OP is on crack. I'm in America and the Camry is not even close to being a small car. It is considered midsize here, though, while it would be considered large everywhere else in the world.
The OP's salesman is on target, though... we just leased a new Civic, and the salespeople definitely had the attitude that we had to take whatever deal they offered, as there were many more customers than cars. (Here is your Civic. It's grey. It's the only 5-speed EX we've got. You say you don't want grey? We've got cars that don't already have deposits on them coming... hmmm... in February. That's right. See all these customers' names? That grey's nice, isn't it? This is the price. No, you don't understand. This *is* the price.) Meanwhile the Infiniti dealer next door had plenty of QX56 sitting around.
... the same way as the iPod uses iTunes to manage songs. I was hoping for an old-fashion drag and drop. I haven't tried on a non-MS OS yet and I am not sure yet if Plays for Sure manages the library like iTunes does (partly meaning that it's "hooked" to one computer.)
You don't have to use your iPod this way if you don't want to. Uncheck the automatic sync option and you can drag and drop to your heart's content (from within iTunes, but you still have full control and can update from any machine you want).
When does iTunes or an iPod ever "rename[d] the songs for no good reason?" I've never seen that.
(I'm not trying to say an iPod is everyone's dream music player... just trying to counteract some of the more common FUD.)
You'll fall down the stairs if you carry one of these... while it's a neat gadget, at 11.15 ounces, it's not exactly a direct competitor to any iPod. Using a 2.5" hard disk necessarily compromises the size and weight.
(Your claimed battery life for the iPod is also way too short.)
If your screen buzzes when dim you have a bad inverter board. Unlike the famous CPU whine, Apple was willing and able to fix this problem from the very beginning. If your machine has the bad inverter, send or take it back to Apple for repair.
The machine will automatically throttle itself back when the CPU reaches some high temperature (95 C?) and then turn itself off at 100C. Without fans running the CPU temperature will climb this high after only a few seconds of processor-intensive work.
However, I cannot hear the fans -- AT ALL -- over the hard drive when the fan speed is under 2000rpm. On the rare occasions when I can get the hard drive to spin down, I can only hear the fan noise as a slight whoosh if I stick my ear right next to the air outlet. Finding a way to get the hard drive to stay spun down -- as it would for hours at a stretch back in the OS 9 days, if you saved your work to a RAM disk -- would be the real breakthrough in making Mac laptops quiet.
There's no benefit in setting fan speed to 6000 at idle. Here are idle CPU1 temps for my MBP (after it's been running for at least 20 mins) at various speeds. Each MBP tends to get different results, so YMMV.
Default (1000rpm): 59-62 C
2000rpm: 49-51 C
2500rpm: 46-48 C
3000rpm: 42-44 C
3500-6000rpm: no change: 38-41 C
Note that the faster speeds DO make a difference when the MBP is doing intensive work, as it appears that setting the minimum speed to higher also causes the fan to ramp up more quickly. At sustained 100% CPU load the machine is always hot but the lowest temperature was reached when I set the minimum to 5000rpm: about 78-81 C.
On the outside, the machine is MUCH cooler when using any setting over 2500rpm. It really is a "laptop" now. And below 3000rpm the fans are barely audible. I don't know what Apple was thinking when they chose such a low default.
Been using smc and then smcFanControl since they showed up... battery life on my MBP doesn't seem appreciably different, not that it was any good to begin with, with the 7200rpm HD.
The best way to save battery is to dim the screen. At less than half brightness I can get nearly 3.5 hours in normal usage. At full brightness it's more like 2.5+.
With extensions, Firefox does pretty much anything that anyone could want in a browser. I'd like only two things from Firefox 3:
1. More stability and less memory usage. On both Windows and OS X, Firefox can swallow all your system resources if you leave it running long enough and do enough browsing. On my machines, the program also crashes, infrequently but regularly, most often when a page it's loading is corrupted by a network error. Spend the effort on finding memory leaks and bugs instead of adding gewgaws.
2. Without changing the functionality of the interface or its basic elements, make it prettier. The buttons look big, garish, and way too colorful; look at Safari for one example of a better way. (I use a skin to make my Firefox installs look much like Safari, but I think a more professional/more beautiful interface could inspire more people to switch.)
