America is shifting back toward the Center and will start to look like a nice place again. Now is the time to not leave the country - America needs you more than ever!
Not to pick nits, but the Smithsonian's Blackbird was still at the Udvar-Hazy center on the ground floor right at the end of the entrance hallway when I visited there just this past July. That doesn't mean that other Blackbirds aren't flying, though, although I'm pretty sure that the entire SR-71 program has in fact been retired.
The Blackbird has an impressive seervice history and is an amazing piece of technology. I often find myself wondering where we would be if we had fully developed this though...
One thing I've thought about that I haven't seen mentioned, and if it is, I apologise, is the Baby Boomer segment of society. The record industry has built itself up over the last 4 decades through a lot of sales to the Baby Boomer generation. I'm sure Boomer sales are slowing down as most Boomers have other things to spend their disposable income on. I'm in that weird "non-labelled-Generation" that was born post-Boomer and pre-Xer (1965), and I know that my music-buying habits have slowed down a lot. Has anyone considered that there simply aren't as many consumers in the target audience as there were say, 20 years ago? The impending Baby Boomer retirement is affecting all segments of society, why not record sales as well?
You're absolutely correct! Album art on LP's was half the joy of getting a record. Roger Dean, Hipgnosis, et al came out with some really neat stuff from The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway to Wish You Were Here to Yessongs. Good stuff!
Useless trivia: Roger Dean did the artwork for Glass Hammer's latest studio album The Inconsolable Secret.
I don't know from the large truck diesels, but we got a VW Beetle with the 1.9L TDI and it cost just about the same as the 2.5L gas engine (we spent about $20K total for a TDI with an automatic transmission, so maybe a $1K difference). The price difference was a deciding factor in why we chose a diesel over a hybrid. In our area, the hybrids started at $26K and went up from there. While I don't expect to "make up the price in gas savings" anytime within the next 5 years or more, diesels do have a tendency to last longer (heavier construction for higher compression rations), and hopefully I'll recoup some costs in lower maintenence (I can hope anyway).
One of the things I've found (for Der Bug, anyway) is that while our diesel doesn't have whopping horsepower (99 bhp, I think), there's gobs of low-end torque (177 lb-ft), making the Bug a lot quicker off the line than I would have expected (not "quick" mind you, but competitive with other vehicles on the road). Of course, the downside to this is that it's real hard to go to the hardware store and load a half ton of manure in Der Bug. Fuel economy or Utility? (Of course my car is a Ford Mustang GT: 18 mpg and no manure-hauling capability - the worst of both worlds.)
Cheers!
That's actually a really good idea. Diesel fuel is generally more efficient than gasoline (more BTU's per volume). I'm a little surprised no on has offered a diesel hybrid yet. Of course, I'd like to see biodiesel more widely available too (my wife has a VW TDI and we love it, but the closest biodiesel dealer to us is like 75 miles away).
Exposé is a Window/desktop manager that lets you quickly see all your windows, or all the windows for a given application, or the desktop. The (corded) Mighty Mouse has two buttons on either side that are linked to this feature in OS X (although all buttons are configurable). You have to squeeze the living snot out of them to get Exposé to come up. I have never brought Exposé up accidentally through the Mighty Mouse. Bringing Dashboard up by accidentally clicking with the wheel, OTOH, happens all the time.
I had mt DPT shots years ago. in 1998, I was one of the first people in the Washington DC area to contract pertussis (whooping cough). My regular GP could not identify the disease because he (and I for that matter) were assured that I had had my shots. But I ended up goiing to a pulmonologist who ran antibody titers and determined that, yes, I did indeed have pertussis.
And let me tell you, pertussis is no fun. When you get it, you keep it for 4 to 6 months. You cough so hard, you can break ribs. You frequently can't breathe. And it damages your lungs, so if you didn't have asthma before, get ready for some mild asthma afterwards. If you contract it as an adult, you probably won't die from it, but it is an extremely unpleasant experience. The pulmonologist wrote it off to vaccines only being effective for so long combined with an influx of people into the country that have never been vaccinated for it. Just lucky, I guess.
