I can't help but to remember a line in Marry Poppins:
"We're clearly soldiers in pettycoats, and dauntless crusaders for women to vote! Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."
To paraphrase:
Though a each member of the Tea Party may be intelligent, I can only conclude that as a group they're rather stupid.
By the way, I think the correct term for a tea party member is now "Tea Party Patriot".
Here is an amusing portion of the transcript from MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olberman":
David Shuster was the guest host and no I'm not making this up (I giggle like a first-grader every time I read this):
SHUSTER: For most Americans, Wednesday, April 15th will be Tax Day. But in our fourth story tonight: It's going to be teabagging day for the right-wing and they're going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals.
They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spendingâ"spending they did not oppose when they were under presidents Bush and Reagan. They oppose Mr. Obama's tax ratesâ"which will be lower for most of themâ"and they oppose the tax increases Mr. Obama is imposing on the rich, whose taxes will skyrocket to a rate about 10 percent less than it was under Reagan. That's teabagging in a nut shell.
Taking its inspiration from the Boston Tea Party when colonists tossed British tea into the sea because the tax in it had not been voted on by their own duly-elected representativesâ"that's exactly the opposite, of course, of today's taxes, known in some quarters as taxation with representation.
But as âoeNew York Timesâ columnist, Paul Krugman, points out today, this time, the tea bagging is not a spontaneous uprising. The people who came up with it are a familiar circle of Republicans, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, both of whom have firm support from right-wing financiers and lobbyists. As well as Washington prostitute patron, Senator David Vitter, who has issued statements in support of teabagging but is publicly tight-lipped.
Then there was the media, specifically the FOX News Channel, including Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. Both are looking forward to an up close and personal taste of teabagging themselves at events this Wednesday. But most amusing of all is Neil Cavuto, a member of the network's executive committee. Neil's online bio says he joined the network in July of 1996, three months before the FOX News Channel went on the air.
Cavuto, defending his network's proportion of teabagging said, quote, âoeWe are going to be right in middle of these teabaggers, because at FOX, we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March.
Can we roll that footage, the FOX News coverage of the Million Man March backing in October of '95?
Of course, the Million Man March occurred, as NewsHounds.org points out, almost a year before FOX News was on the air.
We can only speculate why widespread teabagging made Cavuto think of the Million Man March, unless he got them confused with Dick Armey. And in Cavutoâs defense, if you are planning simultaneous teabagging all around the country, you're going to need a Dick Armey.
He could become a ham radio operator and use his home base as an internet proxy server.
Too bad he wanted this for work, because it is against FCC regulation to use the amateur band for commercial uses. Besides, the latency would most likely be worse than satellite and the downlink speeds would be much slower.
Not to mention, being out in the middle of nowhere usually means being out of UHF+ range of the nearest packet station.
Weird thing and amusing thing was when Fox News marked the history occasion as a recreation of the original tea party at "The Alamo" and not in Boston...
should be:
Weird and amusing thing was when Fox News marked the historic occasion as a recreation of the original tea party at "The Alamo" and not in Boston...
Before you know it, you're having a rational conversation that you both can learn from.
You evidently never met these people in person. Unfortunately I have a relative or two who associates with them and I live in a region that's full of them...
They are there solely to derail and not to discuss. They are the puppets of Fox news who were gracious enough to not only organize the first public protest but also to supply the T-shirts.
Weird thing and amusing thing was when Fox News marked the history occasion as a recreation of the original tea party at "The Alamo" and not in Boston...
Please, a little civility. You're giving Bill named users a bad rep.
Too late... Gates and Clinton messed it up for the Bills.;)
Actually they tried to call themselves teabaggers after they sent bags of tea during their initial protest. Too bad someone explained to them that might not be the best name to call members of the tea party.
Besides it's not an insult... it's an observation.
