I can't understand why they would 'ban' tethering from the iPhone, I mean if it is an unlimited plan, what difference is it if you go straight through the phone or a laptop while out and about on occasion?
I think you just answered your own question... Really, the unlimited plan is limited by how much data you'd actually use on your phone, which is a lot less than you can with your laptop. The phone itself isn't going to transfer much data, because other than YouTube, it can't make use of large amounts of data (unless they start allowing people to buy from the iTunes store directly on the phone). Your laptop is where you could start downloading large files and doing a lot of other communication. That eases the strain on their network, but they still get to call your data plan unlimited.
Typically, (from what I've seen) those are people with Asperger's Syndrome. They can still function in society, even if they aren't very social, and the Asperger's gives them a level of focus and concentration on mundane things that the rest of us don't have, which can help in certain careers, like programming..
Of course Autism is a spectral disorder, but people with full-blown autism probably aren't normally capable of even understanding the choice. That said, my little sister with Asperger's would definitely reverse it in a heartbeat if there were a way to do it right now. She has had a tough time finding a niche where she can apply herself for her career, and she has always struggled socially, which has made her feel miserable.
As far as parents making the decision, though... From what I've seen and read, when autism starts to make itself known, the kids withdraw into themselves, as if their personality gets locked away inside their minds, and you're watching it go until it's all but gone. In addressing one of the posts above that speculated that many religious wacko parents wouldn't want to reverse that, I can assure you, any parent would want to unlock their child from whatever dark room they are trapped in. Just to be able to hug your kid and be hugged back, or to have a normal conversation, would be a tremendously wonderful thing after watcing your kid disappear into his own mind.
I don't think there's anything wrong with linking to sites you get paid for, I'm just saying the only reason I can think of to complain about karma whoring would be when karma is used to bring up a poster's links more often. Anything else I can think of right now is just taking Slashdot too seriously.
And really, even karma whoring for dollars doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me. If a person puts up enough posts that can get modded up to really keep up their karma, they probably are giving some useful/insightful/informative information now and again.
I'm not sure why it would piss you off that someone has released a free (as in beer, but soon to be released with source code, according to their website) app to clean out a couple of personal details in your music files? You don't have to download it or use it, but some people might want to. Not necessarily so that they can share the files on the Internet or anywhere else, but just for their own piece of mind. Atomic Parsley, which can be used to edit the metadata in mp4/aac files, has already had this ability in a simple command line form. I figured it wouldn't be long before someone slapped a limited GUI on it for just this purpose. Really, it's a good thing for people who want it (and obviously people do, because there has been a fair sized outcry over this whole iTunes Plus situation). For people who aren't concerned, don't bother with it. And stop complaining.
intentionally withholding information from the original posting -- that most people will read -- so you can post it later and get karma, is sleazy.
Sleazy? What a strange word to use here. I think you overestimate the importance of Slashdot karma... and probably of Slashdot in general. Most of us like to browse Slashdot, looking for some interesting news, and partake in the discussions. Karma helps us get our points across, but for most of us, it's not the end of the world if we lose some now and again. In any case, it's pretty judgmental to assume that dave is preparing to launch an assault on some Slashdot sacred cow, and he doesn't have any links in his posts (in a sig or in the header) to a commercial site or blog, only his webpage at his school, so he's not making money off of people reading his posts.
Let's all take a break from our computers now and step outside for some fresh air.
Instalinux may meet some of your needs. I haven't looked at it in a long time, though, so I'm not sure exactly what sort of customization they're offering these days.
I don't think TFS was accusing MS of violating the GPL, it was just accusing them of misrepresenting the license that covers Ubuntu Linux. I don't think it was even implying that it was done intentionally, just that whoever listed Ubuntu on there was a little careless with their description.
On a side note... how did that get there to begin with? Can users of the website submit software, a la Web2.0, or did some MS dude explicitly approve it?
Actually, there's a couple of US-based Kaleidescape competitors who do point their customers to DeCSS (they don't include it with the system, but the system absolutely depends on it). Their products aren't nearly as elegant as Kaleidescape's either, I might add.