The Dell XPS is a nice notebook. And when it is similarly equipped as the Apple 17" notebook, the price jumps to $3,393.00, making it $594.00 more expensive than the Apple.
What OS were you running on the Sony? If it was MS Windows, that would explain a lot of the speed difference. I run Windows on a 2.0 GHz Pentium M (Dell D800) and OS X on a 1.5 GHz G4 (PowerBook). The PowerBook seems like it runs circles around the Dell. I'm fairly convinced that this is mostly due to OS Bloat on Windows part. Apple has done a brilliant job on the UI, not so much in terms of look (which is gorgeous), but rather in speeding up response to the user as much as they can. When I upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3, the response time actually got faster.
I'm glad you're digging your Mac. I switched for personal use a couple of years ago and haven't looked back. Very nice machines. One of these days I'm going to break down and try the Intel-based machines.
Sorry, I was multitasking and looking at a different thread where someone was expounding the virtues of Michael Behe. I accidentally responded to your post instead.
My experience, FWIW, has been very good with the OS X based Apples. I am an old Windows programmer - been writing code for Windows since 3.0 and Petzold. I was vociferously opposed to the Mac through OS 9. Hell, prior to OS X, Apple used preemptive multitasking (think Windows 3.1 where the system stops other programs that are running to let the active program use all the system resources). This was primitive and clunky. But when Apple moved to OS X (which is based on the old Unix-based NeXT OS for the three people in the world who didn't know this), I radically changed my view on Apple. Unix and Unix-like operating systems are very stable and have a lot of inherent Goodness. Witness: System V, BSD, NeXTSTEP, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, et al. Add to that that Apple controls the hardware, much like Sun controls their hardware, and you get ridiculous stability. I haven't rebooted my Powerbook in over a year. Very similar to Sun Sparcs and Blades. Are they perfect? No, I have taken our iMac in for service. But are their less maintainence headaches with Apple hardware? From my experience, yes.
You make good points about "the coolness factor", which personally I find a turn-off. I couldn't care less if a young, hip latte-swilling kid thinks my laptop is "cool". What I do care about is stability, ease of use, flexibility of configuration, and ease of maintainence. Apple holds what? Something like 4 or 5% of the market share in the PC world? They have to aggressively sell their product in order to compete. Sex sells, so they advertise their product as sexy and hip.
You might buy your first Mac because of the "cool" factor. But if and when you buy a second Mac, it will be because of the machine's stability and performance - it is a good product.
Not only are the dev tools free, but they are good too! The XCode IDE around gcc is very nice.
Wow, I'm sorry that you seem to have had some bad experiences.
Between myself, my wife and my kids, we collectively own: an iMac, two Powerbooks, a 3G iPod, 2 5G iPods, an iPod Mini and an iPod Nano. I have had to deal with Apple on some issues with the computers but not with the iPods. Apple has always been very responsive, friendly, and have "bent the rules" for me when I had an issue that was a week outside of the warranty period. My friend has a Powerbook and he had to take it in for out of warranty work. He was very pleased with Apple's response and service as well.
In the PC world, I build my own boxen, so I am usually my own "customer service". But I've dealt with Dell for PC's at work, and my take on that is that Apple is significantly better to deal with than Dell. Perhaps it is because there are a lot more Dells, and service is spread thinner, I don't know. But my personal experiences with Apple have been very good.
Tell me about it! My first was a Sinclair ZX-81 with an 8K ROM and a whopping 1K of memory (yes, that's 1024 bytes). I moved up to a Commodore VIC 20 and eventually to a Commodore 64, which lasted me throughout college.
Slashdot Mirror
America is shifting back toward the Center and will start to look like a nice place again. Now is the time to not leave the country - America needs you more than ever!
Not to pick nits, but the Smithsonian's Blackbird was still at the Udvar-Hazy center on the ground floor right at the end of the entrance hallway when I visited there just this past July. That doesn't mean that other Blackbirds aren't flying, though, although I'm pretty sure that the entire SR-71 program has in fact been retired.
The Blackbird has an impressive seervice history and is an amazing piece of technology. I often find myself wondering where we would be if we had fully developed this though...
