Poor people currently pay either no taxes at all or very low taxes as proportion of their income
Depends on where you like in the US. In states where sales tax is the primary method of raising revenue (i.e. they do not have state income and property taxes), poor people pay a disproportionately large amount of their income as taxes compared to the rich. Other taxes such as social security affect the poor more as a percentage of their income as well since there is a cutoff at well under six figures such that the rich pay an extremely small percentage of their salary towards the program.
2) It has a Core 2 Duo CPU that is about 4-8X faster for multithreaded apps than the single core Atom in most netbooks. It is a similar GPU to the 13" Macbook Pro.
Small typo there... meant CPU not GPU. The Air has a CPU in the same family as the Macbook Pro 13".
And why exactly is the new 11" Air *not* a netbook? Sounds like we are mincing words here...
Its a damn netbook, and not even a full year after Steve claimed at the iPad keynote that netbooks have no use...
A netbook is supposed to be cheap, and used for simple tasks like merely surfing the "net". Hence the "net" in the name. Typically, these have 1) a low res display, 2) a very slow processor, 3) minimal ram, 4) a crippled OS (Windows Starter Edition or XP), and 5) slow integrated graphics. They are also usually made from 6) cheaper plastic components, 7) have inferior keyboards or trackpads (I had a MSI Wind with syntelic pad I had to ditch for half of what I paid because it was unusable), and contain 8) either very slow HD's or very limited (think 4GB) SSD. They are meant for a 9) secondary computer.
Response:
1) The Air has a very nice, high quality display with about 30% more lines (768) than the typical 600 line notebook diplay.
2) It has a Core 2 Duo CPU that is about 4-8X faster for multithreaded apps than the single core Atom in most netbooks. It is a similar GPU to the 13" Macbook Pro.
3) Rather than a 1 GB RAM limit, it comes with 2GB or optionally 4GB.
4) The Air comes with the full version of OS X with no limitations.
5) The Air has decently fast NVidia GPU (8-10X faster than most Netbooks and the same GPU as in the 13" macbook pros).
6) High quality unibody Aluminum construction.
7) Full sized keyboard, large high quality glass multitouch trackpad.
8) Fast and Large SSD's (64 / 128 / 256 GB)
9) Meant as a primary computer (similar performance, display, keyboard, and trackpad as the 13" Macbook Pro - no compromises made).
There are other bonuses such as instant on -- even netbooks with an SSD take 20 seconds to wake from sleep under Windows. The only thing this has in common with most netbooks though is the small size and the long battery life.
When did nerds stop saying "wow, technically impressive" and start saying "ooh, shiny?"
I'm a nerd and I can be fascinated by shiny objects for hours... even longer if I know they're powered by technology or contain a mathematical secret I'm trying to discover.
Just realized the above post sounds a bit snide... but saying a problem doesn't exist on updated machines is a lot different from saying a problem doesn't exist. Unfortunately many users don't update... they might not know how, they might choose not to, or their updater might be broken (happens in Windows alot).
If you've updated OSX, yes you are fixed. If you have updated Java on a PC you are fixed as well.
The vulnerabilities lie on un-updated machines. If we consider a magical world of only properly updated machines, the problem doesn't exist on Windows either.
oh please clueless astroturfing MS fanbois: how can you mod +5 informative adisakp's clueless comment?
Not so on Linux.
I'm hardly an MS fanboi but I'll reply to your obvious flamebait anyhow. Isn't it a bit harsh to call someone "really clueless" when all I did was point out that the vulnerability exists on all platforms. After all, the summary makes it sound like a Windows-only problem.
Yes it may be harder to escalate privileges but it's not impossible. Linux and OSX are inherently safer but they've been hacked in seconds to get root privileges in just about every pwn-contest held so far when 3rd party software with vulnerabilities are installed. Pretending this is a Windows-only issue isn't going to make OSX / Linux machines any safer.
