True. If you really want to use machines use machines that fill out the paper ballot.
1.) The voter comes into the room and his name gets striked from the list of people who haven't yet voted
2.) The voter receives a preprinted ballot
3.) The voter takes the ballot to the voting machine and inserts it
4.) The machine uses markings to ensure that the ballot is 100% correctly positioned
5.) The voter selects the candidate he wants to vote for
6.) The machine shows the name of the candidate and a "Do you really want to vote for this candidate?" propmt
7.) After the voter has confirmed the vote a card punch makes a nice hole in the ballot next to the chosen candidate
8.) Under the eyes of a supervisor the ballot is placed in a locked box
9.) After the election all boxes are opened and the ballots are read electronically. If here are doubts a manual recount is possible
There we have it. It's easy to invalidate ballots where the wrong candidate was voted for - just punch out all candidates. You also don't end up with incredibly complex voting machines, as the machines used are just glorified card punches. With the right design you can even make it trivial to detect whether the card has been inserted properly (for example one corner of the ballot could have a small hole. If the ballot is inserted in the wrong orientation a light barrier gets blocked and the machine shows a "please insert the ballot in the right orientation" warning).
If you want to ensure voter anonymity provide envelopes in which the ballots go before they go in the box.
I'm a CS student and at my university we have a compulsory two-semester software project that students are supposed to participate in during their third and fourth semesters. The course tries to emulate the business world: The customer tells the world that he wants a software that does X (with requirements like "should work like, you know, Amazon"), then the project groups have to work out offers, specifications etc. during the first semester and implement the thing during the second. In the end one software is actually used in the real world. (Isn't it great how students can be abused for cheap labor?)
What our "customer" wants is reengineering of an online biblioraphy getting about a hundred unique hits a month. In Java. Use of an appropriate framework recommended.
I'm the one in charge with deciding on which technologies my group uses (except for the mandatory stuff like MySQL). I would have went with Struts (because the university offered a free Struts course), but I decided against it (because I forgot about the course until it was over, also Struts is quite heavy according to my research). I compared JSF against Tapestry; JSF will probably become an industry standard, while Tapestry will not, but Tapestry is easier to deploy than JSF. Since we don't care about industry standards and need to implement the whole thing with about one man-month of work (spread across seven people, including the earning phase) JSF is out of the picture. In the end I settled on Tapestry for the following reasons:
- We don't care about industry standards so it doesn't matter whether Tapestry will become one.
- We have neither the time nor the resources to use anything that introduces more complexity than absolutely necessary, flexibility be damned. The project is already stealing enough time from the other courses.
- Tapestry can be integrated into random HTML or XML just by adding a few parameters to a tag. There is no Java knowledge necessary to integrate the Tapestry parameters into a new layout. This is good since it allows people to play around with the HTML layout with no knowledge of the program whatsoever, as long as they just put the Tapestry stuff in the right place.
In the real world I'd probably last for about five minutes if I kept making such decisins, but then again I'm a student. I'm supposed to make bad decisions.
Most people use whichever tool you give them as long as it's good enough. That means when Microsoft (who own the home user OS market) bundle a program with Windows people are going to use it, even if the competitors' offers are superior (see Netscape Navigator vs. MSIE).
That's why people are complaining about Microsoft bundling IE or WMP: Because they are abusing their dominance in the OS market for keeping competitors out of the browser/media player markets.
And now, as Paul Harvey says, for the rest of the story - the part you won't tell because it's inconvient to your thesis. The groups you list are a minority of the US population, and they have a chance to break themselves of that state if they so choose.
They have a chance but it's not that big. People from a poor background tend to have worse education than those better off, which in turn means that they have problems getting well-paid jobs.
There is not one single historical monarchy where the poor were better off than the poor in the US today. Not one. (One feature of a 'classed' society, unlike the classless one of the US, is that the poor have virtually no rights and no oppurtunities.)