One thing I've thought about that I haven't seen mentioned, and if it is, I apologise, is the Baby Boomer segment of society. The record industry has built itself up over the last 4 decades through a lot of sales to the Baby Boomer generation. I'm sure Boomer sales are slowing down as most Boomers have other things to spend their disposable income on. I'm in that weird "non-labelled-Generation" that was born post-Boomer and pre-Xer (1965), and I know that my music-buying habits have slowed down a lot. Has anyone considered that there simply aren't as many consumers in the target audience as there were say, 20 years ago? The impending Baby Boomer retirement is affecting all segments of society, why not record sales as well?
What can I say but "Have A Nice Day!" : )
You're absolutely correct! Album art on LP's was half the joy of getting a record. Roger Dean, Hipgnosis, et al came out with some really neat stuff from The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway to Wish You Were Here to Yessongs. Good stuff!
Useless trivia: Roger Dean did the artwork for Glass Hammer's latest studio album The Inconsolable Secret.
I love Roger Dean's work.
Cool.
I don't know from the large truck diesels, but we got a VW Beetle with the 1.9L TDI and it cost just about the same as the 2.5L gas engine (we spent about $20K total for a TDI with an automatic transmission, so maybe a $1K difference). The price difference was a deciding factor in why we chose a diesel over a hybrid. In our area, the hybrids started at $26K and went up from there. While I don't expect to "make up the price in gas savings" anytime within the next 5 years or more, diesels do have a tendency to last longer (heavier construction for higher compression rations), and hopefully I'll recoup some costs in lower maintenence (I can hope anyway).
One of the things I've found (for Der Bug, anyway) is that while our diesel doesn't have whopping horsepower (99 bhp, I think), there's gobs of low-end torque (177 lb-ft), making the Bug a lot quicker off the line than I would have expected (not "quick" mind you, but competitive with other vehicles on the road). Of course, the downside to this is that it's real hard to go to the hardware store and load a half ton of manure in Der Bug. Fuel economy or Utility? (Of course my car is a Ford Mustang GT: 18 mpg and no manure-hauling capability - the worst of both worlds.) Cheers!
Would that I had mod points, I'd mod you insightful. I think you're on to something...
EnderGT: hybrid biodiesel vehicles
That's actually a really good idea. Diesel fuel is generally more efficient than gasoline (more BTU's per volume). I'm a little surprised no on has offered a diesel hybrid yet. Of course, I'd like to see biodiesel more widely available too (my wife has a VW TDI and we love it, but the closest biodiesel dealer to us is like 75 miles away).
Cheers!
C | N > K.
You win!
Exposé is a Window/desktop manager that lets you quickly see all your windows, or all the windows for a given application, or the desktop. The (corded) Mighty Mouse has two buttons on either side that are linked to this feature in OS X (although all buttons are configurable). You have to squeeze the living snot out of them to get Exposé to come up. I have never brought Exposé up accidentally through the Mighty Mouse. Bringing Dashboard up by accidentally clicking with the wheel, OTOH, happens all the time.
A møøse once bit my sister...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't HIV "turn off" the T-helper cells in the immune system?
Worst OS experience of my life was running JCL under System/370. That sucked. Lots.
I never did get OS/2 Warp to run with my CMD640 IDE controller.
I'm imaging the night sky with my 6 million pixel digital camera and my 100mm refractor. It's just goinng to take me a bit longer than them...
Personally, I'd have found it more interesting if there had been 1618 genes, with phi turning up all over the place in nature and all...
I had mt DPT shots years ago. in 1998, I was one of the first people in the Washington DC area to contract pertussis (whooping cough). My regular GP could not identify the disease because he (and I for that matter) were assured that I had had my shots. But I ended up goiing to a pulmonologist who ran antibody titers and determined that, yes, I did indeed have pertussis.
