A monopoly doesn't mean 100% market dominance, moron. It means you have enough power to strongarm people/companies, without them being able to switch away from Intel.
Buying an pre-built AMD system is really hard unless you like really crappy machines. The only maker I trust to build a computer for me is Dell, or Apple if I had to run a Mac-only program.
Right now the requirement to own a good AMD system is to know how to build your own. If you don't think Intel has a monopoly, you probably don't think MS has one either.
I hope you're right. I just hope someone can hit Redmond with a huge patent suit of something ingrained in Windows, Sun, and Apple. Just to bring this ridiculous crap to light.
Or maybe, just maybe, a judge with enough technical knowledge to run an electric toothbrush will hear one of these stupid cases. This is like patenting the front panel of a blender. Or, it's more like a company that hasn't done anything useful trying to cash in on another company's success.
1,500 more people to tell you what the System Restore CD looks like.
Desktop support is a tough job to get good people into. If you're any good at it on your own, you're probably qualified for a better job. If you need training to do desktop support, you probably advise the system restore CD often. So, long term desktop support guys aren't going to be the good ones, and the people calling the Geek Squad need the best support/handholding possible.
Basically if you're over 40 and suck at using a computer, find a nerd friend to help or give up. I would suggest a book but people think getting good at using computers just happens with no effort or active learning. I mean, I just bought my first Compaq desktop yesterday and I'm already a Sun cluster admin today, WOW!
Write your senator, maybe start a peaceful demonstration, or do something else that doesn't work anymore. If you have no money, you have no voice, because congressmen only listen to campaign contributors. If you don't know this, or think it's wrong, open your eyes.
This govenment hasn't represented the people in a long long time. If you really want to make an impact, consumers will have to band together and boycott businesses that are backing crappy laws. Your dollar is your vote now. If you can't get corporations to back good laws, they won't pass.
Vote republican or democrat, their concern is money, not you. See: gay marriage, "patriot" act, RealID, patent laws, Microsoft still a monopoly. I'm sorry, money or scaring people with terror threats. Not real terror threats but the ones made up by the Bush people to scare us, and then nothing happens and they claim that they saved the day. Man, being a crooked president must be easy.
This is going to be Macs with a different processor. Apple couldn't produce a OS that runs on generic hardware if they tried. At exactly which point will your average user care? And then explain what this has to do with Linux. A Mac is a Mac a PC is a PC, nothing has changed except by choosing Intel they can no longer say they use the bast components.
The benefit of all of this is we don't have to hear the word Wintel anymore. I hate those words. Can I request that./ers use 'weblog' from now on, do we need to save two letters just to sound stupid? We're better than that.
SLI changes things around as well. I buy a $300 6800GT card this year, wait a year and pick up another card for around $150 after the next gen cards come out, and I'm running a ton faster already.
Sure you can be the idiot who says "but not all games support SLI," that's because it's new, tardy. Wait a bit and every new game that needs SLI support will have it (by needs I mean Farcry and HL2 and Doom3, not Civ3).
PC gaming will stick around because, at this point, my PC kicks the crap out of any current console. This happens about a year into a console's life. After one short year my PC could beat a PS2, and since the Xbox is a PC I know my PC was faster when the Xbox came out. There will be a market for those of us who want to see games get better in a more gradual fashion, a card here a processor there, and then there are console gamers who like to see huge jumps every 5 years and then be obsolete one year later.
With multiple Xbox 360 versions and the HDD possibly not shipping with the PS3, PCs will stay around for a while.
Not many people expect much for free. We just don't like being bled dry by the entertainment industry.
Convince me that a CD should $15. I believe they were right about $15 when CDs first came out. If prices don't change for over 10 years, the record companies make tons of money and the artists get a small piece of that action, I say that's crap. I will say that artists are really stupid if they think they can't sell music off of a website on their own.
Movies? No actor deserves $20M for a movie. If it costs too much to pay to make a movie, hire some new actors that don't ask for ridiculous amounts of money and pass that down to the consumer. Look at reality TV, except replace the horribly fake people with actual actors. Of course that savings would never make it to the consumers, it would make it into an executive's pocket.
The quality of movies and music has also fallen by the wayside. Why should corporate bands music cost the same as real music? Or crappy sequels to movies? With most industries you get what you pay for, not entertainment, it's more of a gamble. Hell, you can't even return CDs or DVDs when you find out they suck unless you pay to rent them first, which only makes them more expensive. You can't win.
