No, college kids buy iBooks. Mac minis are no good for dorm-bound teens. The Mac mini is specifically for switchers who are replacing an obsolete PC with a new Mac.
First, SD video is dead. Forget it. It's history, over, gone. So there will be no S-video output. It'll be either DVI or HDMI with a pigtail-style adapter to go to component analog. (DVI has the ability to carry an analog signal alongside the digital one. I'm only assuming HDMI does too.)
Second, such a device would require a dedicated AVC decoder chip, which would push the price range up into at least the $400 range. Mark my words, when it debuts at $399, every armchair CEO in the world is going to bitch about the price.
Finally, what's the point of building a print server into a device that's meant to plug into your television? Anybody who wants to plug a printer into a wireless network can already buy either an AirPort Extreme base station or an AirPort Express, or any number of third-party wireless products.
What the hell are you talking about? Download the player (which is FREE), double-click it to run it once, it'll say something about wanting to install your browser plug-in. Let it, then go to the URL. Ta-da. Surprisingly high-quality streaming Web video.
Is this just some random troll post that you copied and pasted into this discussion?
I didn't mean to say that it was surprising that shows are sticking with film. I meant to say that it's surprising that shows are going from 35 to Super 16. The 16mm format has come a long way in just the past couple of years. I remember when the pilot to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was shot in 16. It looked like chiseled spam, and not because the crew didn't know how to shoot 16. It was just a limitation of the format. Now you've got top-shelf shows voluntarily stepping down from 35 to 16, which I find frankly amazing.
Note that the replies reference FOX inaccuracies, which are apparently myriad, at mediamatters.org).
Speaking of agendas. Media Matters is the same group, funded by a prominent Democratic fundraiser, who excoriated Jeff Gannon for (1) working for Talon News, which is funded by a prominent Republican fundraiser, and (2) being gay.
I'm talking about things like "Proof the election was hacked!"
Ah, I see. I wasn't thinking about that kind of stuff at all. I guess that's just evidence of a blind spot on my part. I just classify that kind of nonsense in the same category where you find lengthy exposes of the evils of fluoridation.
I know bloggers stayed on the CBS story until CBS rolled. A great example of how blogs can work.
A good example, yes, but not the best one in my opinion. The best example, in my opinion, is the Eason Jordan story. Eason Jordan made some indefensible statements at Davos. How did the public find out about them? Through a blogger who was there. He walked out of the panel session and posted his notes of the event on his blog. Other bloggers picked up the story and it made the rounds. That's a case where the blogosphere -- for lack of a better term -- ran the whole story, from start to finish. The big news outlets never even touched it until it was all over.
The only problem with that story was the way it ended. Jordan should have simply asked the powers that be to release the tape of the session. Instead, CNN fired him. There's some speculation that CNN just wanted to cut its losses and not deal with the PR nightmare that would inevitably follow a release of the tape, but that's their problem, I think.
My implication was that news, ideally, shouldn't have an agenda
That's kind of like saying that people, ideally, should never get sick. Anything that a person writes down is going to be a reflection of that person's point of view. There's simply no way around that. Saying that news should be objective is a waste of breath, because it can never be.
Those who say that news should be objective usually mean to say that they think reporters should go out of their way to hide, or even lie about, their own biases and agendas. I don't agree with that. I think up-front disclosure is the right answer, and that's something that blogs are starting to force professional journalists to do right up front.
Perhaps I'm just really looking at this the wrong way, but it seems that many of these blogs aren't really interested in the truth, or a thorough examination of multiple possibilities and points of view on topics such as, e.g., the Iraq war.
Of course they're not. Nobody is interested in "a thorough examination of multiple possibilities," and if he says he is, he's lying to you. Everybody has a point of view. The best solution is to be exposed to as many different points of view as possible so you can make up your own mind. Newspapers and TV do a really bad job of this. Blogs -- not any one blog, but blogs collectively, as a group -- do it much better.