And let me tell you, pertussis is no fun. When you get it, you keep it for 4 to 6 months. You cough so hard, you can break ribs. You frequently can't breathe. And it damages your lungs, so if you didn't have asthma before, get ready for some mild asthma afterwards. If you contract it as an adult, you probably won't die from it, but it is an extremely unpleasant experience. The pulmonologist wrote it off to vaccines only being effective for so long combined with an influx of people into the country that have never been vaccinated for it. Just lucky, I guess.
The Dell XPS is a nice notebook. And when it is similarly equipped as the Apple 17" notebook, the price jumps to $3,393.00, making it $594.00 more expensive than the Apple.
Just saying...
What OS were you running on the Sony? If it was MS Windows, that would explain a lot of the speed difference. I run Windows on a 2.0 GHz Pentium M (Dell D800) and OS X on a 1.5 GHz G4 (PowerBook). The PowerBook seems like it runs circles around the Dell. I'm fairly convinced that this is mostly due to OS Bloat on Windows part. Apple has done a brilliant job on the UI, not so much in terms of look (which is gorgeous), but rather in speeding up response to the user as much as they can. When I upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3, the response time actually got faster.
I'm glad you're digging your Mac. I switched for personal use a couple of years ago and haven't looked back. Very nice machines. One of these days I'm going to break down and try the Intel-based machines.
Cheers!
Sorry, I was multitasking and looking at a different thread where someone was expounding the virtues of Michael Behe. I accidentally responded to your post instead.
Michael Behe is an embarassment to Lehigh University, and the only reason he is still employed there is because he has tenure.
My bad! You are correct: what I meant was Non-Preemptive multitasking...
My experience, FWIW, has been very good with the OS X based Apples. I am an old Windows programmer - been writing code for Windows since 3.0 and Petzold. I was vociferously opposed to the Mac through OS 9. Hell, prior to OS X, Apple used preemptive multitasking (think Windows 3.1 where the system stops other programs that are running to let the active program use all the system resources). This was primitive and clunky. But when Apple moved to OS X (which is based on the old Unix-based NeXT OS for the three people in the world who didn't know this), I radically changed my view on Apple. Unix and Unix-like operating systems are very stable and have a lot of inherent Goodness. Witness: System V, BSD, NeXTSTEP, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, et al. Add to that that Apple controls the hardware, much like Sun controls their hardware, and you get ridiculous stability. I haven't rebooted my Powerbook in over a year. Very similar to Sun Sparcs and Blades. Are they perfect? No, I have taken our iMac in for service. But are their less maintainence headaches with Apple hardware? From my experience, yes.
You make good points about "the coolness factor", which personally I find a turn-off. I couldn't care less if a young, hip latte-swilling kid thinks my laptop is "cool". What I do care about is stability, ease of use, flexibility of configuration, and ease of maintainence. Apple holds what? Something like 4 or 5% of the market share in the PC world? They have to aggressively sell their product in order to compete. Sex sells, so they advertise their product as sexy and hip.
You might buy your first Mac because of the "cool" factor. But if and when you buy a second Mac, it will be because of the machine's stability and performance - it is a good product.
Not only are the dev tools free, but they are good too! The XCode IDE around gcc is very nice.
Cheers!
Wow, I'm sorry that you seem to have had some bad experiences.
Between myself, my wife and my kids, we collectively own: an iMac, two Powerbooks, a 3G iPod, 2 5G iPods, an iPod Mini and an iPod Nano. I have had to deal with Apple on some issues with the computers but not with the iPods. Apple has always been very responsive, friendly, and have "bent the rules" for me when I had an issue that was a week outside of the warranty period. My friend has a Powerbook and he had to take it in for out of warranty work. He was very pleased with Apple's response and service as well.
In the PC world, I build my own boxen, so I am usually my own "customer service". But I've dealt with Dell for PC's at work, and my take on that is that Apple is significantly better to deal with than Dell. Perhaps it is because there are a lot more Dells, and service is spread thinner, I don't know. But my personal experiences with Apple have been very good.
Cheers!
Tell me about it! My first was a Sinclair ZX-81 with an 8K ROM and a whopping 1K of memory (yes, that's 1024 bytes). I moved up to a Commodore VIC 20 and eventually to a Commodore 64, which lasted me throughout college.
Video games used to look like this.