So Google action's here are similar to looking at the receiver and sender addresses, and the postage stamp on the postcard, and reading a few words of the card in the process. Don't tell me that postal workers won't inadvertently catch a word or two of someone's postcard when reading the public information of the addresses?
Postal workers do not save a copy of it, and they don't save copies of thousands and thousands of postcard texts. I'm pretty sure that if one of them did, he would be in just as much trouble.
Yes, I begin to understand. Mostly, I understand that:
* the driver mess on windos can cause your system to fail if you upgrade it, because... well, because the library management system is so stupid, there are no proper words to describe it * Microsoft is at the same time totally lost and bound in their needs for backwards compatability and can't move forward because of it, and then on the other hand breaks it with minor updates * even if you don't touch the drivers, different hardware can mean your non-driver update breaks. In other words: The hardware abstraction layer doesn't really abstract the hardware
Yes, I agree installing the update on one machine first, checking if it works, and then installing it everywhere is the right thing to do. That wasn't what I'm talking about. I was talking about week-long testing cycles for a minor OS update. Really, if you have to do that, you should ask yourself if you're using the right OS.
To use a car analogy: If every time you fill up you get this urge to run a full maintainance cycle, just to make sure nothing broke, something is wrong with either your head or your car.
You obviously haven't used many Macs for a long period of time -
No, only about five years or so.
The vendor didn't test the fix in your environment, they tested it in theirs.
Obviously, that environment thing sucks. We're talking about operating system updates here. Is your environment really that different from anyone elses? Sure you have other settings, applications, etc. etc. - oh, wait. Now I realize. Of course, it's the windos driver mess. I always forget that. Never understood how someone can come up with such a crappy library management system in the first place.
Hiding it makes a lot of sense if you don't want to look bad, but is unhelpful to users who want to know if they need to update their systems or if it can wait.
I think you run too much windos. The only reason I've ever hesitated installing an OS X update right away was when it required a restart and I had something running I didn't want to interrupt. I've never seen an update break anything. I shake my head when I hear the windos admins at the company test a bugfix update. Why'd the need to do that? Isn't that what the vendor is supposed to do before sending it out?
Other than radio, it is an addressed broadcast. See, every packet has a destination written on it. That makes the argument a little more interesting. It is more like a postcard - yes, you can read it (no encryption), but it has an address. The law considers postcards to be covered by the telecommunications privacy regulations.
Not having to reinvent everything from scratch certainly helps the budget. Never forget that when NASA started out, there was no such thing as space travel.
Going into orbit after someone else figured out how to put people on the moon and robots on Mars and Venus is a lot less of a challenge then going into orbit when nobody quite knows how to do it.
It's still a great feat, but don't forget that a lot of the cost savings are also because someone else invested a lot of money into figuring it all out.
Except that it isn't snippets from a conversation. Passwords. Hello, anyone home? Sure those people were careless. That is not a valid defense in any legal context. You steal someone's purse, you are a thief. Doesn't matter how careful or careless they secured it.
The data interception and telecommunications laws of most countries are very clear on this. Listening into a phone line (voice has never been encrypted, except when you use crypto telephones) is technically very easy. Go down to that beige box at the corner, pry it open, find the correct wire and attach a simple device, essentially a phone, to it. It is still illegal.
The argument that they were broadcasting makes it all a little more interesting, mostly because the laws were written before WiFi came around, but you are still listening into what is clearly a private conversation because even though it was technically broadcasted, it was not broadcasted to you. When your MAC address is in the packet header, you can say "dude, he shouldn't have sent it to me". As it stands, you do have to manipulate the way the WiFi device on your end works from its intended useage in order to get those snippets. Yes, it is trivial to do so. That doesn't automatically mean it's ok.
