First, the annual moving averages in your graph shows iPhones already reaching more than half of the sales of iPods. That is, iPhone sales are already in the same order of magnitude as iPod sales.
Second, the trend of those annual moving average lines shows iPods reached a stable point long ago, while iPhone sales are continuously growing, which means that iPhone sales will most likely pass iPod sales in less than a year.
Third, the sales of iPhones almost reached those of iPods in 2009q4 and 2010q2. 2010q1 was Oct-Dec of 2009 (those are Apple's financial quarters). That quarter, as all q1 quarters, was greatly affected by huge sales of iPods as Christmas gifts.
Fourth, the iPod sales in that graph include the iPod touch, which arguably is closer to the iPhone than to the older iPods. Taking that into account, sales of iPhone OS devices surpassed classic iPod devices long ago.
Fifth, you took that plot from this article from the Guardian, and the whole point of that article is "WTF! How did Apple sell so many iPhones?"
All five points were derived from the plot that you gave me. Boy, did that backfire on you!
hahah you think the iPad will reach iPod or iPhone levels of sales? you must be an iTard.
Yet again, when Apple announced the iPhone, people would mock "iTards" like the GP with phrases like "hahah you think the iPhone will reach iPod levels of sales? you must be an iTard."
There is no text anywhere quiting Google spokespeople saying Google would bring this to the iPhone ???
RTFS again.
There are three FAs in it. The first FA is even quoted in TFS:
'However, Google is working with Apple on bringing it to the iPhone, and it's not ruling out licensing the software to makers of portable navigation devices used in cars throughout the world, said Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google for mobile and developers.'
So, Google's vice-president for engineering said Google is working on bringing it to the iPhone. Now Google says "We did not say we would bring it to iPhone".
Google has no obligation to bring any product to market, but at least they should say "we finally decided not no bring it to the iPhone". Saying "we did not say we would" is just sleazy.
Flash runs fine on my Mac. I've not encountered one problem so I dunno what Mac you use but it sucks. IMO !
Today I was reminded of this interview with Adobe's Chief Technical Officer Kevin Lynch, where he acknowledges the inferior performance of Flash on the Mac:
Around 1:15:
So, for example, performance on the Macintosh is an area that we're working on, we have been working on for a while (...) now we're working really hard on making sure that video renderers are using similar CPU usage in Mac and Windows. Right now the Mac uses more CPU than Windows (...)
I can't help but wonder how you get the same performance under Mac and Windows, when even Adobe's CTO acknowledges that the performance on the Mac is inferior.
Flash runs fine on my Mac. I've not encountered one problem so I dunno what Mac you use but it sucks. IMO !
Today I was reminded of this interview with Adobe's Chief Technical Officer Kevin Lynch, where he acknowledges the inferior performance of Flash on the Mac:
Around 1:15:
So, for example, performance on the Macintosh is an area that we're working on, we have been working on for a while (...) now we're working really hard on making sure that video renderers are using similar CPU usage in Mac and Windows. Right now the Mac uses more CPU than Windows (...)
If even Adobe's CTO acknowledges that, I can't understand why you insist on denying it.
In fact, here I was scratching my head, wondering why Adrian Lopez was apologizing for posting a link to an article that looked quite interesting and insightful.
Until the comments made me realize that it was actually TFA!
You are so full of it! Your browser crashes all the time? WTF None of my 30 or so mac friends have that issue ! Gimme a break!
You really need reading comprehension classes. I quote myself:
Also, almost every single time my browser crashes (which fortunately is not very frequently, but it is pretty much the only application that ever crashes) the culprit is Flash.
Hmmmm.. what about 720p? I see a significant difference there.
On the other hand, I am running on 10.5.8, maybe that's part of the problem. (I do have the Snow Leopard installer but I am doing some critical stuff that I can't risk screwing up so I have delayed the upgrade till June).
How about Hulu? I also see a significant difference there at 480p. I also frequently find Flash ads that completely saturate my CPU, but in Windows they barely take half.