So, I would like to stop people from calling downloaded movies and music "stealing." This is the age of the euphemism, I'm calling it "reparations" from now on. Isn't that what you call being paid back for years for crappy treatment?
I have a Sprint aircard for high speed wireless and it's really fast. It's like using your cell phone as a modem, no filters just Internet access. Regular cell data rates (3G1x) are not too much faster than dial-up, but EVDO is close to DSL.
If you're in a rural area, I wouldn't bet that you'll get EVDO coverage. You'll be at 3G speeds.
I don't know about T-mobile except that they get broken into. Verizon has a fairly unreliable network. If you are out in the country, EVDO isn't a good bet since it costs a lot to implement and the country markets aren't brimming with customers.
I'll start with: this guy is an idiot. From reading this, I can tell that he read 3 articles from MacWorld and now he's a pro. If you can't figure out that spyware comes from the crappy little games people download for free, then you're dumber than you thought.
Seriously I'm a bit tired of people saying they don't know where it came from. If someone walked up to you handed you something and said "Here this is free." You'd ask what the catch was. Those little free programs, there's a catch moron.
I'm not advocating for Mac or Windows, I'm really tired of the Mac fanboys pretending they crap flowers. I see one-sided articles churned out day after day about how bad Windows is. Instead of paying an extra $1000 for a fast Mac, spend $50 on a hardware firewall, there your security problems are down to what you put on the machine, and you can play games.
Ok, now here's why he's wrong:
Expensive: Even the "cheap" Mac Mini starts with a crappy set of hardware and comes with no monitor. Dell will sell someone a PC that's actually under $500 with everything you need. If Mac users think a $500 CPU is cheap, then get pull your head out. Also, why would anyone looking to read email and surf the Internet spend an extra $200-$300 on a "pretty" computer?
Viruses: Turn off all Windows computers for a month, and then tell me that Macs don't have viruses. Why would someone waste time writing a virus for a tiny percentage of computers? There's no glory there.
Games: There are what, like 10 games for Mac that aren't Super Brickout? Parents rely on their teenager to fix the computer, or for information on what kind of computer to buy. I doubt any teenage kid will pick a Mac, they don't want to do work anyway.
People are dumb: They don't understand computers or want to learn anything new. They use Windows at work so they'll use it at home. They've heard that this is easy or that is easier, give up. People are lazy and dumb.
Hardware: I'll go ahead and say that there are people who want a good sound card, or care about the CAS latency of their RAM, or overclocking, or water cooling. These are not Mac people, and at the current rate, they never will be.
They aren't faster: Take an Athlon 64 4000+ or a dual core Athlon 64, the Mac won't beat it except in the magical Apple test center where they guess at benchmark numbers. I've check tomshardware number against Mac numbers, don't trust Apple's marks more than you'd trust them from MS. The days of Apple people claiming that Photoshop or some other program few people use runs faster on a Mac are over. Video and audio editing are just as easy on both platforms, it just matters what program you're using to do it.
Where did these amazing facts come from?
WinTel machines use different versions of BIOS. They are not all equal, nor do they all have the same level of compatibility.
Are you kidding? I've built and installed Windows on lots of computers in the last 10 years, and I can say that I've run into 1 occasion where I needed to update the BIOS.
Some Windows software applications are well written; others take shortcuts. Shortcuts may work in some environments, but not all, and ultimately the consumer pays in lost time, availability and productivity.
I don't like Microsoft, but why would I blame them for other companies screwing up?
Hardware. There are hundreds of "WinTel-compatible" motherboards, each claiming to be better than the next. Whatever.
Sorry, some of us like to upgrade parts at a time. We can't all afford to buy a new tower when we want a faster machine. If you think it doesn't matter, go to tomshardware.com. If you don't get it after that, shut your mouth because you won't ever get it. There are people who understand why you put racing shocks in a car, and there are some people who know why your motherboard chipset is important. Other will sit around and say "I don't get it."
Memory. Not all RAM is equal. Some works well. Cheap stuff doesn't.
How many people who don't know how to secure their computer (read: hardware firewall) know wha
I hate the word blog or blogging or I wish these people so hopelessly behind technology would take their blogetry and shut up.
