Maybe the ISO Standards Committee should dissolve itself and reform under a slightly different name, with a better set of bylaws... You can't disolve something you can't control, you can of course quit from it and reform under a different name but I doubt you could take your ISO approved status with you easilly.
What pisses me off is that I need to buy a new laptop, Vista is now forced down my throat, and I have no option to get XP pre-installed. dell have some laptops with XP, you just have to go through the small buisness section of thier site to find them.
you also have the option of buying vista buisness or ultimate and excercising your downgrade rights (though you are on your own regarding drivers if you choose this route).
The most important thing in a mobile phone ringtone is for it to be distinctive, as a mobile phone user you need to be able to tell it is your phone ringing and not someone elses phone ringing. There are only so many variants of a ringing pattern so someone got the idea of musicial ringtones.
IMO it is best to prepare your own ringtones but some phone vendors make this infeasible and it does take at least a little skill (I did mine by finding a midi file on the internet, doing some rearrangement, converting to audio and then finally cropping off the silent block of midi setup stuff from the beginning).
iirc subscribers can see a users full post history so wouldn't it be easy for a subscriber to look at a low UID account and see when it started posting.
I'll take you up on contrasting the Apple line with the likes of Dell...you overlooked one very important thing in that Dell's don't run OS X indeed if you want OS-X (some people like it, I personally prefer linux but can see the attraction) legit you don't have any choice but to buy your hardware from apple.
the Mac-mini is signficant, because there simply is no competition. Other companies have tried to make mini computers, but they haven't had nearly the success Apple has. (I personally don't get the allure, but obviously there is a big demand for it). Do you have any evidence that people are buying the mini because of the form factor and not simply because it is the cheapest mac on the market?
I think you (and thousands of slashdot posts elsewhere) really are just wanting Apple to make bare-bones towers for rock bottom price, but this will never happen. Just like Mercedes-Benz will never make an entry level economy car. It just isn't going to happen. It doesn't have to be bare bones at a rock bottom price, something with similar specs to the mini but with PC like levels of expansion room for a slight price premium over the mini would be just fine.
sadly you are probablly right, much as I would like to see a lower end mac that isn't in a cripplingly small case with no expansion slots and/or bolted into the back of a monitor with one of its two display outputs permanently routed to said monitor I doubt apple will make one. It wouldn't fit with the image they are trying to project and would also badly hurt mac pro sales.
1. The advertisement is unsolicited. with a website I make a request for content and get content which may have adverts included. If I find the level of adverts unreasonable I can just stop visiting the site just as I could stop buying a magazine that had too high a proportion of adverts. The money made from those adverts goes towards supporting the site/magazine that I find usefull. There is an implicit exchange going on, the user accepts having adverts included in the content in exchange for getting the content free/cheap.
with spam I get sent adverts completely unsolicited because someone happened to find my address. The money from those adverts provides absoloutely no benifit to me. They can't be blocked without considerable risk of lost mail.
2. The recipient is forced to expend his/her bandwidth on the ad. See above, if the adverts are excessive then those who care sufficiantly about bandwidth use will avoid the site.
3. Dealing with the advertisement (deleting it, blocking it, clicking through it if it's an interstitial) takes time away from the recipient. again see above, the crucial difference is that with web adverts I get something in exchange for viewing the advert. If I don't think that exchange is reasonable I will avoid uing the site again.
two years now since all Macs have shipped with Intel chips, yet the slashdot crowd STILL doesn't realize you can run Windows on a Mac? I realise that but adding a retail windows license is going to push the already high price of mac hardware even higher.
And pretty much every professional review would tell you how wrong that statement is. For once, I'll drop my anecdotal evidence and let the computer publications speak for me on this one. sorry poor choice of words on my part.
