"Nothing good can come from service providers and hardware sellers working together."...
I think you're being JUST a bit dogmatic. If hardware sellers and service providers hadn't been "working together", most of us would not be connected to the internet today.
You are perfectly entitled to CLICK NO ON THE WINDOW asking if you want to install the firmware and warning you of the consequences , Mr. False Simile Man.
"I'm a pragmatist who values having different tools for different jobs... and I have to say, I wish there were more of us around. This constant bickering and zealotry is nothing if not tedious."...
There are plenty of us around. But we don't bother posting here.
I'm not sure that necessarily convinces me that this will lead to some of the organisms sprouting wings and others sprouting trunks.
Same tired old shtick. I remember telling you A YEAR AGO that your notion about what macroevolution claims and requires for proof is complete bollocks. Macroevolution does not require the "sprouting wings" and "sprouting trunks". Your analogy comparing macroevolution to the moon is quite absurd.
"I don't think it's any great leap of any kind to state 'Here is evidence for a common creator.'"
Same old shtick. Same old useless analogy about comparing computer programs to living organisms, comparing the machinations of biology and chemistry to the thought process of a human, then implying that the design habits of a creator must be the same as those of a human. You still have not answered the question that forms the basis of this useless analogy. WHY WOULD GOD NEED TO USE TOOLS?
No reason.... Therefore your argument based from the appearance of tool usage is garbage.
I suspect Steve knew you'd blow your trumpet and sound the alarm about this, and you know what? That's fine. The pie chart in the keynote showed Safari eclipsing all browsers except for IE because, to be perfectly frank, most users of IE aren't trained enough or don't care enough to switch browsers, period. Lest you forget: It is pre-installed. Downloadable installs are the realm of "switchers"... away from IE and to something else. Apple would be daft to frame it any other way. The question is, John Lilly, are you going to stand around and whine, then be plowed under by a rival? Or are you going to keep building a better browser?
This is pretty much what Frank Herbert was natting on about in Dune. In the civilizations of his books, humans had destroyed almost all computing devices, in favor of specialized humans called Mentats who did calculations in their heads. Why? Because humans realized that computers had moved beyond the realm of tools and had actually become a competing organism.
Of course, to keep space travel possible, he had to claim that it could be accomplished by, essentially, getting your pilots reaaaally high on drugs. So yeah, definitely science fiction. But his point about computers is becoming increasingly appropriate.
Actually, I don't understand the validity of your comparison. For one thing, the cheapest Macbook Pro comes with 2GB of ram, not 1GB. And it runs at 2.2Ghz, which you can dismiss as trivial if you like - but if you dismiss a 10% speed difference as trivial, be prepared to dismiss a 10% PRICE difference as trivial, too. >:)
The resolution is the same, yes, and the Asus is one inch narrower - but it's not always true that smaller is better, and/or more expensive. Some people (I am one of them) use their portables as primary machines, and since the Asus is being marketed as a portable gaming rig, a physically larger screen would be a positive for those folks too. But to be fair, this "narrowness" issue could go either way.
While we're on the subject of gaming - 512MB of VRAM is certainly superior to 128MB, yes - but consider that the MBP is running a GeForce 8600 (not a Mobility Radeon X1600), which supports the unified shader architecture required for DirectX 10. Now, I haven't been a serious gearhead gamer for years, but I'd bet good money that DX10 support and a faster GPU core is more important to a gamer than additional VRAM - even 384MB more VRAM. Especially when DX10 support means crazy shit like geometry shaders that can organically grow, smooth, and animate your models, entirely on the GPU.
Let's toss in a couple other things:
* The "magsafe" style power adapter. In practice, this enhancement is worth somewhere between 10 bucks and a thousand, depending on how badly you damage your laptop when you trip over the cord and yank it to the floor * Two-finger scrolling support in the trackpad. (OMFG, you have no idea how useful this is until you've tried it!!) * The keyboard that lights up in the dark. I adore this feature, but I'll be conservative and say it's worth about 50 bucks - the same as an add-on Bluetooth module. * The slot-loading, instead of tray-based, optical drive. Cleaner, easier to use. But durability is an either-or. * The aluminum exterior, and the fact that it's almost 50% thinner (thinness, unlike narrowness, is universally a positive), plus ALL the ports are on the sides, and NONE are on the $&#%@ing back.
(I assume we're excluding things like the software bundle, the usefulness of the tech support, and the usefulness of the warranty, since we're talking pure hardware here.)
So, let's see... The regular A8JS you linked is $1475 (that includes the $16 shipping fee)... The MBP is $2000. So for the extra $525 you get the crap I mentioned in that bulleted list, plus an arguably superior video card and twice the RAM. IMHO, we've now entered the realm of "competitive". (Mostly because of the crap in that bulleted list.)
What makes the waters so muddy is that these are really not equivalent machines at all - in fact, the ONLY specs they definitely share are chipset, hard drive capacity, and networking speeds.
"Xcode includes a feature, called Code Sense, which maintains a rich store of information about the symbols defined in your project and its included files. Xcode uses this feature as a basis for code completion. Xcode supports code completion for C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Java, and AppleScript."
You stopped using Windows because they forced you to install a web browser?
Not exactly...:
Bundling a web browser was the right thing to do. While strong arming OEMs into not including Netscape was evil, including IE was completely justified.
I think the argument is, he stopped using Windows because they forced him to browse his local filesystem with the web browser.
(And all the atrocious hacks and spyware that engendered.)
Not in the least. I can buy a $200 PC and do anything I want with it. (How about using a 500 MB Quickbooks file all day?). A $200 Mac is pretty much a doorstop.