Install Boot Camp on one of your Macs and compare the performance and CPU usage of the exact same Flash apps on Mac OS X and Windows (any browser in either case).
The difference is ghastly.
As I told your parent post, "The point is that in Flash-land the Mac (and Linux, etc) are third class citizens. Yes, it works "fine", but compared to Windows it sucks horribly. (And many Windows users complain that it sucks, hink about that!)"
I use the most recent model of MacBook Pro (soon to be dethroned, of course).
And yes, Flash runs "fine" on it. Except that running very simple things consumes an amount of processor time that is far from reasonable for the task at hand, something that becomes extremely evident when you run the same Flash applet on Windows.
Also, almost every single time my browser crashes (which fortunately is not very frequently, but it is pretty much the only application that ever crashes) the culprit is Flash. And let's not ignore the security issues.
The point is that in Flash-land the Mac (and Linux, etc) are third class citizens. Yes, it works "fine", but compared to Windows it sucks horribly. (And many Windows users complain that it sucks, hink about that!)
With flash, applications can be downloaded and run on demand inside a browser. Apple can't have that.
That would make sense, except for the fact that Apple has always pushed non-Flash Web Apps very strongly. In fact, until the introduction of the App Store (one day before the iPhone 3G), Apple touted Web Apps as The One and Only Way® for third parties to run their stuff on the iPhone.
You may think that web apps are too inferior, but think twice: first, there are many that are almost indistinguishable from native apps. In fact, you can add them to your home screen and launch them as regular apps. And also, along with HTML5 and other associated technologies that Apple has been pushing a lot of the special functionality that Flash brings to the game becomes available also for iPhones/iPads and any HTML5 compliant browser.
So if "Apple can't have applications (that) can be downloaded and run on demand inside a browser", how come they have pushed exactly that type of functionality all along?
Although I strongly condemn Apple's bullying tactics, I can only say that Adobe had this coming for a long time.
Back in the 80s, at the dawn of desktop publishing, Apple held a kind of symbiotic relationship with Adobe, Aldus, and Macromedia, the once-competing companies that eventually merged into today's Adobe. But somewhere in the late 90s Adobe started to drop the ball on Apple as they saw greener pastures in Windows Land. They started to invest much more in the development of the Windows versions of many of their products and Mac versions started to become second-class products.
Adobe even used Premiere as leverage against Apple, threatening to stop its development for the Mac, something that would have essentially kicked Apple out of the video editing market. That's why Apple bought and started heavy development of Final Cut (1999?). Adobe in fact pulled the plug from Premiere (2003?) until they realized that this has backfired on them making them loose a lot of the video market (2007?).
But perhaps the epitome of Adobe's contempt for Apple is Flash. if you think Flash for windows is crappy, you haven't seen the Mac version (or for that matter the Linux one). Macromedia Flash was equally good for Mac and Windows, but while the performance of the Windows version was kept almost acceptable, the Mac version became even more sluggish, processor intensive, and buggy.
Furthermore, Flash became probably the biggest security hole in Mac OS X. in the security update for January, 12 vulnerabilities were plugged. But seven of them were not really in the operating system but in the flash pluggin!
Again, I reject Apple's tactics. But with all this, it is not surprising that Apple doesn't want flash anywhere near their new products even if this kills their former ally. These two companies long ago lost any reason to trust each other, and now Apple is punishing Adobe for treating them with contempt.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
I'm waiting for the first review of using VNC on this thing. I see it as the perfect remote console for all my "real" systems.
If at least some of those "real" systems are Macs, you may want to take a look at wormhole remote. (Complete with cheesy introduction video that parodies the one that Apple made for the iPad starring several top executives.)
For all your other systems there are also good (though not perfect) VNC and RDP clients, of course.
ABC.com has put together an app for watching their online streaming shows on the iPad. I've heard Hulu and Netflix are going to do the same, and others are sure to follow, including the adult-oriented of the bunch.
I don't want to be mean, but if the submitter "took everything through AP Calculus in high school" and still "had [his] butt kicked by college calculus", then I can only conclude that the AP Calculus class he was in was a total joke.