And yes, I agree that if you run a wireless LAN, you should encrypt it. I still think it being unencrypted does not automatically give you permission to do what you want. One is the technical protection, the other is what you should do or not do even if you can. We don't all run around in body armour, either. It's trivial to pick up a knife and stab someone, and people would still consider you a lunatic if you answer with "he should've worn a kevlar vest".
You take a picture of your street and by accident there's a part of a naked woman changing in her bedroom on it because she didn't close the blinds? I doubt anyone will prosecute you for that (well, unless she's a kid, in which case you are now in the posession of child pornography, which has become a thought crime in most of the western world, and it won't matter why or how you came across it, but back to topic...)
But if you systematically move through the entire city, taking pictures of each and every house, and end up with a whole lot of naked people, it starts being a different thing. Even without the blinds, people do have expectations of privacy in their homes. You can not come to my house and put up a video camera right in front of my bedroom window. Sure, I could just close the curtains, blinds, or put a cardboard box in front of your camera - but even though you may be 100% on public property, I'm pretty certain a court would find for me and make you take it down.
Yes, you are right and still you are missing a major point.
This isn't about a password or two someone lost to his neighbour. It's about mass collection. There are reasons why it is ok to take a picture on your holiday trip without the necessity of informing everyone in the field of view about your intention - and at the same time you need to put up a notice if you run a 24/7 video surveilance of an area.
Hitler atheism is in doubt. The evidence point more toward him being a catholic.
Err... actually, that's the first time I read that someone considers him an atheist. At the time and place he grew up, it would have been most unusual to not be a catholic. You can probably discuss how devote he was and if he went to church, but atheism? He'd not have lasted a week in either the army during WW1 or the political arena.
Christianity is not about forcing a world view, religion, beliefs, or anything on anyone else. It's about spreading the good news of the Gospel to everyone so they have the choice to be saved or not.
The teachings of Jesus may have been about that. But you only need to read as far as the Apocalypse to realize that the spirit of his teachings was being gang-raped before his body was cold (or arrived in heaven, if you prefer to believe that).
Christianity is the second most aggressively expanding major religion of all times, exceeded only by Islam. The people of Africa and South America didn't exactly hear about this interesting new religion on the radio and decided to investigate.
I know, you'll now offer the usual excuse that all that are just perversions of the real christianity. To which I will offer my usual reply: If we strip away all the allegedly perverted stuff, there isn't a whole lot remaining. Hundreds of years of history have never happened. Millions of people were killed. All "just perversions"? Yeah, right. If something causes that much evil and suffering, anyone who defends it is insane and refuses to see what is in plain view.
Depends on your definition of "spreading". There are many places in the old testament where god himself tells his chosen people to put every man and child of that conquered tribe to the sword, but keep the women for themselves. It doesn't explicitly say, but I have this hunch he didn't mean for cooking and cleaning.
The son of one of Hamas's founders admits that the social restrictions on dating and sex in Islam and the Middle Eastern tribal society is one of the leading causes of militarism in Islam.
Of course it is. There's even a Pentagon handbook outlining that the most important part of nation building is getting the angry young men off the streets. We are biologically programmed to have a period of extreme activity and aggression during certain years of the males of the species. Channeling these energies from the intended purpose of mating into something else is very easy and has been one of the first tricks of social engineering discovered. Why do you think we recruit soldiers in their late teens? Physical performance is not the reason, it peaks a couple years later.
What I really expect is for people to be able to tell the difference between an entire religion, and one asshat who claims to follow that religion. You can claim that the behavior of the asshat characterizes the entire religion, but that doesn't make it so.
When there's a whole lot of assholes, easily numbering in the millions, then it's a bit hard to keep up the front that the religion is not somehow at least a part of the problem. What you're trying to claim essentially amounts to saying that a forest doesn't really have all that much to do with all the trees that just happen to be in the same place.
One scholar at the Notre Dame conference, who uses the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for safety, has raised eyebrows and hackles by suggesting that the "houri" promised to martyrs when they reach Heaven doesn't actually mean "virgin" after all. He argues that instead it means "grapes," and since conceptions of paradise involved bounteous fruit, that might make sense. But suicide bombers presumably would be in for a disappointment if they reached the pearly gates and were presented 72 grapes.
