You can also enable 'airplane mode' on most phones, which turns off the radio but leaves the phone otherwise functional. Some phones behave oddly when you do this though; my RIZR's clock tends to skew by a few hours a day when I leave it on airplane mode (while I was in the hospital). Screwed with my sense of time for a while until I figured it out.
It's because all those nets get snagged on sharp corners and rivets in the tubes. They need to shape your traffic into round balls so that they bounce through the tubes instead of getting tangled, but the balls have to be small enough to go through the holes in the nets that end up getting unravelled.
Aah, Frank and Gordon. Of all the 'personalities' in the media these days, those are the two beavers I least want a good, long look at, and yet, they're the only ones I've seen in a while.
I was thinking about this a few years back, when the CA*Net III project was completed. A huge, national, redundant, ultra-high-bandwidth fibre-optic network, owned by the government and the institutions that provided funding to it. Why not leverage that?
Step 1: The government and private organizations continue to fund it. From the major hub cities, data is run out to other communities (e.g. from Calgary to Edmonton, Vancouver to Victoria, etc).
Step 2: In the major hub cities, lines are run out to each household. Now everyone has government-owned FTTH.
Step 3: Existing 'infrastructure companies' like Telus, Rogers, Shaw, Bell, and so on no longer have to maintain their own networks. They sell their current infrastructure, or parts of it, to the project (this can be done as part of Steps 1 and 2 as well).
Step 4: Existing 'service companies' like Telus, Rogers, Shaw, Bell, and anyone else with content to push, provides their services over this line, paying an access fee to help maintaint he network.
Example use: Each endpoint is a unique node ID. Phone numbers are mapped to node IDs, so existing phones will continue to work for people who don't want (or don't understand) fancy new technology. New phones, however, can take advantage of far more advanced directory services. If I meet someone at a party, I can look them up in the directory, but only be aware of them. If I want to contact them, I can make a request to do so (like making a phone call).
I can also add the phone number to my 'phone book' (which I can transfer to my computer, cell phone, and so on). The person on the other end knows who I am, and can choose to block me if they don't want to talk to me (e.g. harassing phone calls). People still have the option of making 'anonymous calls' (which can be enabled by default), but some 'contacts' won't allow anonymous calls (e.g. myself), and some will always be anonymous (e.g. the various social services hotlines for abuse, teen pregnancy, depression, etc).
Cable companies move from infrastructure maintainers to content aggregators. Suddenly, anyone and their dog can pay the system access fee and opt to provide a service to customers, but if HBO and NBC and CBC don't want to do it themselves, they sign contracts with Rogers, Shaw, etc. who make packages for consumers to provide these 'channels' (or even just pure 'content').
Theoretically, you could get the movie channels through Shaw, regular channels through Rogers, and a 'sports package' through SportsNet so you can watch every hockey game of the season.
The new digital infrastructure allows certain rules for each content provision. For example, SportsNet could allow you to go back and watch any game in the current season; an additional fee allows access to previous seasons. Shaw's movie channels package might let you choose from any movie that's made available for as long as it's made available ('Oh, Ghostbusters 2 is on the movie network this week, let's watch it on Thursday'). Rogers' package might include the major networks, and let you go back to watch any of the season's episodes of Lost, Grey's Anatomy, and Stargate.
The difference between standard 'common carrier' rules and e.g. fibre-optic lines is that while the telephone infrastructure was subsidized by the government (and thus a state-supported monopoly was built), the same can't be said of the fibre lines.
So, if Verizon is running fibre from their NOC out to neighborhoods, then out to houses, why should they have to? If I did the same thing, why would I have to? I mean, I would, but why should I HAVE to?
That said, if Verizon is leveraging the existing infrastructure by only running fibre from the CO, for example, then other companies should also be able to run fibre from the CO.
Seems relatively fair to me. Arguments can be made either way ('but Verizon's doing it with monopoly money!', no 'worthless US dollar' pun intended), but really, at some point we have to forgive at least some of their place in history as a government-mandated monopoly.