I didn't mean the hardware itself is terrible (indeed it is very well made). It is the selection that is terrible.
lets take a look at apples desktop range
mac mini: (Prices start at £399) laptop hard drive and optical drive, integrated graphics. Yes the small form factor is nice but you pay a heavy price for it in terms of both performance and upgradability.
imac: (Prices start at £799) nice if the built in monitor fits your needs, you don't use a kvm switch and you don't mind having to unnessacerally cart along the monitor when/if you need to take it in for repair/support.
mac pro: (Prices start at £1,509.01) very nice machine with as much expansion capability as you could want but you pay through the nose for it.
contrast this with mchines from the likes of dell, even in the bottom of the range home models (some of the bottom of the range office models are really stripped down but given the price is less than half that of the mac mini that is forgivable) i can select a cheap build time option to get a graphics card with dual output or the horsepower for gaming. Alternatively I can easilly add one later. None of thier desktops come with built in monitors so my monitor selection can be mostly independent of the internal components.
what exactly happens in the US if you overstay a visa? presumablly you don't usually get caught until you try and leave but what happens then? do they tend to ban people who do it from coming to the US again or what?
Yeah, yeah. I love flame wars. But seriously, why do people even bother with Vista? because most people feel tied into windows either because they don't want to learn something new or because they have software that ties them in or both. Apple's range of desktop hardware is also terrible (basically if your requirements are even slightly out of the ordinary then often the only mac that can meet them is the very expensive mac pro) and apple doesn't do low end in either the laptop or desktop markets.
Walk into a store like PC world (for those not in the UK PC world is the main chain of bricks and mortar computer retailers here) and you will find that nearly all the machines come with vista, usually the editions of vista that don't come with downgrade rights. By the time the user finds out that vista is more trouble than it is worth there only legitimate option for downgrading is to buy XP retail and then they have to find someone to set it up for them (which often involves a lot of hunting for drivers). Sure there is the odd mac arround but nothing to make the person who went in shopping for a PC think about getting one instead.
not the party line around here for some reason, but it's the truth XP=2K+more bloat+a few marginally usefull features+support for some newer types of hardware+activation crap (which could be got arround by using a pirate copy of the corporate edition but MS targeted people who did that with WGA)
And in all cases, it would be cheaper to simply get a home basic computer and buy XP separately (unless you specifically need XP Pro). Buisness and ultimate OEM copies (there is no such thing as an OEM copy of enterprise, you can only get that edition as part of a volume license) include downgrade rights to XP pro. Buisness is about £50 extra at purchase time, ultimate is £100 extra (at least that is what dells UK small buinsess site quotes), XP home retail (yes I know some will abuse whitebox OEM packs but lets assume things are being done by the book) is about £150.
unfortunately upgrade editions of vista don't come with downgrade rights so yif buy an upgrade to vista buisness for a machine that was bought with vista home basic or home premium you still can't downgrade to XP.
Macs? They don't have too many that are aimed at the geek market, but they are fine for most consumers. And, of course, geeks know where to get whatever OS they want installed on a machine. A few facts about macs
1: apple doesn't do low end, the mini which is apples cheapest box is about £400 (uk price inc VAT), PCs can be had for half that. 2: many people have at least one app which ties them into windows 3: many people don't really understand PCs and treat them as magic boxes to which they recite spells (perform rote memorised lists of clicks) change things arround a bit and theese people panic (just look at the reaction to vista and the difference between XP and OS-X is far bigger than that between XP and vista)
apple is having quite some success by playing up the home media niche but in most peoples minds computer still means windows.
I'm not in a hurry. and as a geek you have that luxury, you can make sure you either buy PCs with XP or with an edition of vista that allows downgrading. You almost certainly have access to suitable media for excercising your downgrade rights (though MS has loosened up a bit on this point recently). If you are so inclined you probablly have the skill to avoid most of the pitfalls of running pirate XP.
Ordinary home users don't! they go out to the computer shop and buy a PC. It comes with vista home basic or home premium. There only legit option to get back to XP is to buy it full retail (upgrade copies of vista don't come with downgrade rights so you can't just upgrade to buisness to get downgrade rights). They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, they either have to deal with vista or spend a lot of money (about £150 for XP home plus they have to find someone to set it up for them, a service they may have to pay for) to go bck to XP.