The keywords in the above descriptions are "remote code execution through Java-enabled browsers on multiple platforms". The flaw is not Windows specific but could also be exploited on OSX and Linux.
CVE-2008-5353
3,560,669
1,196,480
A deserialization issue in vulnerable versions of JRE (Java Runtime Environment) allows remote code execution through Java-enabled browsers on multiple platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Apple Mac OS X.
CVE-2009-3867
2,638,311
1,119,191
Another remote code execution, multi-platform issue caused by improper parsing of long file:// URL arguments.
CVE-2010-0094
213,502
173,123
Another deserialization issue, very similar to CVE-2008-5353.
FTA: The Java spike in Q3 is primarily driven by attacks on three vulnerabilities, which all, by the way, have had patches available for them for some time now.
So unpatched machines are vulnerable. Perhaps people don't auto-update Java as often.
Yeah, but this parent said that DVD (480 lines of resolution) is INDISTINGUISHABLE from BluRay in quality. Basically he said there's no difference between high-def and standard-def video for a big screen at a normal distance away from viewers. That's total BS. If you have a really good DVD upscaler, you come close to BluRay but you'll still see areas that are more blurred out and occasional artifacts that you won't see on the BlueRay versions. And you're never going to see individual facial hairs and pores on an actor during a close-up (although that may be a good thing).
Exactly. I did the math once and at 15', the difference between DVD and HD is meaningless on a 46" screen. Pretty meaningless on a 55" screen.
Either your math is wrong or your TV is crappy or your eyesight is really bad. With the higher resolution, you do get a lot more image. There are BluRay discs of Nature shows where you can see individual blades of grass or individual hairs and whiskers on an animal's face during close ups. On the DVD versions, everything looks a lot muddier.
In addition to just resolution, there is also a much higher bitrate. BluRay can hold 25GB per layer - DVD can only hold just over 4GB per layer. Having 5-6 higher data-rate influences video quality. Finally, BluRay uses a more advanced codec than DVD, even at similar BitRates and resolution to DVD, the codec should generate a higher quality video.
So we have better codec, higher quality bitrate, and higher resolution -- and you can't tell the difference between an older 640x480 video and a high quality 1920x1080 modern one on a display that takes up half your wall? I call bullshit.
maybe it's because there's no 3d standard yet.
I know I'm holding off until I don't have to choose from eighteen different technologies ranging from shutter to active to glasses free to holding flash cards infront of my head.
Make a 'standardized' 3d format, and I'll dive in.
There's a standard format for connectivity and media - HDMI 1.4a, 3D BluRay - there are also 3D file formats for digital files.
There are just multiple ways to implement the physical display and these do use different technology (including glasses). So if you buy one brand of TV you will have to buy glasses that match that TV (if glasses are required).
But the consumer commercially available 3D digital videos and media as well as the hardware to play the media are already standardized all the way out to the final display technology. There isn't going to be a format war on 3D. The content you buy today will work on all the devices sold today.
FWIW, you can choose to be positive and realistic. This is my choice. I always hope for an optimistic outcome. I *REALIZE* that this does not always happen. When it doesn't happen, I don't let it bother me unless it's really important.
In fact, I know many times things don't turn out so well. But you have to account for that in your expectations - you can still hope for the best and be positive, but when something fails that had a fairly low chance of success, there is no need to be disappointed. It's like saying, "Hey the odds are against us but we will never win unless we try" and then when you don't win you can say "At least we tried and maybe we had some fun along the way". That is what being positive means to me -- it doesn't preclude perception of reality.
I choose to be optimisitic, positive, and realistic.
Someone who is biting your head off for being modestly critical isn't a genuinely positive person. They're worrying inside and your comment is touching a nerve.
People who are genuinely positive and at peace with themselves do not become instantly inflamed and angry from small external influences. I think anyone who meditates, practices yoga, or is a follower of Zen would consider that action to be a complete failure of maintaining their inner tranquility and joy.
