We obviously have different banking systems, because if my first transaction either clears out or overdraws my account, the second will go through and simply overdraw.
The potential problem with a credit card transaction that's messed up in the same way is you may not realize it until the end of the month. For me it would be less of a hassle to fix the situation the day of then worry about contacting the store and bank days, if not weeks, after it happens.
Also, if your non-credit card still runs on the credit card system (as all my atm/check cards do), the store has the ability (and obligation) to credit your account for mixed up transactions on the spot. In that case, it really doesn't matter if you have a credit card or not.
If that's your only gripe with $20s, just go to a gas station or convenience store and get change. Every laundry I've ever been to is always close to one and they're usually open very late (if not all night).
Because of parking where I work (quarter an hour at the meters), I find it's a good idea to get a roll or two of quarters at a bank every week or two. Given the fact that I'll often times get a comment like "laundry day today?" or "time to fill up the meter, eh?" it's not that uncommon.
I find $20s terribly useful compared to other denominations. Taking someone to a movie, picking up some alcohol, putting gas in my tank, or just grabbing some extra groceries are all 20 dollar bill jobs.
*sigh*. Unless I need to fill my tank up. Goddamn gas prices...
I do remember when a lot of the ATMs in my area went in $5 denominations, but all eventually went to $20s. Part of it may be related to the surcharges that some people get; who's going to withdraw $5 or $10 when they get charged $1.50?
I honestly think the average person takes out even more than $20 at a time. The Wells-Fargo ATMs even have an option on the main screen called "Quick $40" that withdraws 40 dollars directly from your checking account (nice if you fuck up the number of zeros you're typing and try to withdraw $400 like I've done before).
*shrug*. It probably comes down to cost in the eyes of the bank; something about a machine that only handles 20s has got to be cheaper than an alternative.
First off, what bank issued you your debit card? Reputable financial institutions take fraud seriously, so it's surprising they'd 'stone-wall' you.
Second, what would you expect any bank to do in this situation? The vendor (whose obligation - not necessarily the bank's - is to make sure they're charging the right customer) credited you back the money. Aside from the headache of having an extra charge on your account for a few days, you're not ultimately down any money.
Every credit/debit/check card I've ever owned had purchases on them traced exactly the same way. Considering most debit cards work on credit card systems, they reference the places I used them at in the same fashion. Heck, even checks are starting to show up with more information than just the check number, and many banks (even smaller local ones) give you online access to your accounts regardless if you have a credit card through them.
Every place I've ever used a debit/check/credit card the cashier only rings up the total once; when the items are being scanned or typed in. If you're not observant enough to notice a total during a transaction, there's definitely a problem.
Besides, if you find a cashier that needs to manually type in the amount to be charged to your card (after the total is rung up) and they make a mistake, one of a few things will happen: the cashier will notice the price discrepancy ($200 vs $20 for a DVD, $1000 vs $100 for groceries, etc); you will notice the price discrepancy at that time; you will notice the price discrepancy hours or days later when you check your account. In the worst case where you don't notice until you've either overdrawn or seen a huge charge in your account, you'll simply have to go through the hassel of contacting the store, you bank, and possibly other places (say, if you overdrew and other charges tried to go through). A headache for sure, but not necessarily any different than an incorrect charge on a credit card (which might be worse if you don't notice until potentially weeks later).
A little bit of discretion on the consumer's part is needed. Check both the total of a purchase as it's being rung up *and* check the charge receipt. Sure, it's not as easy as stuffing the receipts in your back pocket and forgetting about them, but placing all the blame on institutions and cashiers because you're too afraid to use check cards is a little silly, don't you think?
I'd recommend looking into the FX-51/FX-53 chips by AMD instead of the other 64bit ones. I had heard that the non FX chips didn't perform as well as one would expect, whereas a friend of mine who got an FX-51 based machine has amazing power and speed.
Given that I've never used any of those 64bit processors (aside from my friend's FX-51), I could be wrong, but it might be worth checking out.
Oh, and if you don't want to go SATA, I just picked up two Seagate 200GB drives (7200rpm w/ 8MB cache) for $107 each; not bad deal at all. Check pricewatch.com's listings.