Bell rents the lines out by tunneling the pppoe connection right to the reseller isp so the isp can traffic shape if they want to. Bell has right to force business decisions on third party isps since they pay for all of the resources they use. Except that's not what happens. In most cases, all that these other ISPs do is resell Bell's DSL. I worked for an ISP where all we did was pay Bell a certain amount each month for each subscriber (based on their plan, e.g. 5 megabits), and then call Bell to go install the lines and get everything set up.
All this company actually did, hardware-wise, was ship DSL modems out. Other than that, their money went into marketing and maintaining additional services (e.g. e-mail, web hosting, domain hosting, etc.). Their money came from these services, as well as mark-up on Bell's wholesale rate.
Companies that DO pay for bandwidth, such as a particular ISP that I know of in Montreal, can save a HUGE amount of money by paying for their own bandwidth, even when you factor in the high-traffic users.
Bell, Telus, Sasktel, and likely another one or two that I can't remember MBTel in Manitoba, Aliant in the maritimes, and NorthWestTel in the territories.
You weighed 300 lbs. Your truck, if it was a Ford F-150 (2005) with a full tank of gas, weighed about 5000 lbs. When you get into the truck, that's 5300 lbs, or an increase of about 6%.
I weighed around 125 lbs after getting out of the hospital after being sick for a week, not being able to eat anything. If I got into the truck, it would be 5125, or a 2.5% increase in weight.
The difference between you at your worst and me at my worst puts a difference of about 3.5% of the weight of the truck. This completely fails to change the aerodynamics of the truck, the efficiency of the fuel, the pressure of the tires, and so on. Pretty insignificant difference.
But... the weight of a Toyota Prius is about 3000 lbs. If you got in at your worst, that would be 10%. If I got in, that would be about 4%, which would make for a difference of about 6%. Still not that much, really, since the aerodynamics, tire pressure, etc. doesn't change.
However, going from the F-150 (12 MPG city, 16 MPG highway) to the Prius (48 city, 45 highway) gets you a 36 MPG gain in the city. Pretty big change. You still get about the same distance on a tank of gas, but filling up an F-150 takes up to a hundred bucks, whereas a Prius will cost you around $35, give or take.
Then again, you can't haul a trailer and a stack of bricks in a Prius...
I was at Dairy Queen the other day with my (underweight if anything) girlfriend, and we happened to see another family enjoying some sundaes. I'm no good at speculation, but two of them seemed to be in their mid-twenties or so, and probably weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds or so, by our estimation. The mother and father of the family were probably more than that, maybe three hundred and three fifty.
They also had a little girl who looked a little on the chubby side, and were feeding her a giant sundae, as they all were eating.
Maybe this family has some kind of genetic disorder, and they may as well eat ice cream because they're going to be that large anyway. Maybe this was the first time in a year that they've gone to Dairy Queen (it was for me, and it was the first REALLY nice day of the year).
Still, I can't help but notice so many surprisingly large people out there on the streets, in the malls, at the food courts, and so on, and inevitably they're eating pizza, drinking coke, choking down a giant tub of popcorn with butter, and so on, and I can't help but think... these people either need self control, or need to realize that they have a problem.
Odd, I've never entered my 'social security number' (or Canadian equivalent, my SIN) or a credit card into a web browser. If I need to buy something online, I get one of those pre-paid credit cards from wherever and use those.
Regardless, you send all of your information over the network - even your e-mail address! - despite not being able to see the code on the other end?
Fact of the matter is, you should trust Opera more than any web site. Breaking into a poorly-maintained server (or even a well-maintained server with a 0-day exploit) is often not as hard as you'd think. Once you're in, it's a trivial matter to dump the database, or even just modify the code to redirect information.
Do you really know who's behind every website you visit? Not 100%, not all the time. But you know who's behind Opera, and you can track where it tries to connect and how. That's more reassuring than anything.