You know, it's often said that semi-depressed people see reality in a much more realistic way, whereas "normal" (if you can call it that) people see reality in an augmented way, and that's why they're more happy and optimistic. It makes me wonder if actually "normal" people should be re-classified as someone who is (by our shitty definitions) semi-depressed, because really they're just seeing reality as it is, not through rose-coloured glasses.
Why is it that imagining the bowl will be empty is more "realistic". One side of the room *ALWAYS* has an empty bowl and the other side of the room *ALWAYS* constains full bowls. Considering that food is always served in a bowl regardless, Were I a canine, I would think that a bowl in a new location has a the POSSIBILITY of being full and I would be excited and happy to investigate that possibility.
When, there is a reasonable expectation of a happy result, I chose to believe that a happy result will occur. If it doesn't though, I don't let it bother me because there are a million possible happy expectations in a day and you just have to see and enjoy a few of them to feel better about the world around you.
I know people who want to be "realistic" and chose to imaging unhappy results for everything in life. They are miserable and not fun to be around. Even when good things happen they are miserable because they are busy imagining the next unhappy "reality". Happiness is a choice -- you will *NEVER* be happier than you chose to be. You might have moments of sadness but your potential enjoyment of life depends completely on your outlook.
their laptops are good for everything except 3d acceleration
FWIW, the majority of PC laptops (with the exception of high-end and gaming laptops) have integrated Intel GFX hardware. This is significantly slower than the Mac laptops -- *ALL* of which are shipping with a discrete 3D chip that provides at least decent if not game-rocking 3D performance.
Re:Wish Apple put some work on OSX
on
The Hackintosh Guide
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Apple doesn't like OS/X anymore. The platform has basically been stagnant since the inception of 10.6, in 2008. Hardware support is poor, even worse than Linux. For instance there is no way to make a Nvidia GTX460 run under OS/X at the moment, in spite of it being the best bang-for-the-buck video card right now. It was impossible to have an AMD 5xxx series run until only a few months ago!
This is hardly a new issue. Apple doesn't care about supporting hardware configurations they don't ship. It allows them to focus on supporting a small number of hardware configurations and giving the maximum stability and ease-of-use for their users.
The cost is that they have always been and will always be behind the performance curve on supporting the latest add-in hardware that is available on the PC. Plus if you were really interested in "the best bang-for-the-buck", you probably aren't buying an expandable Mac Pro (which is $2,500 / $3,500 / $5,000 depending on model you select).
In OSX, AMD 5XXX support came because they are shipping all 3 of these configs with the AMD5770 standard -- again, they really only support hardware they ship.
FWIW, on the PC, MS doesn't write the drivers for Windows. The hardware manufacturers do. If there was an actual GFX card after-market on the Mac, NVidia and AMD would write the drivers for the Mac (and there's a good chance AMD did write them for Apple when they won the bid to include 5770's in Mac Pros).
FTA: "Full disclosure: I worked for Apple in the late 1980s and am the author of "MacPaint 2.0". I use Macs for all my serious work and consider PCs to be best suited for video games."
The author shows a bit of seriously incorrect anti-pc attitude in this statement dismissing Windows. That statement might be true for him personally but it's not true for the majority of people out there.
70-80% of PC's sold today have some sort of integrated display chipset that can sometimes slowdown trying to handle the "enhanced" desktop experience of Vista / Win 7. They are certainly not "game machines" unless you like playing the latest games in low resolution at 8-12 Frames Per Second.
Nope, many of those systems are sold to do general purpose office work (primarily e-mail) but also Office (with a capital "O" as in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). And an awful lot of people buy them for basic home use, like browsing the web and looking at flash videos. The cheap little non-video games are ubiquitous because you can buy a full system including a monitor and printer starting at $400 or less where the cheapest all-in-one mac is $1200 and the mac mini - which doesn't even have a keyboard - now starts at $700.
A death ray powered by a solar wind collector, obviously.
It's right there in the summary, sheesh.