The day it is possible (read: easy) and "legal" (read: not against their EULA) to run MacOSX on most pieces of random hardware, is the day MS will have to heavily consider slashing their price to oblivion to be able to compete Apple only sells upgrades for OS-X not full products (granted they don't directly enforce this but there is no real point in doing so given that it is enforced as a side effect of the hardware lock). If apple ever sold full copies to use on other manufacturers hardware I bet they would cost a lot more than the upgrades they sell now.
IIRC vista buisness and ultimate OEM have always come with downgrade rights BUT until recently MS would not allow the OEM to supply the media/key for the downgrade. They have now relented on this for the big brand OEMS (that is those who use bios locked versions rather than versions that are activated in the same was as retail).
I still think MS did this to try and drive a wedge down the middle of the open source community.
Why novell played along is unclear, maybe they really belived the patent threats, maybe they just wanted the money and didn't realise how this would blow up. Maybe they wanted to be the only linux seen as legit by those who belive microsofts patent claims.
define "normal keyboard". QWERTY is normal here, what about the rest of the world? afaict
in the english speaking world qwerty is mostly used (with minor variations on special characters). in the rest of the latin alphabet using world other layouts of the latin characters are used. in the parts of the world that use other alphabets keyboards tend to be bimodal, that is there is some way for the user to quickly switch between local characters and latin characters.
the common theme being they can ALL be used to type ascii. In other words someone in china will have no trouble typing an english name but they will have great trouble typing a russian one.
they already can though firefox takes a dim view of the way.com and.net are run and will display those names in punycode form. I'm not entirely sure what other browsers do but I belive they have thier own anti-abuse mechanisms.
the current argument is about whether non ascii tlds should be allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
the problem is you probablly need the approval of those who aren't showing up right now to change the rules.
Maybe the ISO Standards Committee should dissolve itself and reform under a slightly different name, with a better set of bylaws...
You can't disolve something you can't control, you can of course quit from it and reform under a different name but I doubt you could take your ISO approved status with you easilly.
What pisses me off is that I need to buy a new laptop, Vista is now forced down my throat, and I have no option to get XP pre-installed.
dell have some laptops with XP, you just have to go through the small buisness section of thier site to find them.
you also have the option of buying vista buisness or ultimate and excercising your downgrade rights (though you are on your own regarding drivers if you choose this route).
I wonder what exactly they had in mind when they wrote up that disclaimer.
goatse?
The most important thing in a mobile phone ringtone is for it to be distinctive, as a mobile phone user you need to be able to tell it is your phone ringing and not someone elses phone ringing. There are only so many variants of a ringing pattern so someone got the idea of musicial ringtones.
IMO it is best to prepare your own ringtones but some phone vendors make this infeasible and it does take at least a little skill (I did mine by finding a midi file on the internet, doing some rearrangement, converting to audio and then finally cropping off the silent block of midi setup stuff from the beginning).
iirc subscribers can see a users full post history so wouldn't it be easy for a subscriber to look at a low UID account and see when it started posting.
where do you get that $200 figure from?! both the UK and US apple stores show the base model imac as being twice the price of the base model mini.
I'll take you up on contrasting the Apple line with the likes of Dell...you overlooked one very important thing in that Dell's don't run OS X
indeed if you want OS-X (some people like it, I personally prefer linux but can see the attraction) legit you don't have any choice but to buy your hardware from apple.
the Mac-mini is signficant, because there simply is no competition. Other companies have tried to make mini computers, but they haven't had nearly the success Apple has. (I personally don't get the allure, but obviously there is a big demand for it).
Do you have any evidence that people are buying the mini because of the form factor and not simply because it is the cheapest mac on the market?
I think you (and thousands of slashdot posts elsewhere) really are just wanting Apple to make bare-bones towers for rock bottom price, but this will never happen. Just like Mercedes-Benz will never make an entry level economy car. It just isn't going to happen.
