And don't give me noncense about how helping people is the best way to live a happy fulfiled life - you are just prooving my point, if you are only helping people because it helps you, then you are doing exactly what I said: living for your own pleasure. I just so happens you are helping people along the way, but that's not why you are doing it.
Someone please mod parent up. This post so well summarizes the problem of theism: what exactly the "believers" just don't get.
It's not about "happy" or "fulfilled". Those are irrelevant.
If you want to look at it from a personal perspective, you find this truth: people tend to treat you the way you treat them. Help your neighbour, he's likely to help you. Ignore him and he's more likely to ignore than help you. Rape him and you're very likely to get acquainted with a baseball bat or similar object of retribution (unless he's much smaller than you and you live in a chaotic society where he has no support structure; but then you are both barbarians anyway so the point is moot). Very simple. This is based on how our instincts are built. This is how we, and most animals, work. It's about survival. In a modern society nice people fare better than the punks and idjits. Reciprocation.
But ultimately a thinking person, past the basest of needs and wants of individual survival, sees a bigger picture: it's about evolution - survival of the species, if you will. As individuals we expire in a relatively short time. During that time we have the opportunity to contribute to the evolution of the species, "leave our mark" if you will. Improve things for the generations to come. For some that realizes as bringing up their kids smarter and better than they themselves were; for some the realization is a scientific achievement (which may be in the form of improving society, in order to facilitate others' evolutionary work), or contributing to such. For many it's a combination of these. Again, this is how we're wired: for reproduction, in physical or abstract form, and ensuring the survival of our offspring (and thus our own genes).
You don't need an abstract deity in order to determine a reasonable value structure and to find meaning to your life. All you need is a working brain, and a post-barbaric society where you have the opportunity to utilize the said organ.
Look at any old religion's holy scripture (Scientology and such are modern day con jobs, they don't count). Read with the above reasoning in mind, one can (usually without squinting too hard) see a group of smart and well-intentioned people trying to write down a code to help their less civilized brethren to work towards the common-good goals I outlined above. Since they knew the brethren are not as educated and civilized, they needed to include a "because this really big and strong guy tells you to" clause to justify the code.
God is a crutch in a civilized society. Think and you will find the reasons why.
And the answer to Stephen's question: the best thing we can do to ensure mankind's survival is to eliminate the unavoidably jilted thinking (think, you'll see why it is unavoidably jilted) of the theists.
Step 1 - teach as many people to read as possible; spread wealth sufficiently to make reading a feasible pastime in as many places as possible.
Step 2 - mandate basic works of philosophy (Kant, Spinoza, whatever; ask some professor for a comprehensive recommendation) as basic educationary material; in effect, after teaching people to read, teach people to think.
Step 3 - observe religions whither, welcome the real age of reason, and watch mankind flourish.
Start aggressively on step 1 now, and we might see the fruition of step 3 in about 2 centuries (about 3 generations of old codgers dead and buried).
In the corporate circles where I roam, migration even from w2k to XP has been reluctant and iffy. Most corporate desktops around here still run 2k.
In fact, now that I think about it: just about when XP was released, we started to see quiet migration all through the ranks to Mac and Linux desktops. My company went from 100% windows desktops to 50% mac / 25% unix / 25% windows between 2003 and 2005. Some organizations we work with have a slower trend, mostly due to inherent sluggishness of big-corp IT, but the trend is there. I suspect that Vista launch will somewhat speed up this process.
And a curious note about hardware requirements: I was running netbsd on my old '00 powermac. A while ago I updated the hard drive to one which happened to have OS X.4 installed -- and it worked beautifully. In a 6 year old system. Of course this system has 1G of RAM and 2x500 MHz cpus; back in the day, this was a power mac. Somehow I never got to reinstalling netbsd.
Open iTunes Preferences, select Advanced, from there the Burning tab. Select how many seconds of gap you need (none to 5 seconds seem to be available).
Fact is, open hardware won hands down. 97% of PCs in the world, you can buy any hardware you want and run the OS of your choice. Windows, Linux, Unix.
To wit: my 1999 powermac, currently cheap-ass to buy, runs Linux and NetBSD as well as OSX. It has PCI and AGP slots, ATA storage, SDRAM DIMMs, USB and firewire ports, wifi, etcetera. I updated a Radeon 9800, off-the-shelf chassis fan, off-the-shelf PSU, a modern ATA HD. OK, I had to cut one cable of the ATX PSU mobo connector because Apple's old connector has one pin differently.