Not in the summary but quite seriously true in the article. The article says that the satellite would generate an infrared laser beam to send the power back to earth and considering the total power from the satellite would be "one billion billion gigawatts" I'm assuming that qualifies as a death ray.
I've got 1920x1200 on my MBP. Plenty of resolution.
Not everyone has or wants a 17" Mac laptop that is an expensive and fairly huge beast to lag around - and the 13" and 15" Mac's only have 800 or 900 vertical pixels which is in the author's "lamentable" range. Plus the article is just complaining about a general trend in lowered laptop resolutions -- I got a laptop nearly 10 years ago with an "ultrasharp" screen that had 1200 vertical pixels on the 14" version. They just don't make screens with high-res pixels much anymore. Ironically, the higher pixel count resolution on tiny phone screens now is actually as high or higher than some much larger laptop screens.
It's not a zero sum game. If I give you, right there and then, four times as much as it costs to put out the fire, as it happens, both sides win, as they are both better off than if the value of the house just evaporates.
Just because it's not a zero sum game doesn't mean that both sides win. Lets take your 4:1 ratio and say the house is worth $500,000 and it costs the fire department $125,000 to save the house.
If we let people not pay until they have a fire and only pay $75 to put of the fire, I would posit that yes there is a net gain ($500K - $125K) overall... but the homeowner comes out ($500K - $75) ahead and the fire department comes out ($125K - $75) behind.
NET_GAIN = GAIN_PARTY_A + GAIN_PARTY_B
$375,000 = ($499,925) + (- $124,925)
I don't see how losing nearly $125K is a win for the city & fire department. However, it is a huge win of nearly half a millions $$$$ for the home-owner.
Now, in a fire, the amount of money destroyed by letting any given fire run amok in an average house is always far higher than the cost of actually stopping the fire. It's not a zero sum game. If I give you, right there and then, four times as much as it costs to put out the fire, as it happens, both sides win, as they are both better off than if the value of the house just evaporates.
It's the exact same as insurance -- by charging a small fee per house, the fire dept is betting that only 1 house out of every couple thousand will catch on fire per year.
If you let them pay after the fact, both sides don't win. It costs way more than $75 to put out a fire -- the cost is amortized by the fact that a fire only occurs for every couple thousand or so citizens who pay the fee. The actual cost of putting out the fire may be $100,000 or more (if you consider the cost of fire dept, vehicles, having fire fighters on standby, etc). If you allow people to pay $75 only when you need services, the fire department will incur a huge loss because it's "betting" that 1,999 out of 2,000 people won't have fires when they charge the $75 fee.
The only way to make the cost a win for the city/fire-dept side would be to charge the person the actual cost of putting out the fire (and running the fire department / number of fires per year). This might result in a charge of $100,000 - $200,000 to the person and might actually be more than their house and possessions are worth.... and note this isn't really a win for the city - it's just break-even cost -- and that assumes you can collect the $200,000 from someone whose house just burned down because insurance doesn't pay for saved houses, only destroyed ones.
The only practical way to do it is to enforce the fact that when someone opts out of paying for a service, they have opted out of receiving that service.
No different then letting your life insurance policy lapse, then you die, and your spouse tries to collect $1 mil by paying this months premium.
I agree 100% -- if you opt out of paying for a service, you have opted out of receiving that service -- whether the service is provided by the gov't or a private entity.
It can costs hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars to run a fire department even if the number of fires are relative low.
Let's say it costs $500,000 to run the department but there are on average only 10 fires a year and coverage is a $75 voluntary fee.
If everyone chose not to pay the $75, there would be no fire department. If you could pay $0, and then only pay $75 when the fire department, the fire department would operate on a $499,250 budget deficit (since who would prepay when you could pay per use).
If you want to make it a "per use" payment -- i.e. pay to save a house after the fact, you need to charge $50,000 or more in order for the department to actually exist.
Or you can charge people a fee and amortize it and deny coverage to those who don't pay.