I wonder WTF they taught the kids in the regular Calculus class...
He has been released already! Let's hope that they don't incarcerate him again. This link is to Globovisión, the network of which Zuloaga is president:
It seems you are severely underestimating what GCD means to the application developer. I strongly suggest you read parts 12 and 13 of John Siracusa's excellent review very carefully. As Siracusa says,
Those with some multithreaded programming experience may be unimpressed with the GCD. So Apple made a thread pool. Big deal. They've been around forever. But the angels are in the details. Yes, the implementation of queues and threads has an elegant simplicity, and baking it into the lowest levels of the OS really helps to lower the perceived barrier to entry, but it's the API built around blocks that makes Grand Central Dispatch so attractive to developers. Just as Time Machine was "the first backup system people will actually use," Grand Central Dispatch is poised to finally spread the heretofore dark art of asynchronous application design to all Mac OS X developers. I can't wait.
Why is it that Walmart pays their employees about $11 a day in Mexico and this is considered a *good* wage as the Mexican minimum wage is about $4 a day?
Because the cost of life is far lower than what you're used to. Think of it this way: a $50,000 salary is a fairly crappy salary in NYC, but the exact same salary is quite acceptable in many, many other regions of the USA. Likewise, in some Third World countries a $20,000 salary allows you to have a standard of living that is far superior to that of most US citizens; unfortunately, the vast majority of the population will have salaries that are far below that number so their standard of living is abysmal.
The problem of poverty in the Third World countries is not that people earn too few dollars per day, but that what they earn (regardless of the amount) is not enough to fulfill their needs.
They have the exact same crap in their stores in Mexico that they have in the states.
That's not too relevant. Some of that crap is exactly the same but is substantially cheaper. Some other crap is not exactly the same: it's locally produced versions of the same product that usually have the same quality (which in the case of Wal-Mart doesn't say much) but is quite cheaper.
Furthermore, if there are many people working for less than $10 a day, where do they get the money to buy cars from?
The people buying the cars are not the ones that get $10 a day. There's a good amount of people that earn a lot more than that. Also, cars are maintained for many more years than in the US. You will see a lot of 20 and 30 year old cars that are in amazingly good shape mechanically and that they can buy for a very low price.
The vast majority will not be able to afford a car anyway, so they depend on a complex public transportation system that, while very chaotic, has a coverage that far surpasses that of any US city with the possible exception of New York.
As I said to the other commenter: I defy you to give a single example of Christine doctrine -- such doctrine as is held by all, or almost all, Christian sects -- that is not subject to examination or isn't backed up by any evidence.
Pudge, English is not my native language so I guess that's why I fail to understand what you mean by that. It seems to me that all of the cornerstones of Christianity (and any other religion, for that matter) fit that description precisely.
In the case of Christianity examples of such basic concepts would include:
The Trinity. There is only one God, but he has three completely separate manifestations: the Father (the concept of God that we share with Jews and Muslims), the Son (Jesus, a human being), and the Holy Spirit (who's difference with the Father isn't completely clear to me). The concept of Jesus as God is incontrovertible to all Christians AFAIK, even though in the Gospels he seen praying in several occasions (to himself?) and while on the cross he says “Father, Father, Why Have You Forsaken Me?” and "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do".
The death and resurrection of Jesus, and his ascension to heaven. Jesus later appears to his disciples on a few occasions.
Christ's second coming and the Day of Judgement. Even though if he already appeared several times to his disciples, that wouldn't be his second coming but his sixth or more.
The concept of heaven and hell (and in some cases purgatory). We are all supposed to end in one of those places either when we die or after Judgment Day.
The concept of Communion. A ritualistic re-creation of the Last Supper where we metaphorically eat and drink the flesh and blood of Jesus. This is, in turn, supposed to be a metaphor but it is attributed special powers that others with the view as "magical".
The concept of a soul independent from the body. The concept of Satan, angels (messengers), and other mythological creatures inherited from the Jews. The miracles performed by Jesus and some other select characters. The direct verbal communication of God (the Father) with select characters in both Testaments.
