"* Terminal application is somewhat lacking. It has basic features but cannot be customized very much. If you do a lot of work on the command line you'll probably want a third-party terminal application to get your real work done."
The defaults are stupid, but once you get it setup with white text on a black background and a reasonable font, it's pretty equivalent to Konsole for me. Konsole has the terminals in a nice tabbed bar that are nameable, while the Mac version just has different floaty windows, but the two operations I do (new terminal window and next/prev terminal window) are identical in behaviour.
"* The wireless setup is not straightforward, and if you're not used to it can be a bit confusing."
You just be joking. MacOS wireless is the easiest wireless I've ever setup. Even doing complex LEAP/PEAP stuff is yonks easier than on Windows. And don't talk to me about Linux wireless -- that's just a fucking joke.
"* If you want an office suite, you have to pay quite a bit extra to get it. MS Office for Mac is something like $379 or so. If you're a student you might get it for less."
Or you could get iWork for 49$. It's got what you're most likely needing (advanced page layout and presentation software) unless you're sitting down to do serious spreadsheet work, which would require Excel. Apple's supposed to be adding a spreadsheet application at some point. I expect it to be as well thought out and designed as Keynote and Pages, and will happily upgrade.
"* Takes a bit more hands-on tweaking to get it working exactly the way you want, but is much more flexible and customizable than OS X."
You know, a large number of people don't change the defaults. I'm unconvinced it's that much of a big deal for people to make some small adjustments in how they work, especially when it allows you to be a lot more productive overall.
"* The office type applications are finally getting to the point where a business user or student can be productive with them. "
I'm going to talk about Keynote v3 here. I arrived at a presentation I was giving with my notes ready, but found I'd be standing on a platform far away from my laptop. Solution? I quickly customized the presenter display so that my laptop would show my presenter notes in 48pt font, and then pulled out my Apple remote which I could use to control slide next/previous while giving my talk. How awesome is that? It just works -- that's Apple.
I've yet to see anything that approaches their iWork suite in terms of being useful for me. Pages is a lot like LaTeX, except that it's easy to make your pages not be printed in Times New Roman (I've written 4 papers in TeX, and still don't know how to make it sans serif). In Pages, I just change the styles in the styles drawer, which are applied to the paragraphs/etc/tagged with that style. You can easily import/export from things like MS Word or PDF, and generally have full control of your document easily -- despite it being a GUI! Plus, I've yet to fight with it like I remember fighting with MSWord autoformatting when I learned to use word processors a decade ago.
iWork is not old -- the first iteration was released in 2005. Why is Linux office software stuck copying MS ideas when Apple so quickly put out a different suite and had it work so well?
"I did buy a budget card, but I find it interesting the latest generation can't even keep up with ATI's 9000 series."
A GeForce 7300 GS has 6.5GB/s of memory bandwidth onboard. That is your main bottle neck on modern cards. My GeForce 6800, which has 12 hungry pipelines, has 22.3GB/s of bandwidth onboard. The only time I run into issues with it is when I run out of RAM onboard for textures (forcing me down to AGP's much slower speed), or when rendering complex scenes (the GF 7 series executes some shaders 50-100% faster than Gefore 6 series). My average FPS in WoW at 1600x1050 is around 55.
If I were you, I would've bought the 7600 GT -- that's got 23GB/s of bandwidth. The 7800 series goes over 40GB/s! (The main deciding facter that made me spend 50$ more to get the 6800 vs. the 6600 GT was the extra 7 GB/s of fillrate, which is more than that dinky 7300 has). Budget cards are often garbage if you take a look at the numbers, unsuitable for gaming due to the non-existant bandwidth. An ATI 9500 has more fill rate than a Geforce 7300 GS:p
Here's the dnscache (part of the djbdns family) solution:/service/dnscache/root/servers# cat spamhaus.org 216.168.28.44 204.69.234.1 204.74.101.1 204.152.184.186 #
No need to HUP -- once the file is created and filled with those IPs, it'll pick them up automatically. You can easily install dnscache with the other tools on your mail servers for 0 interuption of service.
"I have never seen any benefit to OS X's method. "
Great, you haven't, I have. I believe the question was, "what can we do to improve KDE" -- and adding this behaviour would improve my experience with KDE.
Feel free to turn it off on your install, and I'll feel free to turn it on, on mine. There's no such thing as a "right" interface.
