Well, Apple's hardware if it were compared as a generic PC would be marked as woefully inadequate except for the hyper expensive Mac Pro That's why a component for component matching laptop from Dell or HP costs roughly $1K more?
If Microsoft forced their users to jump platforms and have all their older apps unable to run like Apple did with OS 9 and earlier apps on x86 Macs, people would be driving to Washington with pitchforks and torches. You need a memory booster: didn't that exactly happens with the Win9x->NT/2K move? And isn't it happening again with a lot of apps with WinXP SP2 and also with Vista? And let's not limit it to purely OSes either. What about the well-documented Office95 push via a new document format and no option for saving in previous formats nor convertors for reading the new formats for at least 6 months? Or the current default inability to share docs between O2007 and previous versions unless you manually save in older formats or force the receiver to download yet another "patch" from MS?
Other than that, the subject of this post answers any remaining salient points you made. The rest are mere trolling drivel.
First, the EU is bigger population-wise than the US, or even the US + Canada.
Having lived in multiple parts of both, I can say that living in New England in the US most closely resembles living in a roughly single language version of Northern Europe. Architecture and cultural changes abound in relatively short distances. Once you move west out of NE and New York, it largely and quickly becomes large homogeneous areas. Communication in some can be difficult. I recall one time in Tennessee having to order by number because the counter help (definitely all locals, and quite possibly from the same small gene pool) could not speak in anything approaching an understandable dialect (similar to Cockney vs Scots, or Dutch vs Flemish).
I can also say that many of my co-workers in 2 places in Europe had never gone more than 15 miles from their birthplace. However, in all fairness, that 15 miles covered more than 3 major cities and multiple smaller towns, sometimes with great differences between them.
In Europe, you will also get a set of primary TV channels from all the surrounding countries, a really nice feature. Why US cable/satellite providers don't supply BBC, German, Spanish, and French direct feeds I'll never really understand, other than it interferes with the MAFIAA control over what is seen in the US.
You know, Alec Guinness is on official record as saying that the original Star Wars trilogy was the biggest load of crap he ever did. Which exemplifies why he was an A-list actor. You'd never know it from his performance.
first there was pay cable, because the free broadcast reception was so horrible then they raised cable and put the squeeze on free broadcasters, because they had a captive audience
There arose pay satellite radio followed by those same corporations buying radio stations, converting them to mindless drivel industry fronts, and killing free radio
Subscription internet music services followed, and they're working on killing free web radio by applying usurious fee structures that none can survive.
It appears that now that most of the content distribution networks have been moved to a subscription base that they want to remove the ability to "own" a copy of the content, thus providing them with a steady subscription revenue stream that can be increased by tweaking the fee structure at will.
Nothardly. 21 hours seems to be an abnormally long burst from what's been observed so far. But it's not the initial burst you really need to worry about.
I believe it was 28-30 million light years, and then its axis for gamma rays would have to be pointing directly at where the earth would cross the relatively brief beam. IOW, you're more likely to get directly hit by a killer asteroid.
It's in the same state as SXSW. Actually, there's 3 areas in 2 cities that have suffered the this fate over the past 15-20 years. And they wonder why areas effectively "die".
Actually, what's killing music is the death of clubs like CGBG and others like them. Where I live, there used to be a vibrant club scene that had lots of little bars and clubs, many with live acts. Well, for the sake of morality and "think of the children" [TM] they had to "clean up" that area because it was just unsightly to have beer cans and cups on the street on Sat/Sun mornings. So thanks to some regulations and zoning changes, more than half the clubs closed within a 24 month period killing all dynamics of the music scene. Now a metro area of about 5M realizes only bedroom community bliss. My city has become anti-music because there's no place to go see small acts as they begin, there's no place to gather, no place to exchange ideas or have a changing lineup to find something that works.
Your post is the biggest bunch of tripe I've seen in a long while. How much are the various legal professions paying you to post this crap?
As soon as you sell a product, it's no longer yours and you have no control over what's done with it, nor do you really want to. (Hint, think gun manufacturers)
Actually, there's another issue with solar hot-water systems: home owners associations. In my particular case, I can't put such a system on the preferred side of the roof because it'd be visible from the street (my house faces SSW). There's also the issue of performance, although I've not looked into this in the past 8 years so I'm not up on any improvements.
I looked into this recently. Installing a ground based heat pump instead of a regular air conditioner would have been around $6K (instead of $2K for the AC). Note that this was for an old style 12 SEER AC unit that's no longer available against a 25+ SEER heat pump (get added bonus of generating heat). AC units have almost doubled in cost, and now are about $4500 installed (new US regulations require higher SEER units).