Well, for starters, USB 2 doesn't support guaranteed isochronous transport. Um. Actually, that's not just for starters; that's the whole thing. Total showstopper.
do many slashdot readers have to read some primer on 'Philosophy for dummies' before posting or something?
It'd be good if they did.
He didn't say X (Apple) == Y (OSS), he said X was based on Y, which as it happens is correct
Except it's not correct. "Based on?" No, definitely not. Only somebody who's completely ignorant of what Mac OS X really looks like under the hood could say that. "Incorporates ideas and technology from?" Sure, that's accurate. But it doesn't prove his point, you see, which is why he didn't say that.
No. Slashdot is not a blog. Neither is the Drudge Report, neither is Metafilter. The defining characteristic of blogs is original content. None of those sites meet that criteria.
But the thing about your "generalizations" disclaimer is that your generalization was untrue. Bloggers do not think they're going to replace newspapers or TV news, nor do they hope to. Your generalization was wrong.
But where are the checks and balances for some of the popular blogs?
Um. Duh. Other blogs. The system meditates itself. Perfectly? Of course not. In theory, an invalid meme could sweep through, just like a malicious rumor burns across the high-school grapevine. But in practice, it doesn't seem to happen that way. It might someday, but it hasn't yet.
since everyone seems to be pointing their fingers at everyone else (e.g., FOX News) saying they're lying
I find that kind of funny. The one time FOX News ran a bogus story, back in October I think it was, they had a retraction up on the Web site in a matter of hours. It was a case where some of Carl Cameron's private notes accidentally made it through editorial and onto the Web site, and there was stuff in there that just wasn't true. FOX retracted and apologized before the sun went down. Note this in contrast to the little sideshow CBS put on last September when they were caught in a lie.
I just find it funny that FOX News is the pariah when, to my eye, it seems like they have a better record of accuracy and honesty than most.
as blogs appear more like news outlets, many less discriminating among us take the sometimes woefully incorrect stories at face value
It sounds like you're doing an awful lot of speculating here. What woefully incorrect stories are you talking about?
I don't see how this corrects other blogs that purport to be "news" sources with extremely one-sided agendas.
Dude, everybody has an agenda. Stop talking about having an agenda like there's any other option. Everybody has an agenda, period, end of paragraph.
The difference between your average advocacy blog and your average newspaper is that the blog declares its agenda right up front -- sometimes even right in the URL -- while the newspaper lies about it.
Objectivity is a myth. Everybody has a point of view, everybody has an agenda. Better for these things to be discussed openly than for the newspaper of record (or whatever) to try to hide them in a vain attempt to appear unbiased.
There are plenty of people who believe it.
I deny your premise. Can you dig up some old fossil who's just enough of a lunatic to think that blogs are gonna bring down CNN? Sure, no question. But that doesn't add up to "plenty of people" by any stretch of the imagination.
Your whole argument basically boils down to, "Bloggers are snooty." Even if true, that doesn't really seem to say anything useful, I don't think.
I, too, go positively batshit crazy whenever somebody trots out some dusty quote from somebody really fantastic in order to prop up their otherwise indefensible position. The Gandhi one is popular; the Franklin one about liberty and security is even more so. And, of course, anything from Orwell is right on the money.
What these people need to understand is that they're not actually saying anything here. They're trying to imply that they are equivalent to Gandhi or Franklin or whomever, but they're not actually coming right out and saying it. They're just repeating somebody else's words taken out of context.
And, frankly, Gandhi's "first they ignore you" quote is pretty lame to begin with. It's fortune-cooke wisdom: it sounds good, and it's completely irrefutable, but it doesn't actually mean anything or provide any guidance when it comes to making a judgment.
Bloggers think they're going to be the revolution of the press, and that they'll take the place of the New York Times and Washinton Post, and Newscorp will crumble at their feet.
Um. No, we don't. It really seems like the only people who are saying that are the people who are doing what you're doing: writing about blogs.
Blogging is a huge thing, okay? People use blogs for different things. Some people write movie reviews. Some people post photos of their pets. Some people post open letters to their year-old children. Blogs are all over the place.