This is a case of the insurer solely looking at the procedure code and not at the actual diagnosis. Your family physician has to associate a procedural code with a charge in order to be reimbursed for the test. The insurance industry looks at the procedural codes with the idea that if you were tested for a serious condition, the doctor may have felt that you have a predisposition for that serious condition. I think this practice is flawed in logic and morally wrong. A physician is less likely to perform a test on a patient if he/she feels that the patient may suffer some consequence from the test regardless of the outcome.
However in the submitter's case, the middle school shouldn't be sending any claims to the insurance company.
Regardless of how paranoid it may sound, it is still wise to ask how the information will be handled and do some research. Which is worse - Being ridiculed on slashdot for being paranoid, or being ignorant that something nefarious is happening to your children because you didn't ask?
Though the submitter may not suffer the same fate as you did ( I think the information being collected is "harmless" ), I have to agree with you that it is better to ask.
He's commenting on Slashdot, not writing a thesis...
Anyway, I googled to try to find some interesting surveys. Unfortunately, the only conclusion that I can come up with is that surveys are almost worthless. They're biased and seem to always support the views of the entity sponsoring the survey. Just searching for the UK survey mentioned by the GP, I found a survey sponsored by the music industry that shows even worse statistics on piracy and a survey from a group that calls themselves "The Leading Question" that state that CD sells are actually up and files sharing by teens are on the way down, which they base on a 1000 interviews from people aged 14-64... Why don't they ask a 1000 teenagers? Do they count file-sharers who counted in the older survey but are no longer a teenager but still file-share in the current survey? Why did they headline the teen statistics that seem to support their argument and gloss over the fact that the number of files-sharers in their survey population grew from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009.
So my question becomes, does the GP lack of references actually diminish his argument? I think not.
I'm not sure I understand the article's contention that Exchange support frees Apple users from Microsoft.
It doesn't. It frees Microsoft from the abomination that is Entourage...
What people don't seem to want to understand is that Microsoft is a software company. Sure they compete with Apple with the Windows OS, but they still want to develop products on the Mac Platform. Microsoft Office is the big money maker for Microsoft regardless of the OS it runs own.
The Microsoft/Apple relationship may have its moments, but what keeps them compatible is the fact that Apple prefers to stay within the confines of their hardware market leaving Microsoft the rest of the PC Compatible market to control...
# POP3 - you better hope that you you never get those "gallstone" emails that clog up your pipes (ie, your boss emails you the 100MB photo gallery from the company party - as a zipfile)
That's because mail client developers are lazy. I remember the "good old days" traveling for work and having to check the POP3 email server using a 56K modem. Luckily, I had Eudora which allowed me to retrieve a list of emails first and pick which ones I wanted to download. The capability is in the protocol, just nobody really took advantage of it. It is definitely a protocol past it's prime.
# IMAP - I have tried it at my company's system (tried using Thunderbird), and it kept giving me a weird "message not read" error on each sync. Could never get rid of it, even after doing traces and deleting suspect emails on the server
IMAP works great for me. The only gotcha is that you have to keep the main inbox pretty much empty for performance reasons. But I like being able to store my emails on the server and using my mail client to move mail to different folders on the server.
I use IMAP with exchange 2007 and have no issues with Thunderbird on my Linux workstation, Apple Mail on my Mac (I haven't upgraded yet), and Android Mail on my phone.
webmail - ok, on a non-IE browser, this is really weak, like worse than hotmail/yahoo kind of weak.
Microsoft did make improvements with exchange 2007. But before our office upgraded, I would have to agree 100% with you on this one.
The populace has been conditioned to side with the copyright lobby in believing the "copying is stealing" lie:
Copying IS stealing.
My point is that if the populace loses the ability to time-shift television, transfer a song they purchased on a CD to an MP3 player, or anything else we take for granted today simply because the industry believes that we all are sharing our files on the internet, then the populace will become less sympathetic to their cause and just stop caring about the fact that it is stealing.
Any legitimate claims they have about preventing piracy is pretty much becoming meaningless.
When will we reach the point where the rights of the consumer, out weighs the rights of the manufacture to treat all their customers like criminals?
