Now really, why is the security issues in service pack 2 so blown up, all earlier service packs has had security issues too??
Please RT2ndFA. It's actually a fairly insightful look at exactly WHY people have been looking so much more carefully at SP2 than at previous ones. The conclusion is that, basically, people want to know if MS is actually serious about their whole "security is the #1 priority, and we're working very hard to make sure everything is as safe as possible."
Telling people to just take at face value MS's claims of security is like telling a battered woman that she should trust her abusive husband because just because he said he's different now. Skepticism is warranted due to past behaviour.
suggesting that you turn off DHCP when 51% of us use broadband?
As I recall, that was the stat for US broadband. Unless there's been a hostile takeover I'm unaware of, the Reg is a UK rag. This can be confirmed by simply looking at the URL. As our neighbors are fond of reminding us, there really is something outside of our own country other than pretty landmarks, terrorists, and an empty wasteland.
There is no more relationship between these plants and hydrogen than there is between any other power source and hydrogen
TFA indicates that, due to the high temperature at which this operates, they can achieve very efficient extraction of hydrogen. While any other power generation method could, in fact, be used to do likewise, the implication is that it's apparently easier to get from these types of hot-burning plants.
Now, I am not a power-plant designer, but as I understand it, usually the goal of these things is to get some kind of gas really excited, then use it to drive a turbine, which generates the power. That is, Thermal energy -> Kinetic Energy -> Mechanical Energy -> Electricity. None of these steps are 100% efficient, as indicated by the large amount of very hot water which needs to be disposed of from most conventional nuke plants. So, the impression that I got from the article was that some of that "waste heat" could be applied to the process of extracting hydrogen for fuel cells.
Of course, I've likely made a factual/reading error here, but that was the impression that I got.
I wonder, though, if these findings are duplicated with written Oriental languages.
Depends on whether you're talking character or alphabet based reading. Character based reading uses different parts of the brain, so I imagine that the way you read them is a bit different (it would be interesting, for instance, to know whether or not the brain uses the stroke order used in writing them to understand them). Alphabet versions of Asian languages (such as hiragana or katakana) would likely give us fairly similar results.
What caught my eye was the finding that we're better at retaining letters from prounocable nonsense; I wonder what kinds of results you'd get from a phoenetic alphabet like hiragana, since EVERY construction is automatically pronouncable? That might mean that the "word processing" center of the brain of phoenetic letter readers would have to work differently.
Fascinating stuff; this is why cognitive psych is cool.
I hate to be a stickler, but there's nothing you could put after "two cat's" that would make sense. Posessive plural gets the apostrophe after the "s".
So you have two cats'... pajamas, perhaps?
Hmm . . . IANAGN, but that would read to me like "I have the ears of two cats" rather than "I have two ears of a cat." It reads as though the number of animals is plural rather than the number of ears, which I assume to have been the original intent.
Well, given that most of the slim info released so far indicates that it will be using the Aurora Toolset (inferred from the fact that it's been delivered to Obsidian), I'd guess it'll at least be *possible* for them to move ahead with still having nice mod creation tools. One would certainly hope that that'll be the case; after all, why would you license out a sequel to a game whose big draw was "Make your own content!" and then not allow people to make their own content?
Course, then I just have to look at Deus Ex 2, where all the cool things that made Deus Ex so neat were stripped out to appease the allmighty FPS gods to answer my own question.
Still, given that Obsidian is mostly old Black Isle people, I do have to confess that I'm looking forward to it; Torment was more than good enough to give them the benefit of the doubt as regards the single player game, and I recall there being an awful lot of Fallout mods back in the day . . . Let's just hope it's cross platform, so as not to once again crush my fragile hopes and dreams.
However, even in the best case, I'd still think Dragon Age will be the best place to get mod creation tools; after all, Bioware has had how long now to listen to users gripe about the things that were wrong with the old one? One hopes they actually bother to incorporate them. And that they actually release the goddamn mac toolset this time.
they are manually priced by some 15 year old kid that hate's his job.
Having been that kid that hates his job, I'll say amen to that. The words "canned food isle duty" still send a chill down my spine. *shudder*
Though really, you don't know the true meaning of the word "hate" until you hear the two words every stock boy dreads: "Price Change." The night they had me do price changes on every tin of tea we carried (and we're talking *giant* grocery store, here) was the night I decided that I had made enough money that summer ^_^
it is intellectually dishonest of the Slashdot crowd to intentionally ignore the primary purpose of these chips.