How is this hardware not open? Granted, it depends on one vendor for CPU and mobo upgrades; PCs have two CPU brands to choose from.
As for your second question, I have to agree -- if your "OS of choice" is Windows. Luckily, it ain't mine.
Fact is, I'd recommend an old powermac as a Linux/Unix machine over a random PC box any day. It's physically maintenance friendly, robust, and it just works like Apple stuff is wont to do.
Open PC hardware is the great contribution of the 20th century to human intellectual freedom.
Considering the amount of time I have wasted during the past 15 years trying to make Open PC hardware to work, so that myself or colleagues could pursue even remotely intellectual goals by using the said PC, I would have to conjecture that the above statement was made in jest:-)
Linux got me using *NIX. BSD showed me how *NIX is meant to work. I currently use OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and this is exactly the kind of reason why I switched.
Hear, hear. It's exactly the same with me (although [FreeBSD, NetBSD, OSX] is my triplet of choice). "Stable linux" is a myth, as far as my experience goes. The *BSD release engineering and development process is just so much better -- at least if you use your systems for real production use. (Yes, this will spark n+1 fanboi rants, but it doesn't make it less true.)
Until there is a some kind of successful concentrated engineering effort to maintain a stable and reviewed base system (or even kernel, if distro teams handle the rest), linux remains an amateur quality tool.
You know, what I actually hate most about it is the fact that the image buttons (Web, News, Images, etc.) are not links. Only the text is a link.
What image buttons? All I get is the Beta logo, an entry field, and a magnifying glass icon next to it. Otherwise, a blank page. Which is incidentally also what I get if I enter some search terms and hit ENTER. The last time I tried I also got this very mac-boot-spinner kind of small graphic, so I'm not even sure if this is an improvement or not.
I can't possibly see how anyone could benefit from the live.com service... I mean, what does it do?
Re:What do they want it to do?
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 1
The flash animations he's got show you having one PC, a Viiv compatible stereo that can recieve your music wirelessly, a TV in the frontroom linked to your PC so you can use it as a PVR and so on. No-one will ever set their PC up like that, especially not the John Smith from the street that decides he wants a nice new PC.
The funny thing is, this is a fairly trivial setup for a Mac Mini. Add in EyeTV and AirTunes, so easy that even mr. Smith can do it. Not cheap though. But despite their move to Intel, the most obvious HTPC vendor Apple isn't touting Viiv... I guess they want to sidestep the embarrassing Intel campaign.
Almost all of those Northern territories run together to me anyway.
's cool. Us nordics have a genetic habit of bashing each other. Heavens forbid what we'd do if you had confused us for Swedes;-)
To be sure, not all is cutey-poo in the EU. The EUCD... yeah. It will be interesting to see if it'll ever be enforced. My guess is that once someone tries to, the bill will be silently swept under some convenient rug. Also, there are days when I'd happily replace France with, say, Bogota. Or Pulau. The French have the weirdest ideas, some days they sound so much like Americans it's scary.
Of course, they convinced Finland, or was it Denmark, to enforce the DMCA against that kid who posted the source code for decrypting DVDs....
Ewww... We have politicians in Finland, and some of them none too bright, (and I hear the same applies to Denmark,) but puh-leeze. That was Norway you're thinking about. The land of the beautiful fjords and outshore oil platforms. They aren't part of the EU, so they find themselves in the proverbial bitch seat, I guess.
Whatever happened to the concept of "making more profit on volume?" Media companies are missing out on a lot of sales, IMO, with their current pricing strategy.
This is so very true. I'm with you, in the top 1%, and do the exact same things: buy media at bargain bins and online auction shops, and transfer the music to my 'pod for use. DVDs I prefer to watch with my home theater though, torrent rez just doesn't cut it on a 150" screen, and I don't want to spend the time for DVD rips. It's easy enough to find the original media. For me, it's 5 euro tops for a nice-to-have curiosity collectible (mm, I don't have this Jodie Foster film), 10 euro tops for a really-wanna item.
I shell out more than that only for stuff I'm passionate about. If someone were to publish a DVD print of, say, the Rose of Versailles anime, I'd happily pay 25 euro per disc. It's freakin' classic content. But you see stuff like this once or twice in a decade.