And I could go on and on, ad infinitum. It seems to me that most of the above is believed by the vast majority of Christians with no other evidence than "if it's written in the Bible then it has to be true".
As I said, I'm probably misunderstanding what you said due to the language barrier, so I would greatly appreciate your input.
Wait a moment... you are saying that the total healthcare spending in Canada is around $160 billion per year for a population of 33 million... that's $4850 per person per year. (I'm going to ignore the fact that those must be Canadian dollars since both currencies are almost equal).
In the US the total health expenditures are around $2.3 trillion for a population of less than 310 million. That's over $7400 per person per year, in American dollars.
So we spend over 50% more than them. And while they are mostly extremely happy with the healthcare they receive and love rubbing it on our faces, we have a sweet&sour perception of our healthcare: some of us receive the best in the world, but an alarming number of us have an amazingly crappy service, and millions have no health insurance at all and only get healthcare when they are in critical condition.
We are obviously doing a really craptastic job with healthcare in the US....
(And yes, the missing $150 billion come from taxes so ultimately they came from the Canadian citizens' pockets, while most of the $2.3 trillion came from the pockets of the American citizens without passing through the tax system. But the fact remains that they ultimately pay far less and get much more, which is the real point of the GP.)
The OSX updates are service packs, with windows I get that for free. (...) 10.4 -> 10.5 was $129 iirc and came out late 2007 and is not any bit faster than 10.4 (in fact it's slower, I have it on my mac mini I bought back when I didn't realize apple screws it's customers over year after year) 10.5-10.6 is $29.
You are mistaken. The OS X licenses for the boxed versions are upgrades only. That means that you are expected to have a license for the previous version of the OS in order to acquire the new one. But the actual DVDs (and CDs at the time) don't enforce this, they have always included the full version of the operating system. You don't need to have any older version installed (which would be ridiculous if you were installing on a brand new hard drive). That includes Snow Leopard. Let me repeat that: you do not need Leopard installed on your machine in order to install Snow Leopard. Just backup your data and do a fresh install, do not attempt to do an "upgrade".
Of course Apple tells you otherwise because they want to recover part of the money they lost when you bypassed Leopard. So they tell you to buy the $169 Mac Box Set which includes iLife '09 and iWork '09. Bollocks. That's a good deal if you also want iLife and iWork, but the regular DVD of Snow Leopard will install on your system just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for proving my point.
First, the annual moving averages in your graph shows iPhones already reaching more than half of the sales of iPods. That is, iPhone sales are already in the same order of magnitude as iPod sales.
Second, the trend of those annual moving average lines shows iPods reached a stable point long ago, while iPhone sales are continuously growing, which means that iPhone sales will most likely pass iPod sales in less than a year.
Third, the sales of iPhones almost reached those of iPods in 2009q4 and 2010q2. 2010q1 was Oct-Dec of 2009 (those are Apple's financial quarters). That quarter, as all q1 quarters, was greatly affected by huge sales of iPods as Christmas gifts.
Fourth, the iPod sales in that graph include the iPod touch, which arguably is closer to the iPhone than to the older iPods. Taking that into account, sales of iPhone OS devices surpassed classic iPod devices long ago.
Fifth, you took that plot from this article from the Guardian, and the whole point of that article is "WTF! How did Apple sell so many iPhones?"
All five points were derived from the plot that you gave me. Boy, did that backfire on you!
hahah you think the iPad will reach iPod or iPhone levels of sales? you must be an iTard.
Yet again, when Apple announced the iPhone, people would mock "iTards" like the GP with phrases like "hahah you think the iPhone will reach iPod levels of sales? you must be an iTard."
And still...
There is no text anywhere quiting Google spokespeople saying Google would bring this to the iPhone ???
RTFS again.
There are three FAs in it. The first FA is even quoted in TFS:
'However, Google is working with Apple on bringing it to the iPhone, and it's not ruling out licensing the software to makers of portable navigation devices used in cars throughout the world, said Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google for mobile and developers.'
