Or he could just go buy a Dell for 299 and install photoshop on it... Identical results, More performance (than a higher priced Mac)
After he gets more jobs and brings in more cashflow, then he might want to consider upgrading to a PowerMac G5 Dual platform... Then again, he will probably get 4x the machine in an opteron box for the same money. By then he will already like windows enough to not care about mac anymore...
just a thought from me to you (the obvious mac fanboy)
Wealth isn't created in the stock market either. The money invested comes from somewhere. That money definately isn't generated or created in any shape form or fashion in the market. it is only invested there.
Quiet with respect to what? Most dell computers run quieter than the iMac.
It all depends on which computers you use in your office, if you get a quiet dell, and hear a noisy mac, then you tend to think that macs are loud
however, if you get a loud dell, and then see your friend's brand new imac G5 which is probably the quietest one they ever made, then you will tend to think that imacs are quiet
in reality, most apple PC's are loud compared to their competitors. It just so happens that they aren't excessively loud (except in the cases of say the G4 tower which was overwhelmingly loud at one point) and they are consistantly on the near quiet side... whereas, dell produces home desktops on low and high end, business desktops on low and high end, power user workstations on low and high end, servers on low and high end, home and business laptops on low and high end. All of which by default and by nature of the pricepoint and system requirements, are going to be either really quiet, or fairly loud, or in between. In fact, dell currently ships laptops with P4-celerons in them running hotter than hell with loud fans in them... so does that make dell's loud? No, it means dell is catering to a low end sub 600$ notebook cround with these systems and so they have constraints to work in.
But using a blanket statement that apple's are in general quiet is just a gross generalization which isn't even close to being true.
All of the above can also be applied to other system manufacturers.
Mobo mfg's not picking that feature up is nVidia's fault, not the mobo mfg's.
If they didn't want to pay for it, it means they have real research to show that their end users weren't willing to pay over 50$ more for integrated sound. They were correct. nVidia was overcharging. period.
not to mention that soundstorm works like shit in linux.
I don't care what this "certification" means. Its components do not all work fully in linux.
Just by design, the ATI radeon GPU is not compatible with linus except in 2d and command line mode. No 3d support is included.
Also, the article itself mentions taht ACPI doesn't work 100%.
This is a pathetic attempt to try to make it look like laptops are ready for linux, when in fact, even their "certified" laptop isn't worth having with non working hardware under linux.
Not to mention they picked out a Desktop Replacement which is really not even a laptop but a mobile desktop.
When they can come up with a real certified LAPTOP, then it will be news worthy.
You might be true that most windows games are Direct 3D programs, but when you start looking at the top games, they are split pretty much down the middle. There are thousands od D3D games, from total shit to decent. But when you look at top sellers and most popular games, and longest lasting games, OpenGL pulls out ahead.
Besides, its not a problem with games being D3D... there are plenty of opengl games not ported to the Mac.
It's funny you say this when PC gaming is at a higher marketshare than it has ever been, and when consol marketshare has grown, but not nearly as fast as the PC gaming market...
I think maybe you are getting your assumptions from thin air?
You are correct. The apple tax is very big on the desktop.. Maybe it is because they are trying to move all the desktop computers to either ultra low end (eMac) or ultra high end (PowerMac). There really isn't any upper low or mid range apples, and the upper mid range iMac doesn't even have a decent video card. And it's not upgradeable. So the assumption is that apple doesn't really care about gaming. If they did, it would be possible to get a decently fast computer for gaming at an at least REASONABLE price.
For other activities, the mac price isn't so bad when you are talking about paying for the asthetics. But when it comes to gaming performance, the mac has never stacked up on price/performance, even to a reasonbly close margin.
If you start talking about their laptops now, they have very competative pricing, and they really don't have the "apple tax" on those. Their 12" laptop is cheaper than any 12in dell, sony, etc.. It is almost as cheap as the generic avaratech 12in laptop at sams club.
"With the things that x.org and friends are doing, is there some technical hurdle that opengl et al cannot compete on?"
Yes, very much so. Nvidia and ATI refuse to release full featured OpenGL drivers on the linux platform. DoomIII runs about 20% slower on linux because of nvididia drivers, ATI cards won't even PLAY doom3. UT2k4 is on linux, but it rusn slower because yet again, nvidia's poor quality drivers.
Ati BTW doesn't even have released versions of opengl drivers for linux, so they are even farther behind.