I myself thought it was funny that early on in the lawsuit, one of the DVDCCA's reps claimed that the Kaleidescape allows wholesale copying of DVDs, which the CSS was specifically designed to prevent against. Of course, the system at the time had a starting price of $27,000, and the amount you paid for storage far outweighed the "savings" you'd see by copying DVDs that didn't belong to you. Not to mention the fact that the types of people who would buy such an expensive toy, aren't the types to sign up for an unlimited rental plan from Blockbuster, and rent 2 movies at a time, repeatedly trading them in, in order to fill up their DVD server.
The system actually has 3 distinct parts: the reader, the player, and the server (although I believe they sell a combo reader/player now). The only part that actually does any decrypting, thus requiring the CSS license, is the player. The reader transfers the DVD contents bit-for-bit to the server, which transfers them bit-for-bit with encryption to the player, which then decrypts internally, just like any other DVD player.
And on top of that, the server where the movies are stored is a proprietary, locked down black box where you can't just pull the movies from a Samba share or anything. Contrast that with some of their competitors, who use a Windows XP PC as the server, and everything is stored decrypted... you can just hook up a monitor to the server, share the folder, and do whatever you want with the movie files. It's amazing that those other companies can tell their customers where and how to get DeCSS off the internet, and how to install it, and their existing software completely depends on DeCSS... but Kaleidescape got sued for licensing the technology and using it in a responsible manner. Oh yeah, and Kaleidescape also sells large collections of movies with their players, so they are actually providing additional revenue directly for the MPAA.
It's important to remember, though, that the DVDCCA is not only made up of MPAA reps, it's also comprised of electronics manufacturers, which means that part of the whole initiative to shut down Kaleidescape was from long-established companies that just got left in the dust when a start-up company made an excellent, functional, and easy to use high-end product that they hadn't thought of yet.
I built my mythbox for about $250, including a 900 MHz P3 I got for $40. That also includes a 250 GB hard drive, so I can record about 110 hours of TV. I'd like to see the $100 Tivo do that.
Obviously, they're targeting the browser that most people are familiar with. Even with the progress that FF has made, IE still has the overwhelming percentage of the market, so that's what Apple was comparing themselves to. It would be like Creative complaining that the Zune isn't marketed as a Zen-killer.
Get over it, take close to 50% marketshare, and then you'll be in the comparison.
It's really all pretty pointless, though, because I don't think the point of Safari on Windows is really to gain marketshare, I think it's just for developing iPhone apps. But that doesn't stop the FF guys from being offended.
Fuck the text problem; no setting I change is saved on my system. Can't add/remove bookmarks, can't change the home page, etc, etc.
It's nice that I can finally test that webpages will work for mac users, but it's not able to do some really basic functionality for me right now.
Maybe I didn't make myself clear... No text shows up in the browser whatsoever, unless it's actually in a graphic on the page I'm looking at. Not even the menu names or items on the menus (e.g., File, Edit, View, etc...). The only way to navigate anywhere is to hit Ctrl+O to get the Open dialog, which mercifully looks like an ugly Win32 dialog (never thought I'd be so happy to see that), and enter the URL I want in there. Most of the time when I click on links, it brings up what could be an error page... but I don't really know. It has a big graphic of the Safari logo, and that's all I can see. There's no text on the page to read. I could try to right-click on the page and click on "View Source", but the right-click menu doesn't have any text on it either.
Oh, and as someone else mentioned, when I click on the spider button (no idea what that does, as there's no tooltips or labels), Safari crashes completely.
Since I can't even view or navigate between web pages, the basic functionality I (along with plenty of others) am missing makes the basic functionality you want seem pretty advanced.
No, as the GPP stated, each bit is held separately, each bit can be changed independently of the others. In your example, 01 is two bits. The only "counting up" that happens is that each bit goes from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. Even if all of the bits did have to count up together (can you imagine how long it would take to subtract 1 from a number in a 32-bit memory location in a scheme like that?) that still doesn't have anything to do with what state the oxide holds.