So, Google's vice-president for engineering said Google is working on bringing it to the iPhone. Now Google says "We did not say we would bring it to iPhone".
Google has no obligation to bring any product to market, but at least they should say "we finally decided not no bring it to the iPhone". Saying "we did not say we would" is just sleazy.
And of course, I forgot to paste the linkt to the interview.
Flash runs fine on my Mac. I've not encountered one problem so I dunno what Mac you use but it sucks. IMO !
Today I was reminded of this interview with Adobe's Chief Technical Officer Kevin Lynch, where he acknowledges the inferior performance of Flash on the Mac:
Around 1:15:
So, for example, performance on the Macintosh is an area that we're working on, we have been working on for a while (...) now we're working really hard on making sure that video renderers are using similar CPU usage in Mac and Windows. Right now the Mac uses more CPU than Windows (...)
I can't help but wonder how you get the same performance under Mac and Windows, when even Adobe's CTO acknowledges that the performance on the Mac is inferior.
Flash runs fine on my Mac. I've not encountered one problem so I dunno what Mac you use but it sucks. IMO !
Today I was reminded of this interview with Adobe's Chief Technical Officer Kevin Lynch, where he acknowledges the inferior performance of Flash on the Mac:
Around 1:15:
So, for example, performance on the Macintosh is an area that we're working on, we have been working on for a while (...) now we're working really hard on making sure that video renderers are using similar CPU usage in Mac and Windows. Right now the Mac uses more CPU than Windows (...)
If even Adobe's CTO acknowledges that, I can't understand why you insist on denying it.
Yeah, me also.
In fact, here I was scratching my head, wondering why Adrian Lopez was apologizing for posting a link to an article that looked quite interesting and insightful.
Until the comments made me realize that it was actually TFA!
That's Florida though, it has its own Fark tag for a reason.
And the story of TFA takes place in Florida, so what is your point?
You are so full of it! Your browser crashes all the time? WTF None of my 30 or so mac friends have that issue ! Gimme a break!
You really need reading comprehension classes. I quote myself:
Also, almost every single time my browser crashes (which fortunately is not very frequently, but it is pretty much the only application that ever crashes) the culprit is Flash.
Hmmmm.. what about 720p? I see a significant difference there.
On the other hand, I am running on 10.5.8, maybe that's part of the problem. (I do have the Snow Leopard installer but I am doing some critical stuff that I can't risk screwing up so I have delayed the upgrade till June).
How about Hulu? I also see a significant difference there at 480p. I also frequently find Flash ads that completely saturate my CPU, but in Windows they barely take half.
Install Boot Camp on one of your Macs and compare the performance and CPU usage of the exact same Flash apps on Mac OS X and Windows (any browser in either case).
The difference is ghastly.
As I told your parent post, "The point is that in Flash-land the Mac (and Linux, etc) are third class citizens. Yes, it works "fine", but compared to Windows it sucks horribly. (And many Windows users complain that it sucks, hink about that!)"
I use the most recent model of MacBook Pro (soon to be dethroned, of course).
And yes, Flash runs "fine" on it. Except that running very simple things consumes an amount of processor time that is far from reasonable for the task at hand, something that becomes extremely evident when you run the same Flash applet on Windows.
Also, almost every single time my browser crashes (which fortunately is not very frequently, but it is pretty much the only application that ever crashes) the culprit is Flash. And let's not ignore the security issues.
The point is that in Flash-land the Mac (and Linux, etc) are third class citizens. Yes, it works "fine", but compared to Windows it sucks horribly. (And many Windows users complain that it sucks, hink about that!)
With flash, applications can be downloaded and run on demand inside a browser. Apple can't have that.
That would make sense, except for the fact that Apple has always pushed non-Flash Web Apps very strongly. In fact, until the introduction of the App Store (one day before the iPhone 3G), Apple touted Web Apps as The One and Only Way® for third parties to run their stuff on the iPhone.