... just saying. It's all even more ridiculous than we ever thought.
The aggressive export of american culture, and weapons, and methods sometimes has the disadvantage that the dark age cavemen that get their hands on them actually use them, and not always against each other.
If religion is just the tool, then it's a damn easily abuseable tool, again and again and again.
Either you begin to acknowledge that guns do kill people, even though they also do require someone to pull the trigger (and if we want to get anal, actually it's the bullet that kills, neither the gun nor the person using it). And religion kills, too. Maybe sometimes it's a politician who pulls the trigger. But let's get a damn safety on the things, shall we?
A murderous, stupid superstition detrimental to the well-being of mankind? You know, just like christianity, and the other religions?
You can throw out all these philosophical moderate thoughts about how religion "really" or "at its core" or "uncontaminated" really isn't all that evil, and you can do it about every religion on the planet, and probably point to scriptures, and clerics and other evidence.
But you can't deny that they all have skeletons in the closet. Quite often millions of them.
Which, quite directly, leads you to one of two conclusions:
a) religions are obviously extremely easy to pervert, and should therefore be gotten rid of for safety reasons b) religions are inherently evil and only try to cover it up in nice-sounding facades, and should therefore be gotten rid of
No, you can not find a link to an obviously discounted computer outside of Apple and say that it is a standard price. You configure the computer on Apple's website, or your full of shit,
Live by your rules. Configure me that mythical US$35,000 machine you keep talking about on the Apple website. I was unable to go beyond $17k even with a ridiculously overblown configurations. Oh, wait:
And to be honest, I went to their site and couldn't put one together for 35k either, but I am positive I did when I bought this computer, which was black friday of last year.
Sorry, no points. As they said in that movie: It's not what you know, it's what you can prove.
If Macs were really better, I am sure the market would have corrected over such a long time period, especially after microsoft was cut down via anti-trust lawsuits.
We both know those anti-trust lawsuits didn't "cut down" anything. Uh, a browser selection screen on install. I bet that is going to dramatically eat into the windos market share. Oh wait, these lawsuits weren't even about the OS market share, but about the browser and (one in Europe) about the media player.
Alright, now lets get back to the numbers. Dell offers significant discounts to educational facilities, probably moreso than Apple does,
Numbers? Come on, get a quote if you claim it is more. Or don't make the claim. The Apple discount is on the order of 10% to 15% for education, easy to verify by going to the education part of the shop. That does not include bulk discounts.
I very much doubt it is more. Your own argument eats you there: Dell (and all PC makers) has a lot less margin than Apple does. Therefore, they simply have less space to work with. Apple can discount by 10% and still make a profit. I'm not certain Dell can. The last numbers I heard from several years ago spoke of margins in the single-digit percentage range.
when the taxes that power the school district are local, and if the town has 20,000 people
increasing costs by a factor of 1.5x for a subjective preference is a load of bullshit,
Except that it is not a subjective preference. You may or may not like the way these institutions work, but they don't go by some clerk feeling a little Apple-friendly today and therefore issuing an order for MacBooks. If nothing else, there was a vote. You know, democracy and all? Very likely, reasons were given as well. To find out what the actual reasons were, one would have to read the protocols of the board meetings or something. Newspapers do not report all the details, they report the story.
Especially when the change is for a non-industry standard OS that runs a lot fewer programs, especially in the engineering and math sector
Oh, if that's the problem then going with Macs is the right decision. You see, a MacBook can run windos (Bootcamp or via VM). A Dell can't run OS X.
Uh, wrong direction? You're trying to say there used to be a time when there were multiple users per computer. That's right in many cases. But my argument was for the opposite direction - many computers per human.