Open FireFix in Win32. Hit Ctrl+N. Now, does Ctrl+TAB move between the two firefox windows, or does Alt+Tab move between the two Firefox windows? How many entries for Firefox are there in the Windows taskbar?
I think the best thing you can get from MacOS is the SDI vs. MDI issue.
In MacOS, Apple+Tab = switch Application. Apple+~ = switch window. This means I can easily go between application windows without futzing accidently into other applications. In KDE and Windows, this is not enforced, so I run into the situation of EVERYTHING being hidden in alt+tab.
Consider: are subdirectories a good thing? Would you rather everything was in one root directory, each time having to search it for a file you want? No.
Here's another one I'd like: hiding applications. If I'm not working with an application, but I'd like it to retain its state, I just Apple+H it (it'd be even better if all applications were stateful, but that's a bit harder to enforce). I can Apple+Tab back to it when I want it (and have its state restored as it's unhidden). No analog to this behaviour exists under other systems. The closest would be virtual desktops, but those bring their own set of problems (do you switch to a desktop when you switch to that application? Is it bound to that desktop? etc).
MacOS is very consistent in its keyboard shortcuts. Apple+Q, Apple+W, Apple+H -- they all have the same meaning (unless you use bad applications, like Microsoft Office or Photoshop, which are greedy and appropriate every shortcut they can). No such consistency exists in UNIX land.
Current attempts to clone Quicksilver and Expose are terrible, and not ready for prime time. The 3D features of my video card are not used to accelerate anything. Why not?
In MacOS, if I go into the system Applications directory, there are maybe 20 programs. I can live with that (do full development, documentation, office work, etc)./usr/bin$ ls -l k* |wc -l 334
I know that not all of these programs are KDE applications, but there must be a better way. MacOS is nice in that it keeps the GUI world and the CLI world connected, but not intermingled. the KDE team could learn from this.
In MacOS, applications and their support files and libraries are bundled into.app files I can easily drag into my ~/Applications directory (to install), and delete (to uninstall). Have fun doing that on Linux!
KDE is great if you are used to Windows, which is a bad paradigm to begin with, but it's trash if you've used a real GUI system.
"The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frusterate me as I find myself wanting to use more web20 ajaxy fancy pants programs."
Duh. Apple+Tab = applications. Apple+~ = application windows. I personally find this 2-level hierachy much better for working with data than the Windows-inspired "everything is a Window". I also like that I can quickly hide applications I'm not interested in (Apple+H), or merely minimize some Windows (which do get stuck in the dock, Apple+M). The only bad thing is that I haven't found a way to pull minimized windows out of the dock with the keyboard.
For quickly getting between windows in an application when I'm not sure of the order, I just press the Expose key for all application windows (suddenly, all my TextEdit windows are on the screen, waiting for me to pick one!). I can do this for all applications and their windows with a different Expose shortcut.
Between the Expose graphical picking, having a distinction between "another application" and "another window in this application", I find the MacOS X ui richer and more comprehensive than the usual point'n'ook GUI interface that exists under KMW or MS Windows. It's easy to pick up, and I'm missing it so much when I go to my KDE desktop that I'm tempted to write a patch to KMW to make it act more Mac-like.
Nintendo implies it'll upgrade the Wii OS over time to add new features and ensure that the Wii is part of the whole entertaiment system setup they're selling.
With Sony, it seems the reason they are mentioning that they can update the OS is to deal with bugs they expect to give to consumers in exchange for their hard-earned dollars.
1.65 you say? Why keep working -- that's just shy of 25 million dollars in stock per employee. I'd cut and run. Wouldn't you?
Why stick with a company that has a potentially uncertain future, when you can go and start doing whatever you want (founding various cool companies that might be even better), or simply go do charity work.
Here's the dnscache (part of the djbdns family) solution:/service/dnscache/root/servers# cat spamhaus.org 216.168.28.44 204.69.234.1 204.74.101.1 204.152.184.186 #
No need to HUP -- once the file is created and filled with those IPs, it'll pick them up automatically. You can easily install dnscache with the other tools on your mail servers and have them continue to talk to spamhaus w/o using "ICANN't resolve SPAMHAUS!".
For my GameCube, I own first-party titles and Sega titles. For my Xbox, I own Sega titles. For my PS2, I own Sega, Konami, and Namco titles. Everything else (EA and other classic 3rd party), they produce mainly crap anyway.
"InstallShield used to do that by default, until they realized developers were often sloppy and didn't put their files in the right places. That led to missing DLL files, missing OCX files, etc. Again, is this really Microsoft's fault? I don't think so."
