> But if I can double the life of the battery right > off the bat, I might be willing to compromise.
This is exactly why I think the no-removeable battery thing is going to blow over very quickly. I've known a lot of people who carried a spare battery. I don't think I've run into a user in the wild that habitually carried two spares (out of 350-400 laptop users supported throughout my career). So by doubling the capacity you're taking care of damn near everyone, including the people who care enough to carry a spare. If the battery has a better life too, then you come out ahead of carrying a spare. If you don't carry a spare, then you just double your battery life and it's a big win.
Remember, people screamed when Apple dropped the floppy drive from the iMac and the keyboard from their smartphone.
If anything over 6 years old is dropping to $0.69, then I'm at dire risk of completing my New Wave collection. Checking a few Essentials collection, I don't see any drops. Yet.
Dropping the price of an impulse buy for nostalgia music can only increase sales.
> Short reason: there's no physical thing to > produce, package, ship, display, etc.
Short response: bandwidth and datacenters.
Bandwidth costs for the ITMS add up, Apple only gets 30% from each sale, so they're focused on that margin. There's also the somewhat obscure fact that while hard drives are cheap, "managed storage" with backups, backup power, 24-hour sysadmin coverage, emergency power supplies, multiple high-bandwidth uplinks, insurance et al adds up to a hefty sum.
Just because you're only shipping bits doesn't mean there isn't a significant cost associated.
> With Amazon and ITMS and the others, they can't > pack one or two hits on an album and expect you > and I to shell out $16 for it.
I'll give you that, singles were wildly popular back in the vinyl days but faded as the album became king. Anyone remember "cassingles" ? Consumers love a la carte and the big record labels absolutely hate it. If they'd just factor in back catalog sales and call it even we'd all be much happier.
I've got about fifty bucks worth of upgrades downloading right now. It (naturally) is a whole new file download for each track. iTunes offered to move the old files to a folder on the desktop or just trash 'em.
Yup, works great too. My work configuration is an Intel 17" iMac with a 20" LCD attached. There's an adapter for the MiniDV port, pretty sure it's optional. A big step up from the same LCD hooked to a G5; not worth losing half the accounting team for, but close.
I was hoping for an updated Mini, I'm in the market as soon as it's out. Theory: new Minis are delayed until Nvidia sorts out whatever went wrong with the new GPUs .
Drop one of the CPUs from a Mac pro and you save US$500 on a BTO machine. Not only does that take a big bite out of the price, but you can plug in a matching CPU later. A QuadCore Xeon box with an 8800 GT (SLI supported) is still a powerful gaming rig, and it's got a lot of room for drives, RAM, miscellaneous PCI cards and a second optical drive. Mine's on a truck right now.
The drive bays on the Pro are totally sweet. It has 4 SATA bays. Pop the side of the case off and they're lined up horizontally in top of the case, each one is an L-shaped plate with captive screws for mounting a drive. You pull one out, screw in the drive and slide it back in to where the power and data connectors on the drive slide into their mates. Easiest drive installation you'll ever do.
The Pro is whisper silent too, having lots of fans means none of them have to work too hard.
For the longest time my respect for Seinfeld's observation humor was a thin sliver consisting solely of the joke "Am I a leg man or a breast man ? Hey, I've got legs." And then one day a sweet young thing in a miniskirt passed by and "Hey ! Not like that !"
Didn't like ET somehow, multiplayer got too complex. RtCW was nice, straightforward teams-based fps action. ET got way more involved than I wanted to deal with just to play a map and frag some fools.
But yeah, ET in its own right is a very nice package.
> I don't know what it is with ID and their terrible 'revive our old games' thing.
If they end up with more revivifications like RtCW than Doom 3 then the industry as a whole benefits from it. There should always be a Castle Wolfenstein game available on a fairly modern engine. RtCW is a little long in the tooth now, so let's have a new one. Works for me, I loved RtCW and there are damned few servers left whenever I reinstall.
Id's "first party" games are just tech demos for their latest engine anyway, have been for a while. That explains Doom 3 right there - they really weren't trying to make an awesome game, they were demoing an awesome engine.
Waiting until games become cheap is an excellent strategy. If it's any good, there will still be a healthy online community. If there isn't, you didn't miss much.
>Powercord is usually the only thing that is going to the floor.