Huh? Maybe I've just been hanging out with the wrong crowd, but no one I know has used their modded consoles for piracy; pretty much they've been modding them to play wacky japanese imports (in retrospect, maybe that means I've been hanging out with the *right* crowd ^_^). Maybe I'm just naive, but I wasn't under the impression that pirated copies of these games were all that widespread, at least here in the US. It wasn't even an advertised feature of the chips when I had my PS1 modded; it was pretty much all about the imports (in fact, the shop that did it was actually where I *bought* my imports-and no, they weren't pirated; they were factory sealed originals).
Proof by analogy, I realize, but then, proof by analogy is more legitimate than proof by hysteria, which is the kind of argument presented by most opponents of cool tech.
One salient point I think you've missed here is that while a computer is (theoretically) a general purpose machine, capable of any function that can be written for it, a *program* is essentially a machine designed for a very specific purpose or set of purposes. That's why we call them *Applications*. They are designed to allow the general machine to work for a specific task. Now, often a given application will be able to perform a specific task in a variety of ways, or have a number of variations on a theme that it can accomplish. What is being posited, and what is the common sense solution arrived at by decades of research into Human Factors and Usability, is that it's often trivial to arrive at the default actions a user wishes to perform, as well as the default options for those actions, simply by consulting a sufficiently large group of potential users as a step in the design process. That way, it becomes trivial to see what the potential tasks a user will be performing most often are, and, as a result, what tasks should be made as trivially easy to perform as humanly possible. A bad choice in default for a task that a user will need to perform 100s of times per day can actually add a huge amount of wasteful overhead to that task, as the user is forced to reset the option every time the task is performed.
Contrary to popular belief, Usability in interface design is not achieved by voodoo. It is achieved by actually taking the time early in the process to research what people want to use the software for, and designing it accordingly.
Both are excellent reading for those interested in the art (science?) of good UI/usability design.
Answer: B (Science).
There is a great deal of research that has gone into the development of Usable systems; in fact, there is an entire field of Cognitive Psychology devoted to it called "human factors." This science has lead to a lot of fairly simple techniques for determining how to make an interface usable, none of which addresses ephemeral "look and feel" issues, but rather the cold, hard facts of human cognition.
The most useful technique to come from the application of Human Factors to software interface design that I've seen is called GOMS modelling, which you can use to see how usable an interface is (as a function of how much time your user will waste getting it to work for their most likely tasks) before you have even built it. It's a good way of making sure your defaults are actually set to what real people will want their defaults set to. I highly recommend that anyone with any interest whatsoever in designing these kinds of things take a gander at this stuff; it can DRASTICALLY improve an interface by letting you cut the fat. It does, however, involve actually, y'know, TALKING to some potential users to find out what they want the software to do, though.
I RTFA expecting to come out of it thinking "gee, brand dilution like this usually means the beginning of the end for companies." Instead, I was surprised to end up thinking what a neat idea this could be, if implemented correctly.
I think I'm probably preaching to the choir here when I say that there are lots of songs out there that I like but so very few full albums that I want to own. Thus, the joy that is P2P and iTMS; combined with a cd burner, all the music I listen to in my car these days is mixed the way I want it to be, and in ways you'll never find on a commercial mix (try finding a CD with Nightwish, E Nomine, and L'Arc en~Ciel on it ^_^). So the idea of a mix cd with actual labelling and even liner notes is naturally fairly appealing. Simply put, it passes the "I'd give it a try" test.
Three major questions that aren't answered in the article, though, which would be major deciding factors for me:
How varied is the selection? The article claims there's lots of tracks and implies that part of the appeal is the fact that it introduces people to lesser known stuff they won't be sold at major retailers, but how obscure are we talking? My main complaint with iTMS has been a lack of foreign music; I want my Nightwish and my Yuki Kajiura, dammit!
Are the CDs encumbered with spyware and copy protection? I want none of that garbage, and this would be a good source for legal music (especially if it could be ripped onto my computer in something nice and high bitrate)
What format/bitrate are the source tracks stored in? I don't want to make a mix CD only to discover that its source was all 128 kbps wma garbage, especially since, as mentioned above, re-ripping is a big selling point to me (and if it's not over 128 kbps, then since the price/convenience point is worse than iTMS, there's really no point).
Nevertheless, I think this is a fairly neat idea; the current distribution models for music have left a lot of great stuff behind, so going back to a system where people can get recommendations and such is pretty cool. And the inclusion of the Audiogalaxy-esque "you might also like . .." feature is just awesome; that was my favorite part of AG, and it's something I sorely miss.