On the other hand - today's high initial prices keep the bargain bins full, as most people who do buy new releases will watch them once and then recycle. Which keeps people like me happy.
Funny, though: people like us have the cash to spend on entertainment. But it's exactly our money that the conglomerates aren't getting, because we just don't value the stuff like they price it. So they have to rip off the 2-12% range...
How is that impossible? It's a single-byte, single-clock, u/v pipe op to zero eax... How do you (or the original author of the comment) do it? mov eax,0? *snicker* That'd certainly explain some of the Windows bloat...
When I got to my current firm and saw that they were using a calendaring app that relied on e-mail to send notifications, I was confused.
Bottom line, calendaring and e-mail need not go "hand in hand".
You are absolutely right. It just results in manual mucking about when you need to schedule across organizations, which a) might not be using the same scheduling app, and/or b) might not have access to the other's app... It wasn't too long ago when this was actually the norm. What a PITA.
I'm of course a consultant, who by definition constantly works with multiple organizations, so the topic hits sort of close to home. For a single shop solution, a dedicated calendaring app might be quite sufficient even these days.
In a corporate environment, scheduling and email go hand in hand, which is why I'm glad to see the MozCal project finally take steps forward.
I still agree with parent. Mac OSX has separate email and calendar (and address book) apps, which do their own things, but still integrate nicely together. Speedwise beat the Mozilla apps as well. Worthy of learning from, IMHO.
What the Linux/FOSS community needs is a [Net,Free]BSD-like distribution, with a sensible core system with a sensible commit/release cycle, and a sensible & consistent package manager. And Linux kernel for the buzzword that sells. Essentially, Linux with pkgsrc.
GroOvy... I'm getting a hippie feeling here... odd urge for mind-altering substances... OMG that might be their goal! Aargh! Must fight... must f.i.i.g.h.t...
If this is indicative of times to come, it is indeed Windows Vista -- as in Hasta la.
If only it were so. The period saw the rise of monotheistic cults, destruction of priceless scientific works from the antiquity, violence and bloodshed. It is true that less literary works remain of this period, because the said cults decided to burn and rape books, as well as severely censor (as in, flay, draw, quarter, burn at the stake) authors of new works.
Calling the Dark Ages "dumb" may not be right, but neither is it "unknown" particularly descriptive. We know well enough why literacy (and some argue, civilization) crumbled during the second half of the first millennia.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Why has MacOS been so good and stable despite its relative youth? Because it runs on well-known hardware, against which precise configuration the vendor has tested the software.
Do you see this being possible in pc-land? No. Do you see this being feasible with the intelMacs? Yes. Do you see this making the intelMac a preferred platform also for FOSS unices? I definitely do.
I'd like to be able to "just share" the files without setting up users etc, etc.
I've been running samba in my home firewall/filestore box for ages. On a lark I recently pkg_add'd netatalk -- and managed to "just share" stuff with exactly one simple line in a config file:
/pub "Public stuff"
Now compare this to samba. It hurts my head to think that Apple-heads have had this kind of stuff for over a decade (and nobody told me)!
PS. I later got fancy and added "options:usedots" to the line, so that unix users won't see the odd:2E files left by mac clients. Almost doubled the complexity *ugh*.
This would be copyright infringement, plain and simple.
No, no, no. Let's just call it by its proper name: THEFT. No double standards. Copyright violators (now proudly including the MPAA) are THIEVES - isn't that what we've been told time and again in recent years?
There are parks and yards filled with green grass here, a dab south of the arctic circle, now, in the dead of winter. Usually it's 10 to 30 cm of snow, 10 to 30 degrees C below freezing. No "refeeling" involved. I can send you a box of said grass, if doubtful.
Not that I mind the 10 degree temp bump, mind you. Another decade like this, and I can finally start growing palm trees in my back yard, yippee!
I just replaced the drive in my iBook (Fujitsu something-something 60 GB) with Seagate's 7200 rpm model (ST980825A 80 GB). Warmer, definitely, and the drive is noticeably more noisy. On the other hand, I/O related stuff is (measured) 15-20% faster - a definite improvement, if you do a lot of I/O (e.g. swap, or edit DV:-). Don't know the effect to battery life yet. In general, I'm still making up my mind whether this was an improvement overall, or not.
I'd expect the effects would be exactly the same in the Mini (which is effectively a differently packed iBook).
