Sorry, I went to the linked site and posted my impression, comparing it to a recent Mac mini bundle I had purchased with my son and a hacker friend of his at the U Bookstore just a few weeks ago, which had a final total price with tax etc of around $1270 all told. I guess what I was trying to say was the Education iMac they're offering is pretty close to what I ended up buying from other parts, so it's not a bad bundle for a high school kid (my son just finished 9th grade and the Mac mini setup I got him with similar stats is for grades 10-12), but doesn't really work for most kids in a college/university setting, who really need a mobile wireless laptop more than anything else, IMHO. Based on what I've seen on campus (I work at the UW as professional staff, as a Data Manager) and in seminars and discussions with students and grad students.
Well, you might call iLife bloatware, but since my son seems to like it, I don't.
Not everyone is you. They have different needs, different expectations, different ways of doing things. Some seem to like the Mac approach - some seem to like the Linux or BSD approaches - and some even like the Windows approach.
I don't presume to judge why my son prefers the software bundles he gets, even after his hacker friends download a few extra things for him, but then I didn't hack Wikipedia when I was 10 like he did either. I used oscilliscopes when I was that age - and S100 bus computers. We lived off tape and paper back then. And we had real sliderules.
Dang. Just bought an education discount Mac mini myself. Looks like this includes a 17 inch LCD, combo CD+R/W and DVD, 512MB DDR2 SDRAM (expand to 2GB) and HD expand to 160GB. But the cool part is the built-in iSight vcam, Gigapop Ethernet, 802.11g WiFi (54Mbps wireless), 5 USB ports and 2 FireWire 400 ports.
It doesn't really mean all that much. Microsoft will do some kind of wheeling and dealing efforts to 1) lower the fine and 2) establish an even stronger marketshare in the EU
Except the EU is notorious for not caring about wheeling or dealing and thus not lowering the fine and not enabling MSFT to increase marketshare.
We tried to warn them, but they just don't grok that the EU is not the US.
perform surgery on ants as a kid, and who wanted a grant to do the same, but get paid for it.
That said, are we sure that the ants aren't just counting in their heads? Maybe the reason they get disoriented goes something like this:
951, 952, 952, hey what's happening? OOOOOOWWWWWW!! Damn, they cut off my legs! OUCH OUCH OUCH! Now I'm in some sticky goop! Finallly, that's - ouch - over - ouch. Ok, where - ouch - was I - 591 steps from home.
And quite frankly, I think they're underestimating how popular the Wii will be - especially with its wide variety of games designed to appeal to not just hardcore gamers, but especially to women, girls, and occassional gamers.
No, that's red communism - party elites rewarded with excess salaries and benefits while the actual capitalists (the shareowners) are scr.w.d six ways to Sunday.
The guy is way overpaid, with a salary more than 200 times that of the average worker in his firm, not even including his unwarranted pension, benefits, protection from lawsuits for criminal actions, and stock options he backdates for the best strike price.
Hey, don't ask for capitalism if you can't live under it's rules yourself.
It is thought to be the first time such high speeds have been seen at a UK internet cafe.
Are you seriously claiming that there are no research universities with internet cafes that don't use gigapop Internet?
Look, we all use it to do remote telesurgery, splice genomes, and other fun things - and I'm pretty sure Cambridge is just one of many such research universities on our gigapop backbone that are located in the UK.
And I'd be really suprised in none of those university/college locations didn't have such a gigapop cafe, since we have tons of them here in the US on research university campus locations.
That said, South Korea is already wired - the entire country - at that speed, so World's fastest is an interesting and unlikely claim.
1 - everyone in South Korea has gigapop Internet - same speed as what you just quoted - and they have Internet cafes with similar speeds. Thus it's obviously not the World's Fastest, it's not the First, and it's not the only Cafe.
2 - everyone at University of Texas at Austin, most places in the University of Washington, and everyone else who goes to a reasonable research university has this kind of speed available, including in a number of Cafes on campus.
Oh, but if you want to claim "World's Fastest Commercial UK Cafe not part of a research University or College" - go for it!