Hell, there are still addicts to this day playing Doom and all kinds of classics.
This is actually the problem they're seeking to address: people who are playing "the classics," which they either already own or can get for little to no money, as opposed to going out and buying the "new k3wl3r version!" that companies are churning out. Basically, the argument is that without innovation in games, we'll end up with just variations of the exact same thing over and over and over again, until every possibility for the established genre are exaughsted, and there's just no incentive to buy any more new games. And if no one is buying new games, then the industry isn't making any money. And if the industry isn't making any money, no one will be making games.
The problem is that games have reached a point where for a large number of people (read: most casual gamers), there's just no incentive to upgrade; they've already got everything they want out of the current or previous generations, so why keep upgrading?
As I understood it, it doesn't; basically the gif file is actually an exe exploiting the joys of hidden file extensions. Thus, its name would properly be img1big.gif.exe.
I for one am desperately hoping for subbed, primarily due to the fact that the original contained one of the most glaring brain farts in translation in the dub to which I have ever born witness: they mistranslated the bible verse that the Puppet Master says (the "through the glass darkly" bit). That alone completly killed the movie for me when I saw it dubbed after having watched the sub (which translated it correctly). Note that both of these were from the *official* version you'll find on your DVD.
ut a cop that just sees me in a store, I don't think he should be able to ask my ID on "suspicion that I will commit theft in that store".
It's worth pointing out that this decision assumes that the Terry stop during which the officer makes the information request be a valid one. That is, the officer must have a reasonable suspicion that the person in question is related to a crime which has *ALREADY* been committed; they can't just stop you on suspicion that maybe you might do something in the future, but they *CAN* stop you if they think you're connected to a crime which they are investigating. Thus the cop in your example would *NOT* be able to request your ID simply because you're in a store (also, under the law in question, you'd only have to tell him your name, not give him your license, regardless of how the cop's request was phrased).
It's also worth pointing out that this case doesn't establish that an officer can arrest you for refusing a request, but that laws which allow him to do so are not unconstitutional. Which is to say, it's still not illegal if it already wasn't illegal, and it's still illegal if it was already illegal, in the state you live in.
I was going to reply to this, but I don't have my SCIWE (Slashdot certified insightful writing engineer) certification.
If there's one thing I've learned from years of reading papers (academic and documentational) and such it's that this is an oxymoron if I've ever read one. (Disclaimer: I'm an engineer too, so any posts pointing out flaws with this sentence will only serve to further illustrate my point ^_^)
Simple: One of the nice things about our current system is that any person can ask to observe the process by which the votes are actually counted, so that people can catch anyone who appears to be falsifying their records. In fact, this is done every year by at least a few people, which is why we can trust that the vote counters are doing their jobs correctly.
As far as "replacing the ballot box" goes, this is INCREDIBLY difficult, as there are rarely fewer than three people involved in securing and guarding the box, and this includes people who have been specifically certified to ensure the security of the box. As a result, it would be VERY difficult to replace the ballot box without drawing an undue amount of suspicion.
Essentially, the security of the current voting system is based on the number of eyes that can observe the process. The response of the current system to "how do we know you're not changing my vote?" is "come and watch us to make sure we don't." Compare this to the Diebold machines, which hide your ballots away on the PRIVATE servers of a PRIVATE company which is a known advocate, supporter, and donator to one of the political parties, whose president has actually promised to help "deliver Ohio's electoral votes" to his candidate of choice, and whose response to the question of "how do we know you're not changing the votes?" is "trust us." Now do you see why people are more than a little dubious of the current electronic voting system? That's leaving off entirely the discussion about how much easier it would be to introduce code to simply change the votes into the machines themselves than it would be to prepare an entirely new box full of properly labelled new votes.
This is all marketing. Where does having the fastest processor really matter? Gamers, maybe, but what gamers buy a Mac with an IBM chip to play games?
Pick me! Pick me! Believe it or not, I buy a new mac based on whether or not my old one can play the games I want it to. Do I wait longer and have less selection? Yes. Do I particularly regret it? Not so much. Would I buy a G5 to play games on? HELL yeah. For now, I'll just have to live with my nice, new iBook, though ^_^ (bought primarily because I desparately wanted a laptop, but also nice because it can play stuff my elderly desktop can't)
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I knew the source, but I will point you to the best definition of "Conflict of Interests" I've ever seen:
Now really, why is the security issues in service pack 2 so blown up, all earlier service packs has had security issues too??