MPIAA/RIAA is pretty much digging their own grave. Any chance copyright holders have in preserving their rights to market their work without fear of poaching, is quickly diminishing through draconian measures the MPIAA and RIAA are taking.
Once you lose the will of the general populace to protect your interests, you pretty much lost the battle...
I'm all for enforcing the current laws by going after blatant copyright violators who sell pirated CDs or DVDs on the streets. I'm even for them going after the people who distribute copyrighted material through p2p networks without the consent of the copyright holder. However when they start making it difficult for you to actually use what you paid for, then we have no choice but to seek out the street vendor or the p2p network. I'm not buying more equipment just so they can impose more restrictions on me.
Google's main page is their signature product in a way and its usefulness of design is self contained.
True, but they didn't originate the simple page. Lycos, Altavista, Excite, had similar pages during the early days. What set Google apart was that the other services jumped on the "Let's put annoying ads all over our home page" bandwagon, while Google decided to remain simple because that was what was drawing people away from the other sites.. no annoying ads.
I think their page does deserve some design trademark, because of their clever use of themes based on holidays and "on this day" knowledge.
But back to the point...
Scanning in every other page of the book is not like scanning the first 1/2 of the book. It is not complete enough to rip off the books author, but it is complete enough to see what is there and figure out if you could benefit from buying the book or acquiring it through other means (library).
Yes but it is complete enough to be above the amount that would be considered fair use, and Google is benefitting from increase traffic and revenue from advertising.
Google should have had an "opt-in" process, where they could get the authors and publishers to agree to have their works replicated on Google. However, Google would not have been able to develop a product/service that had content worthy to generate advertising revenue quick enough. To overcome this problem (with a clear profit motive), Google came up with an "opt-out" process where they would ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
Don't misunderstand me, I believe Google has the potential to offer a service that benefits the readers as well as the author/publishers. However, I believe they went about it the wrong way in order to quickly generate revenue and to lower the possibility of a another service having any competitive edge from having a larger library.
I would almost go as far to say that Google had unfair advantage in this arena since they used their fortune to develop a service despite any legal consequence. Whereas, a small upstart would have to develop a viable library of books to search through the tedious and time consuming means of asking for permission and coming up with financial agreement.
So point still remains that Google doesn't mind "gaming the legal system" for its own benefit, while at the same time take measures that protect themselves from having a similar thing done to them.
To violate their patent you would have to basically copy their page exactly (perhaps recolor it) and then be sued by them. books.google.com doesn't provide every page of a book. It is broken up so that you can get a good feel for the book before ordering one from amazon.
So you are saying that in order to be sued by Google, a person would have to replicate a single webpage from Google's vast network of webpages. However, Google is in the right since they only replicate a small portion of a book which consist of multiple complete pages of the book?
Sounds like the point I was making in my original post. Google defending itself in court for replicating other people's work, while at the same time taking measures to protect their own.
Google goes to a library and begins to scan every book they can get their hands on for the "Altruistic" reason of making the book available for a wider audience. This is without asking the author's permission, and to make things appear fair they make a scheme that authors have to follow to "opt-out". This is basically changing the enforcement of the current copyright law for Google's benefit.
While at the same time they are defending their right to copy the contents of a book without the author's permission in court, they patent their home page so other's can't copy it without Google's permission. Bizarre. Pot meet Kettle...
So do I, that is why I buy a Mac. They are very reliable machines.
When I have to build a workstation, I use high end parts. The only way I would able to get your $600 price point is to use some very questionable OEM parts. I've learned from experience that the money you saved on the inexpensive component is usually spent when it becomes the weakest link in your system as time takes its toll.
The price versus spec argument is questionable. Especially if you purposely pick out the cheapest parts you can find to make your point. In the professional arena, labor is your largest expense and the price difference between that cheap OEM part and a quality moderately priced part becomes insignificant. The same goes for computer systems, the price between that DIY computer and the comparably spec'ed Apple Mac becomes insignificant too. Now if I was a college student, I would tend toward the cheaper parts because I like to eat and I only need the computer long enough to find a job that allows me to buy something better.