It sure is Microsoft's fault. Apple was smart enough to say, "Look, let's adopt some of these sane ideas that have been coming out of the OS research people. Like these.app files -- they're not really files, but a bundle of everything the program needs to run it its own sandbox. We'll let the memory manager layer and the program loader figure out when to use a shared or private copy. In the meantime, the applications just need to be dragged in."
And they do. If I want Camino in my Mac, I download the.dmg file and mount it (by double clicking it), then I drag the Camino icon to my Applications folder. With that taken care of, I can drag the.dmg to the trash (unmounting it and deleting it in one action). If I'm done with Camino, I can drag it to the trash, too. No registry settings, no OCX files, no DLL files, and no bullshit installers. If a stupid Wizard is the best answer Microsoft has to the task of installing and removing programs, they've already lost.
Some people have been pushing for this kind of ease-of-use in Linux, but it's hard to get the momentum that Steve Jobs can get. Autopackage was kinda easy to use, but most people (who are like myself) seem to be using Synaptic for new applications. It's still hiding the same garbage that Windows has, in terms of the swarm-of-files approach to application distribution (instead of.app blobs), but it's a lot easier to manage and handle since it's through a reasonable interface. That's two solutions that solve the problem you mention, and both were easily achievable 10 years ago as much as today. So why is it that you have to even mention Installshield? Because Microsoft is unwilling to take a serious stance on anything that's not about supporting other Microsoft products -- that's why they're a monopoly!
I was always taught that ignorance was not an excuse in the eyes of the law. If you're charged with a certain degree of responsibility (over seeing a number of corporate affairs, driving a vehicle), you're responsible for making sure everything is ok (that these corporate affairs are in order, that the vehicle is registered and insured, etc).
"But in-house, what are the advantages of a formalized system over verbal, face-to-face communication? Wouldn't the meetings be held and the documentation be written anyway? As the project evolves, design changes can be implemented in an organized way, but again, the formal definitions would be redundant with the design change meetings."
Yea, we have meetings anyway. Let's just make every variable in the system of no specific type. Let's use them as we need them, how we need them. We can verbally agree that we'll always use ints, floats, strings, etc. No point making that compiler do any permission checking or such. Who needs provably correct code? Besides, as a project evolves, it sure sucks to change that int to a float by hand.
Oh, wait, no that'd be stupid. Why don't we have the compiler enforce compile-time and run-time checks on things? I mean beyond the fact that eStudio is ungodly evil incarnate, and Eiffel itself is overly encumbered with PASCAL/Modula-2 syntax. There is no good reason.
Seriously, I'm not about to go buying 150-450$ of iPod + iTunes music on a spur-of-the-moment thing from a vending machine at an airport. How many people are honestly going to do this?
You know, except for the fact that they fly around in a spaceship, it sure seemed to me that FireFly was more about fiction than science fiction. One might even call it a western (much more so that Star Trek, the original Western in space).
The SciFi aspect was more in Serenity, where they dealt with those crazies they mention once in the first 1-2 episodes. SciFi usually has some passing attempt to explain technology, not random people with old mass-thrower weapons that happen to transport cattle, and don't seem to know the basic rules of a western (like never leaving an enemy alive to stab you in the back next episode).
(Yes, I watched every episode + the movie because they were recommended, and I didn't enjoy much about the episodes except the occasional one-liner; the movie had its moments. B5 or BSG are much better, IMO).
Stop smoking that rock -- the 1.66 Ghz CoreDuo Mac Mini is now about 200-300$ cheaper than it was yesterday, and they have a new "highend" model you couldn't buy for love nor money yesterday (although you could've upgraded the CPU separately, if you had your putty knife handy).
Slashdot Mirror
You must be joking.
"* Terminal application is somewhat lacking. It has basic features but cannot be customized very much. If you do a lot of work on the command line you'll probably want a third-party terminal application to get your real work done."
The defaults are stupid, but once you get it setup with white text on a black background and a reasonable font, it's pretty equivalent to Konsole for me. Konsole has the terminals in a nice tabbed bar that are nameable, while the Mac version just has different floaty windows, but the two operations I do (new terminal window and next/prev terminal window) are identical in behaviour.
"* The wireless setup is not straightforward, and if you're not used to it can be a bit confusing."
You just be joking. MacOS wireless is the easiest wireless I've ever setup. Even doing complex LEAP/PEAP stuff is yonks easier than on Windows. And don't talk to me about Linux wireless -- that's just a fucking joke.