And the single-user history of PCs is famous, so the philosophy was "one user" even if in reality it may have been several.
Of course it's bullshit. People would still need to build things and provide services. The main change would be that everything needs to be built only once and can then be replicated. But the thing that you want to replicate has to come from somewhere.
It's an interesting and philosophic concept, but in most cases it is blown out of proportion. A lot of our economy is not built around building stuff. Things need to be created, invented, transported and provided. In fact, even today only a small fraction of the cost of most of the items we buy is in the actual construction.
The economy would change dramatically, because as I said you'd only be able to make a profit on the first sale. But quite honestly, I even doubt that money would disappear. Physical money, as in coins and bills, would. But we already have most of our money in electronic storage.
I don't even know how long it took you to find such an example,
2 minutes, probably less. Google is your friend.
considering one is an off page of google store in german,
I just said Google is your friend. I was too lazy to go through to the actual link. But thanks for reminding me, because that means that in the Euro price, 19% VAT is already inclusive, while the US$ price probably doesn't include tax.
All you have proven is that you are an asshole, who bends facts and relies on exceptions to the rule as the rule itself.
Which rule? You've not proven any rule, either. Only claimed it loudly and repeatedly. Funny how I am (what you say above) when I do the exact same thing that you do. Oh, except that I actually link to the facts I list, while you left checking as an excercise to the reader.
I still don't believe your claims until you give me an actual link. For one, it's impossible to configure a Mac Pro for $35k, even if you include two 30" displays you only come to $17k.
But finally, if you are on components alone then yes, you are correct. I can certainly build an identical machine from parts for less. When I was still a student, I did so. These days, I have more important things to do with my time, and paying someone else to do the dumb work for me is fair to me.
what percentage of the market is Apple again, like 10%
And that has what, exactly, to do with any of the points any of us made in this discussion? Or are you just bringing it up so you can somehow feel superior? Market share says nothing about quality, price or any other metric except market share. Especially not in near-monopoly situations. The german Telekom still has the by far largest market share in the telecommunications market in Germany, but it is neither the cheapest nor the best. It's simply inertia. Same with Microsoft. When they drove out IBM and others they had an offer that was better. Since then, market lock-in, illegal bundling, OEM extortion and pure marketing are certainly a bigger factor than product quality or price.
if you had to search that hard to find a mac that was actually cheaper than a PC
I get slightly tired of it, but once more: You should stop making assumptions. It took me a few tries at Google, searching hard is not something I'd do for a discussion on/. with a total stranger.
I really doubt a whole school system can get the Macs at that price,
Certainly not. Apple is known for giving substantial education discounts. Even an individual student will get around 15%. So if a whole school district places a bulk order, I'd not be surprised if they get a 30% discount.
So that school district probably could have saved taxpayers, parents and students millions of dollars, that were instead wasted because of fags like you.
Again, you assume way too much that you don't know. Yes, it would be interesting to have the actual prices. I'm sure someone who lives in the district could get them via a FOI request. Maybe you yourself could try, you're apparently american, I'm not (as you may have guessed from the link you mentioned - Google does this geolocation thing and points me at german sources first).
Two, you assume that buying price is the only thing that matters. I know it's been a few years since it was a buzzword bingo word, but does "total cost of ownership" mean anything to you?
Three, your guess on the amount involved is terrible math. According to their official website, the school has about 1300 students. Even at the worst-case $900 that comes to at most one million total cost, so the savings of choosing a cheaper alternative would be what? 3-, 400 thousand? That may be
Slashdot Mirror
So Google action's here are similar to looking at the receiver and sender addresses, and the postage stamp on the postcard, and reading a few words of the card in the process. Don't tell me that postal workers won't inadvertently catch a word or two of someone's postcard when reading the public information of the addresses?
Postal workers do not save a copy of it, and they don't save copies of thousands and thousands of postcard texts. I'm pretty sure that if one of them did, he would be in just as much trouble.
So we agree, I assume?