There's one group of bloggers that you're talking about: the news bloggers. These are people who write about news and events and policy and such.
They're not trying to take over the job of distributing the news. What they are trying to do -- and an important job it is, too -- is provide a check-and-balance for the existing news outlets. When an outlet like CBS or the LA Times or the Guardian runs a story that's just flat-out false, it's good that there's a medium for getting the fact that it's a false story out there. Previously the best you could hope for would be to convince the newspaper to run a correction in tiny type on page B3. If it were a TV station, you're just out of luck; most of them don't bother to run corrections at all. But now, through blogs, the public has a new way of being made aware of inconsistencies and inaccuracies in their news coverage.
This is a good thing, yes?
Nobody, but nobody, thinks blogs are going to replace news. It's kind of silly for you to talk about us like we do.
Initially IDE was never supposed to supplant SCSI technology.
It didn't. Fibre channel did. And at that, it only replaced the physical layer. FC storage devices use SCSI protocols. Again, that's a case where there was very slight overlap between two technologies. IDE is only useful for host-to-internal-storage interfacing, and with a limit of two devices per bus it scales very poorly for other applications. SCSI wasn't targeted for that application.
Remember BetaMax and VHS?
Bad example. Betamax was a consumer format, just like VHS. They were functionally equivalent and targeted toward the same customers. Which is not the situation between USB and FireWire. A better example would be Beta and VHS. Unless you work in television, you probably don't know that Beta is still around. As a matter of fact, that's very nearly all anybody uses in TV for recording standard-definition video.
So we come to USB vs. Firewire.... Seen this drama unfold before, slightly different venue each time.
You're absolutely right... but not in the way you think. SCSI vs. IDE, Beta vs. VHS, FireWire vs. USB. In each case, there was a very small sliver of overlap between two standards. One standard came to dominate in that sliver while the other didn't. You mistakenly conclude that means that the other standard went away. It didn't.
You're right that this is a case of history repeating itself. You're confused about just what that means.
Yes, "Galactica" is shot and posted entirely in 1080/24p. It's finished on an Avid DS at Modern. That's one of the reasons they can do a show that looks that good for as little as mumble-mumble-million an episode. The pilot was shot on 35; if you know what to look for, you can see the difference.
And yes, "Galactica" is being broadcast on whatever NBC Universal is calling their HD cable channel these days. It used to be called Bravo HD, but it didn't have anything to do with Bravo, so they changed it to something else. I forget the new name. When NBC ran the pilot in January, they broadcast it in HD (an HD transfer of the 35 master, naturally). And when season one runs on NBC's summer schedule, they're going to be broadcasting the regular episodes in HD.
It's an HD world, man.;-)
Surprisingly, though, a lot of series TV is staying away from HD production in favor of that new Super 16 stock from Kodak. (I think it's 7218, but don't quote me on that.) Believe it or not, "The West Wing" went from 35 to Super 16 this season. It's neither as cheap or as fast as 24p, but it's cheaper than 35, and it's easier to find somebody who can light it.
You get a different box for each of the following:
Um. No. When you buy a non-mini Mac, you get the keyboard, mouse and computer itself all in one box. If you buy a eMac or an iMac, you get the keyboard, mouse, computer and monitor all in one box.
Selling an iPod with a FireWire cable as one SKU and and iPod with a USB 2 cable as another SKU would be a waste of money. Selling an iPod, FireWire and USB 2 cables all as separate SKUs would be a huge waste of money. Apple is trying to reduce waste here, not increase it.
Yes, that's exactly where the fallacy was. Thanks for pointing that out... although I'm guessing that most people already understood what I was saying.
The rest of your post was obviously satire. A for effort, but you really need to work on your sense of humor.
Hard drive based iPod are too expensive to get to most people.
That's a silly statement, and I think you know it. Who is "most people?" If you average it out over the whole world, even the least expensive, $100 iPod shuffle costs something like a year's wages. Of course the iPod is too expensive for most people.