If I bought a $200 PC, the only thing I'd want to do with it would be use it as a doorstop.
Apple doesn't make USB cables. But their online store sells Belkin cables at 20 bucks a pop. Belkin cables _are_ built to high specifications, but whatever. Thanks for the non-sequitor.
And so a PC can be built to higher (but I doubt FAR higher, as you claim) specs than the top-of-the-line Mac... what's your point? Like the GP said: TIME IS MONEY. Whether software and hardware quality are "confused" is completely irrelevant. Even if the (now mythical) Apple hardware 'tax' were in effect, the up-front fee would pay for itself tenfold in the first couple years of use, because you'll be hacking in OS X.
Seriously. This man has to be just about the most boring tech pundit I've ever heard. Every lecture he's given, every speech he's made, has sounded at least five years out of date to me in its starry-eyed optimism, and usually ten years or more.
But you know, the man is just operating a lot like the company he used to run, and this explains a lot: He rummages around on the fringes of what's popular now, picks up something shiny, and starts speechifying about how it's The Road Ahead. Meanwhile his company rummages around on the fringes of what the industry is doing now, buys up something shiny, and starts cranking out a Microsofted version of that something with enough enthusiasm to soak the marketplace - which has, in the meantime, already grown and matured around that thing, or possibly rejected that new thing and already thrown it away.
e.g. the spreadsheet, the word processor, the GUI itself, the web browser, the web server, tabbed browsing, the tablet PC, the game console, the 3D-accelarated UI, the hand-held digital music player... and Microsoft Bob.
Compare this behavior with companies like Nintendo and Apple, both of which recently released devices that actually need new names for the category they are in...
The only issue I have with this is that it's invisible. Because while tear gas will make you cough and choke, and pepper spray will drop you and make you vomit, a blanket of invisible rays will have the apparent effect of an angry crowd turning against itself, its constituents furiously crawling all over each other trying to stop a mysterious pain they can't see. Is this really what we're after, in our crowd control scenarios? Turning an angry mob inward to injure and destroy itself? Tear gas and rubber bullets can at least be seen as they're deployed, so people know where to run and whom to blame...
It'll be very interesting when, in five years, we have access to hand-held, even concealable, versions of this. The potential for abuse is absolutely enormous when you can incapacitate someone at range, out of sight, leaving absolutely NO marks. Imagine the "mysterious" accidents we'll start seeing when insane commuters start zapping each other on the open road to get their "spot" back. Absolutely impossible to prove that some jackass caused you to crash by putting you in excruciating pain from two lanes over.
This scenario may sound wacky,... but I drive Highway 17 in San Jose CA ten times a week, and every day I see drivers who are so psychotic that they would eagerly use such a weapon for such a purpose...
If I did have to write something in the registry it's exactly where I would expect it to be... In the software section under the heading of company name. I dunno. seems quite easy to me.
Would that be the software section under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, or the software section under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE ?:D
I have rarely(once maybe every 6 months) had to use any sort of registry editor. Honestly it doesn't get any easier than that.
Oh come now, that's just a loaded statement. You know what's easier than that? Having a proper freaking search box in the registry editor, which dynamically searches as you type.
Here's an interesting point for you: On OS X you can get just that, by opening a Finder window to Library/Preferences, and typing something (anything) in the spotlight search box on the window. Try it with 'Mail'. Hrmm, what's this, com.apple.mail.plist. You open it up, it opens in the XML plist editor. By cracky, doesn't it look a lot like the registry. Look at all these settings... what does 'WebKitDefaultFixedFontSize' do, I wonder? Or if you have Macromedia Flash installed... try 'flash'. Hrmm. 'com.macromedia.flash.7.plist'. Let's try changing the setting for 'NSColorPanelVisiblSwatchRows'...
You say you've been living with the registry for 10 years. People don't just sit down at a piano and expect to be instant masters, even if they've been playing guitar for a dozen years. Suppose, just for a bit, that your situation is the same, and that the only reason you thought any different was because, most of the time, OS X just did things the right way and you haven't found reason to complain.
Cool. Then you'll appreciate that you can do exactly the same thing you describe, on OS X - with the added bonus that if you want to cycle through the windows of only the foreground application, you use command-`, which is right above the tab key. So you can tab through your Word documents without ever accidentally tabbing into something else.
(By the way, command-` is implemented by the OS, so it works automatically across ALL applications.)
Not exactly. You're right that people having PCs at home has very little to do with the effectiveness of MSFT marketing. Rather, it has everything to do with the low prices and fast development times in the world of PC hardware - and the fact that, 15-20 years ago, PCs catered to the business world FIRST, by a wide margin, and to everyone else second. You say that "deluded people" bought computers because they wanted "corporate compatibility", like that's some kind of hilarious blunder, but PCs were 1.cheaper, 2. faster, 3. ubiquitous, and 4. ran MICROSOFT OFFICE, the killer app above all killer apps.
Maybe you would think the rise to dominance of Microsoft was driven by "games and some other niche software" if you were 12 years old at the time it was happening...
60*60*24*365 = 31536000 seconds. 128 Mbps, that's megaBITS per second, is 128 * 1024 / 8 = 16384 bytes per second, or 16k/second, or 0.015625 MEGABYTES per second.
This times that renders 481 GIGAbytes, not TERAbytes.