So far today, the only games coming out for linux are the ones who have authors who write cross platform games anyway. You won't start seeing ANY type of reasonable effort put into porting to linux from other game manufacturers until there is a reliable and fast driver for both ATI and nVidia cards.
None of these surveys bothered to address anything usefull. Quality. Many of these places which show all these wireless features and ports in every room have very high downtime and super high pings. There are actually some colleges where you try to play online video games and your ping is consistantly 400 or more ping most of the day unless you play at 4am. And the university's link to the internet is saturated most of the day. (not to mention significant downtime).
You gotta realize that many on that list would not make the 'cut' by anyone but the sorority girl's standards ("oh, as long as I can check my email and register for classes...").
"I'd rather talk with THE registrar personally than have some webform. She can ask me how things are going, suggest alternate courses, and generally keep the system running smoothly."
Please. First of all, you never talk to THE registrar. you talk to the registrar's assistants. Secondly, it is your advisors job to recommend other courses. The registrar just keeps track of who is registered for what and the grades and status databases. You have obviously never talked to a registrar before.
This is just utterly false. When a walmart opens up in a small town every mom and pop shop must compete with a shop bigger than all of them combined. They overflood the market and the local supply is significantly larger than the demand. Since walmart can (and does and has been proven to) cut their magin to nothing in small towns which they are new to, the other shops go out of business usually within 1-2 years.
All this happening while that local walmart store runs into the red ink, and it is all perfectly "legal".
Only when demand is very high (on the virge of a small city) does walmart have to compete for the consumer. In small towns, they drop their prices and everyone goes out of business. It has happened literally thousands of times in this country.
Can someone tell me how to get information on signing up for the beta? I went to www.gmail.com and it has a place to login but I don't see a link to signup. Am I missing something?
There is no such thing as an energy source (unless you believe in God). However, there are such thing as energy conversion techniques.
Super Novae -> compressed nebular cloud -> heated hydrogen gas -> Hydrogen fusion (the sun) -> radiation (sun's light) -> photo-electric effect (solar pannel) -> electrolysis (electricity-H2+O2 converter) -> combustible H2 and O2.
This is the conversion technique these people are using. There are others, but the first 5 steps of the process will ALWAYS remain the same in the lifetime of the earth. The trick is finding the best way to convert the 5th step (radiation of the sun's light) into a useable format. Over millions of years, the earth built up fossil fuels from radiation. But we will run out. Fossil fuels are god's gift to man asa free jump start the world's technical revolution and only then will we find alternative techniques of energy conversion.
Right now solar -> hydrogen conversion is a popular but un-explored method because of its sheer cost and safty concerns of a highly compressed gas.
So you see, if there is an energy source in this system, it is only the sun. (but in reality, the sun came from SOMETHING!)
"Why not just skip the middle steps and use Electricity? There's going to be lost energy all over the place every time you do another "conversion""
You missed the point. There is no such thing as "direct energy storage" except in capacitors. Capacitors cannot store enough electricity to be usefull in a vehicle which is powered by an electric motor (a few seconds or minutes of driving at most, and even then you would have very dangerous voltages stored)
You must convert the energy into something that can be safely stored and converted into electricity. There are many types of materials which can do this:
a. Hydrogen Gas (H2) stored in a compressed tank (efficiently converted from water + electricity -> H2 and O2, but hard to store at such high compression)
b. Methane Gas: Stored same as hydrogen, but a little easier to store because the molecule doesn't tend to seep out of the valves. Production of methane might include using "solar" power to grow plants and then convert plants into methane.
c. Battery Power: contrary to popular belief, batteries are highly uneffective at storing electricity. For one thing, they don't store charge, they store chemical potential. There is a chemical process which converts the chemical potential into electricial potential. This conversion is pretty efficient, but the materials are very hazardous, and the chemicals break down over time (usually less than 1 year when used regularly) the mass of the battery is the limiting factor for its use.
So you see, its not a simple answer. You definately cannot just "use electricity directly" to power an electric car. You have to store the energy somehow. The above points are just some options. Gasonline is another option which is another form of solar power (the sun grew plants, plants died and decomposed. Over time pressure converted these plants into fossile fuels for us to pump out of the Earth's crust)
All in all, it looks like hydrogen will be the winner. Currently, it has been found it is tuff to store, but it is easy to create. All we have to do is figure out how to store it. Creation can be done with solar pannels, wind power, hydro-electric power, fission, fusion (if we can ever nail the fusion generator problem), any number of things.
