Is there any objectivity where Apple is concerned?
on
Boot Camp For Suckers?
·
· Score: 1
What did other people think of the last part of TFA?
But I doubt it. Because I'm a firm believer that once you start using a Mac, your IQ begins to creep downwards, inversely proportional to an increase in your AAF (Apple Acceptance Factor).
In fact, I'm blaming the AAF for a wide-range of habits espoused by supposedly "creative people." I'll bet it's responsible for tattoos, piercings, and the wide-spread adoption of the phrase "no worries." In fact, I believe that most of today's societal ills can be either indirectly or directly attributed to Apple. Widespread hearing loss? Blame the iPod. Carpal tunnel? Blame the Newton. Upswing in hernias? That Infinite Loop idiot who decided to put a handle on the first iMac--and started the whole luggable trend. No, Boot Camp is just the latest diabolical piece of Steve Jobs's grand plan to dumb us down and mangle our bodies. It's no coincidence that all this is happening just as Jobs has taken over as the head of Disney (which also owns ABC). Pretty soon we'll be good for nothing but sitting on our butts and watching TV. So go ahead and Boot Camp if you must. But don't come running to me when your mind and body prematurely degenerate. I'll be smart, fit, and enjoying my real Windows computers, while you ooze slowly into the Pixar-Disney-ABC swamp of mindlessness. Chump.
I think this guy is trolling for advertisements, even though I agree that Macintoshes are not the end all be all of computers. (I think such a thing does not exist!) There may be a case to be made against Apple Computer's sainthood, but this guy is DEFINITELY NOT the person to make it.
Just once, I would like to see a Macintosh article that is neither dripping with Apple fanboyism nor mindlessly bashing the Mac.
No, the biggest hurdle is making superior office software! From my limited experience, AbiWord is a decent document writing tool, and I have only a few gripes with OpenOffice.org Writer (namely rotating and flipping graphs), so beating MS Word is not a problem IMO. Excel, on the other hand, is the best spreadsheet software that I have ever used. It seems to contain more convenient functions, it has a nice sliding-bar feature to adjust values of a cell, and it handles large datasets ALOT faster than OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet! Once I had to make a graph of ~3000 datapoints (X & Y), and it took forever to highlight the entire row, and after I plotted the graph, the entire package slowed to a crawl. I then used Excel to plot the same points, and it highlighted and plotted the graph very quickly. Yes, OpenOffice has a shitty codebase that was developed by an obscure German company; however, this means we, the open source crowd, have even more work to do. Don't rest yet boys, 'cuz the party ain't over.
Microsoft announced, in a (very) recent press release, some of the exciting technlologies in Windows Vista. Apparently, the aging NT kernel has been scrapped, and the new Windows kernel will use a combination of the GNU/Hurd and the L4 microkernel to power its next-gen operating system. While desktop users might not care about what is under the hood, they will be amazed at the next-gen Windows desktop, which uses the E17 shell. Gamers of the world will rejoice, because Microsoft has replaced the venerable MS Solitaire card game with Duke Nukem: Forever. In a possible attempt to squash threats from the World Wide Web (again), Microsoft has leveraged Udanax infrastructure to provide 'transclusion' technologies. This will surely be the greatest Windows Operating System ever, if not the greatest Operating System ever!
> Besides, I don't really see a downside, because who, besides free software lovers, would be motivated to buy something non-nvidia and non-ati at this point?
People who do not play high-performance games might not want to pay $100-$600 for a graphics card. Joe User is far more interested in multimedia playback than 3D graphics. Intel's sells their embedded graphics cards for $7, and they are the biggest seller of graphics cards. Plus, they have open source drivers. There is plenty of room in the low-end for S3, although they have a lot of work ahead of them if they want to compete with Nvidia and ATI.
PearPC is a PowerPC emulator that is capable of running versions of OSX up to 10.3. Since developing and testing exploit code should not take much resources, any cracker can run OSX well if they have a relatively modern PC.
I heard that some files on the RHEL distribution CDs contain trademarks, and you cannot redistribute those trademarks. However, you can remove the trademarks and distribute the rest for free like CentOS does.