"* If you want an office suite, you have to pay quite a bit extra to get it. MS Office for Mac is something like $379 or so. If you're a student you might get it for less."
Or you could get iWork for 49$. It's got what you're most likely needing (advanced page layout and presentation software) unless you're sitting down to do serious spreadsheet work, which would require Excel. Apple's supposed to be adding a spreadsheet application at some point. I expect it to be as well thought out and designed as Keynote and Pages, and will happily upgrade.
"* Takes a bit more hands-on tweaking to get it working exactly the way you want, but is much more flexible and customizable than OS X."
You know, a large number of people don't change the defaults. I'm unconvinced it's that much of a big deal for people to make some small adjustments in how they work, especially when it allows you to be a lot more productive overall.
"* The office type applications are finally getting to the point where a business user or student can be productive with them. "
I'm going to talk about Keynote v3 here. I arrived at a presentation I was giving with my notes ready, but found I'd be standing on a platform far away from my laptop. Solution? I quickly customized the presenter display so that my laptop would show my presenter notes in 48pt font, and then pulled out my Apple remote which I could use to control slide next/previous while giving my talk. How awesome is that? It just works -- that's Apple.
I've yet to see anything that approaches their iWork suite in terms of being useful for me. Pages is a lot like LaTeX, except that it's easy to make your pages not be printed in Times New Roman (I've written 4 papers in TeX, and still don't know how to make it sans serif). In Pages, I just change the styles in the styles drawer, which are applied to the paragraphs/etc/tagged with that style. You can easily import/export from things like MS Word or PDF, and generally have full control of your document easily -- despite it being a GUI! Plus, I've yet to fight with it like I remember fighting with MSWord autoformatting when I learned to use word processors a decade ago.
iWork is not old -- the first iteration was released in 2005. Why is Linux office software stuck copying MS ideas when Apple so quickly put out a different suite and had it work so well?
"I did buy a budget card, but I find it interesting the latest generation can't even keep up with ATI's 9000 series."
:p
A GeForce 7300 GS has 6.5GB/s of memory bandwidth onboard. That is your main bottle neck on modern cards. My GeForce 6800, which has 12 hungry pipelines, has 22.3GB/s of bandwidth onboard. The only time I run into issues with it is when I run out of RAM onboard for textures (forcing me down to AGP's much slower speed), or when rendering complex scenes (the GF 7 series executes some shaders 50-100% faster than Gefore 6 series). My average FPS in WoW at 1600x1050 is around 55.
If I were you, I would've bought the 7600 GT -- that's got 23GB/s of bandwidth. The 7800 series goes over 40GB/s! (The main deciding facter that made me spend 50$ more to get the 6800 vs. the 6600 GT was the extra 7 GB/s of fillrate, which is more than that dinky 7300 has). Budget cards are often garbage if you take a look at the numbers, unsuitable for gaming due to the non-existant bandwidth. An ATI 9500 has more fill rate than a Geforce 7300 GS
Here's the dnscache (part of the djbdns family) solution: /service/dnscache/root/servers# cat spamhaus.org
216.168.28.44
204.69.234.1
204.74.101.1
204.152.184.186
#
No need to HUP -- once the file is created and filled with those IPs, it'll pick them up automatically. You can easily install dnscache with the other tools on your mail servers for 0 interuption of service.
Cheers.
"I have never seen any benefit to OS X's method. "
Great, you haven't, I have. I believe the question was, "what can we do to improve KDE" -- and adding this behaviour would improve my experience with KDE.
Feel free to turn it off on your install, and I'll feel free to turn it on, on mine. There's no such thing as a "right" interface.
Open FireFox in Win32.
Hit Ctrl+N.
Does Alt+Tab go between the two Firefox windows, or does Ctrl+tab go between the two Firefox windows?
Alt+Tab should ONLY be for applications, not for two windows of one application.
Open FireFix in Win32. Hit Ctrl+N. Now, does Ctrl+TAB move between the two firefox windows, or does Alt+Tab move between the two Firefox windows? How many entries for Firefox are there in the Windows taskbar?
I thought so.
I think the best thing you can get from MacOS is the SDI vs. MDI issue.
/usr/bin$ ls -l k* |wc -l
.app files I can easily drag into my ~/Applications directory (to install), and delete (to uninstall). Have fun doing that on Linux!
