things have this strange habit of really happening in real life.
comp.lang.c is the exception. Quite a few of the usenet groups that still have useful content are mirrors of mailing lists.
It appears that there are a whole lot of exceptions on usenet. For example, comp.lang.c++ received over 600 posts from last monday up to today and mind you, just like comp.lang.c, it is only a group among many that cover that language. Other languages like Python has comp.lang.python, which carried nearly 1000 posts since last monday. Java has comp.lang.java.help, which got a tad over 500 post but it is only a specific group among 12 other Java groups. Ruby, on comp.lang.ruby, received no less than 1494 posts.
So you see, comp.lang.c isn't the exception but the rule. What web forum gets nearly 500 posts per week covering a single programming language?
With the explosion of the web, a lot of people got into programming that never heard of usenet. Saying "people are no longer answering questions on usenet" is obviously false, but for a lot of "modern" programming languages, the usenet group is just a mirror of the mailing list - and a lot of people using (for instance) python have probably never heard of usenet.
If that is so then there are an awful lot of python programmers out there, as the minority is clogging up the python newsgroup.
I don't think that usenet is dead, but I don't think that it's necessarily the best place to turn to for an answer off the bat anymore.
On the contrary. Usenet has become the leading example of what an expert system should be like. People who rely on usenet to get their questions answered benefit, in some cases, from decades of knowledge being spewed on a medium which is easily accessible, easily searched and with a whole pile of content. In fact, it is surprising how a saturated medium like usenet is still receiving countless new messages per day, as quite a few topics were already discussed multiple times into exhaustion and anyone could get the answer by searching the usenet archives or reading the newsgroup's FAQ.
On the other hand, web forums are obtrusive. You need registrations to ask questions and in some cases even read the content. They are also plagued by nasty usability limits and are subjected to the arbitrary whim of the site owner and moderators. You may get a couple of questions answered through that medium but you have to agree that there are a whole lot of hard to swallow hoops that you need to jump through in order to get to use them and yet the farther you can reach is still miles behind where usenet takes you.
The question you ask is wrong...since people are no longer answering questions on usenet.
Oh really? Then could you explain how exactly did comp.lang.c managed to receive today, a sunday of all days, until now no less than 78 posts, all regarding subjects like call by reference, duff's device and shared pointes? Could you explain how a medium that "people are no longer answering questions on" happens to get over 700 posts a week discussing a single programming language alone?
Do you happen to work for that site you just advertised?
The thing is, the DST adjustment is performed when the average montly temperature drops rather fast. That drop reaches the double digits at my home town. So if someone notices an increase in energy consumption in the range of 1%, why do people jump to the conclusion that the increase was due to the DST and don't even stop to think that when the weather cools down people do enjoy staying warm?
Correlation doesn't imply causality, not even when you are looking into your pet peeve.
Portability? Really? Are you able to say that with a straight face? Do you really, honestly believe that a difference of half an inch and half a pound between laptops which already weigh nearly 5 pounds will affect your ability to carry them around? Moreover, do you believe that that difference is worth 400 dollars? Are you out of your mind?
In TFA it is stated on page 3 that the MacBook costs 1299$ while the Lenovo is 1264.84$, the Sony is $1194.99 and the Dell is $819. Yet, in order to make the MacBook appear to be not so expensive in comparison, it states that they are all of comparable value and therefore, as you should ignore price differences in the scale of 100$, they all cost the same. I mean, WTF?
But that isn't all. There are a few more laptop manufacturers that, oddly enough, happen to be the world's leading laptop manufacturers (Acer, HP, Asus, etc) and also, oddly enough, offer similar laptops in the same price range of the Dell laptop. In fact, Sony and Lenovo are known as the inexplicably expensive laptop brands.
So, having said that, how exactly can anyone claim that the Apple laptops aren't expensive when you realize that their laptops are more expensive than the already expensive windows laptops? You can't.
P.S.: The current Apple laptops are also PCs. It doesn't make sense to claim that a Windows laptop is a PC while the Apple laptop is something else.
Slashdot Mirror
Sauerbraten wins this one by far. The gameplay is addictive and the graphics are actually very good, which is something that isn't quite common in FLOSS games. God knows how many hours I've lost to this piece of software alone.
http://sauerbraten.org/
You live in a fairy tale world. You fail to understand that we, humans, are social beings. We form social groups that have structure and organize individuals in social hierarchies. The members of those groups always wish to "move up" in those hierarchies because being on the bottom sucks.