And I actually do have a music collection that large, however it's because I ripped all my CDs into non-DRM lossless format (ALAC). Which plays on the iPod and sounds (and I can say this with 100% confidence) better than WMA or MP3 or AAC whatever the bitrate, and I don't need a fancy spectral analysis or double-blind experiment to prove it. And if anyone anywhere ever changes the encoding format on whatever device I buy in the future, I'm sure to lose absolutely nothing during the inevitable transcode. Mmmmyep, feels good to be smug.:)
But SRSLY, folks - the whole era of music compression format wars is starting to get just a little bit irrelevant, when we've got bic-sized devices that hold 200 minutes of non-lossy audio and 400GB hard drives on sale for $100 online.
Question: Are more choices really better?
Answer: That depends on WHAT YOU WANT DONE.
THE END.
This man's poorly disguised gripe about the variety of shutdown options presented to him in Windows is not news, nor it is cause for us to exhume a debate about user interface that was already ancient when Neal Stephenson wrote about it in 1999. You want a shutdown option for your laptop, Joel? Close the [expletive] lid.
Yes, Windows GUI designers are suffocated under layers of committee and management, and the result is poop. THAT was old news more than a DOZEN years ago. I hereby knight thee Sir Observalot.
I want my 3,000 sq foot home, my 4 vehicles, my speedboat,...
What happened to the fifth car?;)
But seriously. Here's something for you to consider.
Say you participate in this grand new economy, and you decide to buy some toilet cleaner, and you hop online to find it. Magically, the internet provides you with the most affordable bottle of toilet cleaner you could possibly buy, based not only on price but on effectiveness, and in exactly the amount you need, even relative to the storage space you're willing to provide for it in your home. You press the magical "order" button and your money is deducted in a micro-payment from your virtual checking account, which will accumulate with others until it becomes a large enough transaction to be taken from your real checking account without costing you a transaction fee. Then, you sit on your ass, and soon enough, the doorbell rings and you open it to discover a bottle of cleaner on the doorstep.
How much of THE ECONOMY have you really interacted with, in this grand new method of toilet cleaner purchasing? Surely you have leveraged the internet and the collective power of a million brains and a billion CPUs to find you THE ^^^SUPEREST^^^ )))ULTRA((( ##MEGA## ***BESTEST*** toilet cleaner EVARRR. But aside from informing your choice about what to buy, what has changed? Relative to, say, your grandfather scrawling "toilet cleaner" onto a shopping list and picking the cheapest of maybe two items available at the general store when he goes on his weekly shopping run? Aside from a more intricate and flexible method for shipping goods, which in turn relies on the economic influence of relatively cheap fossil fuels, I don't really see much of a difference except that you have the option of buying more crap than you did before, from farther away.
But wait, maybe you're not talking about pesky things like physical commodities, you know, those material things that people actually need to survive, whose scarcity is still determined by the complex relationship between the quality of our industrial infrastructure and its relative geographic distribution... oh no, you're talking about that most revolutionary of products and services known as INFORMATION. Yes, clearly, stringing wires all over the continent and making our previously book-bound chatterings take the form of infinitely redistributable bitstreams is going to totally redefine the way we, as humans, look at -- as you so boldly define it -- "resource allocation".
That's just a little bit high-handed. The day the very last hungry child on the planet gets a full belly, a soft place to sleep, and the attention of a parent, is the day I'll start taking these "new type of economy" predictions seriously, and amend my low opinion of your attitude. Not one single day before.
No, what's really going on here is, you're another armchair philosopher burbling from an atypically comfortable armchair about the ephemeral novelty of skimming information off the top of information and finagling that into an excuse to collect a distribution fee or a paycheck. That's a new name for a very old role, in economic terms, and that role is "middle-man". Take away the solid material goods driving the exchange, and the paycheck evaporates.
All around you, day by day, the vast majority of the human race is still toiling in dirt fields, when they're not sweating in 12-hour factory jobs making your widgets, or just plain beating on each other. Their time is occupied generating the most basic of material goods. Ask them when they think the "new economy" will be arriving. It'll probably be an answer like, "as soon as I have enough food, and can quit this damn job." And if you take it on relative terms, that sounds an awful lot like your pinings over finally getting a private jet. You have enough ; you can stop accumulating crap now; in no uncertain terms. But you don't. What does that tell you about the li
Quit being so smug about your 1337 sk1llz and acknowledge that you, like many other dotcom bandwagoners, were just lucky enough to leverage the right skills at the right time and avoid being subsequently drowned by the millions of others trying (poorly) to pull the same stunt. I've known many people who had exactly the start you describe with almost exactly the team you describe and most of the same attitude, and some of them got rich, while most of them sputtered along the margins of bankruptcy for years before declaring failure. There was no measure of integrity or skill that separated the rich from the poor at the end of that race; a few of them just plain got lucky, generally for reasons that could not understand until much later.
So let some of that hot air out of your head. The single example of your posh lifestyle does not constitute proof that laws of commerce that have stood for thousands of years are suddenly invalid. (Nor do your credentials of "since 1999" impress me. The computer industry was making billionaires 20 years before fast CPUs and Apache made PHP seem like anything other than the ridiculous shoehorned Perl bastardization that it is.) This is slashdot; we remember these things.
"Come on. The buy-burn-rip option is offensively inelegant and wasteful. The DRM workaround I had in mind was JHymn, which is geeky enough that I wouldn't want to talk my Mum through it."
Unfortunately JHymn doesn't work so well just now. There is hope: haxx04rs have been able to intercept raw unencrypted AAC frames from ITunes 6 and 7, but this rudimentary work hasn't made it up into the handy Java UI that JHymn sports. As for the buy-rip-burn option, I agree that it's inelegant and time consuming, but I'd like to point out your tacit assumption that you'd be importing the music back in to the computer. Once you burn an audio CD with iTunes, the DRM is basically defeated, if you have any practical use for the item you've just created (gift, boombox, car changer, etc). If you want to go back into the computer you can either import is as Apple Lossless in the case of iTunes, or FLAC in the case of anything else, and though your file is larger than it was you essentially suffer no loss of quality for your trouble, and the DRM is still gone. This all begs the question though: Why in the hell would you ever buy music through the iTunes store if you weren't going to at least keep it in iTunes? It's just nonsensical.