Yes, I begin to understand. Mostly, I understand that:
* the driver mess on windos can cause your system to fail if you upgrade it, because... well, because the library management system is so stupid, there are no proper words to describe it
* Microsoft is at the same time totally lost and bound in their needs for backwards compatability and can't move forward because of it, and then on the other hand breaks it with minor updates
* even if you don't touch the drivers, different hardware can mean your non-driver update breaks. In other words: The hardware abstraction layer doesn't really abstract the hardware
Yes, I agree installing the update on one machine first, checking if it works, and then installing it everywhere is the right thing to do. That wasn't what I'm talking about. I was talking about week-long testing cycles for a minor OS update. Really, if you have to do that, you should ask yourself if you're using the right OS.
To use a car analogy: If every time you fill up you get this urge to run a full maintainance cycle, just to make sure nothing broke, something is wrong with either your head or your car.
You obviously haven't used many Macs for a long period of time -
No, only about five years or so.
The vendor didn't test the fix in your environment, they tested it in theirs.
Obviously, that environment thing sucks. We're talking about operating system updates here. Is your environment really that different from anyone elses? Sure you have other settings, applications, etc. etc. - oh, wait. Now I realize. Of course, it's the windos driver mess. I always forget that. Never understood how someone can come up with such a crappy library management system in the first place.
That was 2001.
I agree it's a major thing, one of the "this should never happen" bugs.
Hiding it makes a lot of sense if you don't want to look bad, but is unhelpful to users who want to know if they need to update their systems or if it can wait.
I think you run too much windos. The only reason I've ever hesitated installing an OS X update right away was when it required a restart and I had something running I didn't want to interrupt. I've never seen an update break anything. I shake my head when I hear the windos admins at the company test a bugfix update. Why'd the need to do that? Isn't that what the vendor is supposed to do before sending it out?
It DOES automatically mean it's ok
By what standard? Legal? Moral? Geeky?
IT'S A BROADCAST
Other than radio, it is an addressed broadcast. See, every packet has a destination written on it. That makes the argument a little more interesting. It is more like a postcard - yes, you can read it (no encryption), but it has an address. The law considers postcards to be covered by the telecommunications privacy regulations.
Not having to reinvent everything from scratch certainly helps the budget. Never forget that when NASA started out, there was no such thing as space travel.
Going into orbit after someone else figured out how to put people on the moon and robots on Mars and Venus is a lot less of a challenge then going into orbit when nobody quite knows how to do it.
It's still a great feat, but don't forget that a lot of the cost savings are also because someone else invested a lot of money into figuring it all out.
Yes, I'm sure it's easy to accidentally capture a few more packets than you thought.
It's probably only a little bit less easy to also accidentally store the whole packets on your harddrive, instead of just the bits you care about.
But once you have several frigging drives full of the stuff, you ought to notice, don't you think?
Except that it isn't snippets from a conversation. Passwords. Hello, anyone home? Sure those people were careless. That is not a valid defense in any legal context. You steal someone's purse, you are a thief. Doesn't matter how careful or careless they secured it.
The data interception and telecommunications laws of most countries are very clear on this. Listening into a phone line (voice has never been encrypted, except when you use crypto telephones) is technically very easy. Go down to that beige box at the corner, pry it open, find the correct wire and attach a simple device, essentially a phone, to it. It is still illegal.
The argument that they were broadcasting makes it all a little more interesting, mostly because the laws were written before WiFi came around, but you are still listening into what is clearly a private conversation because even though it was technically broadcasted, it was not broadcasted to you. When your MAC address is in the packet header, you can say "dude, he shouldn't have sent it to me". As it stands, you do have to manipulate the way the WiFi device on your end works from its intended useage in order to get those snippets. Yes, it is trivial to do so. That doesn't automatically mean it's ok.