Note that while in today's society the poor do have rights (although they are more often ignored than those of people better off) they usually have rather limited opportunities. Today there are classes - they're no longer defined by birth but they are there. The poor tend to stay poor and the rich tend to stay rich. The time of "from rags to riches" is gone, today it's "from $5.000 IT upstart to multinational corporation" and the people getting rich don't start as dishwashers but as well-educated people with an IT background. Which in turn requires, yes, at least a certain amount of money.
What we have is better than in most periods before, but it's certainly not classless or fair. Then again, it never has been.
IE7 has one advantage: As for some reason browser generations are coupled to IE releases the release of IE7 will mean that Forefox and Opera will instantly turn from sixth generation browsers into seventh generation browsers as they already do everything IE7 does.
And when Microsoft will announce that their browser now has almost-complete CSS2 support (somewhere around 2011) Firefox, Opera and probably even Lynx will watch the IE dev team in the backlights as they continue to boldly go where no browser has gone before...
I have built myself a start page that has links to all sites I regularly use netaly organized in a CSS popup menu (that probably still doesn't work in IE7). PHP and Magpie are used to collect the newsfeeds I regularly read and embed them into the menu. I think this is a sensible approach as I don't need the feeds outside of the start page and I don't like hunting around in the bookmark bar.
The loading time is kind of a problem (no wonder, with ten or so feeds that have to be processed) but I'm looking into using AJAX to only load a feed when the parent menu item gets focus. (Don't tell me that's a bit over the top for a simple collection-of-links start page. I already went there when I rewrote half the code so that it would have a completely modular OOP design...)
RSS already was revolutionized and by "revolutionized" I mean "standardized". The result was Atom. Yes this theoretical format for newsfeed that is supposed to be superior to RSS (which is probably why no one uses it, see VHS vs. Beta, MP3 vs. Ogg Vorbis, honest politicians vs. real politicians).
This might be one area where Microsoft's tendency to create new de-facto standards might turn out useful - they might consolidate the RSS world where there are thirteen mutually incompatible versions, abot three of which have any market exposure at all. Not that there isn't a standardized feed format, mind you, but it doesn't seem as if anyone was determined to use it so we might as well stick with whichever RSS version (3.1, maybe 4.0?) Microsoft popularizes.
Apparently Ogg Vorbis is not as cheap to implement as MP3. The last MP3 player I bought was a Frontier Labs Nex iA, a nice, small flash-based player with a great user interface (hardare-wise). The manufacturer also promised a firmware upgrade that would enable the device to play Vorbis files. Months later they put up a notice on their website saying that Vorbis support would not come because the Nex iA's processor was not fast enough to handle it. So it seems that Vorbis upport means having to put in a better processor than needed for MP3 alone. OTOH, most modern players also support AAC and/or WMA, which might need a faster processor anyway.
Usually the point of using sprites is being in spirit with something else. Off the top of my head I could cite a Badger Badger Badger clone using sprites from the MMORPG Ragnarok Online[1] (which includes enemies shaped like badgers, mushrooms and snakes). Using anything but the original sprites would effectively negate the reason for making the animation in the first place. There are other animations where the whole point of the exercise is doing something with certain sprites. They aren't common, but there are a few.
Also, some people couldn't draw a vector illustration to save their life but are capable of drawing quite good-looking sprites.
[1] www dot ermacstudios dot org/ROBadger dot htm (I deliberately obfuscated the link. Please visit the site only if you really want to see yet another Badger Badger Badger rehash. Consider using www dot ermacstudios dot org dot nyud dot net:8090/ROBadger dot htm in order to save them some bandwidth.)
It does, but occasionally you encounter animations where AA doesn't influence the fact that they look bad when scaled - for example ones including video game sprites. Antialiasing is nice for most content but scaled sprites usually end up looking butt-ugly, antialiased or not.
