Apple has never really competed for the low-end or mid-low-end computer segment
Well with the Mac Mini, I'd say Apple is compeating low and lower middle computer segment. But when you add a monitor keyboard and mouse it's no longer that affordable. Personally I don't like either all in ones, of any brand, or the Mac Mini. Because they aren't upgradeable they are little more than waste. Apple doesn't compeat in the middle either.
Macs weren't designed to compete with PC's cost-effective hardware... it was designed to be a cohesive hardware + software package, and in this regard they blow away Windows entirely.
True. Where Apple excels, other than getting stuff to work well together, is in the high end. With the Mac Pro and the Xserve.
I wonder how many of those students will end up working on the other side once they graduate. It would be kind of like a hacker working for a security company. They'll be more familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of all the arguments and could demand premium salaries in this area of law.
Except a hacker improves security when they see something that's insecure. It's crackers and script kiddies that break into systems for gain. Hackers have an ethic of not committing theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.
Hmm... maybe I remember wrong, but it seems to me that with the old IBM PC that had no hard drive my employer had you could have subdirectories on its floppies. What version of DOS introduced directories? And why did they use the Unix directory separator for options (as it still is)?
As TFA I linked to said, DOS was based on CP/M which used "/" for options. It also says DOS 1.x used it, then to keep compatibility DOS 2.x kept it.
Dells are not noticeably more expensive than comparable generic white or beige boxes, and are definitely cheaper than comparable Macs. For example, I just compared the closest equivalent Inspiron and Macbook, and the Inspiron was not only $250 cheaper than the Macbook it included an nVidia GPU with 128M of real VRAM instead of the appalling Intel integrated GPU in the Macbook.
This summer before I bought my MacBook Pro I compared it to laptops from both Dell and HP that had similar configurations and the Apple was cheaper than either the Dell or the HP.
This isn't to say I bought the MBP because it was cheaper. I bought it because I was sick and tired of my Windows PCs crashing and having to replace motherboards and hdds that failed as well as having to reinstall Windows. I have never had as much trouble with a Mac I owned as I have with the PCs I also owned. And I bought my Macs used, except this one, whereas I bought brand new PCs. I even had to have the motherboard of the Linux PC I got new replaced before I had it a year.
Well, I am sure BMS also paid about taxes which probably comes to around 20% off their sales profit. As an added bonus, they helped countless cancer patients many of whom are Americans.
A round of chemotherapy with Taxol[pdf]coststhousands of dollars while BMS has been able to produce a dose of Taxol for less than a dollar. And what taxes BMS pays the US only comes from US sales, they don't pay US taxes on their worldwide sales. Not that they should but if you limit earning to only the US for US taxes you're cutting how much tax they do pay. The US could have gotten a better deal by requiring BMS to pay a royalty say of 50% then not taxing the income from the sale of Taxol. Many more American would have been saved if the data needed had been open sourced, or allowed anyone who agreed to pay a royalty to use the data. Then you would of had more than one company fighting for market share by lowering costs.
What's the point in exchanging one foreign-supplied source of energy (oil) for another (Brazillian ethanol)? Part of the reason for alternative fuels is to be energy-independent.
Switchgrass, native to the US, is a better source for ethanol. Another option may be Algae. Algae can produce hydrogen as well as biofuel.
Well, you can only grow sugar in sufficient quantity for fuel usage down in Brazil. We here in America are foolishly nationalistic and want to force everything to be American.
Sugar cane also grows well in Cuba, however besides the nationalistic attitude there's the embargo against Cuba. Part of the reason, for both the embargo and the difficulty of importing sugar from Brazil, is the sugar cane farmers around Lake Okeechobee, FL. Though not as powerful as the corn industry they still wield power. However Switchgrass, native to the US, is a better source for making ethanol. Tennessee has a program for the research into using it as a biomass ethanol. Another good source for ethanol may be Kudzu. Though native to Japan and China, Kudzu is a nuisance invasive species around the Mississippi River region and can be found from Texas to Alabama.
During this time I wasted many, many business support tickets with Apple, just sending it away trying to get the issues fixed. Apple would lose the machine for months at a time and send it back claiming there was nothing wrong,.