In MacOS, Apple+Tab = switch Application. Apple+~ = switch window. This means I can easily go between application windows without futzing accidently into other applications.
In KDE and Windows, this is not enforced, so I run into the situation of EVERYTHING being hidden in alt+tab.
Consider: are subdirectories a good thing? Would you rather everything was in one root directory, each time having to search it for a file you want? No.
Here's another one I'd like: hiding applications. If I'm not working with an application, but I'd like it to retain its state, I just Apple+H it (it'd be even better if all applications were stateful, but that's a bit harder to enforce). I can Apple+Tab back to it when I want it (and have its state restored as it's unhidden). No analog to this behaviour exists under other systems. The closest would be virtual desktops, but those bring their own set of problems (do you switch to a desktop when you switch to that application? Is it bound to that desktop? etc).
MacOS is very consistent in its keyboard shortcuts. Apple+Q, Apple+W, Apple+H -- they all have the same meaning (unless you use bad applications, like Microsoft Office or Photoshop, which are greedy and appropriate every shortcut they can). No such consistency exists in UNIX land.
Current attempts to clone Quicksilver and Expose are terrible, and not ready for prime time. The 3D features of my video card are not used to accelerate anything. Why not?
In MacOS, if I go into the system Applications directory, there are maybe 20 programs. I can live with that (do full development, documentation, office work, etc).
334
I know that not all of these programs are KDE applications, but there must be a better way. MacOS is nice in that it keeps the GUI world and the CLI world connected, but not intermingled. the KDE team could learn from this.
In MacOS, applications and their support files and libraries are bundled into
KDE is great if you are used to Windows, which is a bad paradigm to begin with, but it's trash if you've used a real GUI system.
"The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frusterate me as I find myself wanting to use more web20 ajaxy fancy pants programs."
Duh. Apple+Tab = applications. Apple+~ = application windows. I personally find this 2-level hierachy much better for working with data than the Windows-inspired "everything is a Window". I also like that I can quickly hide applications I'm not interested in (Apple+H), or merely minimize some Windows (which do get stuck in the dock, Apple+M). The only bad thing is that I haven't found a way to pull minimized windows out of the dock with the keyboard.
For quickly getting between windows in an application when I'm not sure of the order, I just press the Expose key for all application windows (suddenly, all my TextEdit windows are on the screen, waiting for me to pick one!). I can do this for all applications and their windows with a different Expose shortcut.
Between the Expose graphical picking, having a distinction between "another application" and "another window in this application", I find the MacOS X ui richer and more comprehensive than the usual point'n'ook GUI interface that exists under KMW or MS Windows. It's easy to pick up, and I'm missing it so much when I go to my KDE desktop that I'm tempted to write a patch to KMW to make it act more Mac-like.
Nintendo implies it'll upgrade the Wii OS over time to add new features and ensure that the Wii is part of the whole entertaiment system setup they're selling.
With Sony, it seems the reason they are mentioning that they can update the OS is to deal with bugs they expect to give to consumers in exchange for their hard-earned dollars.
Gee, thanks, Sony.
1.65 you say? Why keep working -- that's just shy of 25 million dollars in stock per employee. I'd cut and run. Wouldn't you?
Why stick with a company that has a potentially uncertain future, when you can go and start doing whatever you want (founding various cool companies that might be even better), or simply go do charity work.
Well, mostly.
/service/dnscache/root/servers# cat spamhaus.org
Here's the dnscache (part of the djbdns family) solution:
216.168.28.44
204.69.234.1
204.74.101.1
204.152.184.186
#
No need to HUP -- once the file is created and filled with those IPs, it'll pick them up automatically. You can easily install dnscache with the other tools on your mail servers and have them continue to talk to spamhaus w/o using "ICANN't resolve SPAMHAUS!".
Cheers.
For my GameCube, I own first-party titles and Sega titles. For my Xbox, I own Sega titles. For my PS2, I own Sega, Konami, and Namco titles. Everything else (EA and other classic 3rd party), they produce mainly crap anyway.
At least I can burn stuff I torrented to a DVD for playback, should that be the thing I want to do.
Why restrict your paying customers to less use than non-paying copyright infringers? Chewbacca is a Wookie! It does not make SENSE!
"Viola, ESPN in your pocket. "
I fail to see what classical musical instruments and ESPN in a pocket have to do with each other.
Because all those pixels above/below are for overscan and other analog signal artifacts not needed on an end-to-end digital system.