David vs. Goliath... Wasn't that this court case where this little homicidal maniac was sued for attacking this giant with a sniper slingshot, causing massive cranial trauma? However Microsoft tries to apply it here, they apparently already have their legal team on the case. They're planning something... Does the FOSS community have any armed midgets with a short temper?
Everything would suffer. If everyone sticks to what they're best at sooner or later we have (pseudo-)monopolies controlling every sub-market - as evidenced by MSIE it's not a good idea to let anyone completely own a market. Without competition the only thing that would have a blast of a time would be the corporate profits and the massive asshattery every vendor would practice - because it's not as if anyone could ever do anything aginst their bad practices.
Far better than LaTeX could unintentionally. It's pretty amazing how incredibly ugly you can make a LaTeX document with just a few commands. This is easy to witness when watching a CS student in a math lecture try to type down everything the lecturer jots on the blackboard without being fluent in LaTeX.
Ahh, LaTeX... The fact that it's the best typesetting solution out there doesn't necessarily make it good - although it would be if some kinks were ironed out (like the lacking support for non-ASCII charsets) and the error messages were a bit less cryptic ("underfull hbox (badness 10000)" anyone?).
True, but there is one reason for embedding Flash in HTML pages: Some Flash animations are designed for exactly one resolution and look like crap when viewed without something that defines the dimensions. However, if Flash included a command for "force the displayed animation to be X by Y" there would really be no reason fo embedding Flash in hTML.
...I'd much rather see a Marathon movie. Compared to Marathon Halo is a storyless, rainbow-colored arcade shooter. No, I don't want Marathon: Infinity - that one would just confuse the viewers until they wish they could do Electric Sheep 4 again and choose a timeline where they don't watch it. But the first game would make a good movie - a slow, claustrophobic movie about the semi-lone soldier/officer/cyborg/whatever trying to save the ship from aliens while dealing with two warring AIs (one of which is rampant to boot). Just Durandal's insane bickering would make the movie worth watching if done properly. If we give the Marathon a speaker system Durandal doesn't even need to call the protagonist to a terminal to mock him.
You could even put in a jab at the strong female character (which, after all, is quickly becoming a cliché):
About two minutes after the Strong Female Character is introduced Protagonist: I was just about to clean out the crew quarters. Care to lend me a hand there? Strong Female Character: *spots a Pfhor and riddles it with bullets* Sure, why not? I was running out of targets anyway. The Strong Female Character is teleported away, not to be seen again Durandal: Oops! Well, there are more than enough targets for her in the mess hall. But I'm so sorry for that date of yours. You were such a cute pair. Protagonist: Dammit, Durandal! You can't just teleport her away like that! I could have really used her help! Durandal: Maybe I can find you a handkerchief and a magazine. Don't worry, I won't tell anyone.
Actually, the lush jungle and nice beaches (with accompanying huts) looked like something out of a tourism ad. Heck, I'd like to spend a vacation in a lace like that.
The FarCry screenplay should be written by the Penny Arcade folks. After I've read their FarCry promo comic I'm positive that it'd better movie material than what Boll is/will be using.
Once they actually start using the word "propaganda" they're going to receive one big PR buttfuck from Germany. It's just too easy to draw parallels to WW2 (expansionistic policy, the designation of a religion as an enemy, heavy use of propaganda) that the Germans, who have been trained to be naziphobic when the nation was rebuilt, will not loudly complain. Okay, Merkel seems to be determined to crawl up Bush's ass if necessary, but someone is bound to complai and the media will pick up the story because of it's outrageousness.
Sure, the USA has had witch hunts in the past (ooo, evil communism!) but back then everyone over here loved the USA. Today the USA has the image of a power-hungy corrupt banana republic governed by the oil companies. And I have a feeling that it's not going to improve soon.