Somewhat the same thing happened with a Gateway laptop I had. I had it one week shy of a year when the motherboard, MB, failed. I sent it into the service center and a week later not hearing anything I call Gateway about it. They told me it had just been dropped off that day where I lived. It wasn't there so I went to the office of the apartment complex and they didn't have it. Spending some tyme between Gateway and the shipper they decided to send me a replacement laptop. Another week went by when I called again. Gateway said they were short on parts for it and had to wait for them to come in. When I finally got it 4 weeks had gone by since I sent the old one in. Later I replaced it with an HP PC. Again just short of having a year the MB failed. I got it at Best Buy with an extended service plan they offered so I took it back. Best Buy had to send it into it's repair center which took about a week. And with both the HP and Gateway the harddisk died after only a few months. About 15 months ago I bought a PC with Linux preinstalled with an extended service plan. Ten months later it's MB failed as well. Another week was lost. What's worse is that I had a second hdd that was 750GB I used for the users home directory, 250 GB were used for user files. When I took it in for service I specifically took them not to mess with the second hdd. But when I got it back it had been reformatted. That was a few months ago and because I don't want to do anything to permanently loose the data, and haven't recovered it yet, I haven't used the PC since.
Notably my previous macs which ran on PPC, each one had at least one "logicboard failure" (why don't they call it a motherboard or mainboard anyway?), many of which I had issues with Apple also losing for months at a time. My overall experience with Macs has been more troublesome than any over vendor I have used.
Other than the MBP I'm typing this on I've had 2 other Macs. The first one was a Mac SE30 I bought in 1992 used. It lasted until 2000 when the floppy drive died. The second I got in 2000 short after the first died, it's a PowerMac 7300/200 I got used as well. It lasted until 2006 when it refused to boot. In both cases when they died was the only problem I had with them. For my money Macs have been terrific whereas PCs have been terrible.
I don't consider any vendor perfect and in my experience, Macs have given me a lot of grief. A few experiences from a specific vendor is not enough to determine how good a vendor is, because every vendor will have problems.
That said, I have barely ever used Dell (mostly just maintained/fixed them for others), it is possible that Dell is even worse.
In all of the customer surveys I've heard of whether from Consumer Reports or the various computer magazines Apple consistently ranks at the top in satisfaction while Dell ranks in the middle.
I can use the same software on Linux just as easily as I do on my Mac.
What software are you using exactly?
First I should say I got it reversed, instead I should of said I can use the same software on my Macs as I can use in Linux. Now as for what I use, for now I only use Eudora, Firefox, and a text editor on my Mac. When I get around to it though I plan on installing CinePaint and Inkscape, both of which are cross platform. I have X11 installed on my Mac and with either Fink or MacPorts I can download and install the same X11 programs for Linux on my Mac. Fink uses dpkg, dselect and apt-get from the Debian Project and MacPorts uses Redhat's rpm package management software. For technical reasons I haven't used my Linux PC in a few months.
I would rather that they were commissioned as for original research, that publication was part of the contract, and it immediately went into the public domain.
For publicly, taxpayer, financed research all of it should be publicly and openly available. The same applies to tests and clinical trials for drugs submitted for FDA approval. It would be nice if all university, public universities, research was also publicly available.
Can you think of any government research that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollar, yet a business bought that research for less than 1/4 of the cost and made billions of dollars off that research? I can. The National Cancer Institute, NCI, spend $183 million on research for Taxol then sold the rights to the data generated that was needed by the FDA to win drug approval for Taxol on an exclusive basis. Bristol-Myers Squib, BMS, paid the NCI $43 million for the data and has since made billions of dollars selling Taxol.
The only alternative is to publish in open access journals, which is fine in principle. However, for a cash-strapped lab, it can be hard to pay open access fees for several articles a year, even with NIH funding.
Why would a lab have to pay open access fees? As long as it is digital it should be easy to submit the research to a database like PubMed.
Reviewing is unpaid work, and all the reviewer gets is a preview of a paper in return for some professional risk. It takes some hours at a minimum to read, check out the oddities, and write back ones conclusions. There are two reviewers minimum.
Some months back I read an article on/. about how scientists in some fields seek to do peer reviews of research. The more papers their name can be crosschecked with papers the more they can make.
I wish I could recall what article it was so I could provide a link.
The last big deployment by the NZ defence force was to East Timor.
I know this is off topic but that deployment to East Timor wouldn't even had been needed if then US President Ford and Henry Kissinger hadn't supported Indonesia's invasion of East Timor after Portugal granted independence to East Timor.
You want to fix the NIH funding problem? How about starting with making Bristol-Myers Squibb pay a 50% royalty on the sales of Taxol. If BMS paid that'd be billions of dollars right there. I find it totally insane that the National cancer Institute, NCI, spend more than $180 million of taxpayers' money to develop Taxol but BMS was given exclusive rights to the test data needed by the FDA for drug approval for only $43 million. The NCI paid more than $140 million dollars more than BMS paid them, and BMS is making billions of dollars off of it.