And it's nonsensical for a very good reason: Apple doesn't want to sell you music that plays anywhere. (And just because you can make it so, doesn't mean they'll encourage it.) And people know it. By and large, when a consumer makes a purchase in the iTunes store their intent is to make the music available in iTunes, and then typically on their iPod. Not available anywhere, but available in iTunes - to do with as they wish from within the confines of what iTunes allows. Yes, it's a different paradigm than owning CDs or records, and it has different restrictions. But think about how little sense CDs and records made, in their own way: You buy this plastic thingy, so you can stick it in this other electric thingy, and then the sound you want to hear comes out. Lose either one and the sound is lost. Oh, and the plastic thingy costs 50 cents to manufacture, but by paying 15 bucks for it you're actually buying a license to hear the sound it makes and by the way the process of making an identical backup copy is totally illegal according to that license.
To make a long story short, "buy-burn-rip" is an inelegant backup method, yes - just like a VCR is a totally inelegant method for preserving your DVDs. You've gone and transmorgrified them during the backup process. Why? To what end?
"You might have the energy for that. I'll be backing up by copying files to a removable HDD."
Risky... consider burning DVDs through iTunes 7's progressive backup feature. It saves _all_ metadata. Only took me... let's see... 29 DVDs to get it all (lossless ripping)! Then you can stick all those in a booklet and make a really awesome gift of them to a friend, on the condition that they return the booklet if your HD gets hosed.:)
"How can you get less hassle then buying a song from iTunes and backing it up?" : buy it, rip it, own it forever, play it anywhere.
You must realize that "buy it, rip it, own it forever, play it anywhere" is actually more of a hassle, and also misleading. Consider that if you buy music through the iTunes store, you effectively combine "buy it" and "rip it" into a single operation, and that "play it anywhere", of course, still applies. Your iPod goes anywhere. And you can burn a CD in the terribly unlikely event that you go somewhere and decide to play your music "out loud" and the device at hand does not have a line-in jack. As for "own it forever", look around you: Music containers are fickle. Where are the car 8-track players? The cassettes? The good sounding record players? How long before your vinyl warps and the tin in your CDs oxidizes? DRM workaroun
Actually a retrofit is possible, and would still be necessary if you were bringing in a vehicle that was required to pass the state emissions laws (whatever those would be). You go to a competent muffler/exhaust shop and have them purchase and then install a brand new, compliant exhaust system, running you something like $2000. If that exhaust system exists. But there is a loophole - if a vehicle is manufactured within a certain timeframe (can't remember the exact years) and was manufactured with the intent of passing the federal emissions standard, then the federal emissions standard is what applies when you get it smogged. (Of course, non-emissions parts of the standard still apply, for example your "check engine" light in your dashboard must be functioning, and if it's burned out your vehicle does not pass the smog 'equipment check' and therefore must be repaired before it is legal to register. Grrr.)
While we're comparing price points here, let's not forget that a visit to the local movie theatre costs nine bucks. Hordes of people are willing to pay that much to see a film once, on a big screen with their peers. No ownership rights at all; and afterwards they will probably never see the movie again. Plus they have to leave the house, and will probably add a four dollar soda to the bill.
Clearly there is some flexibility in prices, mostly dependent on the interest level that a potential purchaser has. The less interested they are in seeing a movie, the more affordable and convenient you have to make it before they will open their wallets.
The only reason big business is pursuing internet-based distribution AT ALL is because they perceive a demand for the additional measure of convenience that the model could POTENTIALLY deliver, and they expect to derive an acceptable profit from constructing that model.
So the big question is: Is internet-based distribution a new niche of consumers - a third category beyond theatre-goers and DVD renters - who will be convinced to watch a movie via the internet? Or are these people just a subset of that second, established category of DVD renters? In other words, do they need a lower price to bring them on board... or do they just need the same price they're already used to paying for a movie on DVD?
Personally, I think it's a subset of DVD renters. A small subset. People who own computers, and who watch movies primarily on their computers, yet are not particularly concerned with owning a physical copy of their data, and are just a bit too impatient to order a DVD in the mail. That's not a very big demographic, really. Maybe it covers a lot of college students who move too often for a NetFlix account, but at the same time, college students are rampant pirates, to whom most music and movies are contemptuously disposable.
Typical that their media buzz is all about the wireless feature, and typical that their wireless feature comes pre-subverted (wireless sharing of "promotional material") in a way that makes it attractive to advertisers and content providers, not to the buying public. Because that's the way Microsoft does business; the way it always has. It extracts profit from its partners and subordinates, not its customers.
You can expect MS money to go pouring down into this product like a waterfall, hammering the Zune into the marketplace with all the subtlety of the Iraq invasion... so Microsoft can show those sales numbers to record and movie studios and open the bidding for store space as high as possible. Perhaps it will, one day, be just about as profitable for them as the X-BOX.
Of course, if they follow the X-BOX route even more closely, they'll sell the Zune at a massive loss just to get it out there. In that case, us customers don't really lose. Can't complain about that.
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"Nothing good can come from service providers and hardware sellers working together." ...
I think you're being JUST a bit dogmatic. If hardware sellers and service providers hadn't been "working together", most of us would not be connected to the internet today.