Apple doesn't have an in between system. You have their all-in-one, but if you want to go past that, the next thing is a high end workstation.
You are absolutely right. Apple has avoided the "hobbyist" and Gamer market. I think this is a wise move for Apple, since that sector tends to be too volatile to be profitable.
I always recommend Gray Boxes or DIY systems with Windows for Gaming or with Linux for experimenters.
I also recommend Macs for the typical home user or the professional who needs a turnkey solution and are not locked into an OS choice by the tools of their trade.
For example, when I just need a workstation on my desk to do work, my 24" iMac works great. It works well with my rack of OEM linux machines and I have desktop software to do some office work with and OS X actually is a nice desktop environment to use. On the other end of the spectrum, I work with scientists that do some very heavy number crunching, and they are passionate about how much they love the Mac Pros. I personally love the Apple Laptops and they run all my operating systems very well.
These all or none arguments are very unproductive. I'm a veteran of the Atari versus Commodore holy war, so I'm old enough to see that the computer companies have changed but the argument hasn't. Just be happy with what you have, and don't worry about what someone else like to use. You really can't go wrong with whichever computing platform you choose, but you'll be happier if you pick the platform that makes what you want to do with it easier.
or $2,000+ if you don't have a mac and want to switch
Bullocks! Lauren is that you?
I just got my workstation refresh this year, and I had a choice of a Dell or an Apple. I wound up with an Apple iMac 24" with 4GB Ram and 650GB for around $1450. It was actually cheaper than the Dell that I was originally scheduled to get, and the Dell didn't even include a monitor. That price also included iWork '09 and now for $10 more I'll get my Snow Leopard upgrade which will allow me access to the Exchange 2007 server without having to use Safari to access my contacts and schedule through the web interface (Apple Mail 10.5 does work using IMAP).
The Apple replaced my Linux workstation. I still use Linux heavily in all my embedded programming, but the desktop applications available for Linux has a lot of room for improvement. Not to mention, the forced upgrade to Exchange 2007 by our IT department has made my life with Linux very difficult lately.
The Apple upgrade allows me to have all the nice desktop software so I can communicate with management. Especially the ability to print nice documents! Sure the scientists here use LaTeX, but the managers use Word and I could never get OpenOffice to look right on the Xerox WorkCentres that we use here... I know it can't be CUPS because it works fine with OS X, I wonder what the problem could be (As I stare directly at my old OpenOffice suite)?
Anyway back to my original point, this $2000+ for a Mac nonsense is getting ridiculous and is just plain FUD. Sure I paid that much for my 15" MacBook Pro 3 years ago but it was around the same price as the Sony Vaio that I replaced after only 2 years of use. My daughter just bought the new 15" MacBook Pro for College and she only paid around $1700 for it and it came with a free iPod myTouch.
Since we are talking about number values meant for human consumption, the selection of SI versus IEC units is arbitrary. Since most human beings tend to think in powers of 10, the SI units could be thought of as the more appropriate for the task.
Now technically, when it comes to media, the actual number of storage available doesn't necessarily need to be a power of 2. Yes the maximum capacity for a given random access media is limited by the largest value that can be addressed which is a power of two. However, the actual number of data words or address locations don't necessarily need to be. This is why we are able to have data structures of any length (eg char a[10];).
Slashdot Mirror
I can't help but to remember a line in Marry Poppins:
"We're clearly soldiers in pettycoats, and dauntless crusaders for women to vote! Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."
To paraphrase:
Though a each member of the Tea Party may be intelligent, I can only conclude that as a group they're rather stupid.
By the way, I think the correct term for a tea party member is now "Tea Party Patriot".
Here is an amusing portion of the transcript from MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olberman":
David Shuster was the guest host and no I'm not making this up (I giggle like a first-grader every time I read this):
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30210576/#storyContinued
Too bad he wanted this for work, because it is against FCC regulation to use the amateur band for commercial uses. Besides, the latency would most likely be worse than satellite and the downlink speeds would be much slower.