Except that you don't need huge amounts (and usually any ammounts) of fertilizer to produce bio diesel. You can grow corn or hemp pretty much anywhere with simple irrigation. Unless the soil is completely nutrient free, you won't have a problem.
Sure, you will need some fertilizer. But not like you need for food for human consumption. Where do you think all the rice in china comes from? not from fertilizer that is for sure.
Actually, no. Ex post facto doesn't apply to authors who have already written the software. An author would not be held liable unless they are the ones offering it for download. You see, in order to get the spyware in the first place, someone has to offer it up for download. If nobody was offering it up for download, nobody would get the spyware installed. The distributers are still liable and can be jailed under the bill.
An author would be held liable if he was still offering the spyware up for download on his website or attached to an installation package of bonzai buddy super duper buddy atomic clock weather buddy bug.
So the only time ex post facto can be applied is already installed spyware on end users' computers previous to the date the law takes effect.
"We wouldn't even have ever made iron, for crying out loud. We'd still be living in caves and whatever else. "
Please. Iron is an element. We didn't make it. Maybe you are thinking of steel?
And we would have never gotten out of the caveman stoneage were it not for competition? Have you ever thought about how it takes COOPERATION to learn how to build houses and make fire and wheels?
Your ignorance is totally mind boggling. But capitalism is fine. Throwing microsoft's evil empire (TM) into the mix is just karma trolling.
why not different hitboxes for different models? This just adds to the fun of the game. Just look at all the class based games like RTCW where each class already has different strengths and weaknesses.
Slashdot Mirror
Or he could just go buy a Dell for 299 and install photoshop on it... Identical results, More performance (than a higher priced Mac)
After he gets more jobs and brings in more cashflow, then he might want to consider upgrading to a PowerMac G5 Dual platform... Then again, he will probably get 4x the machine in an opteron box for the same money. By then he will already like windows enough to not care about mac anymore...
just a thought from me to you (the obvious mac fanboy)
Well Said.
Wealth isn't created in the stock market either. The money invested comes from somewhere. That money definately isn't generated or created in any shape form or fashion in the market. it is only invested there.
I suppose you are going to pay for one of those for all the friends he was going to send just a card to?
Please
Quiet with respect to what? Most dell computers run quieter than the iMac.
It all depends on which computers you use in your office, if you get a quiet dell, and hear a noisy mac, then you tend to think that macs are loud
however, if you get a loud dell, and then see your friend's brand new imac G5 which is probably the quietest one they ever made, then you will tend to think that imacs are quiet
in reality, most apple PC's are loud compared to their competitors. It just so happens that they aren't excessively loud (except in the cases of say the G4 tower which was overwhelmingly loud at one point) and they are consistantly on the near quiet side... whereas, dell produces home desktops on low and high end, business desktops on low and high end, power user workstations on low and high end, servers on low and high end, home and business laptops on low and high end. All of which by default and by nature of the pricepoint and system requirements, are going to be either really quiet, or fairly loud, or in between. In fact, dell currently ships laptops with P4-celerons in them running hotter than hell with loud fans in them... so does that make dell's loud? No, it means dell is catering to a low end sub 600$ notebook cround with these systems and so they have constraints to work in.
But using a blanket statement that apple's are in general quiet is just a gross generalization which isn't even close to being true.
All of the above can also be applied to other system manufacturers.
"I don't know if the moderators realize this, but there's nothing inflamatory about saying that Mac's run quiet."
Except for the fact the they don't run quiet? Maybe?
Oh i don't know... maybe what you say is a myth in reality?
Or is it that they are just zealots?
I would give them more credit than that, noticing the fact that most mac's don't run quiet at all.
"NVidia drivers are feature for feature compatible"
BZZZZZZT!!! Wrong answer.
You know as good as everyone else here that this is just completely falsified and made up. But good try.
Maybe with the 6-12 month lag time between nvidia and windows drivers, if you can jump forward in time, this would be true. But it isn't.
Mobo mfg's not picking that feature up is nVidia's fault, not the mobo mfg's.
If they didn't want to pay for it, it means they have real research to show that their end users weren't willing to pay over 50$ more for integrated sound. They were correct. nVidia was overcharging. period.
not to mention that soundstorm works like shit in linux.