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Poor people currently pay either no taxes at all or very low taxes as proportion of their income
Depends on where you like in the US. In states where sales tax is the primary method of raising revenue (i.e. they do not have state income and property taxes), poor people pay a disproportionately large amount of their income as taxes compared to the rich. Other taxes such as social security affect the poor more as a percentage of their income as well since there is a cutoff at well under six figures such that the rich pay an extremely small percentage of their salary towards the program.
2) It has a Core 2 Duo CPU that is about 4-8X faster for multithreaded apps than the single core Atom in most netbooks. It is a similar GPU to the 13" Macbook Pro.
Small typo there... meant CPU not GPU. The Air has a CPU in the same family as the Macbook Pro 13".
And why exactly is the new 11" Air *not* a netbook? Sounds like we are mincing words here...
Its a damn netbook, and not even a full year after Steve claimed at the iPad keynote that netbooks have no use...
A netbook is supposed to be cheap, and used for simple tasks like merely surfing the "net". Hence the "net" in the name. Typically, these have 1) a low res display, 2) a very slow processor, 3) minimal ram, 4) a crippled OS (Windows Starter Edition or XP), and 5) slow integrated graphics. They are also usually made from 6) cheaper plastic components, 7) have inferior keyboards or trackpads (I had a MSI Wind with syntelic pad I had to ditch for half of what I paid because it was unusable), and contain 8) either very slow HD's or very limited (think 4GB) SSD. They are meant for a 9) secondary computer.
Response:
1) The Air has a very nice, high quality display with about 30% more lines (768) than the typical 600 line notebook diplay.
2) It has a Core 2 Duo CPU that is about 4-8X faster for multithreaded apps than the single core Atom in most netbooks. It is a similar GPU to the 13" Macbook Pro.
3) Rather than a 1 GB RAM limit, it comes with 2GB or optionally 4GB.
4) The Air comes with the full version of OS X with no limitations.
5) The Air has decently fast NVidia GPU (8-10X faster than most Netbooks and the same GPU as in the 13" macbook pros).
6) High quality unibody Aluminum construction.
7) Full sized keyboard, large high quality glass multitouch trackpad.
8) Fast and Large SSD's (64 / 128 / 256 GB)
9) Meant as a primary computer (similar performance, display, keyboard, and trackpad as the 13" Macbook Pro - no compromises made).
There are other bonuses such as instant on -- even netbooks with an SSD take 20 seconds to wake from sleep under Windows. The only thing this has in common with most netbooks though is the small size and the long battery life.
When did nerds stop saying "wow, technically impressive" and start saying "ooh, shiny?"
I'm a nerd and I can be fascinated by shiny objects for hours... even longer if I know they're powered by technology or contain a mathematical secret I'm trying to discover.
Just realized the above post sounds a bit snide... but saying a problem doesn't exist on updated machines is a lot different from saying a problem doesn't exist. Unfortunately many users don't update... they might not know how, they might choose not to, or their updater might be broken (happens in Windows alot).
If you've updated OSX, yes you are fixed. If you have updated Java on a PC you are fixed as well.
The vulnerabilities lie on un-updated machines. If we consider a magical world of only properly updated machines, the problem doesn't exist on Windows either.
oh please clueless astroturfing MS fanbois: how can you mod +5 informative adisakp's clueless comment?
Not so on Linux.
I'm hardly an MS fanboi but I'll reply to your obvious flamebait anyhow. Isn't it a bit harsh to call someone "really clueless" when all I did was point out that the vulnerability exists on all platforms. After all, the summary makes it sound like a Windows-only problem.
Yes it may be harder to escalate privileges but it's not impossible. Linux and OSX are inherently safer but they've been hacked in seconds to get root privileges in just about every pwn-contest held so far when 3rd party software with vulnerabilities are installed. Pretending this is a Windows-only issue isn't going to make OSX / Linux machines any safer.
The keywords in the above descriptions are "remote code execution through Java-enabled browsers on multiple platforms". The flaw is not Windows specific but could also be exploited on OSX and Linux.