I mean, I'm sure there are places I could find how to get the wireless to work, but as it stands it was easier to shove the XP CD in and walk off for an hour than spend ages online trawling through forum threads with people screaming "pwned n00b" at the people asking questions.
So true. This is the worst thing about trying to get any Linux installation, even of an easy distro like Ubuntu, working on "existing" hardware (i.e. not hardware that you build after carefully reviewing compatibility lists). While forums can be a great source of information, they often assume a high level of knowledge and are not friendly to those learning the basics while trying to transition from Windows. Maybe not "pwned n00b," but "why didn't you read this man page? stop bothering us!" where the man page assumes knowledge of what the poster is trying to ask.
This is a symptom of a larger tension that will need to be addressed if Linux is ever going to work for ordinary consumers. Linux users, being geeks, take their ability to get the system working for granted, and are focused on cool applications. Yet what Linux needs to develop any substantial share is 1) more reliably trouble-free configuration, which might lead to enough of an installed base to provide an incentive to hardware manufacturers to develop 2) many, many more drivers.
I love using Ubuntu when it works. But when it doesn't, it's very, very frustrating; having 2 Macs in close proximity to the Ubuntu box brings the frustration into sharp relief. Suddenly it feels warmer and fuzzier to spend my time actually doing work than to be "using" (OK, fighting configuration issues with) F/OSS software.
Huh? MacBooks and MacBook Pros have exactly the same set of clamshell mode options. In either case the machine will run while closed if it thinks it has a keyboard and a mouse hooked up. Want to fool your MacBook? Use InsomniaX.
Save the integrated graphics and lack of ExpressCard 34 support, you are only losing cosmetics by going from MBP to MacBook. I should know -- there is one of each in my household.
I've always been fascinated with the divergence of opinion on this. It's possibly the single area where a differing interface decision between Windows (and most X11 WMs) and OS X causes the most debate and passionate responses on both sides.
Personally, I generally like having email and document windows as tall as possible (or as necessary to avoid scrolling), but I don't see any reason why they should be as wide as my 1440-pixel-wide laptop screen (let alone my 1920-pixel-wide desktop). I want to see the most information in the least window space.
Working on my laptop, I usually have all my windows staggered, so I can grab a corner of any one with the mouse. Expose should in theory be more efficient than this method (and I use it when there are just too many windows open to stagger), but I've been a predominantly Mac user since 1985 and old habits die hard. Since you can't grab a corner of a window when it's hidden behind another full-screen window, auto-maximizing in Windows has always driven me nuts, and whenever I've worked in a Windows environment everyone makes fun of me for having all these little windows which I never maximize...
On topic, I absolutely agree that more screen real estate = more productivity. With a 2560x1600 screen (and, to be clear, I think it's pixels, not size, that makes the difference), most users can have all their normal windows open, at a size that allows them to see almost all context, without any overlap and without feeling "crammed." For me at least that saves a lot of time and distraction context-switching.
If you're performing an operation within the Finder that hits some sort of bottleneck (ie. a slow network link, unresponsive storage device, etc.), the entire system grinds to a halt.
Absolutely true. I guess I don't take this into account too much anymore since I now run the very multithreaded Path Finder and only touch the Finder when I hit a "show download" link in Safari without thinking.
Unless he is spending all his time in the Finder, I'm pretty baffled by parent. I have a dual 1.8 G5 (the slowest multiprocessor model) with 3 GB of RAM. It's slow to boot and finish the login process, but once that is actually done, it's very responsive and quick in basically all operations. My laptop is a 2.16 MBP with 2 GB of RAM and is blindingly fast at everything (including logging in). Either parent is spending all his time waiting for the Finder to mount network shares, his machines have a configuration problem, or he has only used machines without enough RAM.
I quite like using OS X, but I have been very disappointed with its performance, even on relatively fast machines like my mum's G5 iMac, dual-processor G5 PowerMacs and Core Duo Minis (although my Mini is memory constrained with only 512MB). On my 1Ghz/768MB iBook, it's frustratingly slow to use more than one app at a time (and even the one can get chunky).
Not enough memory.