Why didn't I get the ground based system? Because when it's over 100 F and your main AC unit dies, I couldn't wait for the ground based unit installation taking over a week. I will plan for one at my next house though.
Maybe I'm off-base. MS Office is a de facto standard for business communications, and so forcing students to learn it and develop skills in it is a good thing. I think you're off-base even here. PDF is appearing more and more often for everything from newsletters to marketing info to white papers. I can imagine several good technical reasons why, but I'm willing to bet that more and more it's because of the knee-jerk reactions to MS Office vulnerabilities that have companies blocking all MS attachments as part of their security measures.
Try Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services->Automatic Updates, right click, press the Stop button if it's enabled, and then set the Startup Type to Disabled.
One of the first things I do with a new Windows box.
NT 4.0 what the source of the only install odd numbered SPs. SP1 fixed the memory paging error and added significant stability. SP2 caused massive instabilities (I forget now what they did, but it involved playing around with some of the GDI related issues IIRC. SP3 fixed those problems. SP4 caused another series of instabilities and broke several apps. SP5 fixed those. (If you're beginning to see a pattern there of release beta, fix, release beta, fix, you're not alone).
Win2K, IIRC, followed a similar pattern, initial release was somewhat unstable, SP1 fixed that. SP2 added new functionality bringing along instabilities, SP3 fixed that, and so on.
Those problems with service packs continued with XP with the initial release having some performance and stability issues which were fixed with SP1. SP2 caused a host of incompatibilities and other problems.
In general, SPs from MS, especially lately, have been a case of test, test, and test again before slowly rolling them out.
IIS was a bad product in 4.x and 5.x form. More than 10 heavy concurrent users would crash it on quad CPU systems. Adding new web sites was a risky process at best and guaranteed to corrupt by website 13, the most we ever had running concurrently on a single box. The admin utility itself would corrupt the configuration file (WBM?) among other things and the entire application would have to be removed and reinstalled in order for it to run at all. Apparently there were some DLL/registry issues also. (It's been a long long long time since I played with this, so my memory is somewhat hazy. What I did get out of 5 years of production MS OS development and deployment was: just don't.)
5-8 year old drives? They're still in their prime years!!!!;) My oldest are approaching 15 years of age, but don't see daily use anymore. In fact, a couple of them would only run after refrigeration
I'm about to go down that route. My CDMA based contract is ending here shortly, and I'm shopping for a GSM phone. GSM phones have surpassed CDMA phones in quality of connection (at least as far as Verizon is concerned). The ability to get an overseas phone intrigues me greatly, even if I have to accept a crappy service vendor supplied unit and contract to save some money.
If you wonder why US consumers almost all go for the supplied phone/plan combo, it's because the per month cost on a one or two year contract is at least 20% cheaper than a non-contract month to month plan. They only offer contracts with phones, or did last time around, to consumers. It sucks.
Touchpads, ick:) I used to feel the same way, and I really hate the Dell touchpad. The MBP touchpad I like, however.
I've thought about putting OSX on that G4, but I'm not about to pay retail... I have an old OSX CD that I got for a buck at a yard sale, but haven't got round to trying it. If it's a G4, it should run OSX just fine.
Sometimes one OS will get along with given hardware and the next won't, but that doesn't definitively mean it's the OS at fault -- often it's just that a different OS fails to trigger the hardware fault. A good example is the 47-day timer wrap issue in Win9x. Turns out that only about half of all systems are affected (including NONE of mine)... which implies that the Windows bug requires a matching hardware flaw to manifest. In NT 4.0 original release, there's a 20bit/32bit memory pager counter mismatch that will guarantee bad data/BSODs after running an NT system long enough to page enough pages to have the internal kernel counter roll over. It was fixed in SP1, I believe. No hardware issue there at all.
I don't let my machines do sleep mode -- they get to turn off the monitor, and that's it. As to what part of the common wakeup issues is OS and how much is hardware... I suspect it's an evil synergy much like the timer bug. My IS guy finally tracked it down, he thinks. It's due to a driver setting that allows the network adapter to be managed by the power management system. According to him, this interferes with the OS going into Sleep/Hibernate mode. We'll see.
I used to not sleep my systems, but my power bill and room temperature were just getting too high.