CVE Attacks Computers Description
CVE-2008-5353 3,560,669 1,196,480 A deserialization issue in vulnerable versions of JRE (Java Runtime Environment) allows remote code execution through Java-enabled browsers on multiple platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Apple Mac OS X.
CVE-2009-3867 2,638,311 1,119,191 Another remote code execution, multi-platform issue caused by improper parsing of long file:// URL arguments.
CVE-2010-0094 213,502 173,123 Another deserialization issue, very similar to CVE-2008-5353.
FTA: The Java spike in Q3 is primarily driven by attacks on three vulnerabilities, which all, by the way, have had patches available for them for some time now.
So unpatched machines are vulnerable. Perhaps people don't auto-update Java as often.
Yeah, but this parent said that DVD (480 lines of resolution) is INDISTINGUISHABLE from BluRay in quality. Basically he said there's no difference between high-def and standard-def video for a big screen at a normal distance away from viewers. That's total BS. If you have a really good DVD upscaler, you come close to BluRay but you'll still see areas that are more blurred out and occasional artifacts that you won't see on the BlueRay versions. And you're never going to see individual facial hairs and pores on an actor during a close-up (although that may be a good thing).
Exactly. I did the math once and at 15', the difference between DVD and HD is meaningless on a 46" screen. Pretty meaningless on a 55" screen.
Either your math is wrong or your TV is crappy or your eyesight is really bad. With the higher resolution, you do get a lot more image. There are BluRay discs of Nature shows where you can see individual blades of grass or individual hairs and whiskers on an animal's face during close ups. On the DVD versions, everything looks a lot muddier.
In addition to just resolution, there is also a much higher bitrate. BluRay can hold 25GB per layer - DVD can only hold just over 4GB per layer. Having 5-6 higher data-rate influences video quality. Finally, BluRay uses a more advanced codec than DVD, even at similar BitRates and resolution to DVD, the codec should generate a higher quality video.
So we have better codec, higher quality bitrate, and higher resolution -- and you can't tell the difference between an older 640x480 video and a high quality 1920x1080 modern one on a display that takes up half your wall? I call bullshit.
maybe it's because there's no 3d standard yet. I know I'm holding off until I don't have to choose from eighteen different technologies ranging from shutter to active to glasses free to holding flash cards infront of my head.
Make a 'standardized' 3d format, and I'll dive in.
There's a standard format for connectivity and media - HDMI 1.4a, 3D BluRay - there are also 3D file formats for digital files.
There are just multiple ways to implement the physical display and these do use different technology (including glasses). So if you buy one brand of TV you will have to buy glasses that match that TV (if glasses are required).
But the consumer commercially available 3D digital videos and media as well as the hardware to play the media are already standardized all the way out to the final display technology. There isn't going to be a format war on 3D. The content you buy today will work on all the devices sold today.
FWIW, you can choose to be positive and realistic. This is my choice. I always hope for an optimistic outcome. I *REALIZE* that this does not always happen. When it doesn't happen, I don't let it bother me unless it's really important.
In fact, I know many times things don't turn out so well. But you have to account for that in your expectations - you can still hope for the best and be positive, but when something fails that had a fairly low chance of success, there is no need to be disappointed. It's like saying, "Hey the odds are against us but we will never win unless we try" and then when you don't win you can say "At least we tried and maybe we had some fun along the way". That is what being positive means to me -- it doesn't preclude perception of reality.
I choose to be optimisitic, positive, and realistic.
Someone who is biting your head off for being modestly critical isn't a genuinely positive person. They're worrying inside and your comment is touching a nerve.
People who are genuinely positive and at peace with themselves do not become instantly inflamed and angry from small external influences. I think anyone who meditates, practices yoga, or is a follower of Zen would consider that action to be a complete failure of maintaining their inner tranquility and joy.