You are perfectly entitled to CLICK NO ON THE WINDOW asking if you want to install the firmware and warning you of the consequences , Mr. False Simile Man.
"I'm a pragmatist who values having different tools for different jobs... and I have to say, I wish there were more of us around. This constant bickering and zealotry is nothing if not tedious."... There are plenty of us around. But we don't bother posting here.
Oh, it's you again.
I'm not sure that necessarily convinces me that this will lead to some of the organisms sprouting wings and others sprouting trunks.
Same tired old shtick. I remember telling you A YEAR AGO that your notion about what macroevolution claims and requires for proof is complete bollocks. Macroevolution does not require the "sprouting wings" and "sprouting trunks". Your analogy comparing macroevolution to the moon is quite absurd.
"I don't think it's any great leap of any kind to state 'Here is evidence for a common creator.'"
Same old shtick. Same old useless analogy about comparing computer programs to living organisms, comparing the machinations of biology and chemistry to the thought process of a human, then implying that the design habits of a creator must be the same as those of a human. You still have not answered the question that forms the basis of this useless analogy. WHY WOULD GOD NEED TO USE TOOLS?
No reason. ... Therefore your argument based from the appearance of tool usage is garbage.
I suspect Steve knew you'd blow your trumpet and sound the alarm about this, and you know what? That's fine. The pie chart in the keynote showed Safari eclipsing all browsers except for IE because, to be perfectly frank, most users of IE aren't trained enough or don't care enough to switch browsers, period. Lest you forget: It is pre-installed. Downloadable installs are the realm of "switchers" ... away from IE and to something else. Apple would be daft to frame it any other way. The question is, John Lilly, are you going to stand around and whine, then be plowed under by a rival? Or are you going to keep building a better browser?
This is pretty much what Frank Herbert was natting on about in Dune. In the civilizations of his books, humans had destroyed almost all computing devices, in favor of specialized humans called Mentats who did calculations in their heads. Why? Because humans realized that computers had moved beyond the realm of tools and had actually become a competing organism.
Of course, to keep space travel possible, he had to claim that it could be accomplished by, essentially, getting your pilots reaaaally high on drugs. So yeah, definitely science fiction. But his point about computers is becoming increasingly appropriate.
Actually, I don't understand the validity of your comparison. For one thing, the cheapest Macbook Pro comes with 2GB of ram, not 1GB. And it runs at 2.2Ghz, which you can dismiss as trivial if you like - but if you dismiss a 10% speed difference as trivial, be prepared to dismiss a 10% PRICE difference as trivial, too. >:)
The resolution is the same, yes, and the Asus is one inch narrower - but it's not always true that smaller is better, and/or more expensive. Some people (I am one of them) use their portables as primary machines, and since the Asus is being marketed as a portable gaming rig, a physically larger screen would be a positive for those folks too. But to be fair, this "narrowness" issue could go either way.
While we're on the subject of gaming - 512MB of VRAM is certainly superior to 128MB, yes - but consider that the MBP is running a GeForce 8600 (not a Mobility Radeon X1600), which supports the unified shader architecture required for DirectX 10. Now, I haven't been a serious gearhead gamer for years, but I'd bet good money that DX10 support and a faster GPU core is more important to a gamer than additional VRAM - even 384MB more VRAM. Especially when DX10 support means crazy shit like geometry shaders that can organically grow, smooth, and animate your models, entirely on the GPU.
Let's toss in a couple other things:
* The "magsafe" style power adapter. In practice, this enhancement is worth somewhere between 10 bucks and a thousand, depending on how badly you damage your laptop when you trip over the cord and yank it to the floor
* Two-finger scrolling support in the trackpad. (OMFG, you have no idea how useful this is until you've tried it!!)
* The keyboard that lights up in the dark. I adore this feature, but I'll be conservative and say it's worth about 50 bucks - the same as an add-on Bluetooth module.
* The slot-loading, instead of tray-based, optical drive. Cleaner, easier to use. But durability is an either-or.
* The aluminum exterior, and the fact that it's almost 50% thinner (thinness, unlike narrowness, is universally a positive), plus ALL the ports are on the sides, and NONE are on the $&#%@ing back.
(I assume we're excluding things like the software bundle, the usefulness of the tech support, and the usefulness of the warranty, since we're talking pure hardware here.)
So, let's see ... The regular A8JS you linked is $1475 (that includes the $16 shipping fee) ... The MBP is $2000. So for the extra $525 you get the crap I mentioned in that bulleted list, plus an arguably superior video card and twice the RAM. IMHO, we've now entered the realm of "competitive". (Mostly because of the crap in that bulleted list.)
What makes the waters so muddy is that these are really not equivalent machines at all - in fact, the ONLY specs they definitely share are chipset, hard drive capacity, and networking speeds.
Xcode now does the same thing.
Straight from the docs:
"Xcode includes a feature, called Code Sense, which maintains a rich store of information about the symbols defined in your project and its included files. Xcode uses this feature as a basis for code completion. Xcode supports code completion for C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Java, and AppleScript."
To use it, start typing something, and hit ESC.
You stopped using Windows because they forced you to install a web browser?
Not exactly...:
Bundling a web browser was the right thing to do. While strong arming OEMs into not including Netscape was evil, including IE was completely justified.
I think the argument is, he stopped using Windows because they forced him to browse his local filesystem with the web browser.
(And all the atrocious hacks and spyware that engendered.)
Not in the least. I can buy a $200 PC and do anything I want with it. (How about using a 500 MB Quickbooks file all day?). A $200 Mac is pretty much a doorstop.