It doesn't have to be bare bones at a rock bottom price, something with similar specs to the mini but with PC like levels of expansion room for a slight price premium over the mini would be just fine.
sadly you are probablly right, much as I would like to see a lower end mac that isn't in a cripplingly small case with no expansion slots and/or bolted into the back of a monitor with one of its two display outputs permanently routed to said monitor I doubt apple will make one. It wouldn't fit with the image they are trying to project and would also badly hurt mac pro sales.
1. The advertisement is unsolicited.
with a website I make a request for content and get content which may have adverts included. If I find the level of adverts unreasonable I can just stop visiting the site just as I could stop buying a magazine that had too high a proportion of adverts. The money made from those adverts goes towards supporting the site/magazine that I find usefull. There is an implicit exchange going on, the user accepts having adverts included in the content in exchange for getting the content free/cheap.
with spam I get sent adverts completely unsolicited because someone happened to find my address. The money from those adverts provides absoloutely no benifit to me. They can't be blocked without considerable risk of lost mail.
2. The recipient is forced to expend his/her bandwidth on the ad.
See above, if the adverts are excessive then those who care sufficiantly about bandwidth use will avoid the site.
3. Dealing with the advertisement (deleting it, blocking it, clicking through it if it's an interstitial) takes time away from the recipient.
again see above, the crucial difference is that with web adverts I get something in exchange for viewing the advert. If I don't think that exchange is reasonable I will avoid uing the site again.
iirc hotmail was at 2MB for most of the time I used it, it was only after gmail and the like came along that they started bumping up the capacity.
two years now since all Macs have shipped with Intel chips, yet the slashdot crowd STILL doesn't realize you can run Windows on a Mac?
I realise that but adding a retail windows license is going to push the already high price of mac hardware even higher.
And pretty much every professional review would tell you how wrong that statement is. For once, I'll drop my anecdotal evidence and let the computer publications speak for me on this one.
sorry poor choice of words on my part.
I didn't mean the hardware itself is terrible (indeed it is very well made). It is the selection that is terrible.
lets take a look at apples desktop range
mac mini: (Prices start at £399)
laptop hard drive and optical drive, integrated graphics. Yes the small form factor is nice but you pay a heavy price for it in terms of both performance and upgradability.
imac: (Prices start at £799)
nice if the built in monitor fits your needs, you don't use a kvm switch and you don't mind having to unnessacerally cart along the monitor when/if you need to take it in for repair/support.
mac pro: (Prices start at £1,509.01)
very nice machine with as much expansion capability as you could want but you pay through the nose for it.
contrast this with mchines from the likes of dell, even in the bottom of the range home models (some of the bottom of the range office models are really stripped down but given the price is less than half that of the mac mini that is forgivable) i can select a cheap build time option to get a graphics card with dual output or the horsepower for gaming. Alternatively I can easilly add one later. None of thier desktops come with built in monitors so my monitor selection can be mostly independent of the internal components.
what exactly happens in the US if you overstay a visa? presumablly you don't usually get caught until you try and leave but what happens then? do they tend to ban people who do it from coming to the US again or what?
Yeah, yeah. I love flame wars. But seriously, why do people even bother with Vista?
because most people feel tied into windows either because they don't want to learn something new or because they have software that ties them in or both. Apple's range of desktop hardware is also terrible (basically if your requirements are even slightly out of the ordinary then often the only mac that can meet them is the very expensive mac pro) and apple doesn't do low end in either the laptop or desktop markets.
Walk into a store like PC world (for those not in the UK PC world is the main chain of bricks and mortar computer retailers here) and you will find that nearly all the machines come with vista, usually the editions of vista that don't come with downgrade rights. By the time the user finds out that vista is more trouble than it is worth there only legitimate option for downgrading is to buy XP retail and then they have to find someone to set it up for them (which often involves a lot of hunting for drivers). Sure there is the odd mac arround but nothing to make the person who went in shopping for a PC think about getting one instead.
not the party line around here for some reason, but it's the truth
XP=2K+more bloat+a few marginally usefull features+support for some newer types of hardware+activation crap (which could be got arround by using a pirate copy of the corporate edition but MS targeted people who did that with WGA)
so overall better in some ways worse in others.