And no, artificially tying the product to their lackluster hardware offerings is NOT acceptable. Yes I said lackluster. Sure they are pretty but as PC hardware they just ain't all that. Cheap plastic cases with wimpy power supplies and little expansion for the desktop and useless one button laptops. Gimme a big manly box made of 2mil aluminum and a big ass stable power plant to start, then let me pick out a premium motherboard and memory and an drives of my choice. Why should the OS vendor get to make all of my hardware choices for me? And never forget the insane markup they get for their pretty but bland specced hardware.
By all means, have fun with your three kilogram space heater that makes noises like a vacuum cleaner even when it's not under load. I'll stick with my light, robust, barely audible iBook.
Besides, what's wrong with the Power Mac? It has an aluminium case, it supports 16 GB of RAM, it supports a quad G5... That should be enough to compensate for a lot of things. And if that's still not enough I have some email offers I could forward to you.;)
It depends on the market. In the "entry level notebooks known to run properly with a non-Windows OS installed" market the iBook is one of the best offers. In fact the superior price/performance ratio is what made me get one (along with the fact that the price is low - a product can perform as well as it wants, if I can't afford it I can't afford it).
However, it is true: The low-end Mac notebook (the iBook) does compete with Thinkpads and the likes, because Thinkpads are among the few notebooks known for reliable Linux support. Then again, the non-Windws notebook market is quite small so I guess I can be happy that there is an entry level offer at all.
Right after posting the parent I visit the xmms-kde site and see that they added Amarok support back in 2004. Now I just have to find out how to use it, as the GUI only telly me about XMMS, Noatun and SMPEG...
I do like the interface. I'd really like my XMMS to have a hierarchical way of organizing my music. Or smart playlists for that matter. My biggest problem with iTunes is that it doesn't have a wide selection of input plugins like XMMS does - that severely limits the selection of music I can listen to on the Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
True. If you really want to use machines use machines that fill out the paper ballot.
1.) The voter comes into the room and his name gets striked from the list of people who haven't yet voted 2.) The voter receives a preprinted ballot
3.) The voter takes the ballot to the voting machine and inserts it
4.) The machine uses markings to ensure that the ballot is 100% correctly positioned
5.) The voter selects the candidate he wants to vote for
6.) The machine shows the name of the candidate and a "Do you really want to vote for this candidate?" propmt
7.) After the voter has confirmed the vote a card punch makes a nice hole in the ballot next to the chosen candidate
8.) Under the eyes of a supervisor the ballot is placed in a locked box
9.) After the election all boxes are opened and the ballots are read electronically. If here are doubts a manual recount is possible
There we have it. It's easy to invalidate ballots where the wrong candidate was voted for - just punch out all candidates. You also don't end up with incredibly complex voting machines, as the machines used are just glorified card punches. With the right design you can even make it trivial to detect whether the card has been inserted properly (for example one corner of the ballot could have a small hole. If the ballot is inserted in the wrong orientation a light barrier gets blocked and the machine shows a "please insert the ballot in the right orientation" warning).
If you want to ensure voter anonymity provide envelopes in which the ballots go before they go in the box.
I'm a CS student and at my university we have a compulsory two-semester software project that students are supposed to participate in during their third and fourth semesters. The course tries to emulate the business world: The customer tells the world that he wants a software that does X (with requirements like "should work like, you know, Amazon"), then the project groups have to work out offers, specifications etc. during the first semester and implement the thing during the second. In the end one software is actually used in the real world. (Isn't it great how students can be abused for cheap labor?)
What our "customer" wants is reengineering of an online biblioraphy getting about a hundred unique hits a month. In Java. Use of an appropriate framework recommended.
I'm the one in charge with deciding on which technologies my group uses (except for the mandatory stuff like MySQL). I would have went with Struts (because the university offered a free Struts course), but I decided against it (because I forgot about the course until it was over, also Struts is quite heavy according to my research). I compared JSF against Tapestry; JSF will probably become an industry standard, while Tapestry will not, but Tapestry is easier to deploy than JSF. Since we don't care about industry standards and need to implement the whole thing with about one man-month of work (spread across seven people, including the earning phase) JSF is out of the picture. In the end I settled on Tapestry for the following reasons:
- We don't care about industry standards so it doesn't matter whether Tapestry will become one.