And yes, I agree that if you run a wireless LAN, you should encrypt it. I still think it being unencrypted does not automatically give you permission to do what you want. One is the technical protection, the other is what you should do or not do even if you can. We don't all run around in body armour, either. It's trivial to pick up a knife and stab someone, and people would still consider you a lunatic if you answer with "he should've worn a kevlar vest".
Again, it is also a matter of scale.
You take a picture of your street and by accident there's a part of a naked woman changing in her bedroom on it because she didn't close the blinds? I doubt anyone will prosecute you for that (well, unless she's a kid, in which case you are now in the posession of child pornography, which has become a thought crime in most of the western world, and it won't matter why or how you came across it, but back to topic...)
But if you systematically move through the entire city, taking pictures of each and every house, and end up with a whole lot of naked people, it starts being a different thing. Even without the blinds, people do have expectations of privacy in their homes. You can not come to my house and put up a video camera right in front of my bedroom window. Sure, I could just close the curtains, blinds, or put a cardboard box in front of your camera - but even though you may be 100% on public property, I'm pretty certain a court would find for me and make you take it down.
Yes, you are right and still you are missing a major point.
This isn't about a password or two someone lost to his neighbour. It's about mass collection. There are reasons why it is ok to take a picture on your holiday trip without the necessity of informing everyone in the field of view about your intention - and at the same time you need to put up a notice if you run a 24/7 video surveilance of an area.
Hitler atheism is in doubt. The evidence point more toward him being a catholic.
Err... actually, that's the first time I read that someone considers him an atheist. At the time and place he grew up, it would have been most unusual to not be a catholic. You can probably discuss how devote he was and if he went to church, but atheism? He'd not have lasted a week in either the army during WW1 or the political arena.
Christianity is not about forcing a world view, religion, beliefs, or anything on anyone else. It's about spreading the good news of the Gospel to everyone so they have the choice to be saved or not.
The teachings of Jesus may have been about that. But you only need to read as far as the Apocalypse to realize that the spirit of his teachings was being gang-raped before his body was cold (or arrived in heaven, if you prefer to believe that).
Christianity is the second most aggressively expanding major religion of all times, exceeded only by Islam. The people of Africa and South America didn't exactly hear about this interesting new religion on the radio and decided to investigate.
I know, you'll now offer the usual excuse that all that are just perversions of the real christianity. To which I will offer my usual reply: If we strip away all the allegedly perverted stuff, there isn't a whole lot remaining. Hundreds of years of history have never happened. Millions of people were killed. All "just perversions"? Yeah, right. If something causes that much evil and suffering, anyone who defends it is insane and refuses to see what is in plain view.
Depends on your definition of "spreading". There are many places in the old testament where god himself tells his chosen people to put every man and child of that conquered tribe to the sword, but keep the women for themselves. It doesn't explicitly say, but I have this hunch he didn't mean for cooking and cleaning.
The son of one of Hamas's founders admits that the social restrictions on dating and sex in Islam and the Middle Eastern tribal society is one of the leading causes of militarism in Islam.
Of course it is. There's even a Pentagon handbook outlining that the most important part of nation building is getting the angry young men off the streets. We are biologically programmed to have a period of extreme activity and aggression during certain years of the males of the species. Channeling these energies from the intended purpose of mating into something else is very easy and has been one of the first tricks of social engineering discovered. Why do you think we recruit soldiers in their late teens? Physical performance is not the reason, it peaks a couple years later.
What I really expect is for people to be able to tell the difference between an entire religion, and one asshat who claims to follow that religion. You can claim that the behavior of the asshat characterizes the entire religion, but that doesn't make it so.
When there's a whole lot of assholes, easily numbering in the millions, then it's a bit hard to keep up the front that the religion is not somehow at least a part of the problem. What you're trying to claim essentially amounts to saying that a forest doesn't really have all that much to do with all the trees that just happen to be in the same place.