Paying for convenience, indeed. If I ever got a cell phone which came *near* the convenience of my shuffle, I'd buy it in a heartbeat - even at a premium.
Current cellphones are like Microsoft Office: suffering from featuritis. When was the last time your phone served as a convenient *phone*?
Slashdot Mirror
And don't give me noncense about how helping people is the best way to live a happy fulfiled life - you are just prooving my point, if you are only helping people because it helps you, then you are doing exactly what I said: living for your own pleasure. I just so happens you are helping people along the way, but that's not why you are doing it.
Someone please mod parent up. This post so well summarizes the problem of theism: what exactly the "believers" just don't get.
It's not about "happy" or "fulfilled". Those are irrelevant.
If you want to look at it from a personal perspective, you find this truth: people tend to treat you the way you treat them. Help your neighbour, he's likely to help you. Ignore him and he's more likely to ignore than help you. Rape him and you're very likely to get acquainted with a baseball bat or similar object of retribution (unless he's much smaller than you and you live in a chaotic society where he has no support structure; but then you are both barbarians anyway so the point is moot). Very simple. This is based on how our instincts are built. This is how we, and most animals, work. It's about survival. In a modern society nice people fare better than the punks and idjits. Reciprocation.
But ultimately a thinking person, past the basest of needs and wants of individual survival, sees a bigger picture: it's about evolution - survival of the species, if you will. As individuals we expire in a relatively short time. During that time we have the opportunity to contribute to the evolution of the species, "leave our mark" if you will. Improve things for the generations to come. For some that realizes as bringing up their kids smarter and better than they themselves were; for some the realization is a scientific achievement (which may be in the form of improving society, in order to facilitate others' evolutionary work), or contributing to such. For many it's a combination of these. Again, this is how we're wired: for reproduction, in physical or abstract form, and ensuring the survival of our offspring (and thus our own genes).
You don't need an abstract deity in order to determine a reasonable value structure and to find meaning to your life. All you need is a working brain, and a post-barbaric society where you have the opportunity to utilize the said organ.
Look at any old religion's holy scripture (Scientology and such are modern day con jobs, they don't count). Read with the above reasoning in mind, one can (usually without squinting too hard) see a group of smart and well-intentioned people trying to write down a code to help their less civilized brethren to work towards the common-good goals I outlined above. Since they knew the brethren are not as educated and civilized, they needed to include a "because this really big and strong guy tells you to" clause to justify the code.
God is a crutch in a civilized society. Think and you will find the reasons why.
And the answer to Stephen's question: the best thing we can do to ensure mankind's survival is to eliminate the unavoidably jilted thinking (think, you'll see why it is unavoidably jilted) of the theists.
Start aggressively on step 1 now, and we might see the fruition of step 3 in about 2 centuries (about 3 generations of old codgers dead and buried).
In the corporate circles where I roam, migration even from w2k to XP has been reluctant and iffy. Most corporate desktops around here still run 2k.
In fact, now that I think about it: just about when XP was released, we started to see quiet migration all through the ranks to Mac and Linux desktops. My company went from 100% windows desktops to 50% mac / 25% unix / 25% windows between 2003 and 2005. Some organizations we work with have a slower trend, mostly due to inherent sluggishness of big-corp IT, but the trend is there. I suspect that Vista launch will somewhat speed up this process.
And a curious note about hardware requirements: I was running netbsd on my old '00 powermac. A while ago I updated the hard drive to one which happened to have OS X.4 installed -- and it worked beautifully. In a 6 year old system. Of course this system has 1G of RAM and 2x500 MHz cpus; back in the day, this was a power mac. Somehow I never got to reinstalling netbsd.
Open iTunes Preferences, select Advanced, from there the Burning tab. Select how many seconds of gap you need (none to 5 seconds seem to be available).
This, from a high school senior. It is hard to disagree with your message.
Fact is, open hardware won hands down. 97% of PCs in the world, you can buy any hardware you want and run the OS of your choice. Windows, Linux, Unix.
To wit: my 1999 powermac, currently cheap-ass to buy, runs Linux and NetBSD as well as OSX. It has PCI and AGP slots, ATA storage, SDRAM DIMMs, USB and firewire ports, wifi, etcetera. I updated a Radeon 9800, off-the-shelf chassis fan, off-the-shelf PSU, a modern ATA HD. OK, I had to cut one cable of the ATX PSU mobo connector because Apple's old connector has one pin differently.