Just like Aero, Aqua is a huge memory hog. I'm happy to pay for additional memory as part of the "OS X premium," but the frustrating part is when older machines can't physically accept enough memory. I realize that those of you who created a VR world on your 16k calculator watch will keel over dead at the ugliness of these memory requirements, but I really don't care.
On a PowerPC machine, the sweet spot for everyday use with 3-6 apps open at once is around 1.25GB. On an Intel machine, memory requirements are higher. For OS X use without any virtualization, at least 1.5GB is needed; if you want to run Parallels and do anything useful (i.e. at least 512MB on the Windows side) you need 2GB. If, like on your Mini, you have integrated graphics, you pretty much want 2GB no matter what.
If you have enough memory, the CPU performance of the machine is far less important. A 400MHz PowerMac G4 with the max 2 gigs of RAM doesn't feel snappy (menus draw a little slowly, etc.) but it launches apps quickly, swaps between them quickly, and has no problem with all the eye candy. It would be less frustrating to use than a Core Duo Mini with 512MB RAM, and certainly better than a 600MHz P3 trying to run Aero.
Doh. Already posted some drivel about trucks elsewhere in this thread and therefore can't moderate you up.
If high gas prices really did not affect people's choices over the long term, Europe and the U.S. would look the same. Instead, there are much tighter city centers, much better public transport, and much smaller cars. The key is that people won't instantly adapt -- they'll adapt when they buy a new car or move. Obviously this will take many years population-wide.
Except that companies use big vehicles occasionally. Not all Ford F-350's are recreational vehicles you know.
1. Businesses, just like individuals, should pay the costs associated with the damage they cause to the environment. For physically visible or audible pollution we've long recognized this through nuisance law. Why should greenhouse-effect pollution be different just because you can't see it and it affects the whole world rather than your neighbors?
I know you'll tell me that if we make businesses pay these costs they won't be "competitive." I really hope that at some point we can stop racing to the bottom in both environmental and labor standards; it's not necessary, as demonstrated by the success of the U.S. economy in spite of already-higher labor and environmental costs.
2. The truck market in the U.S. is out of kilter. The vast majority of trucks here are far bigger and less efficient than they should be. Because of historically higher fuel prices almost everywhere else in the world, far more efficient work vehicles, which perform their missions just as well as ours, are commonplace outside of this country. And most personal-use trucks are just wasteful; for every F-350 that actually tows a 10k lb. fifth wheel, there are nine that just take up two spots in mall parking lots.
Personally, I think the way to solve the problem is by basing registration fees on a combination of fuel economy and vehicle weight. Such a system would rapidly encourage the import (or domestic production) of lighter, much more efficient work trucks, and make people think about whether they will really use the capabilities of huge personal trucks. These would help to solve both the original environmental problem and your above objection at once.
First of all, do the MBPs come with big enough hard drives to even hold all that music?!
They come with a FireWire port. You can also get a SATAe Expresscard if you want one. I'll buy a 160GB Seagate 7200.2 the day it ships, so I can at least keep the compressed music on the MBP along with my documents and a Windows partition...
I don't have nearly as much. Therefore, just because the feature wouldn't be useful to you doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful to me.
Fair enough. I just wanted to point out that with built-in transcoding iPod syncs will not be the quick and painless operations they are now, even with small amounts of music. Honestly, I'd like the feature too. I'd probably just let my old G5 crank on the transcoding for a few days.
I hope you have some patience when you're synchronizing that iPod...
On my 2.16GHz Core Duo MBP, iTunes, partly because it's broken (will only use one core), took a little over two days to transcode about 170GB of lossless music to 192Kbps VBR AAC. Now I just keep two copies of each file and play the lossless one on the computer and the 192Kbps one on the iPod.
Maybe after a few more generations of CPUs it will be a realistic option to transcode while syncing.
As a subscriber, I've been using it for quite a while...
I had to use it on IE6 at work for a while. It had its quirks (mostly cosmetic; some headers displayed as white on white) but nothing that prevented me from reading, expanding, contracting, etc. or posting to comment threads. (For what it's worth, I've also had (more minor) issues with both Safari and Firefox on OS X.)
Try using it and see if you can live with the b0rkage. Especially if you are in an IE-only situation, you probably can.
