Don't be too hard on him, the article probably changed a lot since the story was submitted. I've been trying to get all the subnotebook/umpc/ultraportable/ulpc/blah/OMG stuff in order, and edited quite a few definitions in the past week.
Apple will collect and recycle one laptop (or other computer) of any brand or model for every new computer you buy from them. So that's an option, if he's got friends who are going to buy Macs in the near (or not so near) future.
If they just surveyed adults, especially adults with families, and they just phrased it like "do you approve of government controls on the internet" it'd be very high. The general opinion seems to be that the internet allows rampaging child-snatching catburglars access to stealing your family DRMed photos and plagiarising homework with an unsecured wi-fi sued by the RIAA rootkit credit card fraud and drop house prices.
You're right that storage isn't the reason for the higher price. Asus explained a while back that the whole reason that the Linux model has a bigger SSD, is because they saved money on the XP licence, and used that to upgrade the storage rather than dropping the price of the unit. I wouldn't be surprised if MS mandated that too - it would look bad for the price of Windows to be right there on the box as a $100 mark-up.
It's true that it's all rather far-fetched, but the best SF (in my oh-so-humble opinion) is always an incredible extrapolation from existing technology, and the article does a good job of demonstrating how that's true of Iron Man.
No, no, you need ionizing radiation. Put an operating air ionizer in the microwave with the spider next time. You may have to drill a hole in the side of the microwave to feed the power cable through, but it's totally worth it. *fwip fwip*
I recall something similar - Nintendo built video outputs onto the Nintendo DS, so that they could be shown on monitors at trade shows etc., and quite a few of the units on shop shelves at launch had some of the the hardware left in. It was possible to tune into the console (one of the screens, anyway, I forget which) on a common-or-garden TV.
Down at the hardware level, it kind of is these days IMO. The only real differences are the controlled selection of hardware (which is probably a bigger deal that I'm suggesting here, mind you) and the OS that's running.
Yes, I suppose that saying it's "just like a Mac" after all that painful setting up and reconfiguring to get Windows to work is missing half the picture.
Given that the OS is what most people interact with all day, is it really so wrong to call it a Mac? Most the purported Mac advantages are to do with usability after all. You're certainly getting more of the Mac experience than a PC one.
"Evolution" is as much a law as the first law of thermodynamics, and the laws of thermodynamics are theories in exactly the same way as evolution is. And anyone who spends any time in science knows this. It's all a work in progress. Do you know what evolutionary biologists do? They poke holes in evolution! They spend their whole time finding weaknesses, writing them up, discussing them, and trying to find better theories. That's science. By swallowing what the film says, you're giving the creationists - who have been rehashing the same arguments since the 1980s with no modification - a free ride.
That's what it's all about, really. Forget about ID, forget about evolution, forget about persecution - from beginning to end the movie is lying to its audience. That's reason enough to be pissed off at it.
One of the things I like about Vista is that it handles external displays (such as projectors) in a very straightforward way. You connect it up, it asks you what you want to be the main display, and defaults both to their default resolutions. That's it.
If you use Firefox, try setting it up to put the tab bar to the right hand side of the screen. Much easier to use when you've got a lot of tabs (they don't shrink to tiny squares) and it still leaves you a 1024x768-ish bit of screen real-estate for the actual web.
There's lots of tolerance for dissenting opinions. If you read up on the actual stories of the "expelled", you'll see that it's all smoke and mirrors. After failing to get ID-creationism into school science standards, the Discovery Institute is playing the persecution card. Unfortunately for them the biggest threat to ID is open discussion, because then its history as a sci-fi term stapled onto Creation Science comes to the fore.
It'd be kind of helpful if he did discuss the science, because all of the people he claims were "expelled" were actually flunked (or denied tenure, in one case) for doing a completely cack-handed job. Nobody was thrown out just for "questioning evolution", they were thrown out for engaging in the career-killing albatross of Disco-Institute intelligent design creationism. (As distinct from intelligent design, the concept.)