Actually, there's this interesting little detail about the "virgins":
One scholar at the Notre Dame conference, who uses the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for safety, has raised eyebrows and hackles by suggesting that the "houri" promised to martyrs when they reach Heaven doesn't actually mean "virgin" after all. He argues that instead it means "grapes," and since conceptions of paradise involved bounteous fruit, that might make sense. But suicide bombers presumably would be in for a disappointment if they reached the pearly gates and were presented 72 grapes.
... just saying. It's all even more ridiculous than we ever thought.
It also is a sign of things to come: more countries will sue citizens of other countries for what they did on the Internet.
Yeah, something like that could never happen in America...
The aggressive export of american culture, and weapons, and methods sometimes has the disadvantage that the dark age cavemen that get their hands on them actually use them, and not always against each other.
If religion is just the tool, then it's a damn easily abuseable tool, again and again and again.
Either you begin to acknowledge that guns do kill people, even though they also do require someone to pull the trigger (and if we want to get anal, actually it's the bullet that kills, neither the gun nor the person using it). And religion kills, too. Maybe sometimes it's a politician who pulls the trigger. But let's get a damn safety on the things, shall we?
Why don't we read up on what actual Islam is
A murderous, stupid superstition detrimental to the well-being of mankind? You know, just like christianity, and the other religions?
You can throw out all these philosophical moderate thoughts about how religion "really" or "at its core" or "uncontaminated" really isn't all that evil, and you can do it about every religion on the planet, and probably point to scriptures, and clerics and other evidence.
But you can't deny that they all have skeletons in the closet. Quite often millions of them.
Which, quite directly, leads you to one of two conclusions:
a) religions are obviously extremely easy to pervert, and should therefore be gotten rid of for safety reasons
b) religions are inherently evil and only try to cover it up in nice-sounding facades, and should therefore be gotten rid of
No, you can not find a link to an obviously discounted computer outside of Apple and say that it is a standard price. You configure the computer on Apple's website, or your full of shit,
Live by your rules. Configure me that mythical US$35,000 machine you keep talking about on the Apple website. I was unable to go beyond $17k even with a ridiculously overblown configurations. Oh, wait:
And to be honest, I went to their site and couldn't put one together for 35k either, but I am positive I did when I bought this computer, which was black friday of last year.
Sorry, no points. As they said in that movie: It's not what you know, it's what you can prove.
If Macs were really better, I am sure the market would have corrected over such a long time period, especially after microsoft was cut down via anti-trust lawsuits.
We both know those anti-trust lawsuits didn't "cut down" anything. Uh, a browser selection screen on install. I bet that is going to dramatically eat into the windos market share. Oh wait, these lawsuits weren't even about the OS market share, but about the browser and (one in Europe) about the media player.
Alright, now lets get back to the numbers. Dell offers significant discounts to educational facilities, probably moreso than Apple does,
Numbers? Come on, get a quote if you claim it is more. Or don't make the claim. The Apple discount is on the order of 10% to 15% for education, easy to verify by going to the education part of the shop. That does not include bulk discounts.
I very much doubt it is more. Your own argument eats you there: Dell (and all PC makers) has a lot less margin than Apple does. Therefore, they simply have less space to work with. Apple can discount by 10% and still make a profit. I'm not certain Dell can. The last numbers I heard from several years ago spoke of margins in the single-digit percentage range.
when the taxes that power the school district are local, and if the town has 20,000 people
Beverly has a population of 40,000. Please, you talk numbers and you don't even look them up, but pull them out of your ass?
increasing costs by a factor of 1.5x for a subjective preference is a load of bullshit,
Except that it is not a subjective preference. You may or may not like the way these institutions work, but they don't go by some clerk feeling a little Apple-friendly today and therefore issuing an order for MacBooks. If nothing else, there was a vote. You know, democracy and all? Very likely, reasons were given as well. To find out what the actual reasons were, one would have to read the protocols of the board meetings or something. Newspapers do not report all the details, they report the story.