Any 'closed-source is the boogeyman' individuals should honestly stop and think about things like the recent exploit in the Thai (?) language pack for Firefox, or the huge SSL bug that Debian developer introduced way back when. Just because many eyes *can* look at it doesn't mean they will.
I dunno, I've had to resort to some pretty creative hackery to get hardware working in Linux before, which I had to come up with independently.
(And before anyone thinks I'm a troll - I once had a sound card whose driver wouldn't load until I did 'cat/proc/isapnp', after which it worked fine for the remainder of the boot).
Other than the will to organize and a significant tech-savvy population (hardly unique), what does suburban Utah have that most of the country doesn't? Multiple wives?
My previous roommate returned from an overnight flight from Spain, where he was crammed in uncomfortably and couldn't sleep. He arrived at something like three in the morning, and took a taxi home.
The taxi driver spent the whole trip complaining about all the stuff that was going on in his life (about a half-hour ride). My roommate tried to pay with his Visa, and the cabbie protested, because 'it costs me more'. Eventually the cabbie relented, and my roommate paid. Signed the forms, left the imprint, and started climbing out of the cab. He related to me with bitter words the last thing the cabbie said to him:
'What, no tip?'
A message to retailers: if you honestly and truly have a problem with me paying by credit card, you have two options: stop taking credit cards entirely, or refuse my business. Either way, I'll find someone else.
ISPs should stop being cheap bastards then. Buying bandwidth separately and installing your own ADSL2+ equipment provides you with far more flexibility in regards to customers, plans, and bandwidth, and can save a ton of money.
For one Montreal-based ISP, the cost of paying a metered rate on bandwidth was cheaper than paying Bell a flat rate for line access. That is, reselling Bell's DSL is more expensive than installing your own equipment and selling your own bandwidth.
It got to the point where they would install ADSL2+ equipment wherever there was the biggest market for it, but move as many customers in the area over to the new hardware as they could. Every customer they plugged into their own hardware instead of Bell's saved them enough in a short time to buy more equipment to move more customers over. Pretty good deal.
For small mom-and-pop type operations, it doesn't make sense, but for large-scale organizations such as Uniserve, it would make a ton of sense, not to mention save a ton of money. Oh, and there's also the fact that Bell technicians wouldn't have to be sent to client houses, where they can say 'It's a problem with your phone, but I'm not allowed to fix it... but if you were a Bell customer I could...'
Well that's what you get for accusing us of being responsible for letting the September 11th hijackers into the US, rather than paying attention to your own poor security.
There are problems? Ok, we'll crack down. Now the US requires passports from Canadians travelling to the US, so what's wrong with us wanting to be sure?
If you're going to point out that the border between Canada and the US is so insecure, then don't complain when we notice that it was your border security that was breached, and decide to protect ourselves.
I dunno, the Crystal Skull episode of Stargate: SG-1 wasn't that bad.
Incidentally, if anyone is wondering, the 'crystal skull' idea is from contemporary archaeology; they were claimed to be pre-Columbian, but in actuality seem to have been forgeries manufactured in the 19th century. Still, they've been quite popular in fiction.
I saw temple of doom, hoping it would be as good, if not better, than raiders. It didn't even come close. But it didn't "suck", it wasn't heartbreaking, it just wasn't as good as Raiders. One thing that sort of 'fixed' my appreciation of the Indiana Jones moves is remembering that Temple of Doom is a prequel to Raiders. While this doesn't make it a better movie, it does sort of make the movies fit together better.
If you consider Temple of Doom to be the first movie, Indiana Jones is playing more of the mercenary lifestyle, digging up treasure for a Shanghai mobster. After the events of Temple occurs Raiders and Crusade - both of which are similar in style and formula (globetrotting adventure).