I don't care what this "certification" means. Its components do not all work fully in linux.
Just by design, the ATI radeon GPU is not compatible with linus except in 2d and command line mode. No 3d support is included.
Also, the article itself mentions taht ACPI doesn't work 100%.
This is a pathetic attempt to try to make it look like laptops are ready for linux, when in fact, even their "certified" laptop isn't worth having with non working hardware under linux.
Not to mention they picked out a Desktop Replacement which is really not even a laptop but a mobile desktop.
When they can come up with a real certified LAPTOP, then it will be news worthy.
This is a very misinformed opinion IMO.
You might be true that most windows games are Direct 3D programs, but when you start looking at the top games, they are split pretty much down the middle. There are thousands od D3D games, from total shit to decent. But when you look at top sellers and most popular games, and longest lasting games, OpenGL pulls out ahead.
Besides, its not a problem with games being D3D... there are plenty of opengl games not ported to the Mac.
It's funny you say this when PC gaming is at a higher marketshare than it has ever been, and when consol marketshare has grown, but not nearly as fast as the PC gaming market...
I think maybe you are getting your assumptions from thin air?
You are correct. The apple tax is very big on the desktop.. Maybe it is because they are trying to move all the desktop computers to either ultra low end (eMac) or ultra high end (PowerMac). There really isn't any upper low or mid range apples, and the upper mid range iMac doesn't even have a decent video card. And it's not upgradeable. So the assumption is that apple doesn't really care about gaming. If they did, it would be possible to get a decently fast computer for gaming at an at least REASONABLE price.
For other activities, the mac price isn't so bad when you are talking about paying for the asthetics. But when it comes to gaming performance, the mac has never stacked up on price/performance, even to a reasonbly close margin.
If you start talking about their laptops now, they have very competative pricing, and they really don't have the "apple tax" on those. Their 12" laptop is cheaper than any 12in dell, sony, etc.. It is almost as cheap as the generic avaratech 12in laptop at sams club.
"With the things that x.org and friends are doing, is there some technical hurdle that opengl et al cannot compete on?"
Yes, very much so. Nvidia and ATI refuse to release full featured OpenGL drivers on the linux platform. DoomIII runs about 20% slower on linux because of nvididia drivers, ATI cards won't even PLAY doom3. UT2k4 is on linux, but it rusn slower because yet again, nvidia's poor quality drivers.
Ati BTW doesn't even have released versions of opengl drivers for linux, so they are even farther behind.
So far today, the only games coming out for linux are the ones who have authors who write cross platform games anyway. You won't start seeing ANY type of reasonable effort put into porting to linux from other game manufacturers until there is a reliable and fast driver for both ATI and nVidia cards.
None of these surveys bothered to address anything usefull. Quality. Many of these places which show all these wireless features and ports in every room have very high downtime and super high pings. There are actually some colleges where you try to play online video games and your ping is consistantly 400 or more ping most of the day unless you play at 4am. And the university's link to the internet is saturated most of the day. (not to mention significant downtime).
You gotta realize that many on that list would not make the 'cut' by anyone but the sorority girl's standards ("oh, as long as I can check my email and register for classes...").
"I'd rather talk with THE registrar personally than have some webform. She can ask me how things are going, suggest alternate courses, and generally keep the system running smoothly."
Please. First of all, you never talk to THE registrar. you talk to the registrar's assistants. Secondly, it is your advisors job to recommend other courses. The registrar just keeps track of who is registered for what and the grades and status databases. You have obviously never talked to a registrar before.
This is just utterly false. When a walmart opens up in a small town every mom and pop shop must compete with a shop bigger than all of them combined. They overflood the market and the local supply is significantly larger than the demand. Since walmart can (and does and has been proven to) cut their magin to nothing in small towns which they are new to, the other shops go out of business usually within 1-2 years.
All this happening while that local walmart store runs into the red ink, and it is all perfectly "legal".
Only when demand is very high (on the virge of a small city) does walmart have to compete for the consumer. In small towns, they drop their prices and everyone goes out of business. It has happened literally thousands of times in this country.
I'd like one... Thanks!
mp3phish -- at -- yahoo -- com
Can someone tell me how to get information on signing up for the beta? I went to www.gmail.com and it has a place to login but I don't see a link to signup. Am I missing something?
thanks in advance.