That doesn't make any sense... the only thing that "the damage the flow of electricity is doing to the oxide" could possibly tell you would be the average state of that bit over the working life of the chip, not the last state, and even that is a stretch. Any physical damage that could possibly have been done to the chip would have been going on and off since the chip was first powered up. There's no way to tell from looking at the chip later what the last state of each bit was. Once the capacitors drain, which would happen pretty quickly once the chip is removed from the motherboard, there's no telling what the last state was.
In any case, I'm guessing that the judge in this case wasn't thinking of any type of major forensics investigation to get at the relevant information... TFA seems to indicate that this isn't so much about turning over the physical RAM chips so much as about keeping a log of everyting that gets stored in RAM. As one analyst quoted in TFA pointed out, the judge just doesn't have a technical understanding of how much data that would be. Also, it would be hugely impractical (even if it were technically feasible) to expect people to keep such a log and hand it over when requested. It's like saying you're not legally allowed to delete e-mails or erase your web browsing history.
From a feasibility standpoint, there's more simple logs they could try to force TorrentSpy to keep. I don't consider this judgement to be such a huge danger to privacy, it's more newsworthy to me because the judge made a ruling that can't be practically applied, in any way whatsoever. The part that's really about privacy is what the MPAA is really after, which is logs of who is connecting to the torrent servers. They're pretty stupid if they don't realize there's easier (but still just as stupid) things they could try to force the servers to log.
Now if they would just fix the problem that some people (including myself) are having where no text shows up anywhere in the application and you can't type in any of the text input fields (kind of hard to use a browser when you can't type in an address).
Ditto for me... I can't type in the URL bar or the search bar, either. The only way to go to any website is to hit Ctrl + O to bring up the Open dialog, then enter the complete address from there. Then I get to a page and there is little if any text. Most graphics seem to work fine, though. When I try to go to google.com, I see 7 different pulldown menus in the page, and several sets of buttons, as if the page is being rendered incorrectly several times within the window, and the Google logo isn't visible anywhere on the page... there is a blue box in the middle of the screen though.
Lots of people are complaining about font smoothing preferences or not being able to configure proxy settings, but I can't even get any text on any menus to be able to look at those settings. I guess I'll have to wait for Beta 2?
Also, it crashes when I close the window, and if I click on the "spider" button next to the URL bar, it freezes and pegs my cpu to 100%. I can, however, read text in an RSS feed. If I go to an RSS-enbaled page (cnn.com, slashdot, etc., I can click the blue RSS icon in the address bar and get a very legible display of the feed.
Less $20 instant and another $90 in rebates for a total of $1262. That's quite a lot more power than the $800 Mini.
I make it a practice lately to not count on rebates to determine what the price will be. I compare all prices before rebates, then if I have rebates available I'll use them for a little bonus cash later on. But I've had so many bad experiences with them (late, made-up excuses to not honor them, etc.) that I won't rely on them.
But, even if you take that $90 worth of rebates as an actual discount on the cost... of course you'd better be getting "quite a lot more power than the $800 Mini"... you're paying over 50% more for the system, plus the time and effort to put it all together yourself, install software, etc. Plus, as I mentioned above, the Mini uses more expensive laptop parts to squeeze it all into a small box, which for many people and/or certain niche applications, is worth paying more for. The price difference between your home-built PC and the $800 Mini is worth one half-decent bargain-priced PC on its own.
There is no $300 Mac because Apple does not want to produce bottom of the barrel, low end, bare minimum Macs and use AMD Septron processors with a single core, Intel chipset video adapters with shared memory, generic DVD drives and memory, etc to cut costs so low that it fits that $300 budget.
Graphics: Intel GMA 950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
By the way, to get the superdrive, you have to get the more expensive Mini ($799). Otherwise it's just a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. And I know it's a slot-loading drive, but I've never seen a brand name for that drive, so what's to tell me that it is a better drive? From the point of view of the Apple Store, it is a generic DVD drive. (By the way, can it take a mini CD/DVD?) Also, what's special about the Apple memory, other than being expensive? I never see a brand name given with the memory specs, either.