You may think that web apps are too inferior, but think twice: first, there are many that are almost indistinguishable from native apps. In fact, you can add them to your home screen and launch them as regular apps. And also, along with HTML5 and other associated technologies that Apple has been pushing a lot of the special functionality that Flash brings to the game becomes available also for iPhones/iPads and any HTML5 compliant browser.
So if "Apple can't have applications (that) can be downloaded and run on demand inside a browser", how come they have pushed exactly that type of functionality all along?
Although I strongly condemn Apple's bullying tactics, I can only say that Adobe had this coming for a long time.
Back in the 80s, at the dawn of desktop publishing, Apple held a kind of symbiotic relationship with Adobe, Aldus, and Macromedia, the once-competing companies that eventually merged into today's Adobe. But somewhere in the late 90s Adobe started to drop the ball on Apple as they saw greener pastures in Windows Land. They started to invest much more in the development of the Windows versions of many of their products and Mac versions started to become second-class products.
Adobe even used Premiere as leverage against Apple, threatening to stop its development for the Mac, something that would have essentially kicked Apple out of the video editing market. That's why Apple bought and started heavy development of Final Cut (1999?). Adobe in fact pulled the plug from Premiere (2003?) until they realized that this has backfired on them making them loose a lot of the video market (2007?).
But perhaps the epitome of Adobe's contempt for Apple is Flash. if you think Flash for windows is crappy, you haven't seen the Mac version (or for that matter the Linux one). Macromedia Flash was equally good for Mac and Windows, but while the performance of the Windows version was kept almost acceptable, the Mac version became even more sluggish, processor intensive, and buggy.
Furthermore, Flash became probably the biggest security hole in Mac OS X. in the security update for January, 12 vulnerabilities were plugged. But seven of them were not really in the operating system but in the flash pluggin!
Again, I reject Apple's tactics. But with all this, it is not surprising that Apple doesn't want flash anywhere near their new products even if this kills their former ally. These two companies long ago lost any reason to trust each other, and now Apple is punishing Adobe for treating them with contempt.
I'm waiting for the first review of using VNC on this thing. I see it as the perfect remote console for all my "real" systems.
If at least some of those "real" systems are Macs, you may want to take a look at wormhole remote. (Complete with cheesy introduction video that parodies the one that Apple made for the iPad starring several top executives.)
For all your other systems there are also good (though not perfect) VNC and RDP clients, of course.
ABC.com has put together an app for watching their online streaming shows on the iPad. I've heard Hulu and Netflix are going to do the same, and others are sure to follow, including the adult-oriented of the bunch.
Netflix already did.
I don't want to be mean, but if the submitter "took everything through AP Calculus in high school" and still "had [his] butt kicked by college calculus", then I can only conclude that the AP Calculus class he was in was a total joke.
I wonder WTF they taught the kids in the regular Calculus class...
Are all AP courses that crappy?
He has been released already! Let's hope that they don't incarcerate him again. This link is to Globovisión, the network of which Zuloaga is president:
http://www.globovision.com/news.php?nid=144197
Google translation
Yeah. Apparently someone uploaded teh video to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FFazanaWQY
Opera mini is blazing on android.
Cool. Too bad it doesn't support Flash, which makes it completely useless as a web browser according to most here (not me!).
It seems you are severely underestimating what GCD means to the application developer. I strongly suggest you read parts 12 and 13 of John Siracusa's excellent review very carefully. As Siracusa says,
Those with some multithreaded programming experience may be unimpressed with the GCD. So Apple made a thread pool. Big deal. They've been around forever. But the angels are in the details. Yes, the implementation of queues and threads has an elegant simplicity, and baking it into the lowest levels of the OS really helps to lower the perceived barrier to entry, but it's the API built around blocks that makes Grand Central Dispatch so attractive to developers. Just as Time Machine was "the first backup system people will actually use," Grand Central Dispatch is poised to finally spread the heretofore dark art of asynchronous application design to all Mac OS X developers. I can't wait.
Why is it that Walmart pays their employees about $11 a day in Mexico and this is considered a *good* wage as the Mexican minimum wage is about $4 a day?