The system specs for Doom3 aren't ancient. They were pretty standard two and a half years ago when I built my machine.
Two years ago I got an Athlon 1.4GHz with 512MB of ram. This was not top of the line, but was certainly above mid-range. So you're correct in saying these required specs were 'standard' then, but Doom 3 is coming out now, not two and a half years ago. Considering gaming (especially of the Doom variety) is a bit of a niche market, it's fair for developers to target mid to high range systems when writing their games.
As a lot of geeks know, the life of a gaming machine is significantly shorter than that of a home PC; often times it's about two years long. Some things last longer than others, but if you haven't upgraded your machine with anything other than RAM in over two years, you can't expect to play today's newest games extremely well.
Doom 3 or Half Life 2 are not for average crowd who's only played The Sims. They're gamers' games, and given their capability, it's not surprising the amount of horsepower they're require.
It's like trying to play a modern flight sim at 320x240. The framerate might be OK, but your instruments would be unuseable, and because the designers assumed the instruments would be useable, it may not be possible to play it.
Hopefully the game designer would've tested all video modes they make available prior to releasing the game. *Never* have I found a game where a resolution was so low it wasn't possible to play. If one existed, the designers simply didn't allow that as an option.
Slightly offtopic, but 10 - 15fps in MS Flight Simulator is considered acceptable, primarily because it's so slow-paced. Heh, and us gamers complain when our FPS dips below 30 frames/sec.
In this day and age, they should offer 2 boxes on shelves; one with the DVD, one with the requisite number of CDs.
id said (in a PC Gamer article) that they felt a DVD version of Doom 3 wouldn't be cost effective to do.
That's just too much CD swapping to play a game or install it.
While it'd certainly be cool to have a DVD of Doom 3 (I love the UT2004 DVD), you're only swapping discs once for installation. Despite many/most new games coming on multiple CDs, we haven't seen games requiring CD-swapping in some time. Needing the CD to play is primarily an anti-piracy move now.
I'm a fan of spelling it 'aesthetics', but I think the popularity of that versus your rendition is very specific to certain locales.
Anyway, you raise part of the point I've alluded to. Part of Macs' selling point is their visual appeal. It hasn't been until fairly recently that PC makers have begun to make their products look nicer, probably due to the approach Apple takes. Thing is, though, the look of a Mac is necessary. Without it, it has little to offer over other standard PC makers. While they certainly look nice, if performance is your top priority, it's not always the best decision to choose a product that uses image as one of its main features. I can certainly understand some people wanting form over function, it's just not something I would do myself or suggest that others do.
Plus, PC owners have many resources available to them to increase the aesthetic value of their machine, while Mac users have much less in the way of customization. While the visually pleasing case, monitor, peripherals, and GUI are not necessarily provided to a PC user up-front, it *is* possible to find something that appeals to you (provided that's important).
+ go here for the Dimension 2400 (548 base)
+ remove $50 rebate
+ change RAM option to 512MB (+130)
+ change HD option to 80GB (+30)
+ change CD or DVD drive option to "8x DVD+RW Drive + 16x DVD-ROM Drive" (the most expensive option) (+139)
+ change speakers to Dell A425 Speakers (+10)
548 + 130 + 30 + 139 + 10 = 857
I agree whole-heartedly that Apples aren't ungodly expensive, especially considering the price of computers 10 years ago (4 grand for a 486DX4, anyone?). The thing is, you can consistantly spend less for comparable PCs or spend the same for more powerful PCs. By the time you get to $3k+ systems, PCs and Macs get closer in performance (dual G5s vs P4EE vs Athlon FX chips... choose your flavor), but for the budget crowd PCs are the better performance for price choice.
$400 + $50 (taking out rebate) + $150 monitor is still $600, $200 less than the cheapest eMac Hell, get an expensive CRT ($300) and you're still under cost. You can't really count bundled software like iLife, considering most of that can be natively done on an XP or Linux OS, or with software freely available.
And if you want to talk about brandname... fine. Go to Dell and configure yourself a system online there. I was able to get a Celeron-based machine with 512mb ram, a 17" monitor, an 80gb harddrive, two DVD drives (one of them a burner), and the whole keyboard, mouse, speaker deal for $847 (not counting any rebates). So for 50 more bucks you get twice the harddrive capacity, twice the ram, an additional optical drive, the same size monitor, and in a quality brand. If you want, save some money on the harddrive or ram and buy yourself a Radeon 9600XT, which easily outperforms the eMac's 9200.