Also, the $599 Mini only comes with 512MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It's hard to find another desktop with such a small hard drive. In fact, the cheapest desktop I can find on Dell's website (Dimension E520) costs $379, and uses a Pentium D 925 (not a 64-bit Core 2 Duo, but it's still dual core), 160 GB hard drive, and 1GB RAM, and Intel GMA X3000 graphics instead of the GMA 950 in the mini.
The truth is, the Mini is somewhat in-line with the low-end Windows boxes, but everything is packed into such a small space, and that's what you're paying for (paying in terms of performance and in price). Personally, I think it's a decent trade-off, so long as you understand its limitations.
That said, I'm leaning towards an iMac or a Mini when I get around to buying my next computer. I like the small size and footprint of the mini, but by the time I spec out a Mini to meet my needs, I'm in the price range of an iMac. I think it's a stretch to say that the $599 Mini is so much better than the "bottom of the barrel" stuff out there. It has a niche, and works out alright for that niche.
suggesting that Apple is competitive on the low end is just ludicrous. I'd call the low end $500-$1000. Apple's not even in that market.
Especially if the rumors are true that the Mini and the 17" iMac are going away. I'd love to buy a Mac, but those are the only models that I'd really consider right now. I don't really see any likelihood that they would introduce a new type of consumer desktop, like a tower. If the MacBook becomes the lowest-end Mac (starting at $1099), I think a lot of people will really be put off of Macs.
No. Because making the recording is legal, so the fact that it causes MLB harm doesn't give them a cause of action. Their argument here is that "placeshifting" by retransmitting over the internet is a violation of copyright (I think they are wrong, but I don't think the case law is clear on that so that it is as certain as a matter of law) and therefore the harm done to them by circumventing the regional distribution agreements they have are damages attributable to that legal wrong that they can recover.
It doesn't make any sense to me that placeshifting would be more questionable than time shifting. With timeshifting, you have a recorded version you can watch whenever you want, wherever you want (if it's stored on removable media like DVD/VHS or stored on an iPod), and as many times as you want without the MLB ever having control over any of it. Commercials can even be edited out. With placeshifting a la Slingbox, you watch it live, once. You can't go back and rewatch things you missed. You have to sit through the commercials. It's normally a personal thing, I doubt many Sling users are publicly displaying the content for lots of people to see. And with the Slingbox, you already paid to have that content delivered to you. It's not the cable company's business that someone found a way to help you watch it when you're more than 50 feet from your cable box. What's next? Outlawing long cable wires?
That, and the fact that isn't something that keeps people watching MLB games good for the MLB? I guess they have deals with iTunes, so they can pretend that this hurts those, but that doesn't hold a lot of water.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you just answered your own question... Really, the unlimited plan is limited by how much data you'd actually use on your phone, which is a lot less than you can with your laptop. The phone itself isn't going to transfer much data, because other than YouTube, it can't make use of large amounts of data (unless they start allowing people to buy from the iTunes store directly on the phone). Your laptop is where you could start downloading large files and doing a lot of other communication. That eases the strain on their network, but they still get to call your data plan unlimited.
I think you mean:
There's at least one version of [to be continued...]
Typically, (from what I've seen) those are people with Asperger's Syndrome. They can still function in society, even if they aren't very social, and the Asperger's gives them a level of focus and concentration on mundane things that the rest of us don't have, which can help in certain careers, like programming..
Of course Autism is a spectral disorder, but people with full-blown autism probably aren't normally capable of even understanding the choice. That said, my little sister with Asperger's would definitely reverse it in a heartbeat if there were a way to do it right now. She has had a tough time finding a niche where she can apply herself for her career, and she has always struggled socially, which has made her feel miserable.
As far as parents making the decision, though... From what I've seen and read, when autism starts to make itself known, the kids withdraw into themselves, as if their personality gets locked away inside their minds, and you're watching it go until it's all but gone. In addressing one of the posts above that speculated that many religious wacko parents wouldn't want to reverse that, I can assure you, any parent would want to unlock their child from whatever dark room they are trapped in. Just to be able to hug your kid and be hugged back, or to have a normal conversation, would be a tremendously wonderful thing after watcing your kid disappear into his own mind.