I wish the media was as smart as they think they are.
"Christ, you mean if I put my worthless 2 cents on a webpage everyday, I can pretend it's important? Wait, others can do this too, it's like there's a big web of pages full of information that anyone in the world can read! I must join two words togther to form a catch phrase thus cementing this movement in the Big Book of Overrated Fads."
Years earlier:
Computer geek: "Hey, I made a log on my web page. Now I'm going to do something useful."
The Mac mini is a great $499 computer until you put enough options on it to make it worth while. It's a mere $724 with a Superdrive and 80GB HDD. Want a monitor? Not included in this magic $499 price, want wireless? Keep raising the low low $499. Wow, my $499 Mac Mini is really cheap when it has features added, mine would be over $1000 with a few basic additions (512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, wireless, Monitor, DVD-RW, Airport crap). Dimension 3000 with same config (RAM, HDD, DVD-RW, Monitor) was $669. That Mac mini is sure cute.
This is not a discount or cheap computer, it's just another expensive Mac completely stripped down so it looks cheap. At least it's not an eMac or iMac or whatever cute Volkswagon Bug-type crap Mac will try to overprice and get people who buy "cute" things to jump all over. At least they offer loans.
First and foremost is price, which Lindows has already mastered and Apple failed so badly it hurts to watch.
Second is games. You're Joe Average, if you had as much money as you needed to buy any desktop system you wanted what separates a PC from a Mac from a Linux desktop? This being a guy who doesn't know the difference between a Compaq and a real computer, available games are the only thing a guy shopping for a computer at Best Buy (shiver) is going to notice a difference in. Apple lost this race as well because they've established themselves in a non-gamer market (read: uppity Mac users who think that Photoshop performance is the ultimate benchmark of a desktop machine).
What are you going to do to get real games on Lindows (like Splinter Cell or Grand Theft Auto 3, not some crappy tetris clone)?
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A monopoly doesn't mean 100% market dominance, moron. It means you have enough power to strongarm people/companies, without them being able to switch away from Intel.
Buying an pre-built AMD system is really hard unless you like really crappy machines. The only maker I trust to build a computer for me is Dell, or Apple if I had to run a Mac-only program.
Right now the requirement to own a good AMD system is to know how to build your own. If you don't think Intel has a monopoly, you probably don't think MS has one either.
Dumb down a bit.
If you use Linux and bought an ATI, you aren't very good at using Linux.
If I'm reading this correctly, ANY software that enables P2P Piracy is illegal. Windows file share with no Domain Controller would be P2P, correct?
I hope you're right. I just hope someone can hit Redmond with a huge patent suit of something ingrained in Windows, Sun, and Apple. Just to bring this ridiculous crap to light.
Or maybe, just maybe, a judge with enough technical knowledge to run an electric toothbrush will hear one of these stupid cases. This is like patenting the front panel of a blender. Or, it's more like a company that hasn't done anything useful trying to cash in on another company's success.
1,500 more people to tell you what the System Restore CD looks like.
Desktop support is a tough job to get good people into. If you're any good at it on your own, you're probably qualified for a better job. If you need training to do desktop support, you probably advise the system restore CD often. So, long term desktop support guys aren't going to be the good ones, and the people calling the Geek Squad need the best support/handholding possible.
Basically if you're over 40 and suck at using a computer, find a nerd friend to help or give up. I would suggest a book but people think getting good at using computers just happens with no effort or active learning. I mean, I just bought my first Compaq desktop yesterday and I'm already a Sun cluster admin today, WOW!
My #1 reason to stop listening to someone is for them to tell me they DO know better than I do, or that they have THE solution.
Therefore, I am unable to listen to Mac users.
Write your senator, maybe start a peaceful demonstration, or do something else that doesn't work anymore. If you have no money, you have no voice, because congressmen only listen to campaign contributors. If you don't know this, or think it's wrong, open your eyes. This govenment hasn't represented the people in a long long time. If you really want to make an impact, consumers will have to band together and boycott businesses that are backing crappy laws. Your dollar is your vote now. If you can't get corporations to back good laws, they won't pass. Vote republican or democrat, their concern is money, not you. See: gay marriage, "patriot" act, RealID, patent laws, Microsoft still a monopoly. I'm sorry, money or scaring people with terror threats. Not real terror threats but the ones made up by the Bush people to scare us, and then nothing happens and they claim that they saved the day. Man, being a crooked president must be easy.