How is this hardware not open? Granted, it depends on one vendor for CPU and mobo upgrades; PCs have two CPU brands to choose from.
As for your second question, I have to agree -- if your "OS of choice" is Windows. Luckily, it ain't mine.
Fact is, I'd recommend an old powermac as a Linux/Unix machine over a random PC box any day. It's physically maintenance friendly, robust, and it just works like Apple stuff is wont to do.
Open PC hardware is the great contribution of the 20th century to human intellectual freedom.
Considering the amount of time I have wasted during the past 15 years trying to make Open PC hardware to work, so that myself or colleagues could pursue even remotely intellectual goals by using the said PC, I would have to conjecture that the above statement was made in jest :-)
Linux got me using *NIX. BSD showed me how *NIX is meant to work. I currently use OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and this is exactly the kind of reason why I switched.
Hear, hear. It's exactly the same with me (although [FreeBSD, NetBSD, OSX] is my triplet of choice). "Stable linux" is a myth, as far as my experience goes. The *BSD release engineering and development process is just so much better -- at least if you use your systems for real production use. (Yes, this will spark n+1 fanboi rants, but it doesn't make it less true.)
Until there is a some kind of successful concentrated engineering effort to maintain a stable and reviewed base system (or even kernel, if distro teams handle the rest), linux remains an amateur quality tool.
You know, what I actually hate most about it is the fact that the image buttons (Web, News, Images, etc.) are not links. Only the text is a link.
What image buttons? All I get is the Beta logo, an entry field, and a magnifying glass icon next to it. Otherwise, a blank page. Which is incidentally also what I get if I enter some search terms and hit ENTER. The last time I tried I also got this very mac-boot-spinner kind of small graphic, so I'm not even sure if this is an improvement or not.
I can't possibly see how anyone could benefit from the live.com service... I mean, what does it do?
The flash animations he's got show you having one PC, a Viiv compatible stereo that can recieve your music wirelessly, a TV in the frontroom linked to your PC so you can use it as a PVR and so on. No-one will ever set their PC up like that, especially not the John Smith from the street that decides he wants a nice new PC.
The funny thing is, this is a fairly trivial setup for a Mac Mini. Add in EyeTV and AirTunes, so easy that even mr. Smith can do it. Not cheap though. But despite their move to Intel, the most obvious HTPC vendor Apple isn't touting Viiv... I guess they want to sidestep the embarrassing Intel campaign.
Almost all of those Northern territories run together to me anyway.
's cool. Us nordics have a genetic habit of bashing each other. Heavens forbid what we'd do if you had confused us for Swedes ;-)
To be sure, not all is cutey-poo in the EU. The EUCD... yeah. It will be interesting to see if it'll ever be enforced. My guess is that once someone tries to, the bill will be silently swept under some convenient rug. Also, there are days when I'd happily replace France with, say, Bogota. Or Pulau. The French have the weirdest ideas, some days they sound so much like Americans it's scary.
Of course, they convinced Finland, or was it Denmark, to enforce the DMCA against that kid who posted the source code for decrypting DVDs....
Ewww... We have politicians in Finland, and some of them none too bright, (and I hear the same applies to Denmark,) but puh-leeze. That was Norway you're thinking about. The land of the beautiful fjords and outshore oil platforms. They aren't part of the EU, so they find themselves in the proverbial bitch seat, I guess.
This is so very true. I'm with you, in the top 1%, and do the exact same things: buy media at bargain bins and online auction shops, and transfer the music to my 'pod for use. DVDs I prefer to watch with my home theater though, torrent rez just doesn't cut it on a 150" screen, and I don't want to spend the time for DVD rips. It's easy enough to find the original media. For me, it's 5 euro tops for a nice-to-have curiosity collectible (mm, I don't have this Jodie Foster film), 10 euro tops for a really-wanna item.
I shell out more than that only for stuff I'm passionate about. If someone were to publish a DVD print of, say, the Rose of Versailles anime, I'd happily pay 25 euro per disc. It's freakin' classic content. But you see stuff like this once or twice in a decade.
On the other hand - today's high initial prices keep the bargain bins full, as most people who do buy new releases will watch them once and then recycle. Which keeps people like me happy.
Funny, though: people like us have the cash to spend on entertainment. But it's exactly our money that the conglomerates aren't getting, because we just don't value the stuff like they price it. So they have to rip off the 2-12% range...