After Indy's experience in India and becoming a believer of Hinduism, he goes back to the states and alternates between teaching and rescuing artifacts for the museum (which happens in Raiders, which proves Judaism, and Crusade, which proves Christianity).
It doesn't make Temple a better movie, but for me, it made it fit better in the grand scheme.
If your quality/reliability target is that of 'off the shelf' parts anyway, you can get the R200 for around five hundred bucks and spend another five hundred upgrading the hard drive and ram. Heck, you could hit 2x2G of ram and 2x1TB SATA hard drives for not that much more. If you don't need a DRAC then you're saving a nice chunk of change at that price point.
While historically that's true, lately Apple has taken to doing quiet refreshes pretty much whenever. The new revised 8-core Mac Pro, for example, was released a week before the Macworld Expo. Why not wait a week? Well, why wait?
The huge upgrades tend to wait, sure, but basic speed increases are pretty common nowadays.
They give you everything you need up front because most people don't want to say 'Oh, does my computer have that? How do I get it? What do I need to install to buy it? How do I do that?'
The $10 they might save on not adding the firewire port would cost consumers between $30-80, plus installation at $100/hr for most users because they're too afraid to open their computers for fear of damaging something (which they would probably do).
I'm glad that every Mac I get has Firewire and USB. The port hardly costs them a reasonable amount to add, and it means that I know what my Mac can do, and what all future Macs can do. Unlike with Dell, I know I can buy hardware now for my iMac that will work with the next laptop I get; no more picking laptops based on which one has bluetooth and which one has firewire, and which one has both but doesn't cost a thousand dollars more than I want to spend.
There are great benefits in uniformity between product lines, because when someone asks me what kind of external hard drive to get, I only have to ask them what kind of computer they have ('Macbook', 'Power Mac', 'Powerbook', 'iMac') and sometimes how old it is, and I know what their system supports. Macbook? Great, I'll put together a firewire drive for you. iMac G3? A network share would probably be faster than USB 1.1, so let's grab a NAS; then when you finally replace your crappy old computer with a new one, you can share to both.
With a Dell, it's more along the lines of 'What kind of computer do you have? Dell laptop? Which model? What options? Did you get the bluetooth? Does it have firewire?' Consumers don't want to answer those questions.
You forgot my favorite:
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. If you go back and read the Slashdot article about the original iPod, more than half the comments are talking about how Apple will fail and go out of business, and there's no market for it, it sucks, it's too expensive, only Macheads will want them, only fanboys will buy them, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
You can also enable 'airplane mode' on most phones, which turns off the radio but leaves the phone otherwise functional. Some phones behave oddly when you do this though; my RIZR's clock tends to skew by a few hours a day when I leave it on airplane mode (while I was in the hospital). Screwed with my sense of time for a while until I figured it out.
It's because all those nets get snagged on sharp corners and rivets in the tubes. They need to shape your traffic into round balls so that they bounce through the tubes instead of getting tangled, but the balls have to be small enough to go through the holes in the nets that end up getting unravelled.
Aah, Frank and Gordon. Of all the 'personalities' in the media these days, those are the two beavers I least want a good, long look at, and yet, they're the only ones I've seen in a while.
I was thinking about this a few years back, when the CA*Net III project was completed. A huge, national, redundant, ultra-high-bandwidth fibre-optic network, owned by the government and the institutions that provided funding to it. Why not leverage that?
Step 1: The government and private organizations continue to fund it. From the major hub cities, data is run out to other communities (e.g. from Calgary to Edmonton, Vancouver to Victoria, etc).
Step 2: In the major hub cities, lines are run out to each household. Now everyone has government-owned FTTH.
Step 3: Existing 'infrastructure companies' like Telus, Rogers, Shaw, Bell, and so on no longer have to maintain their own networks. They sell their current infrastructure, or parts of it, to the project (this can be done as part of Steps 1 and 2 as well).
Step 4: Existing 'service companies' like Telus, Rogers, Shaw, Bell, and anyone else with content to push, provides their services over this line, paying an access fee to help maintaint he network.