I don't think there's anything wrong with linking to sites you get paid for, I'm just saying the only reason I can think of to complain about karma whoring would be when karma is used to bring up a poster's links more often. Anything else I can think of right now is just taking Slashdot too seriously.
And really, even karma whoring for dollars doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me. If a person puts up enough posts that can get modded up to really keep up their karma, they probably are giving some useful/insightful/informative information now and again.
I'm not sure why it would piss you off that someone has released a free (as in beer, but soon to be released with source code, according to their website) app to clean out a couple of personal details in your music files? You don't have to download it or use it, but some people might want to. Not necessarily so that they can share the files on the Internet or anywhere else, but just for their own piece of mind. Atomic Parsley, which can be used to edit the metadata in mp4/aac files, has already had this ability in a simple command line form. I figured it wouldn't be long before someone slapped a limited GUI on it for just this purpose. Really, it's a good thing for people who want it (and obviously people do, because there has been a fair sized outcry over this whole iTunes Plus situation). For people who aren't concerned, don't bother with it. And stop complaining.
Do things like Tor and TrueCrypt bother you too?
I think it's this guy. You should ask him what a he-person is, who the rest of his he-people are, and why they're all wet.
Sleazy? What a strange word to use here. I think you overestimate the importance of Slashdot karma... and probably of Slashdot in general. Most of us like to browse Slashdot, looking for some interesting news, and partake in the discussions. Karma helps us get our points across, but for most of us, it's not the end of the world if we lose some now and again. In any case, it's pretty judgmental to assume that dave is preparing to launch an assault on some Slashdot sacred cow, and he doesn't have any links in his posts (in a sig or in the header) to a commercial site or blog, only his webpage at his school, so he's not making money off of people reading his posts.
Let's all take a break from our computers now and step outside for some fresh air.
Instalinux may meet some of your needs. I haven't looked at it in a long time, though, so I'm not sure exactly what sort of customization they're offering these days.
Well, I'm pretty sure his next review is going to be even worse.
I don't think TFS was accusing MS of violating the GPL, it was just accusing them of misrepresenting the license that covers Ubuntu Linux. I don't think it was even implying that it was done intentionally, just that whoever listed Ubuntu on there was a little careless with their description.
On a side note... how did that get there to begin with? Can users of the website submit software, a la Web2.0, or did some MS dude explicitly approve it?
Actually, there's a couple of US-based Kaleidescape competitors who do point their customers to DeCSS (they don't include it with the system, but the system absolutely depends on it). Their products aren't nearly as elegant as Kaleidescape's either, I might add.
I myself thought it was funny that early on in the lawsuit, one of the DVDCCA's reps claimed that the Kaleidescape allows wholesale copying of DVDs, which the CSS was specifically designed to prevent against. Of course, the system at the time had a starting price of $27,000, and the amount you paid for storage far outweighed the "savings" you'd see by copying DVDs that didn't belong to you. Not to mention the fact that the types of people who would buy such an expensive toy, aren't the types to sign up for an unlimited rental plan from Blockbuster, and rent 2 movies at a time, repeatedly trading them in, in order to fill up their DVD server.
The system actually has 3 distinct parts: the reader, the player, and the server (although I believe they sell a combo reader/player now). The only part that actually does any decrypting, thus requiring the CSS license, is the player. The reader transfers the DVD contents bit-for-bit to the server, which transfers them bit-for-bit with encryption to the player, which then decrypts internally, just like any other DVD player.
And on top of that, the server where the movies are stored is a proprietary, locked down black box where you can't just pull the movies from a Samba share or anything. Contrast that with some of their competitors, who use a Windows XP PC as the server, and everything is stored decrypted... you can just hook up a monitor to the server, share the folder, and do whatever you want with the movie files. It's amazing that those other companies can tell their customers where and how to get DeCSS off the internet, and how to install it, and their existing software completely depends on DeCSS... but Kaleidescape got sued for licensing the technology and using it in a responsible manner. Oh yeah, and Kaleidescape also sells large collections of movies with their players, so they are actually providing additional revenue directly for the MPAA.