Because the cost of life is far lower than what you're used to. Think of it this way: a $50,000 salary is a fairly crappy salary in NYC, but the exact same salary is quite acceptable in many, many other regions of the USA. Likewise, in some Third World countries a $20,000 salary allows you to have a standard of living that is far superior to that of most US citizens; unfortunately, the vast majority of the population will have salaries that are far below that number so their standard of living is abysmal.
The problem of poverty in the Third World countries is not that people earn too few dollars per day, but that what they earn (regardless of the amount) is not enough to fulfill their needs.
They have the exact same crap in their stores in Mexico that they have in the states.
That's not too relevant. Some of that crap is exactly the same but is substantially cheaper. Some other crap is not exactly the same: it's locally produced versions of the same product that usually have the same quality (which in the case of Wal-Mart doesn't say much) but is quite cheaper.
Furthermore, if there are many people working for less than $10 a day, where do they get the money to buy cars from?
The people buying the cars are not the ones that get $10 a day. There's a good amount of people that earn a lot more than that. Also, cars are maintained for many more years than in the US. You will see a lot of 20 and 30 year old cars that are in amazingly good shape mechanically and that they can buy for a very low price.
The vast majority will not be able to afford a car anyway, so they depend on a complex public transportation system that, while very chaotic, has a coverage that far surpasses that of any US city with the possible exception of New York.
As I said to the other commenter: I defy you to give a single example of Christine doctrine -- such doctrine as is held by all, or almost all, Christian sects -- that is not subject to examination or isn't backed up by any evidence.
Pudge, English is not my native language so I guess that's why I fail to understand what you mean by that. It seems to me that all of the cornerstones of Christianity (and any other religion, for that matter) fit that description precisely.
In the case of Christianity examples of such basic concepts would include:
And I could go on and on, ad infinitum. It seems to me that most of the above is believed by the vast majority of Christians with no other evidence than "if it's written in the Bible then it has to be true".
As I said, I'm probably misunderstanding what you said due to the language barrier, so I would greatly appreciate your input.
Wait a moment... you are saying that the total healthcare spending in Canada is around $160 billion per year for a population of 33 million... that's $4850 per person per year. (I'm going to ignore the fact that those must be Canadian dollars since both currencies are almost equal).
In the US the total health expenditures are around $2.3 trillion for a population of less than 310 million. That's over $7400 per person per year, in American dollars.
So we spend over 50% more than them. And while they are mostly extremely happy with the healthcare they receive and love rubbing it on our faces, we have a sweet&sour perception of our healthcare: some of us receive the best in the world, but an alarming number of us have an amazingly crappy service, and millions have no health insurance at all and only get healthcare when they are in critical condition.
We are obviously doing a really craptastic job with healthcare in the US....
(And yes, the missing $150 billion come from taxes so ultimately they came from the Canadian citizens' pockets, while most of the $2.3 trillion came from the pockets of the American citizens without passing through the tax system. But the fact remains that they ultimately pay far less and get much more, which is the real point of the GP.)
The OSX updates are service packs, with windows I get that for free.
(...)
10.4 -> 10.5 was $129 iirc and came out late 2007 and is not any bit faster than 10.4 (in fact it's slower, I have it on my mac mini I bought back when I didn't realize apple screws it's customers over year after year) 10.5-10.6 is $29.
You are mistaken. The OS X licenses for the boxed versions are upgrades only. That means that you are expected to have a license for the previous version of the OS in order to acquire the new one. But the actual DVDs (and CDs at the time) don't enforce this, they have always included the full version of the operating system. You don't need to have any older version installed (which would be ridiculous if you were installing on a brand new hard drive). That includes Snow Leopard. Let me repeat that: you do not need Leopard installed on your machine in order to install Snow Leopard. Just backup your data and do a fresh install, do not attempt to do an "upgrade".
Of course Apple tells you otherwise because they want to recover part of the money they lost when you bypassed Leopard. So they tell you to buy the $169 Mac Box Set which includes iLife '09 and iWork '09. Bollocks. That's a good deal if you also want iLife and iWork, but the regular DVD of Snow Leopard will install on your system just fine.