Example use: Each endpoint is a unique node ID. Phone numbers are mapped to node IDs, so existing phones will continue to work for people who don't want (or don't understand) fancy new technology. New phones, however, can take advantage of far more advanced directory services. If I meet someone at a party, I can look them up in the directory, but only be aware of them. If I want to contact them, I can make a request to do so (like making a phone call).
I can also add the phone number to my 'phone book' (which I can transfer to my computer, cell phone, and so on). The person on the other end knows who I am, and can choose to block me if they don't want to talk to me (e.g. harassing phone calls). People still have the option of making 'anonymous calls' (which can be enabled by default), but some 'contacts' won't allow anonymous calls (e.g. myself), and some will always be anonymous (e.g. the various social services hotlines for abuse, teen pregnancy, depression, etc).
Cable companies move from infrastructure maintainers to content aggregators. Suddenly, anyone and their dog can pay the system access fee and opt to provide a service to customers, but if HBO and NBC and CBC don't want to do it themselves, they sign contracts with Rogers, Shaw, etc. who make packages for consumers to provide these 'channels' (or even just pure 'content').
Theoretically, you could get the movie channels through Shaw, regular channels through Rogers, and a 'sports package' through SportsNet so you can watch every hockey game of the season.
The new digital infrastructure allows certain rules for each content provision. For example, SportsNet could allow you to go back and watch any game in the current season; an additional fee allows access to previous seasons. Shaw's movie channels package might let you choose from any movie that's made available for as long as it's made available ('Oh, Ghostbusters 2 is on the movie network this week, let's watch it on Thursday'). Rogers' package might include the major networks, and let you go back to watch any of the season's episodes of Lost, Grey's Anatomy, and Stargate.
Oh, if only I were in charge of the world...
The difference between standard 'common carrier' rules and e.g. fibre-optic lines is that while the telephone infrastructure was subsidized by the government (and thus a state-supported monopoly was built), the same can't be said of the fibre lines.
So, if Verizon is running fibre from their NOC out to neighborhoods, then out to houses, why should they have to? If I did the same thing, why would I have to? I mean, I would, but why should I HAVE to?
That said, if Verizon is leveraging the existing infrastructure by only running fibre from the CO, for example, then other companies should also be able to run fibre from the CO.
Seems relatively fair to me. Arguments can be made either way ('but Verizon's doing it with monopoly money!', no 'worthless US dollar' pun intended), but really, at some point we have to forgive at least some of their place in history as a government-mandated monopoly.
All this company actually did, hardware-wise, was ship DSL modems out. Other than that, their money went into marketing and maintaining additional services (e.g. e-mail, web hosting, domain hosting, etc.). Their money came from these services, as well as mark-up on Bell's wholesale rate.
Companies that DO pay for bandwidth, such as a particular ISP that I know of in Montreal, can save a HUGE amount of money by paying for their own bandwidth, even when you factor in the high-traffic users.
Or the parts of the brain responsible for posting well thought-out, insightful, and complimentary comments while playing games like Counterstrike.
'Your time has expired. Please insert $0.25 to continue.'
Well, let's throw some numbers in there...
You weighed 300 lbs. Your truck, if it was a Ford F-150 (2005) with a full tank of gas, weighed about 5000 lbs. When you get into the truck, that's 5300 lbs, or an increase of about 6%.
I weighed around 125 lbs after getting out of the hospital after being sick for a week, not being able to eat anything. If I got into the truck, it would be 5125, or a 2.5% increase in weight.
The difference between you at your worst and me at my worst puts a difference of about 3.5% of the weight of the truck. This completely fails to change the aerodynamics of the truck, the efficiency of the fuel, the pressure of the tires, and so on. Pretty insignificant difference.