So you have to define your market. Who is the iPod for? It's for people who listen to a lot of music, and it's for people who already own computers. That puts it pretty squarely in the 25-44, $40,000-a-year-and-up demo.
And as we've seen, the iPod is not too expensive for those people. In fact, it's taken off like gangbusters.
No. Apple hasn't reduced their prices on anything. Their pro workstations are priced basically the same -- plus or minus a couple bucks -- they were before the iPod came along. The iMac is actually more expensive!
The only thing they've done that's new price-wise is to introduce the Mac mini, which is an entirely new and different product.
No, I don't agree with you. I take completely the opposite position. Apple knows that if your products are great, you can basically charge whatever you want for them and people will buy them. Because they're great, you see.
By contrast, the new Baltar is a seriously flawed human, but not a pure villain.
My absolute favorite Baltar moment of all time comes from the pilot. Six has just told him everything, that she's a cylon, that she put a back door in his avionics program, the whole thing. He doesn't believe her at first, but then she convinces him. He jumps up from his chair, and the very first thing out of his mouth is, "I've gotta call my lawyer."
That's great writing, right there. The old cliché is, "Show, don't tell." That's the perfect way to show the audience that Baltar is a malignant narcissist: when informed that the world is literally coming to an end, have him ask for his lawyer. Brilliant. Just brilliant.
And of course you get the sweet, juicy irony of Six, the inhuman "machine," having to explain to him that he doesn't need a lawyer because by sundown, there's not going to be anybody left to charge him with a crime.
Slashdot Mirror
No, college kids buy iBooks. Mac minis are no good for dorm-bound teens. The Mac mini is specifically for switchers who are replacing an obsolete PC with a new Mac.
First, SD video is dead. Forget it. It's history, over, gone. So there will be no S-video output. It'll be either DVI or HDMI with a pigtail-style adapter to go to component analog. (DVI has the ability to carry an analog signal alongside the digital one. I'm only assuming HDMI does too.)
Second, such a device would require a dedicated AVC decoder chip, which would push the price range up into at least the $400 range. Mark my words, when it debuts at $399, every armchair CEO in the world is going to bitch about the price.
Finally, what's the point of building a print server into a device that's meant to plug into your television? Anybody who wants to plug a printer into a wireless network can already buy either an AirPort Extreme base station or an AirPort Express, or any number of third-party wireless products.
You do realize that practically nobody plays computer games, right? As a ratio of Apple's target customers, practically nobody plays computer games.
Do they officially offer the miniseries for download anywhere?
Yes. Blockbuster. It's been out on DVD for two months now. Hoist yourself off your lazy ass, fork out your three dollars and rent the damn thing.
What the hell are you talking about? Download the player (which is FREE), double-click it to run it once, it'll say something about wanting to install your browser plug-in. Let it, then go to the URL. Ta-da. Surprisingly high-quality streaming Web video.
Is this just some random troll post that you copied and pasted into this discussion?
Why? You should check out the stream. Apart from being small, it's actually very well encoded. It looks and sounds spectacular by Web video standards.
I don't find it all that surprising.
I didn't mean to say that it was surprising that shows are sticking with film. I meant to say that it's surprising that shows are going from 35 to Super 16. The 16mm format has come a long way in just the past couple of years. I remember when the pilot to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was shot in 16. It looked like chiseled spam, and not because the crew didn't know how to shoot 16. It was just a limitation of the format. Now you've got top-shelf shows voluntarily stepping down from 35 to 16, which I find frankly amazing.
Note that the replies reference FOX inaccuracies, which are apparently myriad, at mediamatters.org).
Speaking of agendas. Media Matters is the same group, funded by a prominent Democratic fundraiser, who excoriated Jeff Gannon for (1) working for Talon News, which is funded by a prominent Republican fundraiser, and (2) being gay.
I'm talking about things like "Proof the election was hacked!"
Ah, I see. I wasn't thinking about that kind of stuff at all. I guess that's just evidence of a blind spot on my part. I just classify that kind of nonsense in the same category where you find lengthy exposes of the evils of fluoridation.