- We have neither the time nor the resources to use anything that introduces more complexity than absolutely necessary, flexibility be damned. The project is already stealing enough time from the other courses.
- Tapestry can be integrated into random HTML or XML just by adding a few parameters to a tag. There is no Java knowledge necessary to integrate the Tapestry parameters into a new layout. This is good since it allows people to play around with the HTML layout with no knowledge of the program whatsoever, as long as they just put the Tapestry stuff in the right place.
In the real world I'd probably last for about five minutes if I kept making such decisins, but then again I'm a student. I'm supposed to make bad decisions.
Most people use whichever tool you give them as long as it's good enough. That means when Microsoft (who own the home user OS market) bundle a program with Windows people are going to use it, even if the competitors' offers are superior (see Netscape Navigator vs. MSIE).
That's why people are complaining about Microsoft bundling IE or WMP: Because they are abusing their dominance in the OS market for keeping competitors out of the browser/media player markets.
And now, as Paul Harvey says, for the rest of the story - the part you won't tell because it's inconvient to your thesis. The groups you list are a minority of the US population, and they have a chance to break themselves of that state if they so choose.
They have a chance but it's not that big. People from a poor background tend to have worse education than those better off, which in turn means that they have problems getting well-paid jobs.
There is not one single historical monarchy where the poor were better off than the poor in the US today. Not one. (One feature of a 'classed' society, unlike the classless one of the US, is that the poor have virtually no rights and no oppurtunities.)
Note that while in today's society the poor do have rights (although they are more often ignored than those of people better off) they usually have rather limited opportunities. Today there are classes - they're no longer defined by birth but they are there. The poor tend to stay poor and the rich tend to stay rich. The time of "from rags to riches" is gone, today it's "from $5.000 IT upstart to multinational corporation" and the people getting rich don't start as dishwashers but as well-educated people with an IT background. Which in turn requires, yes, at least a certain amount of money.
What we have is better than in most periods before, but it's certainly not classless or fair. Then again, it never has been.
There are quite a few Atom-capable aggregators. What's lacking is adoption by websites - most offer one or two RSS feeds but no Atom.
IE7 has one advantage: As for some reason browser generations are coupled to IE releases the release of IE7 will mean that Forefox and Opera will instantly turn from sixth generation browsers into seventh generation browsers as they already do everything IE7 does.
And when Microsoft will announce that their browser now has almost-complete CSS2 support (somewhere around 2011) Firefox, Opera and probably even Lynx will watch the IE dev team in the backlights as they continue to boldly go where no browser has gone before...
I have built myself a start page that has links to all sites I regularly use netaly organized in a CSS popup menu (that probably still doesn't work in IE7). PHP and Magpie are used to collect the newsfeeds I regularly read and embed them into the menu. I think this is a sensible approach as I don't need the feeds outside of the start page and I don't like hunting around in the bookmark bar.
The loading time is kind of a problem (no wonder, with ten or so feeds that have to be processed) but I'm looking into using AJAX to only load a feed when the parent menu item gets focus. (Don't tell me that's a bit over the top for a simple collection-of-links start page. I already went there when I rewrote half the code so that it would have a completely modular OOP design...)
RSS already was revolutionized and by "revolutionized" I mean "standardized". The result was Atom. Yes this theoretical format for newsfeed that is supposed to be superior to RSS (which is probably why no one uses it, see VHS vs. Beta, MP3 vs. Ogg Vorbis, honest politicians vs. real politicians).
This might be one area where Microsoft's tendency to create new de-facto standards might turn out useful - they might consolidate the RSS world where there are thirteen mutually incompatible versions, abot three of which have any market exposure at all. Not that there isn't a standardized feed format, mind you, but it doesn't seem as if anyone was determined to use it so we might as well stick with whichever RSS version (3.1, maybe 4.0?) Microsoft popularizes.