My record is held by my 286/M$DOS6.00 machine that was my everyday work box for many years... in the course of 5 years it only had two reboots, once due to a prolonged power outage, and once cuz the MFM hard disk needed a fresh low-level format. I still have it, tho it was finally retired for good in 2001. That machine is why rebooting is against my religion.:) I just hate rebooting. Always have. It's slow as a slug in winter. I didn't believe in Sleep modes due to all the problems I used to have with Windows machines. Then I got my first Mac, and Sleep mode was good. Almost instant on, or close enough that I don't care. 1-2 seconds and I'm working. We'll see if this Dell works, as I just changed the settings that are available today.
DEC was dead long before Compaq entered the picture. They pretty much died when they built the Alpha and failed to update any of their other hardware. Their stuff cost an order of magnitude more than the upcoming solutions offered by other vendors (Remember SGI? Convex? Cray?) which all started playing above, below, and in "their" space, not to forget IBM that had not failed to notice that DEC was a rather big thorn.
It was far more than lack of marketing savvy that killed DEC.
First off, science was paired against religion, not business. I supposed I should have added a single word, respectively, to that particular sentence, at least as far as that goes.
I dislike the whole Mac way of doing things to where I'm not really motivated to do much to "improve" it... Yeah, I know you can use some-key plus click, but that makes everything a two-handed operation, and usually my other hand is already busy. I hate having to reach back and forth like that!
Must be an old box!!! You've got network connectivity, right? That usually works.:)
Oh, the entire second button/hold key down thing is moot with the new MacBook (Pro) series. The touchpad can be configured for gestures that include a double finger tap for right click and two finger drag for scrolling (both H & V if you like). It's so intuitive that I have trouble using the gestures and buttons on the Dell. (You do have to configure the Mac for this though, it doesn't come this way out of the box. Takes about 10s to do, but you have to know to do it.)
Actually, most of the WinApps I use have been dragged from one box to another (not even on the same species of Windows, let alone the same location) multiple times. Sometimes I need to twiddle their registry settings, but for most, life goes on as before. So I do appreciate that feature. -- I understand that at the time the shared-executables/libraries concept came along, disk space was precious and expensive, but by the time the 6GB HD became standard (about 1997) that should have gone away, if only to simplify *Microsoft's* life (think of all the support calls that would never have happened if unrelated apps weren't trying to share stuff!)
I had serious issues with Roxio EasyCD Creator v5 and moving it. I believe I had to completely uninstall and reinstall it a couple of times before I finally got it to work as desired. I've also manually had to remove Oracle 8i out of the registry so I could reinstall it (Oracle's uninstaller sucked complete rocks back then). These are not tasks an average user would be able to deal with, nor should they. The entire registry concept is as sound as a Yugo.
Direct app access: I inherited that G4 when it was about 5 years old, and it came with all sorts of software (Photoshop etc.) -- none of which were immediately accessable unless there was already a seed document cluttering the desktop. There didn't seem to be ANY sort of applications menu available, so I couldn't just start an app, *then* decide whether I wanted a new document or not. Once I discovered OS9.2's notion of a file manager, I was able to dumpster-dive for executables, provided I already had a clue what to look for, but... lordy, shades of the GEM Desktop!!! As I vaguely recall, there was no tree view, either.
You are in for a seriously interesting and pleasant experience. Try OSX 10.4 or 10.5, as soon as it comes out. I wouldn't run any Mac OS prior to 10.3 myself, too painful. Don't even bother with anything pre OSX.
As to the mess you're "enjoying" with WinXP and Dell systems... it's the hardware. Follow:... this Dell motherboard only knows PC2100 RAM, not the PC3200 one would *expect* to see with a 3GHz CPU. [blink] Looks like the motherboard design is about 2 years older than the CPU, and the two don't entirely match!!... [swapped CPU w/ older CPU]... So the problem wasn't WinXP at all, but rather, the fact that Dell shipped mismatched hardware, or an outright defective motherboard design that doesn't properly support the CPU they sold with it.
The heat/shutting down problem is exhibited by the 600/620 series. The D820 is a Core 2 Duo box with 2GB RAM. I don't know the specifics of the MB as I'm not allowed to open it (not my laptop, etc etc etc) nor would I unless I got it for free. However, the problems I listed aren't of that type, but relate to going into some sort of sleep mode. I may try installing an alternate OS and seeing if the same symptoms occur. If so, then it's the hardware. If not, then it's the software. Considering the range and quality of some of
Haven't used Gaim/[Pidgin] on Windows, why bother? Nobody expects an application to close then there are multiple windows of that application open. Firefox and Internet explorer do the same thing. Its pretty standard. But when you close the last window on an application, you don't expect the application to still be running.