The point with regards to the cheap eMachines computer is that PC users have a wide range of choices when it comes to price and power. When you're buying a Mac, you sacrifice price for hip factor to a certain extent.
Missing details: PC: Monitor sold separately, the emac has a built in 17" sony flat screen- takes much less space this way
Mac: also has built-in ethernet
Mac: if used as an 'appliance' will be much more useful since it's a single piece that can be moved from room to room more easily
PC: memory card reader- for mac just plug the camera, mp3 player or other device directly into the emac and it automatically mounts and opens the neccessary software- no drivers needed.
Add a high quality 19" CRT monitor for $250 and you're still well under the price of the Mac. Or, spend $400 for a nice LCD and you've actually got *more* deskspace if you choose to place the case on the floor (as many people do).
As far as plugging in peripherals, the PC listed had 5 USB 2.0 ports. The memory reader is yet another way to get data from your device to your computer.
When I mention appliance I speak to how it's used, not how easily it is to move. Also, how often to you move normal appliances around the house? Last I checked, my fridge and stove were in the same place they've been in for years:P
I'm not going to argue clock speed, but if you've used a mac you'll know why I don't need to.
You won't need to for the same reason it's moot to argue about Pentium vs Athlon clock speeds, especially with the newer chips. They're simply not comparable unless the numbers are *adversely* different.
Though the Mac may be beautiful, one can spend the same amount on a mid-range PC than they would on a low-end Mac.
I have a client that was looking to pay $500 for a new home office pc without the monitor and they wanted an lcd monitor, which would have ran them another $500. I was able, without much effort, to convince them that the emac would fit their needs for less and when the company has more money in the next year or two it would be the perfect computer to hand down to their kids. They're buying it this weekend!
So you're getting someone to spend $200 less (assuming the $500 for the PC and $500 for a monitor) for a machine that didn't even have what they wanted (an LCD display) and would be less powerful than they originally intended. Also, LCDs (17") run in the $300 - $400 range, making the savings you mention less than impressive.
As do a multitude of PCs. In any case, I'd assume the grandparent was trying to point out that Macs are using more common technologies now (Serial ATA is more prevalent than SCSI)
They all run better on the Mac, and the vast majority of people using these apps are doing so on the mac. Your point is moot.
I'm not quite sure where you're getting any of your information here; afaik I've seen PCs and Macs handle Photoshop at about the same speed and Acrobat at the same abysmal speed (heh). Also, I'd doubt there are more Mac users of Photoshop than PC users, and the term 'photoshopping' is too common for it to be perpetuated by only the Mac community.
"I don't see much difference in ease of use between MacOS and XP."
You obviously never used OSX.
Aside from the obvious aesthetic difference, most average users find XP's and OSX's usability to be very similar. The main gripe I hear about PC vs Mac among users is not their ease of use but compatibility between the two.
Because BSD doesnt have quartz, aqua etc etc etc. This shows your obvious ignorance to the subject.
But BSD does have a multitude of other graphical options and features and can also be *free.* Besides, someone who's choosing between only BSD and OSX is not the type of person who cares much for looks.
What lack of applications? I have everything I need, liteally [sic].
Aside from a huge library of open source applications and many games.
"the constantly playing catch up with the PC"
Funny since it's apple who leads the market. Windows copies MacOSX, Apple made USB popular, widescreen displays, firewire etc etc etc.
The Mac *has* been playing catch up in the most important area: sales. Admittedly they're doing better now than they were 5 years ago, but PCs still strongly dominate the computer market. Also, both OSX and Windows borrow heavily from NextStep/OpenStep. As I recall, the beta for OSX came out in August or September of 2000, while development builds of Whistler (codename of XP and Server 2003) were sent out as early as February of 2000.
No that's you. You don't even understand the subject matter yet pass these stupid ass comments off as facts.
It's comments like this that take significant merit away from your real points. Not only will it incite more argument against you, it debases any of the quality claims you made.