Just host the programs on a server at your home, assuming you have an Internet connection. If the IT staff set-up a very restrictive firewall, then run your server on Port 80. Then you can just download and run them from your home directory.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (x) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
> Seems not only highly unlikely, but given that only 2-3,000 chips are affected, just what would be the real world odds of this error actually manifesting itself?
If some typewriter-monkey at a major corporation enters some customer data incorrectly, and if the negative PR from their mistake could cost the company MEGA-BUCKS, they will look for a scape-goat, and AMD will be a good choice.
How would a general strike effect anything? We, at least most of us, are not working for the telecoms, so we would have little influence on their running. Do you mean that we should stop using the Internet?
>> This is mostly for their "business" systems, not the national airspace operations (the flightplan and radar systems) which are being migrated to a Linux-compatible realtime operating system.
The Z-Machine was the virtual machine that ran the first Zork (maybe the rest?). The Zork Trilogy was written in ZIL, the Zork Implementation Language.
Apple did not develop podcasting, and they only integrated podcasts into iTunes six or seven months after it became popular. Also, internet radio has been around long before podcasting.
With its success, Apple has implemented some questionable policies. I think that the MacIntel architecture complies with the TPM, and I think they implemented some DRM features enabled by the TPM. Also, they have stopped releasing the source code to some key components of the x86 port of Darwin, such as XNU, the microkernel. There was also the debugging debacle, which is apparently trivial to rectify, but it still reflects a worrying trend.
>> Whats wrong with runas.exe or shift->right click->run as.. on an executable in explorer?
I forgot to mention that possibility. Also, I once encountered a program that would not run with runas, so I am not sure if it works in all cases. Also, there is no pre-installed GUI for it (that I know of), and Joe-User would be turned-off if , every time he had to install a program, he had to type into a command prompt or Start->Run
runas.exe/User:Administrator "C:\\Documents and Settings\\JoeUser\\Desktop\\setup.exe"
>> I have yet to find a linux distribution or any alternative operating system (besides BeOS and Mac OS X) that didn't run Gnome or KDE, had a functional desktop, and could run nicely under 256mb of ram. X and Firefox alone use ~100mb of ram on my machine AND i don't get an accelerated desktop.
You might be happy with a combination of Debian, XFCE, and Opera. A good repository of binary packages allows you to the luxury of not compiling everything. XFCE seems like a pretty good desktop environment that is not a resource hog. Opera with a statically-compiled QT library is a rather painless installation, and I have heard that it is light on resources.
>> also recall hearing about XP having the ability to switch simultaniously between five different users. I am thinking "great five virtual machines with their own environments." I had high hopes for that, as it was the perfect solution for applications that did not work well together....until I changed screen resolution in one and noticed that the other four reflected this change.
The 'switch user' functionality allows one to easily switch between users. This allows one to easily switch among accounts with different privileges, which is useful if you want your default account to only have normal user privileges (a good idea from a security standpoint), but you want to easily install software without having to logout of your current session, login with Administrator privileges, navigate to your default user's home directory, install the software, logout of the Administrator account, and login to your normal account, and restart all your programs.
You *should* be able to install software as a normal user if you install it into your home directory and the software does not touch the registry or kernel.
>> Again, to Microsoft I say: "just install a small kernal on my system drive, I wlll populate it with apps and functions of my own choosing."
And to you I say "Use Linux!! Gentoo would pe perfect for you!"
The problem with installing multiple versions is the sharp increase in software development complexity. If you have multiple versions of Windows each with different features, a software developer might have a problem if a necessary feature is only available in one or two of the different versions. This increases the required technical knowledge of users, since they need to know which version of Windows will run the programs they need. If they need two pieces of software that require a different version of Vista, then that has problems. The most economical way to implement multiple versions is to create tiered versions, where each better version is a superset of the lesser versions.
Distrowatch offers information on and reviews for many different Linux distributions. It does not really classify them, though. The distro chart at Linux.org classified distributions using several categories, but it has not been updated in a while. Also, there is a test to determine which Linux distribution is right for you.
Most lisp implementations are interactive. Also, a lot of features from modern scripting languages seem to be a knock-off of lisp features. Python is a good example with its (soon to be removed) lambda functions.
Okay, so how do I play my WMV files or my Quicktime files on my new Kubuntu box?