It's important to remember, though, that the DVDCCA is not only made up of MPAA reps, it's also comprised of electronics manufacturers, which means that part of the whole initiative to shut down Kaleidescape was from long-established companies that just got left in the dust when a start-up company made an excellent, functional, and easy to use high-end product that they hadn't thought of yet.
I built my mythbox for about $250, including a 900 MHz P3 I got for $40. That also includes a 250 GB hard drive, so I can record about 110 hours of TV. I'd like to see the $100 Tivo do that.
Obviously, they're targeting the browser that most people are familiar with. Even with the progress that FF has made, IE still has the overwhelming percentage of the market, so that's what Apple was comparing themselves to. It would be like Creative complaining that the Zune isn't marketed as a Zen-killer.
Get over it, take close to 50% marketshare, and then you'll be in the comparison.
It's really all pretty pointless, though, because I don't think the point of Safari on Windows is really to gain marketshare, I think it's just for developing iPhone apps. But that doesn't stop the FF guys from being offended.
Maybe I didn't make myself clear... No text shows up in the browser whatsoever, unless it's actually in a graphic on the page I'm looking at. Not even the menu names or items on the menus (e.g., File, Edit, View, etc...). The only way to navigate anywhere is to hit Ctrl+O to get the Open dialog, which mercifully looks like an ugly Win32 dialog (never thought I'd be so happy to see that), and enter the URL I want in there. Most of the time when I click on links, it brings up what could be an error page... but I don't really know. It has a big graphic of the Safari logo, and that's all I can see. There's no text on the page to read. I could try to right-click on the page and click on "View Source", but the right-click menu doesn't have any text on it either.
Oh, and as someone else mentioned, when I click on the spider button (no idea what that does, as there's no tooltips or labels), Safari crashes completely. Since I can't even view or navigate between web pages, the basic functionality I (along with plenty of others) am missing makes the basic functionality you want seem pretty advanced.
No, as the GPP stated, each bit is held separately, each bit can be changed independently of the others. In your example, 01 is two bits. The only "counting up" that happens is that each bit goes from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. Even if all of the bits did have to count up together (can you imagine how long it would take to subtract 1 from a number in a 32-bit memory location in a scheme like that?) that still doesn't have anything to do with what state the oxide holds.
That doesn't make any sense... the only thing that "the damage the flow of electricity is doing to the oxide" could possibly tell you would be the average state of that bit over the working life of the chip, not the last state, and even that is a stretch. Any physical damage that could possibly have been done to the chip would have been going on and off since the chip was first powered up. There's no way to tell from looking at the chip later what the last state of each bit was. Once the capacitors drain, which would happen pretty quickly once the chip is removed from the motherboard, there's no telling what the last state was.
In any case, I'm guessing that the judge in this case wasn't thinking of any type of major forensics investigation to get at the relevant information... TFA seems to indicate that this isn't so much about turning over the physical RAM chips so much as about keeping a log of everyting that gets stored in RAM. As one analyst quoted in TFA pointed out, the judge just doesn't have a technical understanding of how much data that would be. Also, it would be hugely impractical (even if it were technically feasible) to expect people to keep such a log and hand it over when requested. It's like saying you're not legally allowed to delete e-mails or erase your web browsing history.
From a feasibility standpoint, there's more simple logs they could try to force TorrentSpy to keep. I don't consider this judgement to be such a huge danger to privacy, it's more newsworthy to me because the judge made a ruling that can't be practically applied, in any way whatsoever. The part that's really about privacy is what the MPAA is really after, which is logs of who is connecting to the torrent servers. They're pretty stupid if they don't realize there's easier (but still just as stupid) things they could try to force the servers to log.
Now if they would just fix the problem that some people (including myself) are having where no text shows up anywhere in the application and you can't type in any of the text input fields (kind of hard to use a browser when you can't type in an address).
Ditto for me... I can't type in the URL bar or the search bar, either. The only way to go to any website is to hit Ctrl + O to bring up the Open dialog, then enter the complete address from there. Then I get to a page and there is little if any text. Most graphics seem to work fine, though. When I try to go to google.com, I see 7 different pulldown menus in the page, and several sets of buttons, as if the page is being rendered incorrectly several times within the window, and the Google logo isn't visible anywhere on the page... there is a blue box in the middle of the screen though.