"Most PC users I know use a PC because they don't buy into all that Mac FUD"
Lemmings?
Most PC users I know use a PC because they either have to (ie, at work) or are so used to them that they don't care to change. Interestingly enough, most of the Mac users I know use Macs for the same reasons.
Unix as a short form of UNICS (Uniplexed Operating and Computing System) eventually replaced it (and did so over 30 years ago with the creation of System V Unix in 1973), so it's inaccurate to label a Unix OS as UNICS today. For all intents and purposes, it *can* be considered a misspelling, deliberate or not.
The specs the $799 Mac are roughly the same as a $399 PC here (the Mac has Firewire, probably a more robust processor, and faster memory, while the PC has built-in ethernet, a *much* higher clock speed, and a memory reader). When most people consider their computer an appliance (versus a performance machine), saving $400 for a 'mundane' PC is a big deal.
Also, the person who spends $2,000+ on a PC is either a geek who's putting together an amazingly fast machine themself, or an average person who has the money to buy a top of the line pre-built PC. Neither fall into the category of someone looking for a budget computer.
The Mac is like a designer computer. It looks better and is designed better than PCs. It also has a much higher quality operating system design.
You're mixing up superior quality with chic; while Macs are certainly more consistant in their quality of design, most savvy computer users find less technical worth in Macs than they do PCs.
As far as operating systems go, it's deceptive to claim OSX is higher quality than XP or any of the Linux variants. First of all, OSX was based heavily off of Unix (for good reason), and the current breeds of Windows are arguably as stable as many other OSes.
People who appreciate this tend to be better educated, higher income people, such as artists, writers and programmers. They unite to appreciate a designer computer and laugh at the vulgar boring Windows people.
Your example professions are a little weird.. the average person who makes a living in the arts (artists and writers, like you say) does not command an amazingly high income. Also, most programmers do not use Macs; the developing environments on PCs are much more popular, powerful, refined, and have a longer history of development.
There is a reason Apple chooses to make its products fashionable; there is a certain image that needs to be exuded by the Apple brandname. As a stereotype, people buy Macs to be hip and buy PCs to be productive. The thing is, people rarely complain; those owning Macs are usually happy to pay more for an image, while PC users tend to be happy with the power they receive.
On a hunch, I did a little Googling:
search for mac ass-pirate: 231 matches
search for pc ass-pirate: 434 matches
Now, you can't draw any conclusions from just that, so I continued searching:
search for mac users: 7,240,000 matches
search for pc users: 11,600,000 matches
If you use that calculator thingy, you come up with these percentages (I removed the first three decimal places in the 'users' searches because I'm a PC user and big number scare me):
mac ass-pirates to users %: 0.0319
pc ass-pirates to users %: 0.0374
From this one could conclude there are a higher percentage of ass-pirates in the pc crowd. I did another search on normal people, and found this:
search for ass-pirate: 1,860 matches
search for people: 312,000,000 matches
ass-pirates to people %: 0.0059
Notice that there is a *far* smaller percentage of normal people that are also ass-pirates than both pc users and mac users. From this it's easy to assume that pc and mac users (ie, computer users) are inherently ass-piratical. In other words, it's not necessarily the system that makes an ass-pirate, but the fact that said ass-pirate is a computer user.
Nearly every reply to this said the Xbox was not innovative. Do you people know what the word 'innovative' means? Innovative means 'new' and 'never done before,' and does not necessarily have anything to do with quality. By the definition of innovation, the Xbox was truly innovative, certainly moreso than the PS2.
All of the features of the Xbox that are touted (standard PC hardware, easy to develop architecture, a harddrive, etc) have never been implemented together in a console system. This makes it innovative. It was a new idea to do this. Whether these features were *good* ideas is up for debate, but MS did do it all first.
Look at the features of the PS2: it provided advanced 3D effects, backwards compatibility, and a DVD drive. The N64 was 3D accelerated and did spectacular colored lighting. Every GameBoy since the 'brick' has been backwards compatible. And the previous PS also had an optical drive. The PS2 is hardly innovative, but that doesn't make it a bad system at all.
Before you arguing over something as simple as a single world, make sure you know what it means, especially if the parent (like the parent of this) uses said word correctly.
innovation (n.)