And what makes you expect the "window" to be the actual instance of the app?
Hint, Cmd-Q is not the same as closing a single window for a running application. Alt-F4 just closes a single window; if its the LAST window open for a running application, the application terminates. Cmd-q (according to the OP) will force the application to terminate.
Actually, Cmd-W is the equivalent to Alt-F4 (closing a window). And there are some apps where closing the last open window closes the app. (I remember thinking it odd the other day, but can't remember the name of the app at the moment).
The large number of posts of people complaining about incompatibilities indicate it's the status quo. (+16M entries there)
Right, because the number of google hits is an accurate metric of any problem.
But it certainly indicates at 16+M hits that it's not isolated to the rare individual. That was my point.
Considering there's 100s of millions of PCs out there, and top games sell around 1-2 million copies (there are some that hit 10M), I'd say most people could care less about games....
Again, brush up on your statistics....Nothing will change as far as MACs go next year with regards to gamers; Linux has more users than MACs, yet very few make Linux versions of games. A good example is DOOM 3; it was ported to Linux before it was ported to a MAC.
Let's change the stats to something that may mean something then. There's 300M people in the US. In 2005 there were roughly 38M PC games sold. That's roughly 1 in 9 people bought a PC game if we assume no one bought more than 1 game. My statement stands....
Doom ports are somewhat irrelevant, as I believe their servers were developed on Linux systems to begin with.
I used to do all those on a PC as well. I have several hundred dollars worth of software I no longer use, because even the default bundled Mac software handily beat them in ease of use and efficiency of time spent completing a project. Additionally, I've not had to much with my Mac's OS, unlike my Windows box which requires some sort of maintenance at least every 3 months to keep it running smoothly.
I'd argue MS is a victim of its own success here. Can you imagine the antitrust suits filed if they included a full featured image editor or movie editor? As far as your maintenance comment goes, please step out of 1998. WinXP requires nothing to keep it going just fine. I've had it running on my laptop for six years now without the need to reformat or do anything special.
Unfortunately, if you do software installs and uninstalls, you'll still wind up doing maintenance. If you like your machine to continue performing at the same level over time, you'll have to either install software or write scripts to perform maintenance on your system. You'll also have to reboot regularly depending upon what you're doing even if you're running pure MS apps. They have memory leaks, as does the OS, although the latter's main leaks have been plugged. Macs come with a set of maintenance scripts scheduled for regular execution out of the box, although it too lacks a disk defragmentor (yes, Macs fragment too).
FWIW, to play RE 1 on the Wii requires you buy a Gamecube memory card and controller (for around $30, if you get a new generic controller and used memory card) as RE1 is a gamecube game. If you liked the olden games (NES, SNES, etc.) you'll be pleased to know that the Wii can play natively any gamecube game, and can play many games fro
I said you had to unlearn Windows habits, some of them bad. For one thing, the inconsistency in what happens when you close a window depends on what other windows are running. Sometimes windows close without closing their program, and then you have to resort to Task Manager or some other tool to kill a process.
Where do you get this load of crap? Windows closes a programs when you close their window. The exception is when you have a program running in the notification area. But the behavior has been consistent for all software I've run (winamp, outlook, trillian, MSN messenger, aim, etc etc).
Gaim/Pidgin - Alt-F4 or hitting X doesn't close the app. Have more than 1 window open for Word or any office app? Guess what, closing a window won't close your program.
As for closing a program, try Cmd-Q. Ooo, that was hard.
Oh stupid me for not sitting down in front of a MAC and know suddenly knowing that Cmd-Q actually closes the application and not just hides the window. Of course, so intiutive!
And Alt-F4 is intuitive? (Hint: it's a learned Windows habit.)
...Vista especially is having hardware driver issues....But of course since you know someone that has had problems, that must be the status quo.
The large number of posts of people complaining about incompatibilities indicate it's the status quo. (+16M entries there)
You may not care for them, but people do. Saying MAC is a solution for most people is absurd when most of the top games aren't even playable there. With Linux you have a shot at playing them via Wine, but no chance in hell on a MAC. Its really too bad you didn't know what Resident Evil was; its not just a shooter, there's quite a bit of puzzle solving and a great plot. There's also more strategy games for the PC than MAC.
Considering there's 100s of millions of PCs out there, and top games sell around 1-2 million copies (there are some that hit 10M), I'd say most people could care less about games. And you're correct, there's probably more games for PC than Mac, in no small part thanks to MS's efforts to ensure it stays that way (monopoly, anyone?). Let's wait another year or so and see where this goes.