Not to mention, being out in the middle of nowhere usually means being out of UHF+ range of the nearest packet station.
should be:
Weird and amusing thing was when Fox News marked the historic occasion as a recreation of the original tea party at "The Alamo" and not in Boston...
Sheez... Time for bed.
You evidently never met these people in person. Unfortunately I have a relative or two who associates with them and I live in a region that's full of them...
They are there solely to derail and not to discuss. They are the puppets of Fox news who were gracious enough to not only organize the first public protest but also to supply the T-shirts.
Weird thing and amusing thing was when Fox News marked the history occasion as a recreation of the original tea party at "The Alamo" and not in Boston...
Too late... Gates and Clinton messed it up for the Bills. ;)
Actually they tried to call themselves teabaggers after they sent bags of tea during their initial protest. Too bad someone explained to them that might not be the best name to call members of the tea party.
Besides it's not an insult... it's an observation.
Depends how effective the teabaggers.. I mean tea party folks are at derailing honest debate by yelling falsehoods and showing racists posters.
This is a case of the insurer solely looking at the procedure code and not at the actual diagnosis. Your family physician has to associate a procedural code with a charge in order to be reimbursed for the test. The insurance industry looks at the procedural codes with the idea that if you were tested for a serious condition, the doctor may have felt that you have a predisposition for that serious condition. I think this practice is flawed in logic and morally wrong. A physician is less likely to perform a test on a patient if he/she feels that the patient may suffer some consequence from the test regardless of the outcome.
However in the submitter's case, the middle school shouldn't be sending any claims to the insurance company.
Regardless of how paranoid it may sound, it is still wise to ask how the information will be handled and do some research. Which is worse - Being ridiculed on slashdot for being paranoid, or being ignorant that something nefarious is happening to your children because you didn't ask?
Though the submitter may not suffer the same fate as you did ( I think the information being collected is "harmless" ), I have to agree with you that it is better to ask.
But will it be covered by insurance reform legislation? If so, I could support this kind of reform!
Rule #1: No one talks about that movie...
He's commenting on Slashdot, not writing a thesis...
Anyway, I googled to try to find some interesting surveys. Unfortunately, the only conclusion that I can come up with is that surveys are almost worthless. They're biased and seem to always support the views of the entity sponsoring the survey. Just searching for the UK survey mentioned by the GP, I found a survey sponsored by the music industry that shows even worse statistics on piracy and a survey from a group that calls themselves "The Leading Question" that state that CD sells are actually up and files sharing by teens are on the way down, which they base on a 1000 interviews from people aged 14-64... Why don't they ask a 1000 teenagers? Do they count file-sharers who counted in the older survey but are no longer a teenager but still file-share in the current survey? Why did they headline the teen statistics that seem to support their argument and gloss over the fact that the number of files-sharers in their survey population grew from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009.
So my question becomes, does the GP lack of references actually diminish his argument? I think not.
It doesn't. It frees Microsoft from the abomination that is Entourage...
What people don't seem to want to understand is that Microsoft is a software company. Sure they compete with Apple with the Windows OS, but they still want to develop products on the Mac Platform. Microsoft Office is the big money maker for Microsoft regardless of the OS it runs own.
The Microsoft/Apple relationship may have its moments, but what keeps them compatible is the fact that Apple prefers to stay within the confines of their hardware market leaving Microsoft the rest of the PC Compatible market to control...
That's because mail client developers are lazy. I remember the "good old days" traveling for work and having to check the POP3 email server using a 56K modem. Luckily, I had Eudora which allowed me to retrieve a list of emails first and pick which ones I wanted to download. The capability is in the protocol, just nobody really took advantage of it. It is definitely a protocol past it's prime.
IMAP works great for me. The only gotcha is that you have to keep the main inbox pretty much empty for performance reasons. But I like being able to store my emails on the server and using my mail client to move mail to different folders on the server.