But... the weight of a Toyota Prius is about 3000 lbs. If you got in at your worst, that would be 10%. If I got in, that would be about 4%, which would make for a difference of about 6%. Still not that much, really, since the aerodynamics, tire pressure, etc. doesn't change.
However, going from the F-150 (12 MPG city, 16 MPG highway) to the Prius (48 city, 45 highway) gets you a 36 MPG gain in the city. Pretty big change. You still get about the same distance on a tank of gas, but filling up an F-150 takes up to a hundred bucks, whereas a Prius will cost you around $35, give or take.
Then again, you can't haul a trailer and a stack of bricks in a Prius...
Mulder: His jigging is almost hypnotic...
Scully: Yeah... it's like a lava lamp...
I was at Dairy Queen the other day with my (underweight if anything) girlfriend, and we happened to see another family enjoying some sundaes. I'm no good at speculation, but two of them seemed to be in their mid-twenties or so, and probably weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds or so, by our estimation. The mother and father of the family were probably more than that, maybe three hundred and three fifty.
They also had a little girl who looked a little on the chubby side, and were feeding her a giant sundae, as they all were eating.
Maybe this family has some kind of genetic disorder, and they may as well eat ice cream because they're going to be that large anyway. Maybe this was the first time in a year that they've gone to Dairy Queen (it was for me, and it was the first REALLY nice day of the year).
Still, I can't help but notice so many surprisingly large people out there on the streets, in the malls, at the food courts, and so on, and inevitably they're eating pizza, drinking coke, choking down a giant tub of popcorn with butter, and so on, and I can't help but think... these people either need self control, or need to realize that they have a problem.
Odd, I've never entered my 'social security number' (or Canadian equivalent, my SIN) or a credit card into a web browser. If I need to buy something online, I get one of those pre-paid credit cards from wherever and use those.
Regardless, you send all of your information over the network - even your e-mail address! - despite not being able to see the code on the other end?
Fact of the matter is, you should trust Opera more than any web site. Breaking into a poorly-maintained server (or even a well-maintained server with a 0-day exploit) is often not as hard as you'd think. Once you're in, it's a trivial matter to dump the database, or even just modify the code to redirect information.
Do you really know who's behind every website you visit? Not 100%, not all the time. But you know who's behind Opera, and you can track where it tries to connect and how. That's more reassuring than anything.
Any 'closed-source is the boogeyman' individuals should honestly stop and think about things like the recent exploit in the Thai (?) language pack for Firefox, or the huge SSL bug that Debian developer introduced way back when. Just because many eyes *can* look at it doesn't mean they will.
I dunno, I've had to resort to some pretty creative hackery to get hardware working in Linux before, which I had to come up with independently.
/proc/isapnp', after which it worked fine for the remainder of the boot).
(And before anyone thinks I'm a troll - I once had a sound card whose driver wouldn't load until I did 'cat
My previous roommate returned from an overnight flight from Spain, where he was crammed in uncomfortably and couldn't sleep. He arrived at something like three in the morning, and took a taxi home.
The taxi driver spent the whole trip complaining about all the stuff that was going on in his life (about a half-hour ride). My roommate tried to pay with his Visa, and the cabbie protested, because 'it costs me more'. Eventually the cabbie relented, and my roommate paid. Signed the forms, left the imprint, and started climbing out of the cab. He related to me with bitter words the last thing the cabbie said to him:
'What, no tip?'
A message to retailers: if you honestly and truly have a problem with me paying by credit card, you have two options: stop taking credit cards entirely, or refuse my business. Either way, I'll find someone else.
ISPs should stop being cheap bastards then. Buying bandwidth separately and installing your own ADSL2+ equipment provides you with far more flexibility in regards to customers, plans, and bandwidth, and can save a ton of money.
For one Montreal-based ISP, the cost of paying a metered rate on bandwidth was cheaper than paying Bell a flat rate for line access. That is, reselling Bell's DSL is more expensive than installing your own equipment and selling your own bandwidth.