If I were on the board of [insert large corporation here], I know I would say "hell no" to hiring him. He already drove SCO straight into the ground and turned their name, their trademarks, into a farce. Would you really want him running your business? What would make any board of directors *want* him running their company?
A board could make him president so he inflates the stock price and they dump the shares they own before it tanks. However now that the market is onto that trick the market may not fall for it.
Yeah sure, but after you install AVG, ZA and Spybot your system performs like an ass. Really, on a Mac you do not need those, so you do not get that performance loss.
When I ordered the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on I also ordered VirusBarrier and if ZoneAlarm had a version of ZA for Macs I would have gotten it too. I have the paid version of ZA on my Windows PC and loved the configuration options it offers. Such as being able to allow some websites to use javascript while javascript from other websites was blocked. Yesterday another/.er posted a link for an addon for Firefox, NoScript which does the same for Firefox so I'll try it out. However whereas ZA works with more than one browser NoScript only works with Firefox.
I say good job Adobe for making their commodity products reasonably priced so as to profit from software that would otherwise be unused in the non-professional world (or at least not paid for), while ensuring that professionals will still pay for their core product.
I'll use Film GIMP aka CinePaint first, then if it doesn't work I'll get Photoshop. I'd like to find a book on it though.
Also there is no right mouse button as I assume would be on the dell.
You can buy a two button mouse with the right button to use with a Mac. Though my MacBook Pro has only one button for the trackpad I have a two button trackball for it as well. Switching from Windows I was concerned about adjusting to having only one button for the trackpad, but it didn't take long before I got used to holding down either the command or the ctrl key to simulate the right click. I even got used to holding one of the keys down while clicking with the same hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has never really competed for the low-end or mid-low-end computer segment
Well with the Mac Mini, I'd say Apple is compeating low and lower middle computer segment. But when you add a monitor keyboard and mouse it's no longer that affordable. Personally I don't like either all in ones, of any brand, or the Mac Mini. Because they aren't upgradeable they are little more than waste. Apple doesn't compeat in the middle either.
Macs weren't designed to compete with PC's cost-effective hardware... it was designed to be a cohesive hardware + software package, and in this regard they blow away Windows entirely.
True. Where Apple excels, other than getting stuff to work well together, is in the high end. With the Mac Pro and the Xserve.
FalconNow my question is why didn't Yale do the same thing as the Maine university?
My guess is that there are some folks at Yale raising that question themselves. And maybe next time they will.
I hope they do.
FalconI wonder how many of those students will end up working on the other side once they graduate. It would be kind of like a hacker working for a security company. They'll be more familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of all the arguments and could demand premium salaries in this area of law.
Except a hacker improves security when they see something that's insecure. It's crackers and script kiddies that break into systems for gain. Hackers have an ethic of not committing theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.
FalconHow did they ever get caught pulling their crap at a university with a whole faculty devoted to making lawyers?
Hell the RIAA went after students from Yale which has a good law school. Now my question is why didn't Yale do the same thing as the Maine university?
FalconHmm... maybe I remember wrong, but it seems to me that with the old IBM PC that had no hard drive my employer had you could have subdirectories on its floppies. What version of DOS introduced directories? And why did they use the Unix directory separator for options (as it still is)?
As TFA I linked to said, DOS was based on CP/M which used "/" for options. It also says DOS 1.x used it, then to keep compatibility DOS 2.x kept it.
FalconDells are not noticeably more expensive than comparable generic white or beige boxes, and are definitely cheaper than comparable Macs. For example, I just compared the closest equivalent Inspiron and Macbook, and the Inspiron was not only $250 cheaper than the Macbook it included an nVidia GPU with 128M of real VRAM instead of the appalling Intel integrated GPU in the Macbook.
This summer before I bought my MacBook Pro I compared it to laptops from both Dell and HP that had similar configurations and the Apple was cheaper than either the Dell or the HP.
This isn't to say I bought the MBP because it was cheaper. I bought it because I was sick and tired of my Windows PCs crashing and having to replace motherboards and hdds that failed as well as having to reinstall Windows. I have never had as much trouble with a Mac I owned as I have with the PCs I also owned. And I bought my Macs used, except this one, whereas I bought brand new PCs. I even had to have the motherboard of the Linux PC I got new replaced before I had it a year.
FalconWell, I am sure BMS also paid about taxes which probably comes to around 20% off their sales profit. As an added bonus, they helped countless cancer patients many of whom are Americans.