I know bloggers stayed on the CBS story until CBS rolled. A great example of how blogs can work.
A good example, yes, but not the best one in my opinion. The best example, in my opinion, is the Eason Jordan story. Eason Jordan made some indefensible statements at Davos. How did the public find out about them? Through a blogger who was there. He walked out of the panel session and posted his notes of the event on his blog. Other bloggers picked up the story and it made the rounds. That's a case where the blogosphere -- for lack of a better term -- ran the whole story, from start to finish. The big news outlets never even touched it until it was all over.
The only problem with that story was the way it ended. Jordan should have simply asked the powers that be to release the tape of the session. Instead, CNN fired him. There's some speculation that CNN just wanted to cut its losses and not deal with the PR nightmare that would inevitably follow a release of the tape, but that's their problem, I think.
My implication was that news, ideally, shouldn't have an agenda
That's kind of like saying that people, ideally, should never get sick. Anything that a person writes down is going to be a reflection of that person's point of view. There's simply no way around that. Saying that news should be objective is a waste of breath, because it can never be.
Those who say that news should be objective usually mean to say that they think reporters should go out of their way to hide, or even lie about, their own biases and agendas. I don't agree with that. I think up-front disclosure is the right answer, and that's something that blogs are starting to force professional journalists to do right up front.
Perhaps I'm just really looking at this the wrong way, but it seems that many of these blogs aren't really interested in the truth, or a thorough examination of multiple possibilities and points of view on topics such as, e.g., the Iraq war.
Of course they're not. Nobody is interested in "a thorough examination of multiple possibilities," and if he says he is, he's lying to you. Everybody has a point of view. The best solution is to be exposed to as many different points of view as possible so you can make up your own mind. Newspapers and TV do a really bad job of this. Blogs -- not any one blog, but blogs collectively, as a group -- do it much better.
Why can't it?
Well, for starters, USB 2 doesn't support guaranteed isochronous transport. Um. Actually, that's not just for starters; that's the whole thing. Total showstopper.
The whole point of USB is that it is Universal.
You do know that that's just a name, right?
do many slashdot readers have to read some primer on 'Philosophy for dummies' before posting or something?
It'd be good if they did.
He didn't say X (Apple) == Y (OSS), he said X was based on Y, which as it happens is correct
Except it's not correct. "Based on?" No, definitely not. Only somebody who's completely ignorant of what Mac OS X really looks like under the hood could say that. "Incorporates ideas and technology from?" Sure, that's accurate. But it doesn't prove his point, you see, which is why he didn't say that.
this isn't a glorified blog?
No. Slashdot is not a blog. Neither is the Drudge Report, neither is Metafilter. The defining characteristic of blogs is original content. None of those sites meet that criteria.
But the thing about your "generalizations" disclaimer is that your generalization was untrue. Bloggers do not think they're going to replace newspapers or TV news, nor do they hope to. Your generalization was wrong.
But where are the checks and balances for some of the popular blogs?
Um. Duh. Other blogs. The system meditates itself. Perfectly? Of course not. In theory, an invalid meme could sweep through, just like a malicious rumor burns across the high-school grapevine. But in practice, it doesn't seem to happen that way. It might someday, but it hasn't yet.
since everyone seems to be pointing their fingers at everyone else (e.g., FOX News) saying they're lying
I find that kind of funny. The one time FOX News ran a bogus story, back in October I think it was, they had a retraction up on the Web site in a matter of hours. It was a case where some of Carl Cameron's private notes accidentally made it through editorial and onto the Web site, and there was stuff in there that just wasn't true. FOX retracted and apologized before the sun went down. Note this in contrast to the little sideshow CBS put on last September when they were caught in a lie.
I just find it funny that FOX News is the pariah when, to my eye, it seems like they have a better record of accuracy and honesty than most.
as blogs appear more like news outlets, many less discriminating among us take the sometimes woefully incorrect stories at face value
It sounds like you're doing an awful lot of speculating here. What woefully incorrect stories are you talking about?