Seeing as how parking tickets are a major revenue source for many cities, I don't know how widespread this will be in the US.
It's a good question. Recently, Seattle City Council tried to sneak in evening parking rates for automatic pay meters for parking and was pounced upon by most citizens.
Still, two years is an awfully long time. I wonder how he keeps the battery from going dead.
Maybe it's got one of those solar cell rooftop chargers? You'd think they'd tow him given how much grime must cover the car by now, though.
From the post, "Bandyopadhyay stresses it is important not to just copy nature's work, but to take the best parts of it and apply it elsewhere."
Of course, just because a specific plant or animal is effective at killing off an unwanted pest doesn't mean it's a good thing to use it somewhere else. An example in point would be the use of certain poisonous snakes which ended up killing off songbirds on islands that had no defenses either, or the use of certain diurnal creatures to hunt nocturnal creatures - and then end up eating the diurnal protected species instead.
Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should do something. Nuclear fission taught us that.
I paid for my parking like this 2 years ago in Vancouver.
And you still didn't get a ticket?
You must have an expensive cell phone bill...
But, it is mostly new to the US, I guess. I think Japan had it quite a long time ago, just like how with DoCoMo you can pay for vending machine purchases with your cell phone since at least the early 90s.
I never said it wasn't good, I just said that most of the market is highly resistant to upgrade in a timeline less than 3+ years.
I'm also basing this, as any good economist would, on personal observations and discussions with people I meet. They show no interest in getting them for a few years, the most common phrase being "I'll wait a few years until the price drops to an affordable range", indicating that the price point is still too high for market conversion. This is without leading questions, too.
you're assuming that if I have 300 million people (the US) that a single store chain having some higher proportion of sales (less than a million) means there aren't a few hundred million non-HDTV sets out there that people aren't upgrading from.
Yes, it's an obvious improvement. If Joe Sixpack eventually purchases an HDTV, he'll see the obvious association...
But the thing is, Joe Sixpack only bought an HDTV to watch the World Cup on, and returned it right afterwards. Most people don't want to spend the money yet. They just don't see the need.
So, the format wars are being fought years before they should have, and as a result, consumers just don't care, because they don't need them, and can't see any difference.
Besides, most consumers will be buying a 32 inch DLP set anyway. Not the 60 inch or more 1080p HDTV they would need to even notice the difference.
I thought that the article was fairly concise, and accurately described 10 reasons why the format wars have already failed.
But they forgot another one - most Americans don't have, and don't want to buy, an HDTV set that would even need either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, nor do most consumers see any reason to pay twice as much for the same product they can use today.
Is this true in a few years? Perhaps not. But it's true today.
Which leads us to the conclusion that both Sony and our other player decided to fight this battle early, after what happened to them when Beta and VHS fought - the stakes are so high they're trying to front-end the decision, but both sides ended up trying to steal a march on their competition, resulting in two formats way too early for consumers to be interested in either.
A +5 Interesting just means 3 or 4 people who had mod points found it interesting, not everyone else. Also, it's far too easy to modbomb and ruin an account.
While I frequently disagree with Overly Critical Guy, I think he's smack on with his comment here. I've been modbombed myself, and have found that when there are just so many people online, it's hard to even keep track of what's actually funny or not.
So, is this why Rob Malda is on the 10 Tech People who don't Matter? Maybe, but in some ways, acheiving the Don't Matter list is an achievement in and of itself, in that one had to be (except for Ballmer) someone who did matter to get on the list in the first place.
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Sorry, I went to the linked site and posted my impression, comparing it to a recent Mac mini bundle I had purchased with my son and a hacker friend of his at the U Bookstore just a few weeks ago, which had a final total price with tax etc of around $1270 all told. I guess what I was trying to say was the Education iMac they're offering is pretty close to what I ended up buying from other parts, so it's not a bad bundle for a high school kid (my son just finished 9th grade and the Mac mini setup I got him with similar stats is for grades 10-12), but doesn't really work for most kids in a college/university setting, who really need a mobile wireless laptop more than anything else, IMHO. Based on what I've seen on campus (I work at the UW as professional staff, as a Data Manager) and in seminars and discussions with students and grad students.