A round of chemotherapy with Taxol[pdf] costs thousands of dollars while BMS has been able to produce a dose of Taxol for less than a dollar. And what taxes BMS pays the US only comes from US sales, they don't pay US taxes on their worldwide sales. Not that they should but if you limit earning to only the US for US taxes you're cutting how much tax they do pay. The US could have gotten a better deal by requiring BMS to pay a royalty say of 50% then not taxing the income from the sale of Taxol. Many more American would have been saved if the data needed had been open sourced, or allowed anyone who agreed to pay a royalty to use the data. Then you would of had more than one company fighting for market share by lowering costs.
FalconWhat's the point in exchanging one foreign-supplied source of energy (oil) for another (Brazillian ethanol)? Part of the reason for alternative fuels is to be energy-independent.
Switchgrass, native to the US, is a better source for ethanol. Another option may be Algae. Algae can produce hydrogen as well as biofuel.
FalconWell, you can only grow sugar in sufficient quantity for fuel usage down in Brazil. We here in America are foolishly nationalistic and want to force everything to be American.
Sugar cane also grows well in Cuba, however besides the nationalistic attitude there's the embargo against Cuba. Part of the reason, for both the embargo and the difficulty of importing sugar from Brazil, is the sugar cane farmers around Lake Okeechobee, FL. Though not as powerful as the corn industry they still wield power. However Switchgrass, native to the US, is a better source for making ethanol. Tennessee has a program for the research into using it as a biomass ethanol. Another good source for ethanol may be Kudzu. Though native to Japan and China, Kudzu is a nuisance invasive species around the Mississippi River region and can be found from Texas to Alabama.
FalconDuring this time I wasted many, many business support tickets with Apple, just sending it away trying to get the issues fixed. Apple would lose the machine for months at a time and send it back claiming there was nothing wrong,.
Somewhat the same thing happened with a Gateway laptop I had. I had it one week shy of a year when the motherboard, MB, failed. I sent it into the service center and a week later not hearing anything I call Gateway about it. They told me it had just been dropped off that day where I lived. It wasn't there so I went to the office of the apartment complex and they didn't have it. Spending some tyme between Gateway and the shipper they decided to send me a replacement laptop. Another week went by when I called again. Gateway said they were short on parts for it and had to wait for them to come in. When I finally got it 4 weeks had gone by since I sent the old one in. Later I replaced it with an HP PC. Again just short of having a year the MB failed. I got it at Best Buy with an extended service plan they offered so I took it back. Best Buy had to send it into it's repair center which took about a week. And with both the HP and Gateway the harddisk died after only a few months. About 15 months ago I bought a PC with Linux preinstalled with an extended service plan. Ten months later it's MB failed as well. Another week was lost. What's worse is that I had a second hdd that was 750GB I used for the users home directory, 250 GB were used for user files. When I took it in for service I specifically took them not to mess with the second hdd. But when I got it back it had been reformatted. That was a few months ago and because I don't want to do anything to permanently loose the data, and haven't recovered it yet, I haven't used the PC since.
Notably my previous macs which ran on PPC, each one had at least one "logicboard failure" (why don't they call it a motherboard or mainboard anyway?), many of which I had issues with Apple also losing for months at a time. My overall experience with Macs has been more troublesome than any over vendor I have used.
Other than the MBP I'm typing this on I've had 2 other Macs. The first one was a Mac SE30 I bought in 1992 used. It lasted until 2000 when the floppy drive died. The second I got in 2000 short after the first died, it's a PowerMac 7300/200 I got used as well. It lasted until 2006 when it refused to boot. In both cases when they died was the only problem I had with them. For my money Macs have been terrific whereas PCs have been terrible.
I don't consider any vendor perfect and in my experience, Macs have given me a lot of grief. A few experiences from a specific vendor is not enough to determine how good a vendor is, because every vendor will have problems.
That said, I have barely ever used Dell (mostly just maintained/fixed them for others), it is possible that Dell is even worse.
In all of the customer surveys I've heard of whether from Consumer Reports or the various computer magazines Apple consistently ranks at the top in satisfaction while Dell ranks in the middle.
FalconI would say Apple is not that friendly anymore towards Linux.
While Apple may not directly support Linux anymore it does support X11 and OSS, both of which indirectly helps Linux.
FalconI believe his reasoning is that some Macs come with a monitor which is part of the computer.
Just as with the iMac, the computer is built into the display of the Dell XPS One. They both are afterall all-in-ones.
I can use the same software on Linux just as easily as I do on my Mac.
What software are you using exactly?