1. The act of introducing something new.
2. Something newly introduced.
I'd say that the Xbox was innovative by that definition. Using PC hardware and a lot of standards to create a console that was easily the most powerful on the market was not just new for Microsoft, it was new to the industry.
And given MS's deep pockets, what they managed with the Xbox was less impressive than innovative.
Regarding Word and PDF: first off, Word and PDF are not parallel products. PDF was designed to allow documents to be transported electronically while still retaining its original characteristics. Word, however, is a word processor at its core; its primary uses are related to creation and printing of documents.
Though I don't know much about Word and PDF implementations, I do know there are free readers available for both formats. Also, an open source office suite that works wonderfully with Microsoft's publishing formats is widely and freely available
What we're ending up describing is, essentially, a proprietary environment just like Sony.
True, DirectX is proprietary... but it's extremely widespread and is hardly comparable to Sony's format. We may hate Microsoft, but a lot of their standardized systems (.NET anyone?) are easy and intuitive to develop with.
Slashdot Mirror
Berkshire-Hathaway's A stock was worth just over $88,000 per share this morning. Their B stock is almost $3,000.
Heh, the mark of a true geek.
Well, that and your uid :P
We obviously have different banking systems, because if my first transaction either clears out or overdraws my account, the second will go through and simply overdraw.
The potential problem with a credit card transaction that's messed up in the same way is you may not realize it until the end of the month. For me it would be less of a hassle to fix the situation the day of then worry about contacting the store and bank days, if not weeks, after it happens.
Also, if your non-credit card still runs on the credit card system (as all my atm/check cards do), the store has the ability (and obligation) to credit your account for mixed up transactions on the spot. In that case, it really doesn't matter if you have a credit card or not.
If that's your only gripe with $20s, just go to a gas station or convenience store and get change. Every laundry I've ever been to is always close to one and they're usually open very late (if not all night).
Because of parking where I work (quarter an hour at the meters), I find it's a good idea to get a roll or two of quarters at a bank every week or two. Given the fact that I'll often times get a comment like "laundry day today?" or "time to fill up the meter, eh?" it's not that uncommon.
I find $20s terribly useful compared to other denominations. Taking someone to a movie, picking up some alcohol, putting gas in my tank, or just grabbing some extra groceries are all 20 dollar bill jobs.
*sigh*. Unless I need to fill my tank up. Goddamn gas prices...
I do remember when a lot of the ATMs in my area went in $5 denominations, but all eventually went to $20s. Part of it may be related to the surcharges that some people get; who's going to withdraw $5 or $10 when they get charged $1.50?
I honestly think the average person takes out even more than $20 at a time. The Wells-Fargo ATMs even have an option on the main screen called "Quick $40" that withdraws 40 dollars directly from your checking account (nice if you fuck up the number of zeros you're typing and try to withdraw $400 like I've done before).
*shrug*. It probably comes down to cost in the eyes of the bank; something about a machine that only handles 20s has got to be cheaper than an alternative.
First off, what bank issued you your debit card? Reputable financial institutions take fraud seriously, so it's surprising they'd 'stone-wall' you.
Second, what would you expect any bank to do in this situation? The vendor (whose obligation - not necessarily the bank's - is to make sure they're charging the right customer) credited you back the money. Aside from the headache of having an extra charge on your account for a few days, you're not ultimately down any money.
Every credit/debit/check card I've ever owned had purchases on them traced exactly the same way. Considering most debit cards work on credit card systems, they reference the places I used them at in the same fashion. Heck, even checks are starting to show up with more information than just the check number, and many banks (even smaller local ones) give you online access to your accounts regardless if you have a credit card through them.
Every place I've ever used a debit/check/credit card the cashier only rings up the total once; when the items are being scanned or typed in. If you're not observant enough to notice a total during a transaction, there's definitely a problem.
Besides, if you find a cashier that needs to manually type in the amount to be charged to your card (after the total is rung up) and they make a mistake, one of a few things will happen: the cashier will notice the price discrepancy ($200 vs $20 for a DVD, $1000 vs $100 for groceries, etc); you will notice the price discrepancy at that time; you will notice the price discrepancy hours or days later when you check your account. In the worst case where you don't notice until you've either overdrawn or seen a huge charge in your account, you'll simply have to go through the hassel of contacting the store, you bank, and possibly other places (say, if you overdrew and other charges tried to go through). A headache for sure, but not necessarily any different than an incorrect charge on a credit card (which might be worse if you don't notice until potentially weeks later).