That's what the producers of the movie, and the Discovery Institute, want you to believe. Fact of the matter is, natural selection is always under attack in biology, because nothing makes a career like coming up with a novel mechanism for evolution. Why are intelligent design "researchers" getting terse treatment? Their research is bad. That's why. Most "intelligent design" (basically, everything the Disco Institute has contributed) is just a co-opting of the term by creation science, and has nothing at all to do with the search for evidence of design, so isn't even science at all.
Uh, science can't prove that you won't turn into a delicious cake when I stab you in the face. There's a huge body of evidence against my assumption, but it's still (due to the induction problem) not proof. You'd still be mightily offended if I stabbed you in the face and started eating you, I'm sure.
You know a movie's in trouble when the main response from mainstream movie critics is roughly "deceptive propagandist shit-pile", but the real fun comes when you start reading up on the people who were supposedly expelled. Like the Smithsonian employee who had his keys taken away and was fired, thrown out of his office, and thrown off the editorial staff of a journal.
Well, he was fired from his unpaid assistant job at the Smithsonian. Well, his contract for his unpaid assistant job expired. Well, it expired and they gave him a new one. But he was sacked from the journal! Oh, his contract expired there too. Well, there's his office of course, they took that away. Well they moved him into a crappy office. Well, they moved him into his own office. They took his keys away, though! They took everyone's keys away in his whole building! And, uh, they replaced them with keycards.
This is clearly the most honest movie of all time.
I saw the one at the Science Museum a few years ago, and it's awesome. Well worth a trip. When I went, it was AWOL, although they were building its twin in the same spot. I'm not sure whether Myhrvold got the original or the original's in storage while they build Myhrvold's one.
Well, if you're the only one who does it, then it's not a problem. If half of DFI's customers walk off with motherboards at cost price or lower, then the company stops making motherboards. The tragedy of the commons, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be too hard on him, the article probably changed a lot since the story was submitted. I've been trying to get all the subnotebook/umpc/ultraportable/ulpc/blah/OMG stuff in order, and edited quite a few definitions in the past week.
Apple will collect and recycle one laptop (or other computer) of any brand or model for every new computer you buy from them. So that's an option, if he's got friends who are going to buy Macs in the near (or not so near) future.
If they just surveyed adults, especially adults with families, and they just phrased it like "do you approve of government controls on the internet" it'd be very high. The general opinion seems to be that the internet allows rampaging child-snatching catburglars access to stealing your family DRMed photos and plagiarising homework with an unsecured wi-fi sued by the RIAA rootkit credit card fraud and drop house prices.
Yes.
You're right that storage isn't the reason for the higher price. Asus explained a while back that the whole reason that the Linux model has a bigger SSD, is because they saved money on the XP licence, and used that to upgrade the storage rather than dropping the price of the unit. I wouldn't be surprised if MS mandated that too - it would look bad for the price of Windows to be right there on the box as a $100 mark-up.
Half an ounce of RTFA, you mean. Of course, this being the internet...
It's true that it's all rather far-fetched, but the best SF (in my oh-so-humble opinion) is always an incredible extrapolation from existing technology, and the article does a good job of demonstrating how that's true of Iron Man.
No, no, you need ionizing radiation. Put an operating air ionizer in the microwave with the spider next time. You may have to drill a hole in the side of the microwave to feed the power cable through, but it's totally worth it. *fwip fwip*
I recall something similar - Nintendo built video outputs onto the Nintendo DS, so that they could be shown on monitors at trade shows etc., and quite a few of the units on shop shelves at launch had some of the the hardware left in. It was possible to tune into the console (one of the screens, anyway, I forget which) on a common-or-garden TV.
Sorry, I was typing "get X to work" and "Windows" seemed to be the right thing to stick in there.
I'd be a smartarse and bring up the term "Lindows" but my home desktop has an Athlon, so I'm stuck.