First I should say I got it reversed, instead I should of said I can use the same software on my Macs as I can use in Linux. Now as for what I use, for now I only use Eudora, Firefox, and a text editor on my Mac. When I get around to it though I plan on installing CinePaint and Inkscape, both of which are cross platform. I have X11 installed on my Mac and with either Fink or MacPorts I can download and install the same X11 programs for Linux on my Mac. Fink uses dpkg, dselect and apt-get from the Debian Project and MacPorts uses Redhat's rpm package management software. For technical reasons I haven't used my Linux PC in a few months.
FalconI would rather that they were commissioned as for original research, that publication was part of the contract, and it immediately went into the public domain.
For publicly, taxpayer, financed research all of it should be publicly and openly available. The same applies to tests and clinical trials for drugs submitted for FDA approval. It would be nice if all university, public universities, research was also publicly available.
FalconCan you think of any government research that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollar, yet a business bought that research for less than 1/4 of the cost and made billions of dollars off that research? I can. The National Cancer Institute, NCI, spend $183 million on research for Taxol then sold the rights to the data generated that was needed by the FDA to win drug approval for Taxol on an exclusive basis. Bristol-Myers Squib, BMS, paid the NCI $43 million for the data and has since made billions of dollars selling Taxol.
FalconThe only alternative is to publish in open access journals, which is fine in principle. However, for a cash-strapped lab, it can be hard to pay open access fees for several articles a year, even with NIH funding.
Why would a lab have to pay open access fees? As long as it is digital it should be easy to submit the research to a database like PubMed.
FalconReviewing is unpaid work, and all the reviewer gets is a preview of a paper in return for some professional risk. It takes some hours at a minimum to read, check out the oddities, and write back ones conclusions. There are two reviewers minimum.
Some months back I read an article on /. about how scientists in some fields seek to do peer reviews of research. The more papers their name can be crosschecked with papers the more they can make.
I wish I could recall what article it was so I could provide a link.
FalconThe last big deployment by the NZ defence force was to East Timor.
I know this is off topic but that deployment to East Timor wouldn't even had been needed if then US President Ford and Henry Kissinger hadn't supported Indonesia's invasion of East Timor after Portugal granted independence to East Timor.
Falconproblem
You want to fix the NIH funding problem? How about starting with making Bristol-Myers Squibb pay a 50% royalty on the sales of Taxol. If BMS paid that'd be billions of dollars right there. I find it totally insane that the National cancer Institute, NCI, spend more than $180 million of taxpayers' money to develop Taxol but BMS was given exclusive rights to the test data needed by the FDA for drug approval for only $43 million. The NCI paid more than $140 million dollars more than BMS paid them, and BMS is making billions of dollars off of it.
FalconIf I were on the board of [insert large corporation here], I know I would say "hell no" to hiring him. He already drove SCO straight into the ground and turned their name, their trademarks, into a farce. Would you really want him running your business? What would make any board of directors *want* him running their company?
A board could make him president so he inflates the stock price and they dump the shares they own before it tanks. However now that the market is onto that trick the market may not fall for it.
FalconYeah sure, but after you install AVG, ZA and Spybot your system performs like an ass. Really, on a Mac you do not need those, so you do not get that performance loss.
When I ordered the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on I also ordered VirusBarrier and if ZoneAlarm had a version of ZA for Macs I would have gotten it too. I have the paid version of ZA on my Windows PC and loved the configuration options it offers. Such as being able to allow some websites to use javascript while javascript from other websites was blocked. Yesterday another /.er posted a link for an addon for Firefox, NoScript which does the same for Firefox so I'll try it out. However whereas ZA works with more than one browser NoScript only works with Firefox.
Falconsupposedly only fifty of the people who signed on the waiting list actually purchased a vehicle when offered.
From what I read nobody bought any, GM only leased them, they didn't sell any.
On the other hand, GM is expecting to start a full production run of the Volt on their newer E-flex drivetrain starting in 2010.
Will it use the Skateboard design?
FalconI say good job Adobe for making their commodity products reasonably priced so as to profit from software that would otherwise be unused in the non-professional world (or at least not paid for), while ensuring that professionals will still pay for their core product.
I'll use Film GIMP aka CinePaint first, then if it doesn't work I'll get Photoshop. I'd like to find a book on it though.
FalconBecause you said you could make one cheaper.
FalconAlso there is no right mouse button as I assume would be on the dell.
You can buy a two button mouse with the right button to use with a Mac. Though my MacBook Pro has only one button for the trackpad I have a two button trackball for it as well. Switching from Windows I was concerned about adjusting to having only one button for the trackpad, but it didn't take long before I got used to holding down either the command or the ctrl key to simulate the right click. I even got used to holding one of the keys down while clicking with the same hand.
Falcon