I use IMAP with exchange 2007 and have no issues with Thunderbird on my Linux workstation, Apple Mail on my Mac (I haven't upgraded yet), and Android Mail on my phone.
Microsoft did make improvements with exchange 2007. But before our office upgraded, I would have to agree 100% with you on this one.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5? That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Let me clarify my previous post.
Copying for your own personal use is NOT stealing. Distributing copies is stealing.
Copying IS stealing.
My point is that if the populace loses the ability to time-shift television, transfer a song they purchased on a CD to an MP3 player, or anything else we take for granted today simply because the industry believes that we all are sharing our files on the internet, then the populace will become less sympathetic to their cause and just stop caring about the fact that it is stealing.
Any legitimate claims they have about preventing piracy is pretty much becoming meaningless.
When will we reach the point where the rights of the consumer, out weighs the rights of the manufacture to treat all their customers like criminals?
MPIAA/RIAA is pretty much digging their own grave. Any chance copyright holders have in preserving their rights to market their work without fear of poaching, is quickly diminishing through draconian measures the MPIAA and RIAA are taking.
Once you lose the will of the general populace to protect your interests, you pretty much lost the battle...
I'm all for enforcing the current laws by going after blatant copyright violators who sell pirated CDs or DVDs on the streets. I'm even for them going after the people who distribute copyrighted material through p2p networks without the consent of the copyright holder. However when they start making it difficult for you to actually use what you paid for, then we have no choice but to seek out the street vendor or the p2p network. I'm not buying more equipment just so they can impose more restrictions on me.
True, but they didn't originate the simple page. Lycos, Altavista, Excite, had similar pages during the early days. What set Google apart was that the other services jumped on the "Let's put annoying ads all over our home page" bandwagon, while Google decided to remain simple because that was what was drawing people away from the other sites.. no annoying ads.
I think their page does deserve some design trademark, because of their clever use of themes based on holidays and "on this day" knowledge.
But back to the point...
Yes but it is complete enough to be above the amount that would be considered fair use, and Google is benefitting from increase traffic and revenue from advertising.
Google should have had an "opt-in" process, where they could get the authors and publishers to agree to have their works replicated on Google. However, Google would not have been able to develop a product/service that had content worthy to generate advertising revenue quick enough. To overcome this problem (with a clear profit motive), Google came up with an "opt-out" process where they would ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
Don't misunderstand me, I believe Google has the potential to offer a service that benefits the readers as well as the author/publishers. However, I believe they went about it the wrong way in order to quickly generate revenue and to lower the possibility of a another service having any competitive edge from having a larger library.
I would almost go as far to say that Google had unfair advantage in this arena since they used their fortune to develop a service despite any legal consequence. Whereas, a small upstart would have to develop a viable library of books to search through the tedious and time consuming means of asking for permission and coming up with financial agreement.
So point still remains that Google doesn't mind "gaming the legal system" for its own benefit, while at the same time take measures that protect themselves from having a similar thing done to them.
Well we are all entitled to our opinions..
So you are saying that in order to be sued by Google, a person would have to replicate a single webpage from Google's vast network of webpages. However, Google is in the right since they only replicate a small portion of a book which consist of multiple complete pages of the book?
Sounds like the point I was making in my original post. Google defending itself in court for replicating other people's work, while at the same time taking measures to protect their own.
I think all webmasters who made early webpages with HTML 1.0 could claim prior art.
Well all the early webmasters except the ones that place those annoying GIF animations on their pages... They deserve nothing ;).
Let me get this straight.
Google goes to a library and begins to scan every book they can get their hands on for the "Altruistic" reason of making the book available for a wider audience. This is without asking the author's permission, and to make things appear fair they make a scheme that authors have to follow to "opt-out". This is basically changing the enforcement of the current copyright law for Google's benefit.
While at the same time they are defending their right to copy the contents of a book without the author's permission in court, they patent their home page so other's can't copy it without Google's permission. Bizarre. Pot meet Kettle...