If I bought a $200 PC, the only thing I'd want to do with it would be use it as a doorstop.
So no difference there.
Apple doesn't make USB cables. But their online store sells Belkin cables at 20 bucks a pop. Belkin cables _are_ built to high specifications, but whatever. Thanks for the non-sequitor.
... what's your point? Like the GP said: TIME IS MONEY. Whether software and hardware quality are "confused" is completely irrelevant. Even if the (now mythical) Apple hardware 'tax' were in effect, the up-front fee would pay for itself tenfold in the first couple years of use, because you'll be hacking in OS X.
And so a PC can be built to higher (but I doubt FAR higher, as you claim) specs than the top-of-the-line Mac
Seriously. This man has to be just about the most boring tech pundit I've ever heard. Every lecture he's given, every speech he's made, has sounded at least five years out of date to me in its starry-eyed optimism, and usually ten years or more.
But you know, the man is just operating a lot like the company he used to run, and this explains a lot: He rummages around on the fringes of what's popular now, picks up something shiny, and starts speechifying about how it's The Road Ahead. Meanwhile his company rummages around on the fringes of what the industry is doing now, buys up something shiny, and starts cranking out a Microsofted version of that something with enough enthusiasm to soak the marketplace - which has, in the meantime, already grown and matured around that thing, or possibly rejected that new thing and already thrown it away.
e.g. the spreadsheet, the word processor, the GUI itself, the web browser, the web server, tabbed browsing, the tablet PC, the game console, the 3D-accelarated UI, the hand-held digital music player ... and Microsoft Bob.
Compare this behavior with companies like Nintendo and Apple, both of which recently released devices that actually need new names for the category they are in...
The only issue I have with this is that it's invisible. Because while tear gas will make you cough and choke, and pepper spray will drop you and make you vomit, a blanket of invisible rays will have the apparent effect of an angry crowd turning against itself, its constituents furiously crawling all over each other trying to stop a mysterious pain they can't see. Is this really what we're after, in our crowd control scenarios? Turning an angry mob inward to injure and destroy itself? Tear gas and rubber bullets can at least be seen as they're deployed, so people know where to run and whom to blame...
It'll be very interesting when, in five years, we have access to hand-held, even concealable, versions of this. The potential for abuse is absolutely enormous when you can incapacitate someone at range, out of sight, leaving absolutely NO marks. Imagine the "mysterious" accidents we'll start seeing when insane commuters start zapping each other on the open road to get their "spot" back. Absolutely impossible to prove that some jackass caused you to crash by putting you in excruciating pain from two lanes over.
This scenario may sound wacky, ... but I drive Highway 17 in San Jose CA ten times a week, and every day I see drivers who are so psychotic that they would eagerly use such a weapon for such a purpose...
If I did have to write something in the registry it's exactly where I would expect it to be... In the software section under the heading of company name. I dunno. seems quite easy to me.
Would that be the software section under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, or the software section under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE ? :D
I have rarely(once maybe every 6 months) had to use any sort of registry editor. Honestly it doesn't get any easier than that.
Oh come now, that's just a loaded statement. You know what's easier than that? Having a proper freaking search box in the registry editor, which dynamically searches as you type.
Here's an interesting point for you: On OS X you can get just that, by opening a Finder window to Library/Preferences, and typing something (anything) in the spotlight search box on the window. Try it with 'Mail'. Hrmm, what's this, com.apple.mail.plist. You open it up, it opens in the XML plist editor. By cracky, doesn't it look a lot like the registry. Look at all these settings ... what does 'WebKitDefaultFixedFontSize' do, I wonder? Or if you have Macromedia Flash installed ... try 'flash'. Hrmm. 'com.macromedia.flash.7.plist'. Let's try changing the setting for 'NSColorPanelVisiblSwatchRows' ...
You say you've been living with the registry for 10 years. People don't just sit down at a piano and expect to be instant masters, even if they've been playing guitar for a dozen years. Suppose, just for a bit, that your situation is the same, and that the only reason you thought any different was because, most of the time, OS X just did things the right way and you haven't found reason to complain.
Cool. Then you'll appreciate that you can do exactly the same thing you describe, on OS X - with the added bonus that if you want to cycle through the windows of only the foreground application, you use command-`, which is right above the tab key. So you can tab through your Word documents without ever accidentally tabbing into something else. (By the way, command-` is implemented by the OS, so it works automatically across ALL applications.)
Not exactly. You're right that people having PCs at home has very little to do with the effectiveness of MSFT marketing. Rather, it has everything to do with the low prices and fast development times in the world of PC hardware - and the fact that, 15-20 years ago, PCs catered to the business world FIRST, by a wide margin, and to everyone else second. You say that "deluded people" bought computers because they wanted "corporate compatibility", like that's some kind of hilarious blunder, but PCs were 1 .cheaper, 2. faster, 3. ubiquitous, and 4. ran MICROSOFT OFFICE, the killer app above all killer apps.
...
Maybe you would think the rise to dominance of Microsoft was driven by "games and some other niche software" if you were 12 years old at the time it was happening
Why hasn't anything overtaken the MP3 standard you ask?
In response I present you Exhibit P:
One hundred million pirates.
60*60*24*365 = 31536000 seconds. 128 Mbps, that's megaBITS per second, is 128 * 1024 / 8 = 16384 bytes per second, or 16k/second, or 0.015625 MEGABYTES per second.
This times that renders 481 GIGAbytes, not TERAbytes.