I heard that Quake 4 was supported under Linux, and I want to play it, but the program says it will not run without "3D acceleration", so I go to ATI's site to download their drivers. First, I am not sure which X I have, so I just pick the first one on the list; I am sure Ubuntu supports XFree86 4.1. It takes me a while to figure out how to open an RPM file; I have to google all over the place, and several minutes later, I find a forum post that says I have to type in some wizardly commands "rpm -ivh ~/fglrx_4_1_0-8.24.8-1.i386.rpm". I then search through the KMenu through the K menu for a little while, and finally I click on the Terminal icon, and a little white box pops up, and it looks like it wants me to enter something. I then type the wizardly command listed above, and it appears that the first part of the command, rpm, was not found, bu I just typed it in. How stupid can you be Linux?
In frustration, I navigate back to ATI's website, and I come across the ATI installer, and then I read the instructions, but it says that only Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse are supported. So it appears, that I have used the wrong Linux operating system. My Suse 10 CDs are curently in route to my house, and I should be installing them any day now.
I have never played it, but I have heard that Deathlord was a unique, fantastic game. I heard that players had to work damn hard to outsmart the game, since it ofen outsmarted the player and his preconceptions. I would have linked to the Home of the Underdogs page on Deathlord, which features the above review and screenshots, but I decided against it because of legal concerns (if you have ever been to HOTU, you know what I mean).
The problem with your idea is that "It's easy for prices to drift upward when the person choosing the product doesn't really care how much it costs." Professors might have to choose some cheaper textbooks, but all the textbooks would most likely come from 'official' channels (i.e. brand new copies for every person), and most new textbooks cost more than used ones. Since colleges would be ordering textbooks en masse, they would not take the time to order many used copies from Amazon.com or EBay, which would be the preferred channel of the poor college student.
Including mandatory costs drives up tuition for price-sensitive students. For example, my university mandates that all incoming (i.e. freshman or transfer) students must purchase a specific laptop model for the year; you HAVE to buy it, if you do not send in the "laptop purchase form", they include the cost in your tution. The laptop I 'purchased' nearly two years ago (I am a Sophomore now) was the HP Compaq Business Notebook nw8000, which cost me a cool $3400!! It is still a good laptop, but I do not think it justifies the cost. A lot of the cost is probably software, although, as I type this on my nw8000 running Ubuntu, I am not helped by most of it (except for Maple, MatLab, Mathematica, and some other Math Program, and a copy of Windows 2000, which I used to upgrade from Windows XP). I would not have been helped by most of that software anyway, since it is primarily engineering software, and I am a Physics major.
While there are some advantages to mandating computer models, such as having your technical support be already familiar with the system, the disadvantages seem to outweigh the advantages, one could find a similar system with decent specs for a lot less than $3400.
Slashdot Mirror
but don't you mean 'football'?
I think this guy is trolling for advertisements, even though I agree that Macintoshes are not the end all be all of computers. (I think such a thing does not exist!) There may be a case to be made against Apple Computer's sainthood, but this guy is DEFINITELY NOT the person to make it.
Just once, I would like to see a Macintosh article that is neither dripping with Apple fanboyism nor mindlessly bashing the Mac.
No, the biggest hurdle is making superior office software! From my limited experience, AbiWord is a decent document writing tool, and I have only a few gripes with OpenOffice.org Writer (namely rotating and flipping graphs), so beating MS Word is not a problem IMO. Excel, on the other hand, is the best spreadsheet software that I have ever used. It seems to contain more convenient functions, it has a nice sliding-bar feature to adjust values of a cell, and it handles large datasets ALOT faster than OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet! Once I had to make a graph of ~3000 datapoints (X & Y), and it took forever to highlight the entire row, and after I plotted the graph, the entire package slowed to a crawl. I then used Excel to plot the same points, and it highlighted and plotted the graph very quickly. Yes, OpenOffice has a shitty codebase that was developed by an obscure German company; however, this means we, the open source crowd, have even more work to do. Don't rest yet boys, 'cuz the party ain't over.