The crashes were impossible - instructions like
How is that impossible? It's a single-byte, single-clock, u/v pipe op to zero eax... How do you (or the original author of the comment) do it? mov eax,0? *snicker* That'd certainly explain some of the Windows bloat...
When I got to my current firm and saw that they were using a calendaring app that relied on e-mail to send notifications, I was confused.
Bottom line, calendaring and e-mail need not go "hand in hand".
You are absolutely right. It just results in manual mucking about when you need to schedule across organizations, which a) might not be using the same scheduling app, and/or b) might not have access to the other's app... It wasn't too long ago when this was actually the norm. What a PITA.
I'm of course a consultant, who by definition constantly works with multiple organizations, so the topic hits sort of close to home. For a single shop solution, a dedicated calendaring app might be quite sufficient even these days.
In a corporate environment, scheduling and email go hand in hand, which is why I'm glad to see the MozCal project finally take steps forward.
I still agree with parent. Mac OSX has separate email and calendar (and address book) apps, which do their own things, but still integrate nicely together. Speedwise beat the Mozilla apps as well. Worthy of learning from, IMHO.
What the Linux/FOSS community needs is a [Net,Free]BSD-like distribution, with a sensible core system with a sensible commit/release cycle, and a sensible & consistent package manager. And Linux kernel for the buzzword that sells. Essentially, Linux with pkgsrc.
GroOvy... I'm getting a hippie feeling here... odd urge for mind-altering substances... OMG that might be their goal! Aargh! Must fight... must f.i.i.g.h.t...
If this is indicative of times to come, it is indeed Windows Vista -- as in Hasta la.
If only it were so. The period saw the rise of monotheistic cults, destruction of priceless scientific works from the antiquity, violence and bloodshed. It is true that less literary works remain of this period, because the said cults decided to burn and rape books, as well as severely censor (as in, flay, draw, quarter, burn at the stake) authors of new works.
Calling the Dark Ages "dumb" may not be right, but neither is it "unknown" particularly descriptive. We know well enough why literacy (and some argue, civilization) crumbled during the second half of the first millennia.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Why has MacOS been so good and stable despite its relative youth? Because it runs on well-known hardware, against which precise configuration the vendor has tested the software.
Do you see this being possible in pc-land? No. Do you see this being feasible with the intelMacs? Yes. Do you see this making the intelMac a preferred platform also for FOSS unices? I definitely do.
I've been running samba in my home firewall/filestore box for ages. On a lark I recently pkg_add'd netatalk -- and managed to "just share" stuff with exactly one simple line in a config file:
Now compare this to samba. It hurts my head to think that Apple-heads have had this kind of stuff for over a decade (and nobody told me)!
PS. I later got fancy and added "options:usedots" to the line, so that unix users won't see the odd :2E files left by mac clients. Almost doubled the complexity *ugh*.
You make a very good point, AC. Please see here for a good and insightful analysis of this very controversy!
No, no, no. Let's just call it by its proper name: THEFT. No double standards. Copyright violators (now proudly including the MPAA) are THIEVES - isn't that what we've been told time and again in recent years?
There are parks and yards filled with green grass here, a dab south of the arctic circle, now, in the dead of winter. Usually it's 10 to 30 cm of snow, 10 to 30 degrees C below freezing. No "refeeling" involved. I can send you a box of said grass, if doubtful.
Not that I mind the 10 degree temp bump, mind you. Another decade like this, and I can finally start growing palm trees in my back yard, yippee!
I just replaced the drive in my iBook (Fujitsu something-something 60 GB) with Seagate's 7200 rpm model (ST980825A 80 GB). Warmer, definitely, and the drive is noticeably more noisy. On the other hand, I/O related stuff is (measured) 15-20% faster - a definite improvement, if you do a lot of I/O (e.g. swap, or edit DV :-). Don't know the effect to battery life yet. In general, I'm still making up my mind whether this was an improvement overall, or not.
I'd expect the effects would be exactly the same in the Mini (which is effectively a differently packed iBook).
Notice how the small print studiously identifies all used MS trademarks, but fails to mention "Mac". Isn't that punishable by something?
Paying for convenience, indeed. If I ever got a cell phone which came *near* the convenience of my shuffle, I'd buy it in a heartbeat - even at a premium. Current cellphones are like Microsoft Office: suffering from featuritis. When was the last time your phone served as a convenient *phone*?