The fast food business is seen as the most demeaning work in today's society because you are placed in the very bottom of your society's hierarchy. You earn minimum wage, you are forced to take orders from everyone that crosses your path, you are forced to wear demeaning uniforms and, to make matters worse, you have virtually zero prospects of being promoted. You are the sad sack of human flesh that was desperate enough to apply to the job that the entire society views as the lowest common denominator. Heck, it's so demeaning that that kind of job has a demeaning nickname and the companies behind that spend their money fighting the negative connotation that the nickname gives them.
But you can pretend that the entire world is something other than reality just to fit your pristine, idealized view all you want. Nonetheless, that won't make it real, will it?
It's only a myth if you don't understand the basics behind decision theory and you fail to understand the most basic economic fact of all which is: money isn't the end all, be all element in economy, let alone life.
Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.
Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code".
Oh yes, what a charming little statement. Absolutely nobody from BSD land cares if companies like Cisco run away with BSD's code and never give anything back in return. Not a single grudge at all. Well, except from people like Theo de Raadt. From a Theo de Raadt interview from 2006:
That does sound like somebody in the BSD camp does give a shit. In fact, it sounds like the BSD camp does get right out pissed off from the lack of contributions. So, care to retract your statement?
Is there some sort of benchmark comparing FreeBSD 7.1 with other operating systems and distributions? I would be more than happy to run it on a couple of systems that I have hanging around but the user experience needs to be at least comparable to what I'm already running (kubuntu 8.10)
Don't believe Microsoft did that marketing gimmick just because they think you are a great guy and they love your beautiful smile. Their objective is to get a hold of Apple's iPod market share no matter what it takes. And as they are trying to compete with a god-awful mess of a product that even goes through a mass breakdown episode that no other product as ever experienced before... Well, they have to tweak their marketing mix.
The problem is they can't bring the prices any lower, they are unable to improve the quality of their product, their product is already everywhere and is heavily promoted. Yet no one buys their crap. What else can they do? Microsoft can always give them away for free. Well, dispense upgrades for free... Which in essence it's the same thing.
Well, using the desktop suite means that you fully control the access to your documents. On the other hand, a "server-based suite" like Google's forces you to relinquish the control of your documents to a third party, which means that you explicitly give vital information on your business to an external party subject to the control of a foreign country. Having economic espionage fresh in the collective memory, including ECHELON, that is a very dumb thing to do.
So yes, users do really need an open source desktop suite, no matter how cheap broadband is at the moment. It's all about control.
Indeed that is a problem that affects OpenOffice since it's inception. To make matters worse, it's recent migration from a 2.0 to 3.0 was apparently made with a conscious decision to keep the code as unlearnable and unwriteable as it was. You can't have a flourishing developer community if your project purposely obscures the code.
Moreover, you don't make many friends or any inroads if you manage a project in such a way that you expect volunteers to contribute their work for free in such a way that a company keeps the rights to that code and incorporates it in a proprietary product while the original developer gets squat.
Having said that, let's not forget other FLOSS MS-Office clones out there such as KOffice. It would be nice to compare the community participation.
Well, Amarok has a config menu entry with a big old icon with the label "last.fm" on it. Everyone who ever used Amarok had to pass his's cursor over the label "last.fm", which has been there for a few years, mind you. Other media players also support last.fm, whether through a plugin or even built in. So you may have not been living under a rock but you sure were quite a bit distracted. For at least the last 6 years or so.
On a side note, I've made a point of turning on the last.fm plugin for a simple reason: it build popularity charts directly from the user's preferences instead of some unscientific, corrupted, payola-based sales chart. It bugged me how some artists were put on the top of the charts although no one was really listening to them. With last.fm the charts were compiled directly from the user's input and that meant that bands like Queen and Pink Floyd are still topping the charts even though they don't come near the "official", record company-compiled charts. That was very refreshing.
But now that I've learnt that last.fm is not only tracking down contributors but also is owned by one of RIAA's record companies... Well, let's just say that the plugin is off and will never be turned on again.
Audioscrobbler, and now last.fm, is a beautiful concept. The 200 million they got from it is more than deserved. Too bad it's being corrupted by the RIAA's companies. Maybe the sudden appearance of trash like kayne west and britney spears on the top of last.fm's charts has something to do with it.