Microsoft announced, in a (very) recent press release, some of the exciting technlologies in Windows Vista. Apparently, the aging NT kernel has been scrapped, and the new Windows kernel will use a combination of the GNU/Hurd and the L4 microkernel to power its next-gen operating system. While desktop users might not care about what is under the hood, they will be amazed at the next-gen Windows desktop, which uses the E17 shell. Gamers of the world will rejoice, because Microsoft has replaced the venerable MS Solitaire card game with Duke Nukem: Forever. In a possible attempt to squash threats from the World Wide Web (again), Microsoft has leveraged Udanax infrastructure to provide 'transclusion' technologies. This will surely be the greatest Windows Operating System ever, if not the greatest Operating System ever!
Replace "flags" with "keyboard commands", and you have Emacs.
> Besides, I don't really see a downside, because who, besides free software lovers, would be motivated to buy something non-nvidia and non-ati at this point?
People who do not play high-performance games might not want to pay $100-$600 for a graphics card. Joe User is far more interested in multimedia playback than 3D graphics. Intel's sells their embedded graphics cards for $7, and they are the biggest seller of graphics cards. Plus, they have open source drivers. There is plenty of room in the low-end for S3, although they have a lot of work ahead of them if they want to compete with Nvidia and ATI.
They could implement an HFS+ driver, but the payoff would not be worth the effort.
PearPC is a PowerPC emulator that is capable of running versions of OSX up to 10.3. Since developing and testing exploit code should not take much resources, any cracker can run OSX well if they have a relatively modern PC.
I heard that some files on the RHEL distribution CDs contain trademarks, and you cannot redistribute those trademarks. However, you can remove the trademarks and distribute the rest for free like CentOS does.
Just host the programs on a server at your home, assuming you have an Internet connection. If the IT staff set-up a very restrictive firewall, then run your server on Port 80. Then you can just download and run them from your home directory.
You, and individual, advocate a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
> Seems not only highly unlikely, but given that only 2-3,000 chips are affected, just what would be the real world odds of this error actually manifesting itself?
If some typewriter-monkey at a major corporation enters some customer data incorrectly, and if the negative PR from their mistake could cost the company MEGA-BUCKS, they will look for a scape-goat, and AMD will be a good choice.
What about Windows XP?
How would a general strike effect anything? We, at least most of us, are not working for the telecoms, so we would have little influence on their running. Do you mean that we should stop using the Internet?
>> This is mostly for their "business" systems, not the national airspace operations (the flightplan and radar systems) which are being migrated to a Linux-compatible realtime operating system.
Is it LynxOS?
The Z-Machine was the virtual machine that ran the first Zork (maybe the rest?). The Zork Trilogy was written in ZIL, the Zork Implementation Language.
Apple did not develop podcasting, and they only integrated podcasts into iTunes six or seven months after it became popular. Also, internet radio has been around long before podcasting.
With its success, Apple has implemented some questionable policies. I think that the MacIntel architecture complies with the TPM, and I think they implemented some DRM features enabled by the TPM. Also, they have stopped releasing the source code to some key components of the x86 port of Darwin, such as XNU, the microkernel. There was also the debugging debacle, which is apparently trivial to rectify, but it still reflects a worrying trend.
I forgot to mention that possibility. Also, I once encountered a program that would not run with runas, so I am not sure if it works in all cases. Also, there is no pre-installed GUI for it (that I know of), and Joe-User would be turned-off if , every time he had to install a program, he had to type into a command prompt or Start->Run
>> I have yet to find a linux distribution or any alternative operating system (besides BeOS and Mac OS X) that didn't run Gnome or KDE, had a functional desktop, and could run nicely under 256mb of ram. X and Firefox alone use ~100mb of ram on my machine AND i don't get an accelerated desktop.
You might be happy with a combination of Debian, XFCE, and Opera. A good repository of binary packages allows you to the luxury of not compiling everything. XFCE seems like a pretty good desktop environment that is not a resource hog. Opera with a statically-compiled QT library is a rather painless installation, and I have heard that it is light on resources.
>> also recall hearing about XP having the ability to switch simultaniously between five different users. I am thinking "great five virtual machines with their own environments." I had high hopes for that, as it was the perfect solution for applications that did not work well together....until I changed screen resolution in one and noticed that the other four reflected this change.