A little bit of discretion on the consumer's part is needed. Check both the total of a purchase as it's being rung up *and* check the charge receipt. Sure, it's not as easy as stuffing the receipts in your back pocket and forgetting about them, but placing all the blame on institutions and cashiers because you're too afraid to use check cards is a little silly, don't you think?
Good point with the price :)
If you go ahead with that new system, congrats and hope you enjoy it! It'll be damn fast.
I'd recommend looking into the FX-51/FX-53 chips by AMD instead of the other 64bit ones. I had heard that the non FX chips didn't perform as well as one would expect, whereas a friend of mine who got an FX-51 based machine has amazing power and speed.
Given that I've never used any of those 64bit processors (aside from my friend's FX-51), I could be wrong, but it might be worth checking out.
Oh, and if you don't want to go SATA, I just picked up two Seagate 200GB drives (7200rpm w/ 8MB cache) for $107 each; not bad deal at all. Check pricewatch.com's listings.
Two years ago I got an Athlon 1.4GHz with 512MB of ram. This was not top of the line, but was certainly above mid-range. So you're correct in saying these required specs were 'standard' then, but Doom 3 is coming out now, not two and a half years ago. Considering gaming (especially of the Doom variety) is a bit of a niche market, it's fair for developers to target mid to high range systems when writing their games.
As a lot of geeks know, the life of a gaming machine is significantly shorter than that of a home PC; often times it's about two years long. Some things last longer than others, but if you haven't upgraded your machine with anything other than RAM in over two years, you can't expect to play today's newest games extremely well.
Doom 3 or Half Life 2 are not for average crowd who's only played The Sims. They're gamers' games, and given their capability, it's not surprising the amount of horsepower they're require.
Hopefully the game designer would've tested all video modes they make available prior to releasing the game. *Never* have I found a game where a resolution was so low it wasn't possible to play. If one existed, the designers simply didn't allow that as an option.
Slightly offtopic, but 10 - 15fps in MS Flight Simulator is considered acceptable, primarily because it's so slow-paced. Heh, and us gamers complain when our FPS dips below 30 frames/sec.
id said (in a PC Gamer article) that they felt a DVD version of Doom 3 wouldn't be cost effective to do.
While it'd certainly be cool to have a DVD of Doom 3 (I love the UT2004 DVD), you're only swapping discs once for installation. Despite many/most new games coming on multiple CDs, we haven't seen games requiring CD-swapping in some time. Needing the CD to play is primarily an anti-piracy move now.
I'm a fan of spelling it 'aesthetics', but I think the popularity of that versus your rendition is very specific to certain locales.
Anyway, you raise part of the point I've alluded to. Part of Macs' selling point is their visual appeal. It hasn't been until fairly recently that PC makers have begun to make their products look nicer, probably due to the approach Apple takes. Thing is, though, the look of a Mac is necessary. Without it, it has little to offer over other standard PC makers. While they certainly look nice, if performance is your top priority, it's not always the best decision to choose a product that uses image as one of its main features. I can certainly understand some people wanting form over function, it's just not something I would do myself or suggest that others do.
Plus, PC owners have many resources available to them to increase the aesthetic value of their machine, while Mac users have much less in the way of customization. While the visually pleasing case, monitor, peripherals, and GUI are not necessarily provided to a PC user up-front, it *is* possible to find something that appeals to you (provided that's important).
+ go here for the Dimension 2400 (548 base)
+ remove $50 rebate
+ change RAM option to 512MB (+130)
+ change HD option to 80GB (+30)
+ change CD or DVD drive option to "8x DVD+RW Drive + 16x DVD-ROM Drive" (the most expensive option) (+139)
+ change speakers to Dell A425 Speakers (+10)
548 + 130 + 30 + 139 + 10 = 857
I agree whole-heartedly that Apples aren't ungodly expensive, especially considering the price of computers 10 years ago (4 grand for a 486DX4, anyone?). The thing is, you can consistantly spend less for comparable PCs or spend the same for more powerful PCs. By the time you get to $3k+ systems, PCs and Macs get closer in performance (dual G5s vs P4EE vs Athlon FX chips... choose your flavor), but for the budget crowd PCs are the better performance for price choice.