"InstallShield used to do that by default, until they realized developers were often sloppy and didn't put their files in the right places. That led to missing DLL files, missing OCX files, etc. Again, is this really Microsoft's fault? I don't think so."
.app files -- they're not really files, but a bundle of everything the program needs to run it its own sandbox. We'll let the memory manager layer and the program loader figure out when to use a shared or private copy. In the meantime, the applications just need to be dragged in."
.dmg file and mount it (by double clicking it), then I drag the Camino icon to my Applications folder. With that taken care of, I can drag the .dmg to the trash (unmounting it and deleting it in one action). If I'm done with Camino, I can drag it to the trash, too. No registry settings, no OCX files, no DLL files, and no bullshit installers. If a stupid Wizard is the best answer Microsoft has to the task of installing and removing programs, they've already lost.
.app blobs), but it's a lot easier to manage and handle since it's through a reasonable interface. That's two solutions that solve the problem you mention, and both were easily achievable 10 years ago as much as today. So why is it that you have to even mention Installshield? Because Microsoft is unwilling to take a serious stance on anything that's not about supporting other Microsoft products -- that's why they're a monopoly!
It sure is Microsoft's fault. Apple was smart enough to say, "Look, let's adopt some of these sane ideas that have been coming out of the OS research people. Like these
And they do. If I want Camino in my Mac, I download the
Some people have been pushing for this kind of ease-of-use in Linux, but it's hard to get the momentum that Steve Jobs can get. Autopackage was kinda easy to use, but most people (who are like myself) seem to be using Synaptic for new applications. It's still hiding the same garbage that Windows has, in terms of the swarm-of-files approach to application distribution (instead of
I was always taught that ignorance was not an excuse in the eyes of the law. If you're charged with a certain degree of responsibility (over seeing a number of corporate affairs, driving a vehicle), you're responsible for making sure everything is ok (that these corporate affairs are in order, that the vehicle is registered and insured, etc).
Nail these people to the wall.
"But in-house, what are the advantages of a formalized system over verbal, face-to-face communication? Wouldn't the meetings be held and the documentation be written anyway? As the project evolves, design changes can be implemented in an organized way, but again, the formal definitions would be redundant with the design change meetings."
Yea, we have meetings anyway. Let's just make every variable in the system of no specific type. Let's use them as we need them, how we need them. We can verbally agree that we'll always use ints, floats, strings, etc. No point making that compiler do any permission checking or such. Who needs provably correct code? Besides, as a project evolves, it sure sucks to change that int to a float by hand.
Oh, wait, no that'd be stupid. Why don't we have the compiler enforce compile-time and run-time checks on things? I mean beyond the fact that eStudio is ungodly evil incarnate, and Eiffel itself is overly encumbered with PASCAL/Modula-2 syntax. There is no good reason.
Seriously, I'm not about to go buying 150-450$ of iPod + iTunes music on a spur-of-the-moment thing from a vending machine at an airport. How many people are honestly going to do this?
You need a Masters before you do a PhD. If he jumped into the MSc program, he's doing it the right way around.
Cowboy Neal
You know, except for the fact that they fly around in a spaceship, it sure seemed to me that FireFly was more about fiction than science fiction. One might even call it a western (much more so that Star Trek, the original Western in space).
The SciFi aspect was more in Serenity, where they dealt with those crazies they mention once in the first 1-2 episodes. SciFi usually has some passing attempt to explain technology, not random people with old mass-thrower weapons that happen to transport cattle, and don't seem to know the basic rules of a western (like never leaving an enemy alive to stab you in the back next episode).
(Yes, I watched every episode + the movie because they were recommended, and I didn't enjoy much about the episodes except the occasional one-liner; the movie had its moments. B5 or BSG are much better, IMO).
Remove Apple remote.
Add Core2Duo processor, 512Mb of RAM (1Gb total), and make the whole unit about $100 cheaper (education pricing).
Why, with that price difference, you could get 3 Apple remotes, in addition to the sexier specs!
"No pricedrop though :(."
Stop smoking that rock -- the 1.66 Ghz CoreDuo Mac Mini is now about 200-300$ cheaper than it was yesterday, and they have a new "highend" model you couldn't buy for love nor money yesterday (although you could've upgraded the CPU separately, if you had your putty knife handy).
200-300$ seems like a pretty big pricedrop to me.
"Unfortunately for the buying public this is a major issue."
Perhaps this is why those torrents of bits are so popular!
Seriously, though, all companies do when they take actions like this is make it easier for the majority to side with not paying for content.