And in all cases, it would be cheaper to simply get a home basic computer and buy XP separately (unless you specifically need XP Pro).
Buisness and ultimate OEM copies (there is no such thing as an OEM copy of enterprise, you can only get that edition as part of a volume license) include downgrade rights to XP pro. Buisness is about £50 extra at purchase time, ultimate is £100 extra (at least that is what dells UK small buinsess site quotes), XP home retail (yes I know some will abuse whitebox OEM packs but lets assume things are being done by the book) is about £150.
unfortunately upgrade editions of vista don't come with downgrade rights so yif buy an upgrade to vista buisness for a machine that was bought with vista home basic or home premium you still can't downgrade to XP.
Macs? They don't have too many that are aimed at the geek market, but they are fine for most consumers. And, of course, geeks know where to get whatever OS they want installed on a machine.
A few facts about macs
1: apple doesn't do low end, the mini which is apples cheapest box is about £400 (uk price inc VAT), PCs can be had for half that.
2: many people have at least one app which ties them into windows
3: many people don't really understand PCs and treat them as magic boxes to which they recite spells (perform rote memorised lists of clicks) change things arround a bit and theese people panic (just look at the reaction to vista and the difference between XP and OS-X is far bigger than that between XP and vista)
apple is having quite some success by playing up the home media niche but in most peoples minds computer still means windows.
I'm not in a hurry.
and as a geek you have that luxury, you can make sure you either buy PCs with XP or with an edition of vista that allows downgrading. You almost certainly have access to suitable media for excercising your downgrade rights (though MS has loosened up a bit on this point recently). If you are so inclined you probablly have the skill to avoid most of the pitfalls of running pirate XP.
Ordinary home users don't! they go out to the computer shop and buy a PC. It comes with vista home basic or home premium. There only legit option to get back to XP is to buy it full retail (upgrade copies of vista don't come with downgrade rights so you can't just upgrade to buisness to get downgrade rights). They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, they either have to deal with vista or spend a lot of money (about £150 for XP home plus they have to find someone to set it up for them, a service they may have to pay for) to go bck to XP.
The day it is possible (read: easy) and "legal" (read: not against their EULA) to run MacOSX on most pieces of random hardware, is the day MS will have to heavily consider slashing their price to oblivion to be able to compete
Apple only sells upgrades for OS-X not full products (granted they don't directly enforce this but there is no real point in doing so given that it is enforced as a side effect of the hardware lock). If apple ever sold full copies to use on other manufacturers hardware I bet they would cost a lot more than the upgrades they sell now.
which edition of vista was it?
IIRC vista buisness and ultimate OEM have always come with downgrade rights BUT until recently MS would not allow the OEM to supply the media/key for the downgrade. They have now relented on this for the big brand OEMS (that is those who use bios locked versions rather than versions that are activated in the same was as retail).
The advice I heared was to avoid the basic theme in vista, apparently it is heavier on the CPU than either classic or aero.
I still think MS did this to try and drive a wedge down the middle of the open source community.
Why novell played along is unclear, maybe they really belived the patent threats, maybe they just wanted the money and didn't realise how this would blow up. Maybe they wanted to be the only linux seen as legit by those who belive microsofts patent claims.
I bet a few dead spammers would scare quite a lot of spammers away from the buisness.
The way I see the deal MS paid novell to help them in thier anti linux FUD campaign.
define "normal keyboard". QWERTY is normal here, what about the rest of the world?
afaict
in the english speaking world qwerty is mostly used (with minor variations on special characters).
in the rest of the latin alphabet using world other layouts of the latin characters are used.
in the parts of the world that use other alphabets keyboards tend to be bimodal, that is there is some way for the user to quickly switch between local characters and latin characters.
the common theme being they can ALL be used to type ascii. In other words someone in china will have no trouble typing an english name but they will have great trouble typing a russian one.
they already can though firefox takes a dim view of the way .com and .net are run and will display those names in punycode form. I'm not entirely sure what other browsers do but I belive they have thier own anti-abuse mechanisms.
the current argument is about whether non ascii tlds should be allowed.