Especially when the change is for a non-industry standard OS that runs a lot fewer programs, especially in the engineering and math sector
Oh, if that's the problem then going with Macs is the right decision. You see, a MacBook can run windos (Bootcamp or via VM). A Dell can't run OS X.
Uh, wrong direction? You're trying to say there used to be a time when there were multiple users per computer. That's right in many cases. But my argument was for the opposite direction - many computers per human.
And the single-user history of PCs is famous, so the philosophy was "one user" even if in reality it may have been several.
Of course it's bullshit. People would still need to build things and provide services. The main change would be that everything needs to be built only once and can then be replicated. But the thing that you want to replicate has to come from somewhere.
It's an interesting and philosophic concept, but in most cases it is blown out of proportion. A lot of our economy is not built around building stuff. Things need to be created, invented, transported and provided. In fact, even today only a small fraction of the cost of most of the items we buy is in the actual construction.
The economy would change dramatically, because as I said you'd only be able to make a profit on the first sale. But quite honestly, I even doubt that money would disappear. Physical money, as in coins and bills, would. But we already have most of our money in electronic storage.
I don't even know how long it took you to find such an example,
2 minutes, probably less. Google is your friend.
considering one is an off page of google store in german,
I just said Google is your friend. I was too lazy to go through to the actual link. But thanks for reminding me, because that means that in the Euro price, 19% VAT is already inclusive, while the US$ price probably doesn't include tax.
All you have proven is that you are an asshole, who bends facts and relies on exceptions to the rule as the rule itself.
Which rule? You've not proven any rule, either. Only claimed it loudly and repeatedly. Funny how I am (what you say above) when I do the exact same thing that you do. Oh, except that I actually link to the facts I list, while you left checking as an excercise to the reader.
I still don't believe your claims until you give me an actual link. For one, it's impossible to configure a Mac Pro for $35k, even if you include two 30" displays you only come to $17k.
But finally, if you are on components alone then yes, you are correct. I can certainly build an identical machine from parts for less. When I was still a student, I did so. These days, I have more important things to do with my time, and paying someone else to do the dumb work for me is fair to me.
what percentage of the market is Apple again, like 10%
And that has what, exactly, to do with any of the points any of us made in this discussion? Or are you just bringing it up so you can somehow feel superior? Market share says nothing about quality, price or any other metric except market share. Especially not in near-monopoly situations. The german Telekom still has the by far largest market share in the telecommunications market in Germany, but it is neither the cheapest nor the best. It's simply inertia. Same with Microsoft. When they drove out IBM and others they had an offer that was better. Since then, market lock-in, illegal bundling, OEM extortion and pure marketing are certainly a bigger factor than product quality or price.
if you had to search that hard to find a mac that was actually cheaper than a PC
I get slightly tired of it, but once more: You should stop making assumptions. It took me a few tries at Google, searching hard is not something I'd do for a discussion on /. with a total stranger.
I really doubt a whole school system can get the Macs at that price,
Certainly not. Apple is known for giving substantial education discounts. Even an individual student will get around 15%. So if a whole school district places a bulk order, I'd not be surprised if they get a 30% discount.
So that school district probably could have saved taxpayers, parents and students millions of dollars, that were instead wasted because of fags like you.
Again, you assume way too much that you don't know. Yes, it would be interesting to have the actual prices. I'm sure someone who lives in the district could get them via a FOI request. Maybe you yourself could try, you're apparently american, I'm not (as you may have guessed from the link you mentioned - Google does this geolocation thing and points me at german sources first).
Two, you assume that buying price is the only thing that matters. I know it's been a few years since it was a buzzword bingo word, but does "total cost of ownership" mean anything to you?
Three, your guess on the amount involved is terrible math. According to their official website, the school has about 1300 students. Even at the worst-case $900 that comes to at most one million total cost, so the savings of choosing a cheaper alternative would be what? 3-, 400 thousand? That may be