Lots of people are complaining about font smoothing preferences or not being able to configure proxy settings, but I can't even get any text on any menus to be able to look at those settings. I guess I'll have to wait for Beta 2?
Also, it crashes when I close the window, and if I click on the "spider" button next to the URL bar, it freezes and pegs my cpu to 100%. I can, however, read text in an RSS feed. If I go to an RSS-enbaled page (cnn.com, slashdot, etc., I can click the blue RSS icon in the address bar and get a very legible display of the feed.
I make it a practice lately to not count on rebates to determine what the price will be. I compare all prices before rebates, then if I have rebates available I'll use them for a little bonus cash later on. But I've had so many bad experiences with them (late, made-up excuses to not honor them, etc.) that I won't rely on them.
But, even if you take that $90 worth of rebates as an actual discount on the cost... of course you'd better be getting "quite a lot more power than the $800 Mini"... you're paying over 50% more for the system, plus the time and effort to put it all together yourself, install software, etc. Plus, as I mentioned above, the Mini uses more expensive laptop parts to squeeze it all into a small box, which for many people and/or certain niche applications, is worth paying more for. The price difference between your home-built PC and the $800 Mini is worth one half-decent bargain-priced PC on its own.
"A more elegant weapon for a more civilized age"
According to the Apple Store'sMac Mini page:
By the way, to get the superdrive, you have to get the more expensive Mini ($799). Otherwise it's just a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. And I know it's a slot-loading drive, but I've never seen a brand name for that drive, so what's to tell me that it is a better drive? From the point of view of the Apple Store, it is a generic DVD drive. (By the way, can it take a mini CD/DVD?) Also, what's special about the Apple memory, other than being expensive? I never see a brand name given with the memory specs, either.
Also, the $599 Mini only comes with 512MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. It's hard to find another desktop with such a small hard drive. In fact, the cheapest desktop I can find on Dell's website (Dimension E520) costs $379, and uses a Pentium D 925 (not a 64-bit Core 2 Duo, but it's still dual core), 160 GB hard drive, and 1GB RAM, and Intel GMA X3000 graphics instead of the GMA 950 in the mini.
The truth is, the Mini is somewhat in-line with the low-end Windows boxes, but everything is packed into such a small space, and that's what you're paying for (paying in terms of performance and in price). Personally, I think it's a decent trade-off, so long as you understand its limitations. That said, I'm leaning towards an iMac or a Mini when I get around to buying my next computer. I like the small size and footprint of the mini, but by the time I spec out a Mini to meet my needs, I'm in the price range of an iMac. I think it's a stretch to say that the $599 Mini is so much better than the "bottom of the barrel" stuff out there. It has a niche, and works out alright for that niche.
Especially if the rumors are true that the Mini and the 17" iMac are going away. I'd love to buy a Mac, but those are the only models that I'd really consider right now. I don't really see any likelihood that they would introduce a new type of consumer desktop, like a tower. If the MacBook becomes the lowest-end Mac (starting at $1099), I think a lot of people will really be put off of Macs.
You can't expect that from these jokesters who don't know the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground.
It doesn't make any sense to me that placeshifting would be more questionable than time shifting. With timeshifting, you have a recorded version you can watch whenever you want, wherever you want (if it's stored on removable media like DVD/VHS or stored on an iPod), and as many times as you want without the MLB ever having control over any of it. Commercials can even be edited out. With placeshifting a la Slingbox, you watch it live, once. You can't go back and rewatch things you missed. You have to sit through the commercials. It's normally a personal thing, I doubt many Sling users are publicly displaying the content for lots of people to see. And with the Slingbox, you already paid to have that content delivered to you. It's not the cable company's business that someone found a way to help you watch it when you're more than 50 feet from your cable box. What's next? Outlawing long cable wires?
That, and the fact that isn't something that keeps people watching MLB games good for the MLB? I guess they have deals with iTunes, so they can pretend that this hurts those, but that doesn't hold a lot of water.