Your experience has been the complete opposite of mine. After my laptop died I looked into the market and did the math, which lead me to the conclusion that a 15'' laptop being sold for 900 euros would ended up with the same specs of a 190 euro desktop. I could add to that the 160 euros for a brand new 19'' monitor and voilÃ: the desktop would end up costing nearly half as the equivalent laptop. The choice was obvious.
But that's not all. My previous laptop, which costed me 1200 euros, died due to a burned out graphics card, a recurring problem that occurred twice and was repaired while the warranty lasted. After that the laptop was as good as garbage (thanks, acer). If that happened to my desktop then, even if I needed to purchase it all over, I would end up with a loss of less than 200 euros. Well, 200 euros is a heck of a lot less than 1200 euros.
And let's not talk about upgrades. Desktops nail that advantage firmly, both in cost and in flexibility. You simply can't pop in a ATI HD4870 on a 450 euro laptop but you can easily add a couple of those to a desktop.
So he was good enough to circumvent a system designed to prevent people like him from acheiving success and you say he wasn't successful? Just what exactly is your definition of success?!?
Pulling a fast one on the system's selection process so that it selects a clearly inferior and inapt candidate for the task is not by any way a definition of success. The character succeeded in stealing the identity of a qualifiable candidate and evading the selection process. Yet, the story doesn't approach the part that really matters: the part where the character does indeed needs to put his genetic traits to the test. Sure, myopia is no biggie but cardiac problems that result in a life expectancy of 30.2 years sure can cause a bit of trouble in long space travels.
And what happened if one of those "qualified" people tripped and broke their neck, or made a bad decision that led to mission failure, or a faulty part on the craft killed them all, etc.
One of the points of the movie that genes are not the sum of the person.
That isn't the point. The point is that the genetic testing was put in place in order to eliminate needless problems that could be caused by health problems arising from genetic defects. Indeed a "qualified" astronaut could break his/her neck but so does the unqualified astronaut, which means it's irrelevant. The point is that the unqualified astronaut suffers from a genetic-based cardiac defect. What if his heart craps up on him in the middle of the trip to Titan? What else then? Should the mission be forced to nurse a corpse through the entire mission and be chronically and maybe critically sub-manned through the entire mission? That problem, which is a massive problem, could be avoided. By genetic testing. That the character violated through identity theft. That's the point.
I don't get it. The corporations are asking for an investment. How exactly is it socialism if the potential investor demands a return from it's investment?
So the upgrade of a whole new OS at a cost of quite a lot of money is suddenly worth it due to the addition of a piece of functionality that, quite bluntly, is gained by a measly sudo apt-get install katapult ?
Wow.
Was this real? The letter snippet reads as if the supposed teacher was ranting about drug use or some other evil of society. So much righteous indignation, so little understanding of the real world.
I pity the school system that relies on these characters to educate and "guide and discipline" any child.
Maybe he meant Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.
Laugh, dammit.
How exactly could a market be described as "free" if a single market actor is able to force other market actors to not sell the goods at a price they see fit?
Obviously you're a PI, then. Most PIs seem to think that way. In my experience they are usually wrong, but that control is more important to them than results.
That shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, it's a known fact that PIs are irrational.
You seem to be a bit lost. This GPGPU deal is not a means to get the holy grail of multicore computing nor was it ever seen as such. It is just a means to enable the users, whether they are regular folks or scientists in computing-intensive fields like structural engineering and biomedical research, to harness the computing power of high power processors which happen to be very cheap and available in any store shelf in any computer store. It's a means to take advantage of the hardware that sits idle on your computer and a means to get the job done spending only a couple thousands of dollars on off-the-shelf parts instead of a multi-million dollar CPU cluster. It isn't a solution for tomorrow's computing needs that uses tomorrow's hardware. It's a solution for today's computing needs that takes advantage of yesterday's computing hardware.
And if you really believe that Intel and even AMD don't have a clue about making CPUs or even how the IT market is ran then you probably should just leave slashdot and never return, impostor.
Is the OP serious about Ubuntu's port to ARM causing Intel to worry and Microsoft to follow suit?
Well, a couple of years ago it also wouldn't make much sense to claim that this little operating system kernel called linux would worry a software giant like Microsoft. Lo and behold, at this very moment we are seeing multiple multi-national OEM selling flagship products with linux-based operating systems.