The vouchers are not being suggested as a magic bullet for creating more good schools.
Their purpose is to divorce the problem of good schools from the (now intimately related) problem of completely unaffordable housing. While there would still be difficult competition to get into the best schools, that competition would not start with winning a bidding war for a house in an exclusive neighborhood. Instead, it could be determined by other factors... say, with preference for poor but engaged parents, or by random lottery, or what have you.
The vouchers won't change the problem of a shortage of good education. The hope is that they might prevent people from driving themselves into bankruptcy in a quest to get their kids a decent education.
Give me a break -- you don't need a ginourmous home (with the huge loan payment that goes with it) to achieve your goals. You're more than welcome to put a ginourmous McMansion on your list of things that you'll buy to flaunt your wealth when you do make it.
Uh, no, that's not what's happening.
The reason people's home loans are so huge has nothing to do with the size or opulence of the homes they're buying. It has to do with schools.
With the current system of schooling, a parent wanting his/her child to have any realistic shot at a good college has two choices: 1) join a bidding war with every other parent in the country to get a house -- usually a modest one -- in the few towns/neighborhoods that have decent public schools, or 2) pay the money saved by not living in that neighborhood for tuition at an expensive private school and transportation to reach it.
Of course, since it's parents who are in this situation, and they have 1) all the extra expenses of childrearing and 2) more frequent schedule disruptions and 3) more fragile health, with a greater probability of illness either for themselves or their kids, the financial stretch from a good-school neighborhood or a private school is doubly taxing.
Interestingly for someone who's often considered a liberal scholar, Prof. Warren has suggested geographically flexible school vouchers as a solution to this problem. Despite my (much more overt) liberalism I'm inclined to agree, if we can avoid providing special support to religious schools and keep exclusive communities from somehow circumventing the system.
As for the car loans, I'm more inclined to agree with you, but society doesn't agree with either of us... it labels parents who don't have their kids riding around in the latest monster van or SUV as irresponsible. I'm not sure I can fault parents for giving into that level of pressure.
Student loans is where we'll probably disagree the most. I think it's a real indictment of our society if only those with lucrative future careers can get good educations -- shouldn't we have well-educated social workers, teachers, etc.? The solution, loan-forgiveness programs for those in lower-paying careers that benefit the public, seems obvious to me, but then again (Oh my God!) that might be a *government program*. (The horror!)
The Warren study used lax criteria in order to come up with that specious bit of causation. Essentially if you had missed one week in the last two years due to medical problems or had more than $2000 in unpaid medical bills that was "medical bill causation". If someone had $100K in unsecured debt and another $100K in student loans with a single unpaid ER bill (which could easily exceed $2000), for the purposes of the Warren study you could conclude that the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. WTF!?
Except that the vast majority of the people in Warren's study were not in the situation you imply. One of the important lessons offered by her body of work is that it is *not* huge frivolous debt that is keeping people so close to the edge, but student loans, home loans and car loans -- all of which are necessary for people to have a decent shot at achieving their goals in today's world. If you want to go through Warren's data and knock out the people who had unmanageable credit-card debt for frivolous reasons before their medical emergency, you will lose a few of those 74%, but I expect (without actually doing the work) that the number of those bankrupted by medical bills who 1) had insurance and 2) were carrying "responsible" or necessary debt would still be over 60%.
The point here is that morally condemning people for failure to pay debt, without knowing their circumstances, is unjust. That injustice is compounded when the condemnation comes in the context of applying for jobs, because those being condemned are exactly those trying the hardest to improve what is probably a pretty dismal situation. The tendency to morally condemn debtors is as old as society, but needs to be reevaluated in a world where such high levels of debt are a prerequisite to success for the majority.
My take is that Prof. Warren is a very good judge of public opinion and used the "perfect storm" of bankruptcy reform and rapidly rising health care costs to turn out a study that rocketed her into the public eye.
Having had the singularly good fortune to study with Professor Warren, I find this comment absurd. Whatever criticisms can be applied to her work -- and there is no question it has produced considerable controversy -- it's clear that publicity for herself is not high on the list of her motivations.
Or have a group study it for us, publish their findings, and having the people make informed choices.