Please RT2ndFA. It's actually a fairly insightful look at exactly WHY people have been looking so much more carefully at SP2 than at previous ones. The conclusion is that, basically, people want to know if MS is actually serious about their whole "security is the #1 priority, and we're working very hard to make sure everything is as safe as possible."
Telling people to just take at face value MS's claims of security is like telling a battered woman that she should trust her abusive husband because just because he said he's different now. Skepticism is warranted due to past behaviour.
suggesting that you turn off DHCP when 51% of us use broadband?
As I recall, that was the stat for US broadband. Unless there's been a hostile takeover I'm unaware of, the Reg is a UK rag. This can be confirmed by simply looking at the URL. As our neighbors are fond of reminding us, there really is something outside of our own country other than pretty landmarks, terrorists, and an empty wasteland.
There is no more relationship between these plants and hydrogen than there is between any other power source and hydrogen
TFA indicates that, due to the high temperature at which this operates, they can achieve very efficient extraction of hydrogen. While any other power generation method could, in fact, be used to do likewise, the implication is that it's apparently easier to get from these types of hot-burning plants.
Now, I am not a power-plant designer, but as I understand it, usually the goal of these things is to get some kind of gas really excited, then use it to drive a turbine, which generates the power. That is, Thermal energy -> Kinetic Energy -> Mechanical Energy -> Electricity. None of these steps are 100% efficient, as indicated by the large amount of very hot water which needs to be disposed of from most conventional nuke plants. So, the impression that I got from the article was that some of that "waste heat" could be applied to the process of extracting hydrogen for fuel cells.
Of course, I've likely made a factual/reading error here, but that was the impression that I got.
I wonder, though, if these findings are duplicated with written Oriental languages.
Depends on whether you're talking character or alphabet based reading. Character based reading uses different parts of the brain, so I imagine that the way you read them is a bit different (it would be interesting, for instance, to know whether or not the brain uses the stroke order used in writing them to understand them). Alphabet versions of Asian languages (such as hiragana or katakana) would likely give us fairly similar results.
What caught my eye was the finding that we're better at retaining letters from prounocable nonsense; I wonder what kinds of results you'd get from a phoenetic alphabet like hiragana, since EVERY construction is automatically pronouncable? That might mean that the "word processing" center of the brain of phoenetic letter readers would have to work differently.
Fascinating stuff; this is why cognitive psych is cool.
A Cesium clock operates by exposing the Cesium-133 isotope to microwaves and measuring the frequency of the emitted spectral line.
Cesium? Note to self: Do not buy underwater version ^_^;;
Aleph sub naught:1?
SCO showing copyrighted code in Linux: 50,000:1
<Grand Moff> 50000:1? I think you overestimate their chances.</Grand Moff>
And, as you can imagine, I'll form the head.
And I'm NUTS!!
Had to be done.
I hate to be a stickler, but there's nothing you could put after "two cat's" that would make sense. Posessive plural gets the apostrophe after the "s".
So you have two cats'... pajamas, perhaps?
Hmm . . . IANAGN, but that would read to me like "I have the ears of two cats" rather than "I have two ears of a cat." It reads as though the number of animals is plural rather than the number of ears, which I assume to have been the original intent.
In retrospect, I suppose IAAGN.
Well, given that most of the slim info released so far indicates that it will be using the Aurora Toolset (inferred from the fact that it's been delivered to Obsidian), I'd guess it'll at least be *possible* for them to move ahead with still having nice mod creation tools. One would certainly hope that that'll be the case; after all, why would you license out a sequel to a game whose big draw was "Make your own content!" and then not allow people to make their own content?
Course, then I just have to look at Deus Ex 2, where all the cool things that made Deus Ex so neat were stripped out to appease the allmighty FPS gods to answer my own question.
Still, given that Obsidian is mostly old Black Isle people, I do have to confess that I'm looking forward to it; Torment was more than good enough to give them the benefit of the doubt as regards the single player game, and I recall there being an awful lot of Fallout mods back in the day . . . Let's just hope it's cross platform, so as not to once again crush my fragile hopes and dreams.
However, even in the best case, I'd still think Dragon Age will be the best place to get mod creation tools; after all, Bioware has had how long now to listen to users gripe about the things that were wrong with the old one? One hopes they actually bother to incorporate them. And that they actually release the goddamn mac toolset this time.
But I'm not bitter. I swear.