There is no such thing as an energy source (unless you believe in God). However, there are such thing as energy conversion techniques.
Super Novae -> compressed nebular cloud -> heated hydrogen gas -> Hydrogen fusion (the sun) -> radiation (sun's light) -> photo-electric effect (solar pannel) -> electrolysis (electricity-H2+O2 converter) -> combustible H2 and O2.
This is the conversion technique these people are using. There are others, but the first 5 steps of the process will ALWAYS remain the same in the lifetime of the earth. The trick is finding the best way to convert the 5th step (radiation of the sun's light) into a useable format. Over millions of years, the earth built up fossil fuels from radiation. But we will run out. Fossil fuels are god's gift to man asa free jump start the world's technical revolution and only then will we find alternative techniques of energy conversion.
Right now solar -> hydrogen conversion is a popular but un-explored method because of its sheer cost and safty concerns of a highly compressed gas.
So you see, if there is an energy source in this system, it is only the sun. (but in reality, the sun came from SOMETHING!)
"Why not just skip the middle steps and use Electricity? There's going to be lost energy all over the place every time you do another "conversion""
You missed the point. There is no such thing as "direct energy storage" except in capacitors. Capacitors cannot store enough electricity to be usefull in a vehicle which is powered by an electric motor (a few seconds or minutes of driving at most, and even then you would have very dangerous voltages stored)
You must convert the energy into something that can be safely stored and converted into electricity. There are many types of materials which can do this:
a. Hydrogen Gas (H2) stored in a compressed tank (efficiently converted from water + electricity -> H2 and O2, but hard to store at such high compression)
b. Methane Gas: Stored same as hydrogen, but a little easier to store because the molecule doesn't tend to seep out of the valves. Production of methane might include using "solar" power to grow plants and then convert plants into methane.
c. Battery Power: contrary to popular belief, batteries are highly uneffective at storing electricity. For one thing, they don't store charge, they store chemical potential. There is a chemical process which converts the chemical potential into electricial potential. This conversion is pretty efficient, but the materials are very hazardous, and the chemicals break down over time (usually less than 1 year when used regularly) the mass of the battery is the limiting factor for its use.
So you see, its not a simple answer. You definately cannot just "use electricity directly" to power an electric car. You have to store the energy somehow. The above points are just some options. Gasonline is another option which is another form of solar power (the sun grew plants, plants died and decomposed. Over time pressure converted these plants into fossile fuels for us to pump out of the Earth's crust)
All in all, it looks like hydrogen will be the winner. Currently, it has been found it is tuff to store, but it is easy to create. All we have to do is figure out how to store it. Creation can be done with solar pannels, wind power, hydro-electric power, fission, fusion (if we can ever nail the fusion generator problem), any number of things.
So far perpetual motion engines have not been developed yet.
:)
But it was a good try; I'm sure there are plenty of people on slashdot who have no idea that that is waht you just proposed.
Except that you don't need huge amounts (and usually any ammounts) of fertilizer to produce bio diesel. You can grow corn or hemp pretty much anywhere with simple irrigation. Unless the soil is completely nutrient free, you won't have a problem.
Sure, you will need some fertilizer. But not like you need for food for human consumption. Where do you think all the rice in china comes from? not from fertilizer that is for sure.
Actually, no. Ex post facto doesn't apply to authors who have already written the software. An author would not be held liable unless they are the ones offering it for download. You see, in order to get the spyware in the first place, someone has to offer it up for download. If nobody was offering it up for download, nobody would get the spyware installed. The distributers are still liable and can be jailed under the bill.
An author would be held liable if he was still offering the spyware up for download on his website or attached to an installation package of bonzai buddy super duper buddy atomic clock weather buddy bug.
So the only time ex post facto can be applied is already installed spyware on end users' computers previous to the date the law takes effect.
"We wouldn't even have ever made iron, for crying out loud. We'd still be living in caves and whatever else. "
Please. Iron is an element. We didn't make it. Maybe you are thinking of steel?
And we would have never gotten out of the caveman stoneage were it not for competition? Have you ever thought about how it takes COOPERATION to learn how to build houses and make fire and wheels?
Your ignorance is totally mind boggling. But capitalism is fine. Throwing microsoft's evil empire (TM) into the mix is just karma trolling.
why not different hitboxes for different models? This just adds to the fun of the game. Just look at all the class based games like RTCW where each class already has different strengths and weaknesses.