$400 + $50 (taking out rebate) + $150 monitor is still $600, $200 less than the cheapest eMac Hell, get an expensive CRT ($300) and you're still under cost. You can't really count bundled software like iLife, considering most of that can be natively done on an XP or Linux OS, or with software freely available.
And if you want to talk about brandname... fine. Go to Dell and configure yourself a system online there. I was able to get a Celeron-based machine with 512mb ram, a 17" monitor, an 80gb harddrive, two DVD drives (one of them a burner), and the whole keyboard, mouse, speaker deal for $847 (not counting any rebates). So for 50 more bucks you get twice the harddrive capacity, twice the ram, an additional optical drive, the same size monitor, and in a quality brand. If you want, save some money on the harddrive or ram and buy yourself a Radeon 9600XT, which easily outperforms the eMac's 9200.
The point with regards to the cheap eMachines computer is that PC users have a wide range of choices when it comes to price and power. When you're buying a Mac, you sacrifice price for hip factor to a certain extent.
Hehe. Remind me to hang out with you on September 19th.
Add a high quality 19" CRT monitor for $250 and you're still well under the price of the Mac. Or, spend $400 for a nice LCD and you've actually got *more* deskspace if you choose to place the case on the floor (as many people do).
As far as plugging in peripherals, the PC listed had 5 USB 2.0 ports. The memory reader is yet another way to get data from your device to your computer.
When I mention appliance I speak to how it's used, not how easily it is to move. Also, how often to you move normal appliances around the house? Last I checked, my fridge and stove were in the same place they've been in for years :P
You won't need to for the same reason it's moot to argue about Pentium vs Athlon clock speeds, especially with the newer chips. They're simply not comparable unless the numbers are *adversely* different.
Though the Mac may be beautiful, one can spend the same amount on a mid-range PC than they would on a low-end Mac.
So you're getting someone to spend $200 less (assuming the $500 for the PC and $500 for a monitor) for a machine that didn't even have what they wanted (an LCD display) and would be less powerful than they originally intended. Also, LCDs (17") run in the $300 - $400 range, making the savings you mention less than impressive.
As do a multitude of PCs. In any case, I'd assume the grandparent was trying to point out that Macs are using more common technologies now (Serial ATA is more prevalent than SCSI)
I'm not quite sure where you're getting any of your information here; afaik I've seen PCs and Macs handle Photoshop at about the same speed and Acrobat at the same abysmal speed (heh). Also, I'd doubt there are more Mac users of Photoshop than PC users, and the term 'photoshopping' is too common for it to be perpetuated by only the Mac community.
Aside from the obvious aesthetic difference, most average users find XP's and OSX's usability to be very similar. The main gripe I hear about PC vs Mac among users is not their ease of use but compatibility between the two.
But BSD does have a multitude of other graphical options and features and can also be *free.* Besides, someone who's choosing between only BSD and OSX is not the type of person who cares much for looks.
Aside from a huge library of open source applications and many games.
The Mac *has* been playing catch up in the most important area: sales. Admittedly they're doing better now than they were 5 years ago, but PCs still strongly dominate the computer market. Also, both OSX and Windows borrow heavily from NextStep/OpenStep. As I recall, the beta for OSX came out in August or September of 2000, while development builds of Whistler (codename of XP and Server 2003) were sent out as early as February of 2000.
It's comments like this that take significant merit away from your real points. Not only will it incite more argument against you, it debases any of the quality claims you made.
Most PC users I know use a PC because they either have to (ie, at work) or are so used to them that they don't care to change. Interestingly enough, most of the Mac users I know use Macs for the same reasons.
Unix as a short form of UNICS (Uniplexed Operating and Computing System) eventually replaced it (and did so over 30 years ago with the creation of System V Unix in 1973), so it's inaccurate to label a Unix OS as UNICS today. For all intents and purposes, it *can* be considered a misspelling, deliberate or not.