And I actually do have a music collection that large, however it's because I ripped all my CDs into non-DRM lossless format (ALAC). Which plays on the iPod and sounds (and I can say this with 100% confidence) better than WMA or MP3 or AAC whatever the bitrate, and I don't need a fancy spectral analysis or double-blind experiment to prove it. And if anyone anywhere ever changes the encoding format on whatever device I buy in the future, I'm sure to lose absolutely nothing during the inevitable transcode. Mmmmyep, feels good to be smug. :)
But SRSLY, folks - the whole era of music compression format wars is starting to get just a little bit irrelevant, when we've got bic-sized devices that hold 200 minutes of non-lossy audio and 400GB hard drives on sale for $100 online.
Question: Are more choices really better?
Answer: That depends on WHAT YOU WANT DONE.
THE END.
This man's poorly disguised gripe about the variety of shutdown options presented to him in Windows is not news, nor it is cause for us to exhume a debate about user interface that was already ancient when Neal Stephenson wrote about it in 1999. You want a shutdown option for your laptop, Joel? Close the [expletive] lid.
Yes, Windows GUI designers are suffocated under layers of committee and management, and the result is poop. THAT was old news more than a DOZEN years ago. I hereby knight thee Sir Observalot.
I want my 3,000 sq foot home, my 4 vehicles, my speedboat, ...
What happened to the fifth car? ;)
But seriously. Here's something for you to consider.
Say you participate in this grand new economy, and you decide to buy some toilet cleaner, and you hop online to find it. Magically, the internet provides you with the most affordable bottle of toilet cleaner you could possibly buy, based not only on price but on effectiveness, and in exactly the amount you need, even relative to the storage space you're willing to provide for it in your home. You press the magical "order" button and your money is deducted in a micro-payment from your virtual checking account, which will accumulate with others until it becomes a large enough transaction to be taken from your real checking account without costing you a transaction fee. Then, you sit on your ass, and soon enough, the doorbell rings and you open it to discover a bottle of cleaner on the doorstep.
How much of THE ECONOMY have you really interacted with, in this grand new method of toilet cleaner purchasing? Surely you have leveraged the internet and the collective power of a million brains and a billion CPUs to find you THE ^^^SUPEREST^^^ )))ULTRA((( ##MEGA## ***BESTEST*** toilet cleaner EVARRR. But aside from informing your choice about what to buy, what has changed? Relative to, say, your grandfather scrawling "toilet cleaner" onto a shopping list and picking the cheapest of maybe two items available at the general store when he goes on his weekly shopping run? Aside from a more intricate and flexible method for shipping goods, which in turn relies on the economic influence of relatively cheap fossil fuels, I don't really see much of a difference except that you have the option of buying more crap than you did before, from farther away.
But wait, maybe you're not talking about pesky things like physical commodities, you know, those material things that people actually need to survive, whose scarcity is still determined by the complex relationship between the quality of our industrial infrastructure and its relative geographic distribution ... oh no, you're talking about that most revolutionary of products and services known as INFORMATION. Yes, clearly, stringing wires all over the continent and making our previously book-bound chatterings take the form of infinitely redistributable bitstreams is going to totally redefine the way we, as humans, look at -- as you so boldly define it -- "resource allocation".
That's just a little bit high-handed. The day the very last hungry child on the planet gets a full belly, a soft place to sleep, and the attention of a parent, is the day I'll start taking these "new type of economy" predictions seriously, and amend my low opinion of your attitude. Not one single day before.
No, what's really going on here is, you're another armchair philosopher burbling from an atypically comfortable armchair about the ephemeral novelty of skimming information off the top of information and finagling that into an excuse to collect a distribution fee or a paycheck. That's a new name for a very old role, in economic terms, and that role is "middle-man". Take away the solid material goods driving the exchange, and the paycheck evaporates.
All around you, day by day, the vast majority of the human race is still toiling in dirt fields, when they're not sweating in 12-hour factory jobs making your widgets, or just plain beating on each other. Their time is occupied generating the most basic of material goods. Ask them when they think the "new economy" will be arriving. It'll probably be an answer like, "as soon as I have enough food, and can quit this damn job." And if you take it on relative terms, that sounds an awful lot like your pinings over finally getting a private jet. You have enough ; you can stop accumulating crap now; in no uncertain terms. But you don't. What does that tell you about the li
Quit being so smug about your 1337 sk1llz and acknowledge that you, like many other dotcom bandwagoners, were just lucky enough to leverage the right skills at the right time and avoid being subsequently drowned by the millions of others trying (poorly) to pull the same stunt. I've known many people who had exactly the start you describe with almost exactly the team you describe and most of the same attitude, and some of them got rich, while most of them sputtered along the margins of bankruptcy for years before declaring failure. There was no measure of integrity or skill that separated the rich from the poor at the end of that race; a few of them just plain got lucky, generally for reasons that could not understand until much later.
So let some of that hot air out of your head. The single example of your posh lifestyle does not constitute proof that laws of commerce that have stood for thousands of years are suddenly invalid. (Nor do your credentials of "since 1999" impress me. The computer industry was making billionaires 20 years before fast CPUs and Apache made PHP seem like anything other than the ridiculous shoehorned Perl bastardization that it is.) This is slashdot; we remember these things.
"Come on. The buy-burn-rip option is offensively inelegant and wasteful. The DRM workaround I had in mind was JHymn, which is geeky enough that I wouldn't want to talk my Mum through it."