Silly things have this strange habit of really happening in real life.
comp.lang.c is the exception. Quite a few of the usenet groups that still have useful content are mirrors of mailing lists.
It appears that there are a whole lot of exceptions on usenet. For example, comp.lang.c++ received over 600 posts from last monday up to today and mind you, just like comp.lang.c, it is only a group among many that cover that language. Other languages like Python has comp.lang.python, which carried nearly 1000 posts since last monday. Java has comp.lang.java.help, which got a tad over 500 post but it is only a specific group among 12 other Java groups. Ruby, on comp.lang.ruby, received no less than 1494 posts.
So you see, comp.lang.c isn't the exception but the rule. What web forum gets nearly 500 posts per week covering a single programming language?
With the explosion of the web, a lot of people got into programming that never heard of usenet. Saying "people are no longer answering questions on usenet" is obviously false, but for a lot of "modern" programming languages, the usenet group is just a mirror of the mailing list - and a lot of people using (for instance) python have probably never heard of usenet.
If that is so then there are an awful lot of python programmers out there, as the minority is clogging up the python newsgroup.
I don't think that usenet is dead, but I don't think that it's necessarily the best place to turn to for an answer off the bat anymore.
On the contrary. Usenet has become the leading example of what an expert system should be like. People who rely on usenet to get their questions answered benefit, in some cases, from decades of knowledge being spewed on a medium which is easily accessible, easily searched and with a whole pile of content. In fact, it is surprising how a saturated medium like usenet is still receiving countless new messages per day, as quite a few topics were already discussed multiple times into exhaustion and anyone could get the answer by searching the usenet archives or reading the newsgroup's FAQ.
On the other hand, web forums are obtrusive. You need registrations to ask questions and in some cases even read the content. They are also plagued by nasty usability limits and are subjected to the arbitrary whim of the site owner and moderators. You may get a couple of questions answered through that medium but you have to agree that there are a whole lot of hard to swallow hoops that you need to jump through in order to get to use them and yet the farther you can reach is still miles behind where usenet takes you.
The question you ask is wrong...since people are no longer answering questions on usenet.
Oh really? Then could you explain how exactly did comp.lang.c managed to receive today, a sunday of all days, until now no less than 78 posts, all regarding subjects like call by reference, duff's device and shared pointes? Could you explain how a medium that "people are no longer answering questions on" happens to get over 700 posts a week discussing a single programming language alone?
Do you happen to work for that site you just advertised?
The thing is, the DST adjustment is performed when the average montly temperature drops rather fast. That drop reaches the double digits at my home town. So if someone notices an increase in energy consumption in the range of 1%, why do people jump to the conclusion that the increase was due to the DST and don't even stop to think that when the weather cools down people do enjoy staying warm?
Correlation doesn't imply causality, not even when you are looking into your pet peeve.
Portability? Really? Are you able to say that with a straight face? Do you really, honestly believe that a difference of half an inch and half a pound between laptops which already weigh nearly 5 pounds will affect your ability to carry them around? Moreover, do you believe that that difference is worth 400 dollars? Are you out of your mind?
Moreover, the Dell that was pointed out as being equivalent to the Apple laptop in the comparison is already 400$ cheaper.
And yet the fanboys want to pass the Apple laptops as not being overpriced. Go figure.
In TFA it is stated on page 3 that the MacBook costs 1299$ while the Lenovo is 1264.84$, the Sony is $1194.99 and the Dell is $819. Yet, in order to make the MacBook appear to be not so expensive in comparison, it states that they are all of comparable value and therefore, as you should ignore price differences in the scale of 100$, they all cost the same. I mean, WTF?
But that isn't all. There are a few more laptop manufacturers that, oddly enough, happen to be the world's leading laptop manufacturers (Acer, HP, Asus, etc) and also, oddly enough, offer similar laptops in the same price range of the Dell laptop. In fact, Sony and Lenovo are known as the inexplicably expensive laptop brands.
So, having said that, how exactly can anyone claim that the Apple laptops aren't expensive when you realize that their laptops are more expensive than the already expensive windows laptops? You can't.
P.S.: The current Apple laptops are also PCs. It doesn't make sense to claim that a Windows laptop is a PC while the Apple laptop is something else.