Down at the hardware level, it kind of is these days IMO. The only real differences are the controlled selection of hardware (which is probably a bigger deal that I'm suggesting here, mind you) and the OS that's running.
Yes, I suppose that saying it's "just like a Mac" after all that painful setting up and reconfiguring to get Windows to work is missing half the picture.
Given that the OS is what most people interact with all day, is it really so wrong to call it a Mac? Most the purported Mac advantages are to do with usability after all. You're certainly getting more of the Mac experience than a PC one.
"Evolution" is as much a law as the first law of thermodynamics, and the laws of thermodynamics are theories in exactly the same way as evolution is. And anyone who spends any time in science knows this. It's all a work in progress. Do you know what evolutionary biologists do? They poke holes in evolution! They spend their whole time finding weaknesses, writing them up, discussing them, and trying to find better theories. That's science. By swallowing what the film says, you're giving the creationists - who have been rehashing the same arguments since the 1980s with no modification - a free ride.
That's what it's all about, really. Forget about ID, forget about evolution, forget about persecution - from beginning to end the movie is lying to its audience. That's reason enough to be pissed off at it.
One of the things I like about Vista is that it handles external displays (such as projectors) in a very straightforward way. You connect it up, it asks you what you want to be the main display, and defaults both to their default resolutions. That's it.
If you use Firefox, try setting it up to put the tab bar to the right hand side of the screen. Much easier to use when you've got a lot of tabs (they don't shrink to tiny squares) and it still leaves you a 1024x768-ish bit of screen real-estate for the actual web.
There's lots of tolerance for dissenting opinions. If you read up on the actual stories of the "expelled", you'll see that it's all smoke and mirrors. After failing to get ID-creationism into school science standards, the Discovery Institute is playing the persecution card. Unfortunately for them the biggest threat to ID is open discussion, because then its history as a sci-fi term stapled onto Creation Science comes to the fore.
It'd be kind of helpful if he did discuss the science, because all of the people he claims were "expelled" were actually flunked (or denied tenure, in one case) for doing a completely cack-handed job. Nobody was thrown out just for "questioning evolution", they were thrown out for engaging in the career-killing albatross of Disco-Institute intelligent design creationism. (As distinct from intelligent design, the concept.)
That's what the producers of the movie, and the Discovery Institute, want you to believe. Fact of the matter is, natural selection is always under attack in biology, because nothing makes a career like coming up with a novel mechanism for evolution. Why are intelligent design "researchers" getting terse treatment? Their research is bad. That's why. Most "intelligent design" (basically, everything the Disco Institute has contributed) is just a co-opting of the term by creation science, and has nothing at all to do with the search for evidence of design, so isn't even science at all.
Uh, science can't prove that you won't turn into a delicious cake when I stab you in the face. There's a huge body of evidence against my assumption, but it's still (due to the induction problem) not proof. You'd still be mightily offended if I stabbed you in the face and started eating you, I'm sure.
You know a movie's in trouble when the main response from mainstream movie critics is roughly "deceptive propagandist shit-pile", but the real fun comes when you start reading up on the people who were supposedly expelled. Like the Smithsonian employee who had his keys taken away and was fired, thrown out of his office, and thrown off the editorial staff of a journal.
Well, he was fired from his unpaid assistant job at the Smithsonian. Well, his contract for his unpaid assistant job expired. Well, it expired and they gave him a new one. But he was sacked from the journal! Oh, his contract expired there too. Well, there's his office of course, they took that away. Well they moved him into a crappy office. Well, they moved him into his own office. They took his keys away, though! They took everyone's keys away in his whole building! And, uh, they replaced them with keycards.
This is clearly the most honest movie of all time.
They're on a murderous rampage across the country, their digital bloodlust now unsatable due to a stack overflow error.
Well, if you're the only one who does it, then it's not a problem. If half of DFI's customers walk off with motherboards at cost price or lower, then the company stops making motherboards. The tragedy of the commons, I think.