At any rate, I don't only play games on my PC, and lately I haven't at all. But its nice knowing that I can. I also manage my finances and home business, develop software, get pictures and video off my camera, listen to music, get email, etc. I can do all those very easily on a PC. Saying I should unlearn "bad" habits so that I can cut some of my uses out and use a MAC is stupid.
I used to do all those on a PC as well. I have several hundred dollars worth of software I no longer use, because even the default bundled Mac software handily beat them in ease of use and efficiency of time spent completing a project. Additionally, I've not had to much with my Mac's OS, unlike my Windows box which requires some sort of maintenance at least every 3 months to keep it running smoothly.
I actually agree here, I've been having a lot of fun with my Wii. Currently RE1 is my game of choice, and can't be considered a shooter at all.
Well cool, that's another plus in the Wii column. I'll probably buy one soon. The only negatives I've seen posted are regarding the things I mentioned as being non-issues to me at this point.
Video and photo editing software on the PC is just as good as on the MAC. There's also more choices. This argument for the MAC has been dead for quite a while now. You've listed nothing that I can't do with easy on my PC. As far as integration goes, MAC has to integrate with outside systems, or it'd be totally useless. I haven't found a need to ever integrate with a MAC, because there was nothing only a MAC could do.
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Other than that, the subject of this post answers any remaining salient points you made. The rest are mere trolling drivel.
Mohandas Gandhi? Abraham Lincoln? Thurgood Marshall? So you're saying the only good lawyer is a dead lawyer?
First, the EU is bigger population-wise than the US, or even the US + Canada.
Having lived in multiple parts of both, I can say that living in New England in the US most closely resembles living in a roughly single language version of Northern Europe. Architecture and cultural changes abound in relatively short distances. Once you move west out of NE and New York, it largely and quickly becomes large homogeneous areas. Communication in some can be difficult. I recall one time in Tennessee having to order by number because the counter help (definitely all locals, and quite possibly from the same small gene pool) could not speak in anything approaching an understandable dialect (similar to Cockney vs Scots, or Dutch vs Flemish).
I can also say that many of my co-workers in 2 places in Europe had never gone more than 15 miles from their birthplace. However, in all fairness, that 15 miles covered more than 3 major cities and multiple smaller towns, sometimes with great differences between them.
In Europe, you will also get a set of primary TV channels from all the surrounding countries, a really nice feature. Why US cable/satellite providers don't supply BBC, German, Spanish, and French direct feeds I'll never really understand, other than it interferes with the MAFIAA control over what is seen in the US.
first there was pay cable, because the free broadcast reception was so horrible
then they raised cable and put the squeeze on free broadcasters, because they had a captive audience
There arose pay satellite radio followed by those same corporations buying radio stations, converting them to mindless drivel industry fronts, and killing free radio
Subscription internet music services followed, and they're working on killing free web radio by applying usurious fee structures that none can survive.
It appears that now that most of the content distribution networks have been moved to a subscription base that they want to remove the ability to "own" a copy of the content, thus providing them with a steady subscription revenue stream that can be increased by tweaking the fee structure at will.
Yet the BBC allows you to download their content from their servers....
Nothardly. 21 hours seems to be an abnormally long burst from what's been observed so far. But it's not the initial burst you really need to worry about.
And how many of today's /. crowd would actually get that reference? The movie's over 20 years old after all.
Well, the inability to use it in GPL v2/3 code would be the evil part that the OP was referring to. There you go.
I believe it was 28-30 million light years, and then its axis for gamma rays would have to be pointing directly at where the earth would cross the relatively brief beam. IOW, you're more likely to get directly hit by a killer asteroid.
It's in the same state as SXSW. Actually, there's 3 areas in 2 cities that have suffered the this fate over the past 15-20 years. And they wonder why areas effectively "die".
Actually, what's killing music is the death of clubs like CGBG and others like them. Where I live, there used to be a vibrant club scene that had lots of little bars and clubs, many with live acts. Well, for the sake of morality and "think of the children" [TM] they had to "clean up" that area because it was just unsightly to have beer cans and cups on the street on Sat/Sun mornings. So thanks to some regulations and zoning changes, more than half the clubs closed within a 24 month period killing all dynamics of the music scene. Now a metro area of about 5M realizes only bedroom community bliss. My city has become anti-music because there's no place to go see small acts as they begin, there's no place to gather, no place to exchange ideas or have a changing lineup to find something that works.
Your post is the biggest bunch of tripe I've seen in a long while. How much are the various legal professions paying you to post this crap?