This is going to be Macs with a different processor. Apple couldn't produce a OS that runs on generic hardware if they tried. At exactly which point will your average user care? And then explain what this has to do with Linux. A Mac is a Mac a PC is a PC, nothing has changed except by choosing Intel they can no longer say they use the bast components.
./ers use 'weblog' from now on, do we need to save two letters just to sound stupid? We're better than that.
The benefit of all of this is we don't have to hear the word Wintel anymore. I hate those words. Can I request that
SLI changes things around as well. I buy a $300 6800GT card this year, wait a year and pick up another card for around $150 after the next gen cards come out, and I'm running a ton faster already.
Sure you can be the idiot who says "but not all games support SLI," that's because it's new, tardy. Wait a bit and every new game that needs SLI support will have it (by needs I mean Farcry and HL2 and Doom3, not Civ3).
PC gaming will stick around because, at this point, my PC kicks the crap out of any current console. This happens about a year into a console's life. After one short year my PC could beat a PS2, and since the Xbox is a PC I know my PC was faster when the Xbox came out. There will be a market for those of us who want to see games get better in a more gradual fashion, a card here a processor there, and then there are console gamers who like to see huge jumps every 5 years and then be obsolete one year later.
With multiple Xbox 360 versions and the HDD possibly not shipping with the PS3, PCs will stay around for a while.
Not many people expect much for free. We just don't like being bled dry by the entertainment industry.
Convince me that a CD should $15. I believe they were right about $15 when CDs first came out. If prices don't change for over 10 years, the record companies make tons of money and the artists get a small piece of that action, I say that's crap. I will say that artists are really stupid if they think they can't sell music off of a website on their own.
Movies? No actor deserves $20M for a movie. If it costs too much to pay to make a movie, hire some new actors that don't ask for ridiculous amounts of money and pass that down to the consumer. Look at reality TV, except replace the horribly fake people with actual actors. Of course that savings would never make it to the consumers, it would make it into an executive's pocket.
The quality of movies and music has also fallen by the wayside. Why should corporate bands music cost the same as real music? Or crappy sequels to movies? With most industries you get what you pay for, not entertainment, it's more of a gamble. Hell, you can't even return CDs or DVDs when you find out they suck unless you pay to rent them first, which only makes them more expensive. You can't win.
So, I would like to stop people from calling downloaded movies and music "stealing." This is the age of the euphemism, I'm calling it "reparations" from now on. Isn't that what you call being paid back for years for crappy treatment?
The Dell Ultrasharp 21" rocks your mom's world. I'll never go back to CRT, this looks too good (especially for games).
Although the Ultrasharp 19" is a much better price per inch and looks really good too.
I have a Sprint aircard for high speed wireless and it's really fast. It's like using your cell phone as a modem, no filters just Internet access. Regular cell data rates (3G1x) are not too much faster than dial-up, but EVDO is close to DSL.
If you're in a rural area, I wouldn't bet that you'll get EVDO coverage. You'll be at 3G speeds.
I don't know about T-mobile except that they get broken into. Verizon has a fairly unreliable network. If you are out in the country, EVDO isn't a good bet since it costs a lot to implement and the country markets aren't brimming with customers.