-Z
they are manually priced by some 15 year old kid that hate's his job.
Having been that kid that hates his job, I'll say amen to that. The words "canned food isle duty" still send a chill down my spine. *shudder*
Though really, you don't know the true meaning of the word "hate" until you hear the two words every stock boy dreads: "Price Change." The night they had me do price changes on every tin of tea we carried (and we're talking *giant* grocery store, here) was the night I decided that I had made enough money that summer ^_^
it is intellectually dishonest of the Slashdot crowd to intentionally ignore the primary purpose of these chips.
Huh? Maybe I've just been hanging out with the wrong crowd, but no one I know has used their modded consoles for piracy; pretty much they've been modding them to play wacky japanese imports (in retrospect, maybe that means I've been hanging out with the *right* crowd ^_^). Maybe I'm just naive, but I wasn't under the impression that pirated copies of these games were all that widespread, at least here in the US. It wasn't even an advertised feature of the chips when I had my PS1 modded; it was pretty much all about the imports (in fact, the shop that did it was actually where I *bought* my imports-and no, they weren't pirated; they were factory sealed originals).
Proof by analogy, I realize, but then, proof by analogy is more legitimate than proof by hysteria, which is the kind of argument presented by most opponents of cool tech.
One salient point I think you've missed here is that while a computer is (theoretically) a general purpose machine, capable of any function that can be written for it, a *program* is essentially a machine designed for a very specific purpose or set of purposes. That's why we call them *Applications*. They are designed to allow the general machine to work for a specific task. Now, often a given application will be able to perform a specific task in a variety of ways, or have a number of variations on a theme that it can accomplish. What is being posited, and what is the common sense solution arrived at by decades of research into Human Factors and Usability, is that it's often trivial to arrive at the default actions a user wishes to perform, as well as the default options for those actions, simply by consulting a sufficiently large group of potential users as a step in the design process. That way, it becomes trivial to see what the potential tasks a user will be performing most often are, and, as a result, what tasks should be made as trivially easy to perform as humanly possible. A bad choice in default for a task that a user will need to perform 100s of times per day can actually add a huge amount of wasteful overhead to that task, as the user is forced to reset the option every time the task is performed.
Contrary to popular belief, Usability in interface design is not achieved by voodoo. It is achieved by actually taking the time early in the process to research what people want to use the software for, and designing it accordingly.
Both are excellent reading for those interested in the art (science?) of good UI/usability design.
Answer: B (Science).
There is a great deal of research that has gone into the development of Usable systems; in fact, there is an entire field of Cognitive Psychology devoted to it called "human factors." This science has lead to a lot of fairly simple techniques for determining how to make an interface usable, none of which addresses ephemeral "look and feel" issues, but rather the cold, hard facts of human cognition.
The most useful technique to come from the application of Human Factors to software interface design that I've seen is called GOMS modelling, which you can use to see how usable an interface is (as a function of how much time your user will waste getting it to work for their most likely tasks) before you have even built it. It's a good way of making sure your defaults are actually set to what real people will want their defaults set to. I highly recommend that anyone with any interest whatsoever in designing these kinds of things take a gander at this stuff; it can DRASTICALLY improve an interface by letting you cut the fat. It does, however, involve actually, y'know, TALKING to some potential users to find out what they want the software to do, though.
I RTFA expecting to come out of it thinking "gee, brand dilution like this usually means the beginning of the end for companies." Instead, I was surprised to end up thinking what a neat idea this could be, if implemented correctly.
I think I'm probably preaching to the choir here when I say that there are lots of songs out there that I like but so very few full albums that I want to own. Thus, the joy that is P2P and iTMS; combined with a cd burner, all the music I listen to in my car these days is mixed the way I want it to be, and in ways you'll never find on a commercial mix (try finding a CD with Nightwish, E Nomine, and L'Arc en~Ciel on it ^_^). So the idea of a mix cd with actual labelling and even liner notes is naturally fairly appealing. Simply put, it passes the "I'd give it a try" test.
Three major questions that aren't answered in the article, though, which would be major deciding factors for me:
Nevertheless, I think this is a fairly neat idea; the current distribution models for music have left a lot of great stuff behind, so going back to a system where people can get recommendations and such is pretty cool. And the inclusion of the Audiogalaxy-esque "you might also like . . ." feature is just awesome; that was my favorite part of AG, and it's something I sorely miss.
Now, if it were a Konami boss, it would be Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START.
Best. Code. Ever.