As soon as you sell a product, it's no longer yours and you have no control over what's done with it, nor do you really want to. (Hint, think gun manufacturers)
Actually, there's another issue with solar hot-water systems: home owners associations. In my particular case, I can't put such a system on the preferred side of the roof because it'd be visible from the street (my house faces SSW). There's also the issue of performance, although I've not looked into this in the past 8 years so I'm not up on any improvements.
I looked into this recently. Installing a ground based heat pump instead of a regular air conditioner would have been around $6K (instead of $2K for the AC). Note that this was for an old style 12 SEER AC unit that's no longer available against a 25+ SEER heat pump (get added bonus of generating heat). AC units have almost doubled in cost, and now are about $4500 installed (new US regulations require higher SEER units).
Why didn't I get the ground based system? Because when it's over 100 F and your main AC unit dies, I couldn't wait for the ground based unit installation taking over a week. I will plan for one at my next house though.
Try Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services->Automatic Updates, right click, press the Stop button if it's enabled, and then set the Startup Type to Disabled.
One of the first things I do with a new Windows box.
NT 4.0 what the source of the only install odd numbered SPs. SP1 fixed the memory paging error and added significant stability. SP2 caused massive instabilities (I forget now what they did, but it involved playing around with some of the GDI related issues IIRC. SP3 fixed those problems. SP4 caused another series of instabilities and broke several apps. SP5 fixed those. (If you're beginning to see a pattern there of release beta, fix, release beta, fix, you're not alone).
;) My oldest are approaching 15 years of age, but don't see daily use anymore. In fact, a couple of them would only run after refrigeration
Win2K, IIRC, followed a similar pattern, initial release was somewhat unstable, SP1 fixed that. SP2 added new functionality bringing along instabilities, SP3 fixed that, and so on.
Those problems with service packs continued with XP with the initial release having some performance and stability issues which were fixed with SP1. SP2 caused a host of incompatibilities and other problems.
In general, SPs from MS, especially lately, have been a case of test, test, and test again before slowly rolling them out.
IIS was a bad product in 4.x and 5.x form. More than 10 heavy concurrent users would crash it on quad CPU systems. Adding new web sites was a risky process at best and guaranteed to corrupt by website 13, the most we ever had running concurrently on a single box. The admin utility itself would corrupt the configuration file (WBM?) among other things and the entire application would have to be removed and reinstalled in order for it to run at all. Apparently there were some DLL/registry issues also. (It's been a long long long time since I played with this, so my memory is somewhat hazy. What I did get out of 5 years of production MS OS development and deployment was: just don't.)
5-8 year old drives? They're still in their prime years!!!!
I'm about to go down that route. My CDMA based contract is ending here shortly, and I'm shopping for a GSM phone. GSM phones have surpassed CDMA phones in quality of connection (at least as far as Verizon is concerned). The ability to get an overseas phone intrigues me greatly, even if I have to accept a crappy service vendor supplied unit and contract to save some money.
If you wonder why US consumers almost all go for the supplied phone/plan combo, it's because the per month cost on a one or two year contract is at least 20% cheaper than a non-contract month to month plan. They only offer contracts with phones, or did last time around, to consumers. It sucks.
I used to not sleep my systems, but my power bill and room temperature were just getting too high. My record is held by my 286/M$DOS6.00 machine that was my everyday work box for many years... in the course of 5 years it only had two reboots, once due to a prolonged power outage, and once cuz the MFM hard disk needed a fresh low-level format. I still have it, tho it was finally retired for good in 2001. That machine is why rebooting is against my religion.
DEC was dead long before Compaq entered the picture. They pretty much died when they built the Alpha and failed to update any of their other hardware. Their stuff cost an order of magnitude more than the upcoming solutions offered by other vendors (Remember SGI? Convex? Cray?) which all started playing above, below, and in "their" space, not to forget IBM that had not failed to notice that DEC was a rather big thorn.
It was far more than lack of marketing savvy that killed DEC.
First off, science was paired against religion, not business. I supposed I should have added a single word, respectively, to that particular sentence, at least as far as that goes.
We do have flying cars, controlled nuclear fusion, and there are potential cures for cancer.
They're just no ubiquitous. Then again, Rome wasn't built in a day. Give it time, or are you upset that it took 8 years to land on the moon?
I dislike the whole Mac way of doing things to where I'm not really motivated to do much to "improve" it... Yeah, I know you can use some-key plus click, but that makes everything a two-handed operation, and usually my other hand is already busy. I hate having to reach back and forth like that!