I'll start with: this guy is an idiot. From reading this, I can tell that he read 3 articles from MacWorld and now he's a pro. If you can't figure out that spyware comes from the crappy little games people download for free, then you're dumber than you thought. Seriously I'm a bit tired of people saying they don't know where it came from. If someone walked up to you handed you something and said "Here this is free." You'd ask what the catch was. Those little free programs, there's a catch moron. I'm not advocating for Mac or Windows, I'm really tired of the Mac fanboys pretending they crap flowers. I see one-sided articles churned out day after day about how bad Windows is. Instead of paying an extra $1000 for a fast Mac, spend $50 on a hardware firewall, there your security problems are down to what you put on the machine, and you can play games. Ok, now here's why he's wrong: Expensive: Even the "cheap" Mac Mini starts with a crappy set of hardware and comes with no monitor. Dell will sell someone a PC that's actually under $500 with everything you need. If Mac users think a $500 CPU is cheap, then get pull your head out. Also, why would anyone looking to read email and surf the Internet spend an extra $200-$300 on a "pretty" computer? Viruses: Turn off all Windows computers for a month, and then tell me that Macs don't have viruses. Why would someone waste time writing a virus for a tiny percentage of computers? There's no glory there. Games: There are what, like 10 games for Mac that aren't Super Brickout? Parents rely on their teenager to fix the computer, or for information on what kind of computer to buy. I doubt any teenage kid will pick a Mac, they don't want to do work anyway. People are dumb: They don't understand computers or want to learn anything new. They use Windows at work so they'll use it at home. They've heard that this is easy or that is easier, give up. People are lazy and dumb. Hardware: I'll go ahead and say that there are people who want a good sound card, or care about the CAS latency of their RAM, or overclocking, or water cooling. These are not Mac people, and at the current rate, they never will be. They aren't faster: Take an Athlon 64 4000+ or a dual core Athlon 64, the Mac won't beat it except in the magical Apple test center where they guess at benchmark numbers. I've check tomshardware number against Mac numbers, don't trust Apple's marks more than you'd trust them from MS. The days of Apple people claiming that Photoshop or some other program few people use runs faster on a Mac are over. Video and audio editing are just as easy on both platforms, it just matters what program you're using to do it. Where did these amazing facts come from? WinTel machines use different versions of BIOS. They are not all equal, nor do they all have the same level of compatibility. Are you kidding? I've built and installed Windows on lots of computers in the last 10 years, and I can say that I've run into 1 occasion where I needed to update the BIOS. Some Windows software applications are well written; others take shortcuts. Shortcuts may work in some environments, but not all, and ultimately the consumer pays in lost time, availability and productivity. I don't like Microsoft, but why would I blame them for other companies screwing up? Hardware. There are hundreds of "WinTel-compatible" motherboards, each claiming to be better than the next. Whatever. Sorry, some of us like to upgrade parts at a time. We can't all afford to buy a new tower when we want a faster machine. If you think it doesn't matter, go to tomshardware.com. If you don't get it after that, shut your mouth because you won't ever get it. There are people who understand why you put racing shocks in a car, and there are some people who know why your motherboard chipset is important. Other will sit around and say "I don't get it." Memory. Not all RAM is equal. Some works well. Cheap stuff doesn't. How many people who don't know how to secure their computer (read: hardware firewall) know wha
I hate the word blog or blogging or I wish these people so hopelessly behind technology would take their blogetry and shut up. I wish the media was as smart as they think they are. "Christ, you mean if I put my worthless 2 cents on a webpage everyday, I can pretend it's important? Wait, others can do this too, it's like there's a big web of pages full of information that anyone in the world can read! I must join two words togther to form a catch phrase thus cementing this movement in the Big Book of Overrated Fads." Years earlier: Computer geek: "Hey, I made a log on my web page. Now I'm going to do something useful."
The Mac mini is a great $499 computer until you put enough options on it to make it worth while. It's a mere $724 with a Superdrive and 80GB HDD. Want a monitor? Not included in this magic $499 price, want wireless? Keep raising the low low $499. Wow, my $499 Mac Mini is really cheap when it has features added, mine would be over $1000 with a few basic additions (512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, wireless, Monitor, DVD-RW, Airport crap). Dimension 3000 with same config (RAM, HDD, DVD-RW, Monitor) was $669. That Mac mini is sure cute.
This is not a discount or cheap computer, it's just another expensive Mac completely stripped down so it looks cheap. At least it's not an eMac or iMac or whatever cute Volkswagon Bug-type crap Mac will try to overprice and get people who buy "cute" things to jump all over. At least they offer loans.
First and foremost is price, which Lindows has already mastered and Apple failed so badly it hurts to watch. Second is games. You're Joe Average, if you had as much money as you needed to buy any desktop system you wanted what separates a PC from a Mac from a Linux desktop? This being a guy who doesn't know the difference between a Compaq and a real computer, available games are the only thing a guy shopping for a computer at Best Buy (shiver) is going to notice a difference in. Apple lost this race as well because they've established themselves in a non-gamer market (read: uppity Mac users who think that Photoshop performance is the ultimate benchmark of a desktop machine). What are you going to do to get real games on Lindows (like Splinter Cell or Grand Theft Auto 3, not some crappy tetris clone)?