Apparently Ogg Vorbis is not as cheap to implement as MP3. The last MP3 player I bought was a Frontier Labs Nex iA, a nice, small flash-based player with a great user interface (hardare-wise). The manufacturer also promised a firmware upgrade that would enable the device to play Vorbis files. Months later they put up a notice on their website saying that Vorbis support would not come because the Nex iA's processor was not fast enough to handle it. So it seems that Vorbis upport means having to put in a better processor than needed for MP3 alone. OTOH, most modern players also support AAC and/or WMA, which might need a faster processor anyway.
When it's fair use, you get what you pay for. As was pointed out in Universal v. Reimerdes, fair use doesn't guarantee high-quality use.
True. However, the point remains: There is one occasion on which embedding Flash in HTML is a good idea.
Oh, and it was ROBadger.html not ROBadger.htm.
Apparently I didn't select the full URL. Mea culpa.
Usually the point of using sprites is being in spirit with something else. Off the top of my head I could cite a Badger Badger Badger clone using sprites from the MMORPG Ragnarok Online[1] (which includes enemies shaped like badgers, mushrooms and snakes). Using anything but the original sprites would effectively negate the reason for making the animation in the first place. There are other animations where the whole point of the exercise is doing something with certain sprites. They aren't common, but there are a few.
Also, some people couldn't draw a vector illustration to save their life but are capable of drawing quite good-looking sprites.
[1] www dot ermacstudios dot org/ROBadger dot htm (I deliberately obfuscated the link. Please visit the site only if you really want to see yet another Badger Badger Badger rehash. Consider using www dot ermacstudios dot org dot nyud dot net:8090/ROBadger dot htm in order to save them some bandwidth.)
It does, but occasionally you encounter animations where AA doesn't influence the fact that they look bad when scaled - for example ones including video game sprites. Antialiasing is nice for most content but scaled sprites usually end up looking butt-ugly, antialiased or not.
David vs. Goliath... Wasn't that this court case where this little homicidal maniac was sued for attacking this giant with a sniper slingshot, causing massive cranial trauma? However Microsoft tries to apply it here, they apparently already have their legal team on the case. They're planning something... Does the FOSS community have any armed midgets with a short temper?
Everything would suffer. If everyone sticks to what they're best at sooner or later we have (pseudo-)monopolies controlling every sub-market - as evidenced by MSIE it's not a good idea to let anyone completely own a market. Without competition the only thing that would have a blast of a time would be the corporate profits and the massive asshattery every vendor would practice - because it's not as if anyone could ever do anything aginst their bad practices.
Far better than LaTeX could unintentionally. It's pretty amazing how incredibly ugly you can make a LaTeX document with just a few commands. This is easy to witness when watching a CS student in a math lecture try to type down everything the lecturer jots on the blackboard without being fluent in LaTeX.
Ahh, LaTeX... The fact that it's the best typesetting solution out there doesn't necessarily make it good - although it would be if some kinks were ironed out (like the lacking support for non-ASCII charsets) and the error messages were a bit less cryptic ("underfull hbox (badness 10000)" anyone?).
True, but there is one reason for embedding Flash in HTML pages: Some Flash animations are designed for exactly one resolution and look like crap when viewed without something that defines the dimensions. However, if Flash included a command for "force the displayed animation to be X by Y" there would really be no reason fo embedding Flash in hTML.
...I'd much rather see a Marathon movie. Compared to Marathon Halo is a storyless, rainbow-colored arcade shooter. No, I don't want Marathon: Infinity - that one would just confuse the viewers until they wish they could do Electric Sheep 4 again and choose a timeline where they don't watch it. But the first game would make a good movie - a slow, claustrophobic movie about the semi-lone soldier/officer/cyborg/whatever trying to save the ship from aliens while dealing with two warring AIs (one of which is rampant to boot). Just Durandal's insane bickering would make the movie worth watching if done properly. If we give the Marathon a speaker system Durandal doesn't even need to call the protagonist to a terminal to mock him.