You know, it's often said that semi-depressed people see reality in a much more realistic way, whereas "normal" (if you can call it that) people see reality in an augmented way, and that's why they're more happy and optimistic. It makes me wonder if actually "normal" people should be re-classified as someone who is (by our shitty definitions) semi-depressed, because really they're just seeing reality as it is, not through rose-coloured glasses.
Why is it that imagining the bowl will be empty is more "realistic". One side of the room *ALWAYS* has an empty bowl and the other side of the room *ALWAYS* constains full bowls. Considering that food is always served in a bowl regardless, Were I a canine, I would think that a bowl in a new location has a the POSSIBILITY of being full and I would be excited and happy to investigate that possibility.
When, there is a reasonable expectation of a happy result, I chose to believe that a happy result will occur. If it doesn't though, I don't let it bother me because there are a million possible happy expectations in a day and you just have to see and enjoy a few of them to feel better about the world around you.
I know people who want to be "realistic" and chose to imaging unhappy results for everything in life. They are miserable and not fun to be around. Even when good things happen they are miserable because they are busy imagining the next unhappy "reality". Happiness is a choice -- you will *NEVER* be happier than you chose to be. You might have moments of sadness but your potential enjoyment of life depends completely on your outlook.
their laptops are good for everything except 3d acceleration
FWIW, the majority of PC laptops (with the exception of high-end and gaming laptops) have integrated Intel GFX hardware. This is significantly slower than the Mac laptops -- *ALL* of which are shipping with a discrete 3D chip that provides at least decent if not game-rocking 3D performance.
Apple doesn't like OS/X anymore. The platform has basically been stagnant since the inception of 10.6, in 2008. Hardware support is poor, even worse than Linux. For instance there is no way to make a Nvidia GTX460 run under OS/X at the moment, in spite of it being the best bang-for-the-buck video card right now. It was impossible to have an AMD 5xxx series run until only a few months ago!
This is hardly a new issue. Apple doesn't care about supporting hardware configurations they don't ship. It allows them to focus on supporting a small number of hardware configurations and giving the maximum stability and ease-of-use for their users.
The cost is that they have always been and will always be behind the performance curve on supporting the latest add-in hardware that is available on the PC. Plus if you were really interested in "the best bang-for-the-buck", you probably aren't buying an expandable Mac Pro (which is $2,500 / $3,500 / $5,000 depending on model you select).
In OSX, AMD 5XXX support came because they are shipping all 3 of these configs with the AMD5770 standard -- again, they really only support hardware they ship.
FWIW, on the PC, MS doesn't write the drivers for Windows. The hardware manufacturers do. If there was an actual GFX card after-market on the Mac, NVidia and AMD would write the drivers for the Mac (and there's a good chance AMD did write them for Apple when they won the bid to include 5770's in Mac Pros).
Bah. Who needs to build a Hackintosh? I have Snow Leopard running in VirtualBox.
Maybe you could write a guide to virtualizing the Mac under Windows / Linux (or whatever you are using).
FTA: "Full disclosure: I worked for Apple in the late 1980s and am the author of "MacPaint 2.0". I use Macs for all my serious work and consider PCs to be best suited for video games."
The author shows a bit of seriously incorrect anti-pc attitude in this statement dismissing Windows. That statement might be true for him personally but it's not true for the majority of people out there.
70-80% of PC's sold today have some sort of integrated display chipset that can sometimes slowdown trying to handle the "enhanced" desktop experience of Vista / Win 7. They are certainly not "game machines" unless you like playing the latest games in low resolution at 8-12 Frames Per Second.
Nope, many of those systems are sold to do general purpose office work (primarily e-mail) but also Office (with a capital "O" as in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). And an awful lot of people buy them for basic home use, like browsing the web and looking at flash videos. The cheap little non-video games are ubiquitous because you can buy a full system including a monitor and printer starting at $400 or less where the cheapest all-in-one mac is $1200 and the mac mini - which doesn't even have a keyboard - now starts at $700.
A death ray powered by a solar wind collector, obviously.
It's right there in the summary, sheesh.