Hell, there are still addicts to this day playing Doom and all kinds of classics.
This is actually the problem they're seeking to address: people who are playing "the classics," which they either already own or can get for little to no money, as opposed to going out and buying the "new k3wl3r version!" that companies are churning out. Basically, the argument is that without innovation in games, we'll end up with just variations of the exact same thing over and over and over again, until every possibility for the established genre are exaughsted, and there's just no incentive to buy any more new games. And if no one is buying new games, then the industry isn't making any money. And if the industry isn't making any money, no one will be making games.
The problem is that games have reached a point where for a large number of people (read: most casual gamers), there's just no incentive to upgrade; they've already got everything they want out of the current or previous generations, so why keep upgrading?
As I understood it, it doesn't; basically the gif file is actually an exe exploiting the joys of hidden file extensions. Thus, its name would properly be img1big.gif.exe.
I for one am desperately hoping for subbed, primarily due to the fact that the original contained one of the most glaring brain farts in translation in the dub to which I have ever born witness: they mistranslated the bible verse that the Puppet Master says (the "through the glass darkly" bit). That alone completly killed the movie for me when I saw it dubbed after having watched the sub (which translated it correctly). Note that both of these were from the *official* version you'll find on your DVD.
ut a cop that just sees me in a store, I don't think he should be able to ask my ID on "suspicion that I will commit theft in that store".
It's worth pointing out that this decision assumes that the Terry stop during which the officer makes the information request be a valid one. That is, the officer must have a reasonable suspicion that the person in question is related to a crime which has *ALREADY* been committed; they can't just stop you on suspicion that maybe you might do something in the future, but they *CAN* stop you if they think you're connected to a crime which they are investigating. Thus the cop in your example would *NOT* be able to request your ID simply because you're in a store (also, under the law in question, you'd only have to tell him your name, not give him your license, regardless of how the cop's request was phrased).
It's also worth pointing out that this case doesn't establish that an officer can arrest you for refusing a request, but that laws which allow him to do so are not unconstitutional. Which is to say, it's still not illegal if it already wasn't illegal, and it's still illegal if it was already illegal, in the state you live in.
I was going to reply to this, but I don't have my SCIWE (Slashdot certified insightful writing engineer) certification.
If there's one thing I've learned from years of reading papers (academic and documentational) and such it's that this is an oxymoron if I've ever read one. (Disclaimer: I'm an engineer too, so any posts pointing out flaws with this sentence will only serve to further illustrate my point ^_^)
Taco: "Caller? Are you sane? Are you a sane person?"
Caller: "Absolutely, Taco. KILLER BEES!!!"
Note: If you don't get it, you obviously haven't played enough GTA3 ^_^
Simple: One of the nice things about our current system is that any person can ask to observe the process by which the votes are actually counted, so that people can catch anyone who appears to be falsifying their records. In fact, this is done every year by at least a few people, which is why we can trust that the vote counters are doing their jobs correctly.
As far as "replacing the ballot box" goes, this is INCREDIBLY difficult, as there are rarely fewer than three people involved in securing and guarding the box, and this includes people who have been specifically certified to ensure the security of the box. As a result, it would be VERY difficult to replace the ballot box without drawing an undue amount of suspicion.
Essentially, the security of the current voting system is based on the number of eyes that can observe the process. The response of the current system to "how do we know you're not changing my vote?" is "come and watch us to make sure we don't." Compare this to the Diebold machines, which hide your ballots away on the PRIVATE servers of a PRIVATE company which is a known advocate, supporter, and donator to one of the political parties, whose president has actually promised to help "deliver Ohio's electoral votes" to his candidate of choice, and whose response to the question of "how do we know you're not changing the votes?" is "trust us." Now do you see why people are more than a little dubious of the current electronic voting system? That's leaving off entirely the discussion about how much easier it would be to introduce code to simply change the votes into the machines themselves than it would be to prepare an entirely new box full of properly labelled new votes.
This is all marketing. Where does having the fastest processor really matter? Gamers, maybe, but what gamers buy a Mac with an IBM chip to play games?
Pick me! Pick me! Believe it or not, I buy a new mac based on whether or not my old one can play the games I want it to. Do I wait longer and have less selection? Yes. Do I particularly regret it? Not so much. Would I buy a G5 to play games on? HELL yeah. For now, I'll just have to live with my nice, new iBook, though ^_^ (bought primarily because I desparately wanted a laptop, but also nice because it can play stuff my elderly desktop can't)