Yup. Magsafe can save a whole business trip. I've seen too many laptops ruined because the power cord got tripped a wrenched he socket out of alignment. And a MagSafe connector really works, the laptop gets a small yank horizontally and the connector pops out. Even if it was perched precariously enough that it still hits the floor the accelerometer will park the drive heads before it lands.
Those two features alone make switching a good idea. Kick the power cord out in a hotel room the night before a presentation and you're toast. That could cost your company real money.
Right. PvP in EVE has a real risk and a very real adrenaline rush. You aren't a PvP veteran until either your hands stop shaking during fights or you learn to fight through it.
The learning curve puts a lot of people off the game. So does the "pervasive PvP" where you can get ganked and lose stuff anywhere. The PvP will keep the core population coming back, because it's just that much of a rush.
As others posters have pointed out, my assertion that the translation of the Bible into vernacular heralded the Renaissance is incorrect.
It may not have caused it as directly as you asserted originally, but "heralded" is exactly what it did. The printed Bible in the vernacular was walking down the street, beating a drum and shouting that something is going on. It was as recently as the previous century or two that possession of a manuscript Bible in English would get you burned.
4) I've not tried the migration tool (did it manually instead), but I hear there's a network enabling patch or utility out there somewhere that does it. Mac to Mac migration is pretty much a snap with or without a tool. PC to mac migration? I'd never try that... It just sounds like a bad idea!
Migration Utility is one of Apple's little pieces of magic. Someone upthread said OS X was an idiot savant, well this is one of the genius parts.
"All" it does is copy your home directory. OS X is structured so that every bit of personalized data and configuration is in the home directory, down to the position of icons on your desktop. Optionally it will also transfer folders at the root of the hard drive, the root Library folder and installed applications complete with serialization, plug-ins, support libraries and configuration. It's all kinds of slick.
The Migration Utility is in/Applications/Utilities. It also runs the first time a Mac is booted from a factory image. As of Leopard it will transfer from any mounted volume; technically Firewire drive, network volume, or another internal drive ).
It's painfully obvious that many of Microsoft's core algorithms do not scale well with large numbers of objects. Look at how badly explorer.exe handles a folder with more than 2000 files in it. Similarly, as the registry size increases it's performance degrades out of scale with the increase.
If Microsoft had written algorithms that scale well, explorer.exe would be able to handle large directories as well as Finder.app, Nautilus or - if I can be sarky for a moment - bash. They didn't. It's inexcusable and somewhat mind boggling, but it's the truth. It's why deleting a subtree on disk with thousands of files takes long minutes. Not the emptying the Recycle Bin part, moving them there takes ages. Finder.app takes a while to delete, oh 6500 files to pick a recent example, but it's still notably faster than explorer.exe.
> If the RAM you get is defective, RMA'ing it > always works. All you pay for is shipping. That > alternative is still cheaper than going through > Apple, for those that have the know how.
Yeah. But.
Bad RAM turns up often enough that I'll pay a premium for tested RAM versus some chip that came from a "good batch". Like the CEO's machine. Crashes and lost work on that machine are extremely expensive and can't be allowed to happen, so I'll put everything on a single vendor and not open the machine. It helps that I have an Apple store 2 blocks away too, but onsite service can be had. Bad RAM can be swapped at the store, to do the same with 3rd party RAM would require purchasing RAM locally and swapping it out.
Macs have always been twitchy about RAM, more so since OS X was introduced. Chips that have small flaws in timing or other factors can screw up the system more than under another OS. You can swap the RAM between a Dell and a Mac, the Dell won't notice and the Mac might not recognize the chips or it might become wildly unstable. You don't need to get it from Apple, but at least pay the premium on "Mac" RAM to save yourself a lot of headaches.
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> But if I can double the life of the battery right
> off the bat, I might be willing to compromise.
This is exactly why I think the no-removeable battery thing is going to blow over very quickly. I've known a lot of people who carried a spare battery. I don't think I've run into a user in the wild that habitually carried two spares (out of 350-400 laptop users supported throughout my career). So by doubling the capacity you're taking care of damn near everyone, including the people who care enough to carry a spare. If the battery has a better life too, then you come out ahead of carrying a spare. If you don't carry a spare, then you just double your battery life and it's a big win.
Remember, people screamed when Apple dropped the floppy drive from the iMac and the keyboard from their smartphone.