Unfortunately JHymn doesn't work so well just now. There is hope: haxx04rs have been able to intercept raw unencrypted AAC frames from ITunes 6 and 7, but this rudimentary work hasn't made it up into the handy Java UI that JHymn sports. As for the buy-rip-burn option, I agree that it's inelegant and time consuming, but I'd like to point out your tacit assumption that you'd be importing the music back in to the computer. Once you burn an audio CD with iTunes, the DRM is basically defeated, if you have any practical use for the item you've just created (gift, boombox, car changer, etc). If you want to go back into the computer you can either import is as Apple Lossless in the case of iTunes, or FLAC in the case of anything else, and though your file is larger than it was you essentially suffer no loss of quality for your trouble, and the DRM is still gone. This all begs the question though: Why in the hell would you ever buy music through the iTunes store if you weren't going to at least keep it in iTunes? It's just nonsensical.
And it's nonsensical for a very good reason: Apple doesn't want to sell you music that plays anywhere. (And just because you can make it so, doesn't mean they'll encourage it.) And people know it. By and large, when a consumer makes a purchase in the iTunes store their intent is to make the music available in iTunes, and then typically on their iPod. Not available anywhere, but available in iTunes - to do with as they wish from within the confines of what iTunes allows. Yes, it's a different paradigm than owning CDs or records, and it has different restrictions. But think about how little sense CDs and records made, in their own way: You buy this plastic thingy, so you can stick it in this other electric thingy, and then the sound you want to hear comes out. Lose either one and the sound is lost. Oh, and the plastic thingy costs 50 cents to manufacture, but by paying 15 bucks for it you're actually buying a license to hear the sound it makes and by the way the process of making an identical backup copy is totally illegal according to that license.
To make a long story short, "buy-burn-rip" is an inelegant backup method, yes - just like a VCR is a totally inelegant method for preserving your DVDs. You've gone and transmorgrified them during the backup process. Why? To what end?
"You might have the energy for that. I'll be backing up by copying files to a removable HDD."
Risky ... consider burning DVDs through iTunes 7's progressive backup feature. It saves _all_ metadata. Only took me ... let's see ... 29 DVDs to get it all (lossless ripping)! Then you can stick all those in a booklet and make a really awesome gift of them to a friend, on the condition that they return the booklet if your HD gets hosed. :)
"How can you get less hassle then buying a song from iTunes and backing it up?" : buy it, rip it, own it forever, play it anywhere.
You must realize that "buy it, rip it, own it forever, play it anywhere" is actually more of a hassle, and also misleading. Consider that if you buy music through the iTunes store, you effectively combine "buy it" and "rip it" into a single operation, and that "play it anywhere", of course, still applies. Your iPod goes anywhere. And you can burn a CD in the terribly unlikely event that you go somewhere and decide to play your music "out loud" and the device at hand does not have a line-in jack. As for "own it forever", look around you: Music containers are fickle. Where are the car 8-track players? The cassettes? The good sounding record players? How long before your vinyl warps and the tin in your CDs oxidizes? DRM workaroun
Actually a retrofit is possible, and would still be necessary if you were bringing in a vehicle that was required to pass the state emissions laws (whatever those would be). You go to a competent muffler/exhaust shop and have them purchase and then install a brand new, compliant exhaust system, running you something like $2000. If that exhaust system exists. But there is a loophole - if a vehicle is manufactured within a certain timeframe (can't remember the exact years) and was manufactured with the intent of passing the federal emissions standard, then the federal emissions standard is what applies when you get it smogged. (Of course, non-emissions parts of the standard still apply, for example your "check engine" light in your dashboard must be functioning, and if it's burned out your vehicle does not pass the smog 'equipment check' and therefore must be repaired before it is legal to register. Grrr.)
While we're comparing price points here, let's not forget that a visit to the local movie theatre costs nine bucks. Hordes of people are willing to pay that much to see a film once, on a big screen with their peers. No ownership rights at all; and afterwards they will probably never see the movie again. Plus they have to leave the house, and will probably add a four dollar soda to the bill.
Clearly there is some flexibility in prices, mostly dependent on the interest level that a potential purchaser has. The less interested they are in seeing a movie, the more affordable and convenient you have to make it before they will open their wallets.
The only reason big business is pursuing internet-based distribution AT ALL is because they perceive a demand for the additional measure of convenience that the model could POTENTIALLY deliver, and they expect to derive an acceptable profit from constructing that model.
So the big question is: Is internet-based distribution a new niche of consumers - a third category beyond theatre-goers and DVD renters - who will be convinced to watch a movie via the internet? Or are these people just a subset of that second, established category of DVD renters? In other words, do they need a lower price to bring them on board ... or do they just need the same price they're already used to paying for a movie on DVD?
Personally, I think it's a subset of DVD renters. A small subset. People who own computers, and who watch movies primarily on their computers, yet are not particularly concerned with owning a physical copy of their data, and are just a bit too impatient to order a DVD in the mail. That's not a very big demographic, really. Maybe it covers a lot of college students who move too often for a NetFlix account, but at the same time, college students are rampant pirates, to whom most music and movies are contemptuously disposable.
Typical that their media buzz is all about the wireless feature, and typical that their wireless feature comes pre-subverted (wireless sharing of "promotional material") in a way that makes it attractive to advertisers and content providers, not to the buying public. Because that's the way Microsoft does business; the way it always has. It extracts profit from its partners and subordinates, not its customers.
You can expect MS money to go pouring down into this product like a waterfall, hammering the Zune into the marketplace with all the subtlety of the Iraq invasion ... so Microsoft can show those sales numbers to record and movie studios and open the bidding for store space as high as possible. Perhaps it will, one day, be just about as profitable for them as the X-BOX.
Of course, if they follow the X-BOX route even more closely, they'll sell the Zune at a massive loss just to get it out there. In that case, us customers don't really lose. Can't complain about that.