The 'switch user' functionality allows one to easily switch between users. This allows one to easily switch among accounts with different privileges, which is useful if you want your default account to only have normal user privileges (a good idea from a security standpoint), but you want to easily install software without having to logout of your current session, login with Administrator privileges, navigate to your default user's home directory, install the software, logout of the Administrator account, and login to your normal account, and restart all your programs.
You *should* be able to install software as a normal user if you install it into your home directory and the software does not touch the registry or kernel.
>> Again, to Microsoft I say: "just install a small kernal on my system drive, I wlll populate it with apps and functions of my own choosing."
And to you I say "Use Linux!! Gentoo would pe perfect for you!"
The problem with installing multiple versions is the sharp increase in software development complexity. If you have multiple versions of Windows each with different features, a software developer might have a problem if a necessary feature is only available in one or two of the different versions. This increases the required technical knowledge of users, since they need to know which version of Windows will run the programs they need. If they need two pieces of software that require a different version of Vista, then that has problems. The most economical way to implement multiple versions is to create tiered versions, where each better version is a superset of the lesser versions.
Distrowatch offers information on and reviews for many different Linux distributions. It does not really classify them, though. The distro chart at Linux.org classified distributions using several categories, but it has not been updated in a while. Also, there is a test to determine which Linux distribution is right for you.
Most lisp implementations are interactive. Also, a lot of features from modern scripting languages seem to be a knock-off of lisp features. Python is a good example with its (soon to be removed) lambda functions.
Okay, so how do I play my WMV files or my Quicktime files on my new Kubuntu box?
I heard that Quake 4 was supported under Linux, and I want to play it, but the program says it will not run without "3D acceleration", so I go to ATI's site to download their drivers. First, I am not sure which X I have, so I just pick the first one on the list; I am sure Ubuntu supports XFree86 4.1. It takes me a while to figure out how to open an RPM file; I have to google all over the place, and several minutes later, I find a forum post that says I have to type in some wizardly commands "rpm -ivh ~/fglrx_4_1_0-8.24.8-1.i386.rpm". I then search through the KMenu through the K menu for a little while, and finally I click on the Terminal icon, and a little white box pops up, and it looks like it wants me to enter something. I then type the wizardly command listed above, and it appears that the first part of the command, rpm, was not found, bu I just typed it in. How stupid can you be Linux?
In frustration, I navigate back to ATI's website, and I come across the ATI installer, and then I read the instructions, but it says that only Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse are supported. So it appears, that I have used the wrong Linux operating system. My Suse 10 CDs are curently in route to my house, and I should be installing them any day now.
I have never played it, but I have heard that Deathlord was a unique, fantastic game. I heard that players had to work damn hard to outsmart the game, since it ofen outsmarted the player and his preconceptions. I would have linked to the Home of the Underdogs page on Deathlord, which features the above review and screenshots, but I decided against it because of legal concerns (if you have ever been to HOTU, you know what I mean).
The problem with your idea is that "It's easy for prices to drift upward when the person choosing the product doesn't really care how much it costs." Professors might have to choose some cheaper textbooks, but all the textbooks would most likely come from 'official' channels (i.e. brand new copies for every person), and most new textbooks cost more than used ones. Since colleges would be ordering textbooks en masse, they would not take the time to order many used copies from Amazon.com or EBay, which would be the preferred channel of the poor college student.
Including mandatory costs drives up tuition for price-sensitive students. For example, my university mandates that all incoming (i.e. freshman or transfer) students must purchase a specific laptop model for the year; you HAVE to buy it, if you do not send in the "laptop purchase form", they include the cost in your tution. The laptop I 'purchased' nearly two years ago (I am a Sophomore now) was the HP Compaq Business Notebook nw8000, which cost me a cool $3400!! It is still a good laptop, but I do not think it justifies the cost. A lot of the cost is probably software, although, as I type this on my nw8000 running Ubuntu, I am not helped by most of it (except for Maple, MatLab, Mathematica, and some other Math Program, and a copy of Windows 2000, which I used to upgrade from Windows XP). I would not have been helped by most of that software anyway, since it is primarily engineering software, and I am a Physics major.
While there are some advantages to mandating computer models, such as having your technical support be already familiar with the system, the disadvantages seem to outweigh the advantages, one could find a similar system with decent specs for a lot less than $3400.