If anything over 6 years old is dropping to $0.69, then I'm at dire risk of completing my New Wave collection. Checking a few Essentials collection, I don't see any drops. Yet.
Dropping the price of an impulse buy for nostalgia music can only increase sales.
> Short reason: there's no physical thing to
> produce, package, ship, display, etc.
Short response: bandwidth and datacenters.
Bandwidth costs for the ITMS add up, Apple only gets 30% from each sale, so they're focused on that margin. There's also the somewhat obscure fact that while hard drives are cheap, "managed storage" with backups, backup power, 24-hour sysadmin coverage, emergency power supplies, multiple high-bandwidth uplinks, insurance et al adds up to a hefty sum.
Just because you're only shipping bits doesn't mean there isn't a significant cost associated.
> With Amazon and ITMS and the others, they can't
> pack one or two hits on an album and expect you
> and I to shell out $16 for it.
I'll give you that, singles were wildly popular back in the vinyl days but faded as the album became king. Anyone remember "cassingles" ? Consumers love a la carte and the big record labels absolutely hate it. If they'd just factor in back catalog sales and call it even we'd all be much happier.
I've got about fifty bucks worth of upgrades downloading right now. It (naturally) is a whole new file download for each track. iTunes offered to move the old files to a folder on the desktop or just trash 'em.
Yup, works great too. My work configuration is an Intel 17" iMac with a 20" LCD attached. There's an adapter for the MiniDV port, pretty sure it's optional. A big step up from the same LCD hooked to a G5; not worth losing half the accounting team for, but close.
I was hoping for an updated Mini, I'm in the market as soon as it's out. Theory: new Minis are delayed until Nvidia sorts out whatever went wrong with the new GPUs .
Apple didn't write BSD itself, but Avie Tevanian developed Mach while at Carnegie-Mellon and worked for NeXT and then Apple.
Sticking a really nice API and UI toolkit on top of a Unix does count as a technological accomplishment in my book anyway.
"A Fisher-Price handbag for drag queens"
Get it right.
Drop one of the CPUs from a Mac pro and you save US$500 on a BTO machine. Not only does that take a big bite out of the price, but you can plug in a matching CPU later. A QuadCore Xeon box with an 8800 GT (SLI supported) is still a powerful gaming rig, and it's got a lot of room for drives, RAM, miscellaneous PCI cards and a second optical drive. Mine's on a truck right now.
Go ahead, drool: http://www.apple.com/macpro/design.html
The drive bays on the Pro are totally sweet. It has 4 SATA bays. Pop the side of the case off and they're lined up horizontally in top of the case, each one is an L-shaped plate with captive screws for mounting a drive. You pull one out, screw in the drive and slide it back in to where the power and data connectors on the drive slide into their mates. Easiest drive installation you'll ever do.
The Pro is whisper silent too, having lots of fans means none of them have to work too hard.
At my domain blacklist-admin@ gets a surprising amount of spam.
Yeah, that and we got our asses kicked in SMASH. We had a good run, but the Goons tore our shit up.
A sawbuck for the Platinum edition, or more for bundles. Steam has an appalling variety of games these days.
Damn you for mentioning RT II, I had Steam open. Now I'm out 5 bucks.
Red Baron
For the longest time my respect for Seinfeld's observation humor was a thin sliver consisting solely of the joke "Am I a leg man or a breast man ? Hey, I've got legs." And then one day a sweet young thing in a miniskirt passed by and "Hey ! Not like that !"
Yeah, angry at the ignorance. That's it.
And the ISK farmers give the highsec pirates someone to prey on who isn't me coming in to empire for implants.
Didn't like ET somehow, multiplayer got too complex. RtCW was nice, straightforward teams-based fps action. ET got way more involved than I wanted to deal with just to play a map and frag some fools.
But yeah, ET in its own right is a very nice package.
> I don't know what it is with ID and their terrible 'revive our old games' thing.
If they end up with more revivifications like RtCW than Doom 3 then the industry as a whole benefits from it. There should always be a Castle Wolfenstein game available on a fairly modern engine. RtCW is a little long in the tooth now, so let's have a new one. Works for me, I loved RtCW and there are damned few servers left whenever I reinstall.
Id's "first party" games are just tech demos for their latest engine anyway, have been for a while. That explains Doom 3 right there - they really weren't trying to make an awesome game, they were demoing an awesome engine.