The specs the $799 Mac are roughly the same as a $399 PC here (the Mac has Firewire, probably a more robust processor, and faster memory, while the PC has built-in ethernet, a *much* higher clock speed, and a memory reader). When most people consider their computer an appliance (versus a performance machine), saving $400 for a 'mundane' PC is a big deal.
Also, the person who spends $2,000+ on a PC is either a geek who's putting together an amazingly fast machine themself, or an average person who has the money to buy a top of the line pre-built PC. Neither fall into the category of someone looking for a budget computer.
You're mixing up superior quality with chic; while Macs are certainly more consistant in their quality of design, most savvy computer users find less technical worth in Macs than they do PCs.
As far as operating systems go, it's deceptive to claim OSX is higher quality than XP or any of the Linux variants. First of all, OSX was based heavily off of Unix (for good reason), and the current breeds of Windows are arguably as stable as many other OSes.
Your example professions are a little weird.. the average person who makes a living in the arts (artists and writers, like you say) does not command an amazingly high income. Also, most programmers do not use Macs; the developing environments on PCs are much more popular, powerful, refined, and have a longer history of development.
There is a reason Apple chooses to make its products fashionable; there is a certain image that needs to be exuded by the Apple brandname. As a stereotype, people buy Macs to be hip and buy PCs to be productive. The thing is, people rarely complain; those owning Macs are usually happy to pay more for an image, while PC users tend to be happy with the power they receive.
On a hunch, I did a little Googling:
search for mac ass-pirate: 231 matches
search for pc ass-pirate: 434 matches
Now, you can't draw any conclusions from just that, so I continued searching:
search for mac users: 7,240,000 matches
search for pc users: 11,600,000 matches
If you use that calculator thingy, you come up with these percentages (I removed the first three decimal places in the 'users' searches because I'm a PC user and big number scare me):
mac ass-pirates to users %: 0.0319
pc ass-pirates to users %: 0.0374
From this one could conclude there are a higher percentage of ass-pirates in the pc crowd. I did another search on normal people, and found this:
search for ass-pirate: 1,860 matches
search for people: 312,000,000 matches
ass-pirates to people %: 0.0059
Notice that there is a *far* smaller percentage of normal people that are also ass-pirates than both pc users and mac users. From this it's easy to assume that pc and mac users (ie, computer users) are inherently ass-piratical. In other words, it's not necessarily the system that makes an ass-pirate, but the fact that said ass-pirate is a computer user.
Nearly every reply to this said the Xbox was not innovative. Do you people know what the word 'innovative' means? Innovative means 'new' and 'never done before,' and does not necessarily have anything to do with quality. By the definition of innovation, the Xbox was truly innovative, certainly moreso than the PS2.
All of the features of the Xbox that are touted (standard PC hardware, easy to develop architecture, a harddrive, etc) have never been implemented together in a console system. This makes it innovative. It was a new idea to do this. Whether these features were *good* ideas is up for debate, but MS did do it all first.
Look at the features of the PS2: it provided advanced 3D effects, backwards compatibility, and a DVD drive. The N64 was 3D accelerated and did spectacular colored lighting. Every GameBoy since the 'brick' has been backwards compatible. And the previous PS also had an optical drive.
The PS2 is hardly innovative, but that doesn't make it a bad system at all.
Before you arguing over something as simple as a single world, make sure you know what it means, especially if the parent (like the parent of this) uses said word correctly.
I'd say that the Xbox was innovative by that definition. Using PC hardware and a lot of standards to create a console that was easily the most powerful on the market was not just new for Microsoft, it was new to the industry.
And given MS's deep pockets, what they managed with the Xbox was less impressive than innovative.
Regarding Word and PDF: first off, Word and PDF are not parallel products. PDF was designed to allow documents to be transported electronically while still retaining its original characteristics. Word, however, is a word processor at its core; its primary uses are related to creation and printing of documents.
Though I don't know much about Word and PDF implementations, I do know there are free readers available for both formats. Also, an open source office suite that works wonderfully with Microsoft's publishing formats is widely and freely available
True, DirectX is proprietary... but it's extremely widespread and is hardly comparable to Sony's format. We may hate Microsoft, but a lot of their standardized systems (.NET anyone?) are easy and intuitive to develop with.