Not in the summary but quite seriously true in the article. The article says that the satellite would generate an infrared laser beam to send the power back to earth and considering the total power from the satellite would be "one billion billion gigawatts" I'm assuming that qualifies as a death ray.
I've got 1920x1200 on my MBP. Plenty of resolution.
Not everyone has or wants a 17" Mac laptop that is an expensive and fairly huge beast to lag around - and the 13" and 15" Mac's only have 800 or 900 vertical pixels which is in the author's "lamentable" range. Plus the article is just complaining about a general trend in lowered laptop resolutions -- I got a laptop nearly 10 years ago with an "ultrasharp" screen that had 1200 vertical pixels on the 14" version. They just don't make screens with high-res pixels much anymore. Ironically, the higher pixel count resolution on tiny phone screens now is actually as high or higher than some much larger laptop screens.
It's not a zero sum game. If I give you, right there and then, four times as much as it costs to put out the fire, as it happens, both sides win, as they are both better off than if the value of the house just evaporates.
Just because it's not a zero sum game doesn't mean that both sides win. Lets take your 4:1 ratio and say the house is worth $500,000 and it costs the fire department $125,000 to save the house.
If we let people not pay until they have a fire and only pay $75 to put of the fire, I would posit that yes there is a net gain ($500K - $125K) overall... but the homeowner comes out ($500K - $75) ahead and the fire department comes out ($125K - $75) behind.
NET_GAIN = GAIN_PARTY_A + GAIN_PARTY_B
$375,000 = ($499,925) + (- $124,925)
I don't see how losing nearly $125K is a win for the city & fire department. However, it is a huge win of nearly half a millions $$$$ for the home-owner.
Now, in a fire, the amount of money destroyed by letting any given fire run amok in an average house is always far higher than the cost of actually stopping the fire. It's not a zero sum game. If I give you, right there and then, four times as much as it costs to put out the fire, as it happens, both sides win, as they are both better off than if the value of the house just evaporates.
It's the exact same as insurance -- by charging a small fee per house, the fire dept is betting that only 1 house out of every couple thousand will catch on fire per year.
If you let them pay after the fact, both sides don't win. It costs way more than $75 to put out a fire -- the cost is amortized by the fact that a fire only occurs for every couple thousand or so citizens who pay the fee. The actual cost of putting out the fire may be $100,000 or more (if you consider the cost of fire dept, vehicles, having fire fighters on standby, etc). If you allow people to pay $75 only when you need services, the fire department will incur a huge loss because it's "betting" that 1,999 out of 2,000 people won't have fires when they charge the $75 fee.
The only way to make the cost a win for the city/fire-dept side would be to charge the person the actual cost of putting out the fire (and running the fire department / number of fires per year). This might result in a charge of $100,000 - $200,000 to the person and might actually be more than their house and possessions are worth.... and note this isn't really a win for the city - it's just break-even cost -- and that assumes you can collect the $200,000 from someone whose house just burned down because insurance doesn't pay for saved houses, only destroyed ones.
The only practical way to do it is to enforce the fact that when someone opts out of paying for a service, they have opted out of receiving that service.
No different then letting your life insurance policy lapse, then you die, and your spouse tries to collect $1 mil by paying this months premium.
I agree 100% -- if you opt out of paying for a service, you have opted out of receiving that service -- whether the service is provided by the gov't or a private entity.
It can costs hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars to run a fire department even if the number of fires are relative low.
Let's say it costs $500,000 to run the department but there are on average only 10 fires a year and coverage is a $75 voluntary fee.
If everyone chose not to pay the $75, there would be no fire department. If you could pay $0, and then only pay $75 when the fire department, the fire department would operate on a $499,250 budget deficit (since who would prepay when you could pay per use).
If you want to make it a "per use" payment -- i.e. pay to save a house after the fact, you need to charge $50,000 or more in order for the department to actually exist.
Or you can charge people a fee and amortize it and deny coverage to those who don't pay.