Waiting until games become cheap is an excellent strategy. If it's any good, there will still be a healthy online community. If there isn't, you didn't miss much.
>Powercord is usually the only thing that is going to the floor.
Yup. Magsafe can save a whole business trip. I've seen too many laptops ruined because the power cord got tripped a wrenched he socket out of alignment. And a MagSafe connector really works, the laptop gets a small yank horizontally and the connector pops out. Even if it was perched precariously enough that it still hits the floor the accelerometer will park the drive heads before it lands.
Those two features alone make switching a good idea. Kick the power cord out in a hotel room the night before a presentation and you're toast. That could cost your company real money.
That, and it's Unix and it runs Microsoft Office.
Right. PvP in EVE has a real risk and a very real adrenaline rush. You aren't a PvP veteran until either your hands stop shaking during fights or you learn to fight through it.
The learning curve puts a lot of people off the game. So does the "pervasive PvP" where you can get ganked and lose stuff anywhere. The PvP will keep the core population coming back, because it's just that much of a rush.
Funny, I'd say WoW keeps the 13 year old retards out of EVE.
EVE, come for the crafting, stay for the PvP.
As others posters have pointed out, my assertion that the translation of the Bible into vernacular heralded the Renaissance is incorrect.
It may not have caused it as directly as you asserted originally, but "heralded" is exactly what it did. The printed Bible in the vernacular was walking down the street, beating a drum and shouting that something is going on. It was as recently as the previous century or two that possession of a manuscript Bible in English would get you burned.
4) I've not tried the migration tool (did it manually instead), but I hear there's a network enabling patch or utility out there somewhere that does it. Mac to Mac migration is pretty much a snap with or without a tool. PC to mac migration? I'd never try that... It just sounds like a bad idea!
Migration Utility is one of Apple's little pieces of magic. Someone upthread said OS X was an idiot savant, well this is one of the genius parts.
"All" it does is copy your home directory. OS X is structured so that every bit of personalized data and configuration is in the home directory, down to the position of icons on your desktop. Optionally it will also transfer folders at the root of the hard drive, the root Library folder and installed applications complete with serialization, plug-ins, support libraries and configuration. It's all kinds of slick.
The Migration Utility is in /Applications/Utilities. It also runs the first time a Mac is booted from a factory image. As of Leopard it will transfer from any mounted volume; technically Firewire drive, network volume, or another internal drive ).
Ok, from the Finder open the Go menu and select "go to Folder..." Type in "/etc". Right-click hosts and open with TextEdit.
How's that ?
Moron.
It's painfully obvious that many of Microsoft's core algorithms do not scale well with large numbers of objects. Look at how badly explorer.exe handles a folder with more than 2000 files in it. Similarly, as the registry size increases it's performance degrades out of scale with the increase.
If Microsoft had written algorithms that scale well, explorer.exe would be able to handle large directories as well as Finder.app, Nautilus or - if I can be sarky for a moment - bash. They didn't. It's inexcusable and somewhat mind boggling, but it's the truth. It's why deleting a subtree on disk with thousands of files takes long minutes. Not the emptying the Recycle Bin part, moving them there takes ages. Finder.app takes a while to delete, oh 6500 files to pick a recent example, but it's still notably faster than explorer.exe.
> If the RAM you get is defective, RMA'ing it
> always works. All you pay for is shipping. That > alternative is still cheaper than going through
> Apple, for those that have the know how.
Yeah. But.
Bad RAM turns up often enough that I'll pay a premium for tested RAM versus some chip that came from a "good batch". Like the CEO's machine. Crashes and lost work on that machine are extremely expensive and can't be allowed to happen, so I'll put everything on a single vendor and not open the machine. It helps that I have an Apple store 2 blocks away too, but onsite service can be had. Bad RAM can be swapped at the store, to do the same with 3rd party RAM would require purchasing RAM locally and swapping it out.
Macs have always been twitchy about RAM, more so since OS X was introduced. Chips that have small flaws in timing or other factors can screw up the system more than under another OS. You can swap the RAM between a Dell and a Mac, the Dell won't notice and the Mac might not recognize the chips or it might become wildly unstable. You don't need to get it from Apple, but at least pay the premium on "Mac" RAM to save yourself a lot of headaches.