You could even put in a jab at the strong female character (which, after all, is quickly becoming a cliché):
About two minutes after the Strong Female Character is introduced
Protagonist: I was just about to clean out the crew quarters. Care to lend me a hand there?
Strong Female Character: *spots a Pfhor and riddles it with bullets* Sure, why not? I was running out of targets anyway.
The Strong Female Character is teleported away, not to be seen again
Durandal: Oops! Well, there are more than enough targets for her in the mess hall. But I'm so sorry for that date of yours. You were such a cute pair.
Protagonist: Dammit, Durandal! You can't just teleport her away like that! I could have really used her help!
Durandal: Maybe I can find you a handkerchief and a magazine. Don't worry, I won't tell anyone.
Actually, the lush jungle and nice beaches (with accompanying huts) looked like something out of a tourism ad. Heck, I'd like to spend a vacation in a lace like that.
The FarCry screenplay should be written by the Penny Arcade folks. After I've read their FarCry promo comic I'm positive that it'd better movie material than what Boll is/will be using.
viruses can be transfered on floppy disk
The answer to that one is simple: Don't copy that floppy.
Once they actually start using the word "propaganda" they're going to receive one big PR buttfuck from Germany. It's just too easy to draw parallels to WW2 (expansionistic policy, the designation of a religion as an enemy, heavy use of propaganda) that the Germans, who have been trained to be naziphobic when the nation was rebuilt, will not loudly complain. Okay, Merkel seems to be determined to crawl up Bush's ass if necessary, but someone is bound to complai and the media will pick up the story because of it's outrageousness.
Sure, the USA has had witch hunts in the past (ooo, evil communism!) but back then everyone over here loved the USA. Today the USA has the image of a power-hungy corrupt banana republic governed by the oil companies. And I have a feeling that it's not going to improve soon.
And no, artificially tying the product to their lackluster hardware offerings is NOT acceptable. Yes I said lackluster. Sure they are pretty but as PC hardware they just ain't all that. Cheap plastic cases with wimpy power supplies and little expansion for the desktop and useless one button laptops. Gimme a big manly box made of 2mil aluminum and a big ass stable power plant to start, then let me pick out a premium motherboard and memory and an drives of my choice. Why should the OS vendor get to make all of my hardware choices for me? And never forget the insane markup they get for their pretty but bland specced hardware.
;)
By all means, have fun with your three kilogram space heater that makes noises like a vacuum cleaner even when it's not under load. I'll stick with my light, robust, barely audible iBook.
Besides, what's wrong with the Power Mac? It has an aluminium case, it supports 16 GB of RAM, it supports a quad G5... That should be enough to compensate for a lot of things. And if that's still not enough I have some email offers I could forward to you.
It depends on the market. In the "entry level notebooks known to run properly with a non-Windows OS installed" market the iBook is one of the best offers. In fact the superior price/performance ratio is what made me get one (along with the fact that the price is low - a product can perform as well as it wants, if I can't afford it I can't afford it).
However, it is true: The low-end Mac notebook (the iBook) does compete with Thinkpads and the likes, because Thinkpads are among the few notebooks known for reliable Linux support. Then again, the non-Windws notebook market is quite small so I guess I can be happy that there is an entry level offer at all.
Right after posting the parent I visit the xmms-kde site and see that they added Amarok support back in 2004. Now I just have to find out how to use it, as the GUI only telly me about XMMS, Noatun and SMPEG...
Do you also have an equivalent to xmms-kde for Amarok?
I do like the interface. I'd really like my XMMS to have a hierarchical way of organizing my music. Or smart playlists for that matter. My biggest problem with iTunes is that it doesn't have a wide selection of input plugins like XMMS does - that severely limits the selection of music I can listen to on the Mac.