I don't see how this corrects other blogs that purport to be "news" sources with extremely one-sided agendas.
Dude, everybody has an agenda. Stop talking about having an agenda like there's any other option. Everybody has an agenda, period, end of paragraph.
The difference between your average advocacy blog and your average newspaper is that the blog declares its agenda right up front -- sometimes even right in the URL -- while the newspaper lies about it.
Objectivity is a myth. Everybody has a point of view, everybody has an agenda. Better for these things to be discussed openly than for the newspaper of record (or whatever) to try to hide them in a vain attempt to appear unbiased.
There are plenty of people who believe it.
I deny your premise. Can you dig up some old fossil who's just enough of a lunatic to think that blogs are gonna bring down CNN? Sure, no question. But that doesn't add up to "plenty of people" by any stretch of the imagination.
Your whole argument basically boils down to, "Bloggers are snooty." Even if true, that doesn't really seem to say anything useful, I don't think.
Best. Comment. Ever.
I, too, go positively batshit crazy whenever somebody trots out some dusty quote from somebody really fantastic in order to prop up their otherwise indefensible position. The Gandhi one is popular; the Franklin one about liberty and security is even more so. And, of course, anything from Orwell is right on the money.
What these people need to understand is that they're not actually saying anything here. They're trying to imply that they are equivalent to Gandhi or Franklin or whomever, but they're not actually coming right out and saying it. They're just repeating somebody else's words taken out of context.
And, frankly, Gandhi's "first they ignore you" quote is pretty lame to begin with. It's fortune-cooke wisdom: it sounds good, and it's completely irrefutable, but it doesn't actually mean anything or provide any guidance when it comes to making a judgment.
His writing styles is absolutely atrocious.
... it burns!
The irony
Bloggers think they're going to be the revolution of the press, and that they'll take the place of the New York Times and Washinton Post, and Newscorp will crumble at their feet.
Um. No, we don't. It really seems like the only people who are saying that are the people who are doing what you're doing: writing about blogs.
Blogging is a huge thing, okay? People use blogs for different things. Some people write movie reviews. Some people post photos of their pets. Some people post open letters to their year-old children. Blogs are all over the place.
There's one group of bloggers that you're talking about: the news bloggers. These are people who write about news and events and policy and such.
They're not trying to take over the job of distributing the news. What they are trying to do -- and an important job it is, too -- is provide a check-and-balance for the existing news outlets. When an outlet like CBS or the LA Times or the Guardian runs a story that's just flat-out false, it's good that there's a medium for getting the fact that it's a false story out there. Previously the best you could hope for would be to convince the newspaper to run a correction in tiny type on page B3. If it were a TV station, you're just out of luck; most of them don't bother to run corrections at all. But now, through blogs, the public has a new way of being made aware of inconsistencies and inaccuracies in their news coverage.
This is a good thing, yes?
Nobody, but nobody, thinks blogs are going to replace news. It's kind of silly for you to talk about us like we do.
Initially IDE was never supposed to supplant SCSI technology.
... Seen this drama unfold before, slightly different venue each time.
... but not in the way you think. SCSI vs. IDE, Beta vs. VHS, FireWire vs. USB. In each case, there was a very small sliver of overlap between two standards. One standard came to dominate in that sliver while the other didn't. You mistakenly conclude that means that the other standard went away. It didn't.
It didn't. Fibre channel did. And at that, it only replaced the physical layer. FC storage devices use SCSI protocols. Again, that's a case where there was very slight overlap between two technologies. IDE is only useful for host-to-internal-storage interfacing, and with a limit of two devices per bus it scales very poorly for other applications. SCSI wasn't targeted for that application.
Remember BetaMax and VHS?
Bad example. Betamax was a consumer format, just like VHS. They were functionally equivalent and targeted toward the same customers. Which is not the situation between USB and FireWire. A better example would be Beta and VHS. Unless you work in television, you probably don't know that Beta is still around. As a matter of fact, that's very nearly all anybody uses in TV for recording standard-definition video.