Must be an old box!!! You've got network connectivity, right? That usually works. :)
Oh, the entire second button/hold key down thing is moot with the new MacBook (Pro) series. The touchpad can be configured for gestures that include a double finger tap for right click and two finger drag for scrolling (both H & V if you like). It's so intuitive that I have trouble using the gestures and buttons on the Dell. (You do have to configure the Mac for this though, it doesn't come this way out of the box. Takes about 10s to do, but you have to know to do it.)
Actually, most of the WinApps I use have been dragged from one box to another (not even on the same species of Windows, let alone the same location) multiple times. Sometimes I need to twiddle their registry settings, but for most, life goes on as before. So I do appreciate that feature. -- I understand that at the time the shared-executables/libraries concept came along, disk space was precious and expensive, but by the time the 6GB HD became standard (about 1997) that should have gone away, if only to simplify *Microsoft's* life (think of all the support calls that would never have happened if unrelated apps weren't trying to share stuff!)
I had serious issues with Roxio EasyCD Creator v5 and moving it. I believe I had to completely uninstall and reinstall it a couple of times before I finally got it to work as desired. I've also manually had to remove Oracle 8i out of the registry so I could reinstall it (Oracle's uninstaller sucked complete rocks back then). These are not tasks an average user would be able to deal with, nor should they. The entire registry concept is as sound as a Yugo.
Direct app access: I inherited that G4 when it was about 5 years old, and it came with all sorts of software (Photoshop etc.) -- none of which were immediately accessable unless there was already a seed document cluttering the desktop. There didn't seem to be ANY sort of applications menu available, so I couldn't just start an app, *then* decide whether I wanted a new document or not. Once I discovered OS9.2's notion of a file manager, I was able to dumpster-dive for executables, provided I already had a clue what to look for, but ... lordy, shades of the GEM Desktop!!! As I vaguely recall, there was no tree view, either.
You are in for a seriously interesting and pleasant experience. Try OSX 10.4 or 10.5, as soon as it comes out. I wouldn't run any Mac OS prior to 10.3 myself, too painful. Don't even bother with anything pre OSX.
As to the mess you're "enjoying" with WinXP and Dell systems... it's the hardware. Follow: ... this Dell motherboard only knows PC2100 RAM, not the PC3200 one would *expect* to see with a 3GHz CPU. [blink] Looks like the motherboard design is about 2 years older than the CPU, and the two don't entirely match!! ... ...
[swapped CPU w/ older CPU]
So the problem wasn't WinXP at all, but rather, the fact that Dell shipped mismatched hardware, or an outright defective motherboard design that doesn't properly support the CPU they sold with it.
The heat/shutting down problem is exhibited by the 600/620 series. The D820 is a Core 2 Duo box with 2GB RAM. I don't know the specifics of the MB as I'm not allowed to open it (not my laptop, etc etc etc) nor would I unless I got it for free. However, the problems I listed aren't of that type, but relate to going into some sort of sleep mode. I may try installing an alternate OS and seeing if the same symptoms occur. If so, then it's the hardware. If not, then it's the software. Considering the range and quality of some of
Haven't used Gaim/[Pidgin] on Windows, why bother? Nobody expects an application to close then there are multiple windows of that application open. Firefox and Internet explorer do the same thing. Its pretty standard. But when you close the last window on an application, you don't expect the application to still be running.
And what makes you expect the "window" to be the actual instance of the app?
Hint, Cmd-Q is not the same as closing a single window for a running application. Alt-F4 just closes a single window; if its the LAST window open for a running application, the application terminates. Cmd-q (according to the OP) will force the application to terminate.
Actually, Cmd-W is the equivalent to Alt-F4 (closing a window). And there are some apps where closing the last open window closes the app. (I remember thinking it odd the other day, but can't remember the name of the app at the moment).
The large number of posts of people complaining about incompatibilities indicate it's the status quo. (+16M entries there)
Right, because the number of google hits is an accurate metric of any problem.
But it certainly indicates at 16+M hits that it's not isolated to the rare individual. That was my point.
Considering there's 100s of millions of PCs out there, and top games sell around 1-2 million copies (there are some that hit 10M), I'd say most people could care less about games....
...Nothing will change as far as MACs go next year with regards to gamers; Linux has more users than MACs, yet very few make Linux versions of games. A good example is DOOM 3; it was ported to Linux before it was ported to a MAC.
Again, brush up on your statistics.
Let's change the stats to something that may mean something then. There's 300M people in the US. In 2005 there were roughly 38M PC games sold. That's roughly 1 in 9 people bought a PC game if we assume no one bought more than 1 game. My statement stands....