You don't need a "remanufactured" laptop for it to cost 500 bucks.
Dell, HP, Toshiba, Acer all have very afordable offerings around $499 - $599.
I'd rather have a top of line model with a small hairline crack in the shell case for $499 thanks, than an underpowered laptop.
But if you just do web surfing, maybe that could work.
Well, you might call iLife bloatware, but since my son seems to like it, I don't.
Not everyone is you. They have different needs, different expectations, different ways of doing things. Some seem to like the Mac approach - some seem to like the Linux or BSD approaches - and some even like the Windows approach.
I don't presume to judge why my son prefers the software bundles he gets, even after his hacker friends download a few extra things for him, but then I didn't hack Wikipedia when I was 10 like he did either. I used oscilliscopes when I was that age - and S100 bus computers. We lived off tape and paper back then. And we had real sliderules.
it's cheap compared to most of the other machines at the bookstore.
but I agree, a $500 remanufactured laptop is all you really need.
Dang. Just bought an education discount Mac mini myself. Looks like this includes a 17 inch LCD, combo CD+R/W and DVD, 512MB DDR2 SDRAM (expand to 2GB) and HD expand to 160GB. But the cool part is the built-in iSight vcam, Gigapop Ethernet, 802.11g WiFi (54Mbps wireless), 5 USB ports and 2 FireWire 400 ports.
And the usual extra software thrown in.
It doesn't really mean all that much. Microsoft will do some kind of wheeling and dealing efforts to 1) lower the fine and 2) establish an even stronger marketshare in the EU
Except the EU is notorious for not caring about wheeling or dealing and thus not lowering the fine and not enabling MSFT to increase marketshare.
We tried to warn them, but they just don't grok that the EU is not the US.
that's ok, I'm waiting until I hear that Will Wright's Spore is going to be on the Wii. Then I won't have to own a Windows box.
so if this whole WGA spyware-in-a-download thing gets too bothersome, it's sayonara WinXP, hello Linux.
At least I'll get rid of that dumb Exchange icon that pops up all the time.
she has to stop calling me while she's driving.
At least she isn't putting on makeup, talking in a cellphone, and being distracted by thoughts of me.
I figure she can cope with only the distracting thoughts of me, but I don't want to see any studies on that one.
perform surgery on ants as a kid, and who wanted a grant to do the same, but get paid for it.
That said, are we sure that the ants aren't just counting in their heads? Maybe the reason they get disoriented goes something like this:
951, 952, 952, hey what's happening?
OOOOOOWWWWWW!! Damn, they cut off my legs!
OUCH OUCH OUCH! Now I'm in some sticky goop!
Finallly, that's - ouch - over - ouch.
Ok, where - ouch - was I - 591 steps from home.
And quite frankly, I think they're underestimating how popular the Wii will be - especially with its wide variety of games designed to appeal to not just hardcore gamers, but especially to women, girls, and occassional gamers.
No, that's red communism - party elites rewarded with excess salaries and benefits while the actual capitalists (the shareowners) are scr.w.d six ways to Sunday.
well, there's always nuclear fusion ... 20 years from today, just like it was 20 years from today in 1960.
The guy is way overpaid, with a salary more than 200 times that of the average worker in his firm, not even including his unwarranted pension, benefits, protection from lawsuits for criminal actions, and stock options he backdates for the best strike price.
Hey, don't ask for capitalism if you can't live under it's rules yourself.
It is thought to be the first time such high speeds have been seen at a UK internet cafe.
Are you seriously claiming that there are no research universities with internet cafes that don't use gigapop Internet?
Look, we all use it to do remote telesurgery, splice genomes, and other fun things - and I'm pretty sure Cambridge is just one of many such research universities on our gigapop backbone that are located in the UK.
And I'd be really suprised in none of those university/college locations didn't have such a gigapop cafe, since we have tons of them here in the US on research university campus locations.
That said, South Korea is already wired - the entire country - at that speed, so World's fastest is an interesting and unlikely claim.