So we come to USB vs. Firewire.
You're absolutely right
You're right that this is a case of history repeating itself. You're confused about just what that means.
In lieu of payment, feel free to go buy a song on iTunes.
Yes, "Galactica" is shot and posted entirely in 1080/24p. It's finished on an Avid DS at Modern. That's one of the reasons they can do a show that looks that good for as little as mumble-mumble-million an episode. The pilot was shot on 35; if you know what to look for, you can see the difference.
;-)
And yes, "Galactica" is being broadcast on whatever NBC Universal is calling their HD cable channel these days. It used to be called Bravo HD, but it didn't have anything to do with Bravo, so they changed it to something else. I forget the new name. When NBC ran the pilot in January, they broadcast it in HD (an HD transfer of the 35 master, naturally). And when season one runs on NBC's summer schedule, they're going to be broadcasting the regular episodes in HD.
It's an HD world, man.
Surprisingly, though, a lot of series TV is staying away from HD production in favor of that new Super 16 stock from Kodak. (I think it's 7218, but don't quote me on that.) Believe it or not, "The West Wing" went from 35 to Super 16 this season. It's neither as cheap or as fast as 24p, but it's cheaper than 35, and it's easier to find somebody who can light it.
You get a different box for each of the following:
Um. No. When you buy a non-mini Mac, you get the keyboard, mouse and computer itself all in one box. If you buy a eMac or an iMac, you get the keyboard, mouse, computer and monitor all in one box.
Selling an iPod with a FireWire cable as one SKU and and iPod with a USB 2 cable as another SKU would be a waste of money. Selling an iPod, FireWire and USB 2 cables all as separate SKUs would be a huge waste of money. Apple is trying to reduce waste here, not increase it.
Making computers that you sell as servers does not count as being in the server business.
Except that osx=bsd
... although I'm guessing that most people already understood what I was saying.
Yes, that's exactly where the fallacy was. Thanks for pointing that out
The rest of your post was obviously satire. A for effort, but you really need to work on your sense of humor.
Hard drive based iPod are too expensive to get to most people.
That's a silly statement, and I think you know it. Who is "most people?" If you average it out over the whole world, even the least expensive, $100 iPod shuffle costs something like a year's wages. Of course the iPod is too expensive for most people.
So you have to define your market. Who is the iPod for? It's for people who listen to a lot of music, and it's for people who already own computers. That puts it pretty squarely in the 25-44, $40,000-a-year-and-up demo.
And as we've seen, the iPod is not too expensive for those people. In fact, it's taken off like gangbusters.
No. Apple hasn't reduced their prices on anything. Their pro workstations are priced basically the same -- plus or minus a couple bucks -- they were before the iPod came along. The iMac is actually more expensive!
The only thing they've done that's new price-wise is to introduce the Mac mini, which is an entirely new and different product.
No, I don't agree with you. I take completely the opposite position. Apple knows that if your products are great, you can basically charge whatever you want for them and people will buy them. Because they're great, you see.
By contrast, the new Baltar is a seriously flawed human, but not a pure villain.
My absolute favorite Baltar moment of all time comes from the pilot. Six has just told him everything, that she's a cylon, that she put a back door in his avionics program, the whole thing. He doesn't believe her at first, but then she convinces him. He jumps up from his chair, and the very first thing out of his mouth is, "I've gotta call my lawyer."
That's great writing, right there. The old cliché is, "Show, don't tell." That's the perfect way to show the audience that Baltar is a malignant narcissist: when informed that the world is literally coming to an end, have him ask for his lawyer. Brilliant. Just brilliant.
And of course you get the sweet, juicy irony of Six, the inhuman "machine," having to explain to him that he doesn't need a lawyer because by sundown, there's not going to be anybody left to charge him with a crime.
I bet the guy to whom you replied would be pissed to find out that Peter Pan is traditionally played on stage by a girl.