Doom ports are somewhat irrelevant, as I believe their servers were developed on Linux systems to begin with.
I used to do all those on a PC as well. I have several hundred dollars worth of software I no longer use, because even the default bundled Mac software handily beat them in ease of use and efficiency of time spent completing a project. Additionally, I've not had to much with my Mac's OS, unlike my Windows box which requires some sort of maintenance at least every 3 months to keep it running smoothly.
I'd argue MS is a victim of its own success here. Can you imagine the antitrust suits filed if they included a full featured image editor or movie editor? As far as your maintenance comment goes, please step out of 1998. WinXP requires nothing to keep it going just fine. I've had it running on my laptop for six years now without the need to reformat or do anything special.
Unfortunately, if you do software installs and uninstalls, you'll still wind up doing maintenance. If you like your machine to continue performing at the same level over time, you'll have to either install software or write scripts to perform maintenance on your system. You'll also have to reboot regularly depending upon what you're doing even if you're running pure MS apps. They have memory leaks, as does the OS, although the latter's main leaks have been plugged. Macs come with a set of maintenance scripts scheduled for regular execution out of the box, although it too lacks a disk defragmentor (yes, Macs fragment too).
FWIW, to play RE 1 on the Wii requires you buy a Gamecube memory card and controller (for around $30, if you get a new generic controller and used memory card) as RE1 is a gamecube game. If you liked the olden games (NES, SNES, etc.) you'll be pleased to know that the Wii can play natively any gamecube game, and can play many games fro
I said you had to unlearn Windows habits, some of them bad. For one thing, the inconsistency in what happens when you close a window depends on what other windows are running. Sometimes windows close without closing their program, and then you have to resort to Task Manager or some other tool to kill a process.
Where do you get this load of crap? Windows closes a programs when you close their window. The exception is when you have a program running in the notification area. But the behavior has been consistent for all software I've run (winamp, outlook, trillian, MSN messenger, aim, etc etc).
Gaim/Pidgin - Alt-F4 or hitting X doesn't close the app. Have more than 1 window open for Word or any office app? Guess what, closing a window won't close your program.
As for closing a program, try Cmd-Q. Ooo, that was hard.
Oh stupid me for not sitting down in front of a MAC and know suddenly knowing that Cmd-Q actually closes the application and not just hides the window. Of course, so intiutive!
And Alt-F4 is intuitive? (Hint: it's a learned Windows habit.)
The large number of posts of people complaining about incompatibilities indicate it's the status quo. (+16M entries there)
You may not care for them, but people do. Saying MAC is a solution for most people is absurd when most of the top games aren't even playable there. With Linux you have a shot at playing them via Wine, but no chance in hell on a MAC. Its really too bad you didn't know what Resident Evil was; its not just a shooter, there's quite a bit of puzzle solving and a great plot. There's also more strategy games for the PC than MAC.
Considering there's 100s of millions of PCs out there, and top games sell around 1-2 million copies (there are some that hit 10M), I'd say most people could care less about games. And you're correct, there's probably more games for PC than Mac, in no small part thanks to MS's efforts to ensure it stays that way (monopoly, anyone?). Let's wait another year or so and see where this goes.
At any rate, I don't only play games on my PC, and lately I haven't at all. But its nice knowing that I can. I also manage my finances and home business, develop software, get pictures and video off my camera, listen to music, get email, etc. I can do all those very easily on a PC. Saying I should unlearn "bad" habits so that I can cut some of my uses out and use a MAC is stupid.
I used to do all those on a PC as well. I have several hundred dollars worth of software I no longer use, because even the default bundled Mac software handily beat them in ease of use and efficiency of time spent completing a project. Additionally, I've not had to much with my Mac's OS, unlike my Windows box which requires some sort of maintenance at least every 3 months to keep it running smoothly.
I actually agree here, I've been having a lot of fun with my Wii. Currently RE1 is my game of choice, and can't be considered a shooter at all.
Well cool, that's another plus in the Wii column. I'll probably buy one soon. The only negatives I've seen posted are regarding the things I mentioned as being non-issues to me at this point.
Video and photo editing software on the PC is just as good as on the MAC. There's also more choices. This argument for the MAC has been dead for quite a while now. You've listed nothing that I can't do with easy on my PC. As far as integration goes, MAC has to integrate with outside systems, or it'd be totally useless. I haven't found a need to ever integrate with a MAC, because there was nothing only a MAC could do.
On video and photo editing, I humbly su