1 - everyone in South Korea has gigapop Internet - same speed as what you just quoted - and they have Internet cafes with similar speeds. Thus it's obviously not the World's Fastest, it's not the First, and it's not the only Cafe.
2 - everyone at University of Texas at Austin, most places in the University of Washington, and everyone else who goes to a reasonable research university has this kind of speed available, including in a number of Cafes on campus.
Oh, but if you want to claim "World's Fastest Commercial UK Cafe not part of a research University or College" - go for it!
Seeing as how parking tickets are a major revenue source for many cities, I don't know how widespread this will be in the US.
It's a good question. Recently, Seattle City Council tried to sneak in evening parking rates for automatic pay meters for parking and was pounced upon by most citizens.
Still, two years is an awfully long time. I wonder how he keeps the battery from going dead.
Maybe it's got one of those solar cell rooftop chargers? You'd think they'd tow him given how much grime must cover the car by now, though.
From the post, "Bandyopadhyay stresses it is important not to just copy nature's work, but to take the best parts of it and apply it elsewhere."
Of course, just because a specific plant or animal is effective at killing off an unwanted pest doesn't mean it's a good thing to use it somewhere else. An example in point would be the use of certain poisonous snakes which ended up killing off songbirds on islands that had no defenses either, or the use of certain diurnal creatures to hunt nocturnal creatures - and then end up eating the diurnal protected species instead.
Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should do something. Nuclear fission taught us that.
I paid for my parking like this 2 years ago in Vancouver.
...
And you still didn't get a ticket?
You must have an expensive cell phone bill
But, it is mostly new to the US, I guess. I think Japan had it quite a long time ago, just like how with DoCoMo you can pay for vending machine purchases with your cell phone since at least the early 90s.
I never said it wasn't good, I just said that most of the market is highly resistant to upgrade in a timeline less than 3+ years.
I'm also basing this, as any good economist would, on personal observations and discussions with people I meet. They show no interest in getting them for a few years, the most common phrase being "I'll wait a few years until the price drops to an affordable range", indicating that the price point is still too high for market conversion. This is without leading questions, too.
you're assuming that if I have 300 million people (the US) that a single store chain having some higher proportion of sales (less than a million) means there aren't a few hundred million non-HDTV sets out there that people aren't upgrading from.
Based on articles in Fortune and the Wall Street Journal.
I'll just wait until 1080p DLP costs less than $300 and then see what's available.
But I still can't get that excited by the formats - there's not much of a reason to even bother.
Yes, it's an obvious improvement. If Joe Sixpack eventually purchases an HDTV, he'll see the obvious association ...
But the thing is, Joe Sixpack only bought an HDTV to watch the World Cup on, and returned it right afterwards. Most people don't want to spend the money yet. They just don't see the need.
So, the format wars are being fought years before they should have, and as a result, consumers just don't care, because they don't need them, and can't see any difference.
Besides, most consumers will be buying a 32 inch DLP set anyway. Not the 60 inch or more 1080p HDTV they would need to even notice the difference.
I thought that the article was fairly concise, and accurately described 10 reasons why the format wars have already failed.
But they forgot another one - most Americans don't have, and don't want to buy, an HDTV set that would even need either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, nor do most consumers see any reason to pay twice as much for the same product they can use today.
Is this true in a few years? Perhaps not. But it's true today.
Which leads us to the conclusion that both Sony and our other player decided to fight this battle early, after what happened to them when Beta and VHS fought - the stakes are so high they're trying to front-end the decision, but both sides ended up trying to steal a march on their competition, resulting in two formats way too early for consumers to be interested in either.
A +5 Interesting just means 3 or 4 people who had mod points found it interesting, not everyone else. Also, it's far too easy to modbomb and ruin an account.
While I frequently disagree with Overly Critical Guy, I think he's smack on with his comment here. I've been modbombed myself, and have found that when there are just so many people online, it's hard to even keep track of what's actually funny or not.
So, is this why Rob Malda is on the 10 Tech People who don't Matter? Maybe, but in some ways, acheiving the Don't Matter list is an achievement in and of itself, in that one had to be (except for Ballmer) someone who did matter to get on the list in the first place.