So do I, that is why I buy a Mac. They are very reliable machines.
When I have to build a workstation, I use high end parts. The only way I would able to get your $600 price point is to use some very questionable OEM parts. I've learned from experience that the money you saved on the inexpensive component is usually spent when it becomes the weakest link in your system as time takes its toll.
The price versus spec argument is questionable. Especially if you purposely pick out the cheapest parts you can find to make your point. In the professional arena, labor is your largest expense and the price difference between that cheap OEM part and a quality moderately priced part becomes insignificant. The same goes for computer systems, the price between that DIY computer and the comparably spec'ed Apple Mac becomes insignificant too. Now if I was a college student, I would tend toward the cheaper parts because I like to eat and I only need the computer long enough to find a job that allows me to buy something better.
You are absolutely right. Apple has avoided the "hobbyist" and Gamer market. I think this is a wise move for Apple, since that sector tends to be too volatile to be profitable.
I always recommend Gray Boxes or DIY systems with Windows for Gaming or with Linux for experimenters.
I also recommend Macs for the typical home user or the professional who needs a turnkey solution and are not locked into an OS choice by the tools of their trade.
For example, when I just need a workstation on my desk to do work, my 24" iMac works great. It works well with my rack of OEM linux machines and I have desktop software to do some office work with and OS X actually is a nice desktop environment to use. On the other end of the spectrum, I work with scientists that do some very heavy number crunching, and they are passionate about how much they love the Mac Pros. I personally love the Apple Laptops and they run all my operating systems very well.
These all or none arguments are very unproductive. I'm a veteran of the Atari versus Commodore holy war, so I'm old enough to see that the computer companies have changed but the argument hasn't. Just be happy with what you have, and don't worry about what someone else like to use. You really can't go wrong with whichever computing platform you choose, but you'll be happier if you pick the platform that makes what you want to do with it easier.
Bullocks! Lauren is that you?
I just got my workstation refresh this year, and I had a choice of a Dell or an Apple. I wound up with an Apple iMac 24" with 4GB Ram and 650GB for around $1450. It was actually cheaper than the Dell that I was originally scheduled to get, and the Dell didn't even include a monitor. That price also included iWork '09 and now for $10 more I'll get my Snow Leopard upgrade which will allow me access to the Exchange 2007 server without having to use Safari to access my contacts and schedule through the web interface (Apple Mail 10.5 does work using IMAP).
The Apple replaced my Linux workstation. I still use Linux heavily in all my embedded programming, but the desktop applications available for Linux has a lot of room for improvement. Not to mention, the forced upgrade to Exchange 2007 by our IT department has made my life with Linux very difficult lately.
The Apple upgrade allows me to have all the nice desktop software so I can communicate with management. Especially the ability to print nice documents! Sure the scientists here use LaTeX, but the managers use Word and I could never get OpenOffice to look right on the Xerox WorkCentres that we use here... I know it can't be CUPS because it works fine with OS X, I wonder what the problem could be (As I stare directly at my old OpenOffice suite)?
Anyway back to my original point, this $2000+ for a Mac nonsense is getting ridiculous and is just plain FUD. Sure I paid that much for my 15" MacBook Pro 3 years ago but it was around the same price as the Sony Vaio that I replaced after only 2 years of use. My daughter just bought the new 15" MacBook Pro for College and she only paid around $1700 for it and it came with a free iPod myTouch.
Well...
Since we are talking about number values meant for human consumption, the selection of SI versus IEC units is arbitrary. Since most human beings tend to think in powers of 10, the SI units could be thought of as the more appropriate for the task.
Now technically, when it comes to media, the actual number of storage available doesn't necessarily need to be a power of 2. Yes the maximum capacity for a given random access media is limited by the largest value that can be addressed which is a power of two. However, the actual number of data words or address locations don't necessarily need to be. This is why we are able to have data structures of any length (eg char a[10];).