It got to the point where they would install ADSL2+ equipment wherever there was the biggest market for it, but move as many customers in the area over to the new hardware as they could. Every customer they plugged into their own hardware instead of Bell's saved them enough in a short time to buy more equipment to move more customers over. Pretty good deal.
For small mom-and-pop type operations, it doesn't make sense, but for large-scale organizations such as Uniserve, it would make a ton of sense, not to mention save a ton of money. Oh, and there's also the fact that Bell technicians wouldn't have to be sent to client houses, where they can say 'It's a problem with your phone, but I'm not allowed to fix it... but if you were a Bell customer I could...'
Well that's what you get for accusing us of being responsible for letting the September 11th hijackers into the US, rather than paying attention to your own poor security.
There are problems? Ok, we'll crack down. Now the US requires passports from Canadians travelling to the US, so what's wrong with us wanting to be sure?
If you're going to point out that the border between Canada and the US is so insecure, then don't complain when we notice that it was your border security that was breached, and decide to protect ourselves.
I dunno, the Crystal Skull episode of Stargate: SG-1 wasn't that bad.
Incidentally, if anyone is wondering, the 'crystal skull' idea is from contemporary archaeology; they were claimed to be pre-Columbian, but in actuality seem to have been forgeries manufactured in the 19th century. Still, they've been quite popular in fiction.
If you consider Temple of Doom to be the first movie, Indiana Jones is playing more of the mercenary lifestyle, digging up treasure for a Shanghai mobster. After the events of Temple occurs Raiders and Crusade - both of which are similar in style and formula (globetrotting adventure).
After Indy's experience in India and becoming a believer of Hinduism, he goes back to the states and alternates between teaching and rescuing artifacts for the museum (which happens in Raiders, which proves Judaism, and Crusade, which proves Christianity).
It doesn't make Temple a better movie, but for me, it made it fit better in the grand scheme.
If your quality/reliability target is that of 'off the shelf' parts anyway, you can get the R200 for around five hundred bucks and spend another five hundred upgrading the hard drive and ram. Heck, you could hit 2x2G of ram and 2x1TB SATA hard drives for not that much more. If you don't need a DRAC then you're saving a nice chunk of change at that price point.
Yeah, but how long until the dupe is posted? Or is it posted already and we just can't see it yet?
While historically that's true, lately Apple has taken to doing quiet refreshes pretty much whenever. The new revised 8-core Mac Pro, for example, was released a week before the Macworld Expo. Why not wait a week? Well, why wait?
The huge upgrades tend to wait, sure, but basic speed increases are pretty common nowadays.
They give you everything you need up front because most people don't want to say 'Oh, does my computer have that? How do I get it? What do I need to install to buy it? How do I do that?'
The $10 they might save on not adding the firewire port would cost consumers between $30-80, plus installation at $100/hr for most users because they're too afraid to open their computers for fear of damaging something (which they would probably do).
I'm glad that every Mac I get has Firewire and USB. The port hardly costs them a reasonable amount to add, and it means that I know what my Mac can do, and what all future Macs can do. Unlike with Dell, I know I can buy hardware now for my iMac that will work with the next laptop I get; no more picking laptops based on which one has bluetooth and which one has firewire, and which one has both but doesn't cost a thousand dollars more than I want to spend.
There are great benefits in uniformity between product lines, because when someone asks me what kind of external hard drive to get, I only have to ask them what kind of computer they have ('Macbook', 'Power Mac', 'Powerbook', 'iMac') and sometimes how old it is, and I know what their system supports. Macbook? Great, I'll put together a firewire drive for you. iMac G3? A network share would probably be faster than USB 1.1, so let's grab a NAS; then when you finally replace your crappy old computer with a new one, you can share to both.
With a Dell, it's more along the lines of 'What kind of computer do you have? Dell laptop? Which model? What options? Did you get the bluetooth? Does it have firewire?' Consumers don't want to answer those questions.
Suckers.