This approach sometimes works OK when a well-known magazine helps you decide which $50 DVD player is the best value. But it breaks down quickly when things get more complicated.
First, industry associations often will publish their own materials, and a consumer seeking to educate him/herself may not have any way to tell the difference between a truly independent review and industry publicity. Second, any review or comparison that is exacting enough to capture all the important details in complicated transactions or on complicated products is going to lose the comprehension of readers who just don't want to spend time and effort on the subject. "Informed choices" these days require a truly staggering amount of knowledge. Don't believe me? Let your uncle Bob buy a PC on his own, even after he does an amount of research that seems appropriate to him at a level he understands, and see what he brings home. Now realize how often you are doing exactly the same thing in other areas. Scary.
In such complex environments, abuses become easier to hide. The purpose of consumer regulation is not to enforce that everyone get the best value all of the time -- we don't need to regulate against your uncle Bob bringing home a $1000 Pentium 4 box with integrated video -- but to prevent egregious abuses and anticompetitive behavior by companies with huge, impossible-to-change market-power and information advantages.
I don't really understand how fighting to have verifiably independent professionals on our side, which might actually protect us, is "stupidly passive" where beating our head against incomprehensible small print without any help or possibility of getting a different outcome is not. I can only conclude that you, like many, many others in the US, are fetishizing anything done by a single individual while rejecting collective action out of hand, regardless of the actual effectiveness of either course of action in any particular situation.
educate the people to start participating in the free market
Hmmm, let's see. To run my daily life I deal with...
three major credit card companies
three major national banks
two giant telecommunications companies
two insurance companies
one power monopoly
one large property-management company
one federal government (student loan) bureaucracy
one auto company
2 city, 1 county, and 1 state government
and the usual mix of consumer retailers and manufacturers.
So what I need to do is drop my life's plans and ambitions (to say nothing of my job) in order to spend years learning about every little detail of each of these businesses or regulatory entities. Even if I do that, I will still have less knowledge about any one of them than any of the thousands of professional staff who have spent their careers learning the details.
Face it. There is no way even the smartest, most willing-to-learn consumer can prevent himself/herself from being at an information disadvantage in modern society. If the consumer actually wants to live a life instead of constantly learning about uninteresting subjects, the information disadvantage will be worse. If we want to take advantage of the possibilities modern technology and finance offer us, we need to protect the consumer -- not because he/she is "lazy" but because it's *impossible* for him/her to learn all the details.
There are now only two alternatives to regulation, as imperfect a tool as it is:
1. large companies and government bureaucracies that are able to screw consumers at will thanks to superior knowledge, or
2. reverting to a world simple enough for everyone to know all the details... uh, no thanks, I like having cars, computers, electricity, and plentiful food.
Slashdot Mirror
OP is on crack. I'm in America and the Camry is not even close to being a small car. It is considered midsize here, though, while it would be considered large everywhere else in the world.
The OP's salesman is on target, though... we just leased a new Civic, and the salespeople definitely had the attitude that we had to take whatever deal they offered, as there were many more customers than cars. (Here is your Civic. It's grey. It's the only 5-speed EX we've got. You say you don't want grey? We've got cars that don't already have deposits on them coming... hmmm... in February. That's right. See all these customers' names? That grey's nice, isn't it? This is the price. No, you don't understand. This *is* the price.) Meanwhile the Infiniti dealer next door had plenty of QX56 sitting around.
... the same way as the iPod uses iTunes to manage songs. I was hoping for an old-fashion drag and drop. I haven't tried on a non-MS OS yet and I am not sure yet if Plays for Sure manages the library like iTunes does (partly meaning that it's "hooked" to one computer.)
You don't have to use your iPod this way if you don't want to. Uncheck the automatic sync option and you can drag and drop to your heart's content (from within iTunes, but you still have full control and can update from any machine you want).
When does iTunes or an iPod ever "rename[d] the songs for no good reason?" I've never seen that.
(I'm not trying to say an iPod is everyone's dream music player... just trying to counteract some of the more common FUD.)
You'll fall down the stairs if you carry one of these... while it's a neat gadget, at 11.15 ounces, it's not exactly a direct competitor to any iPod. Using a 2.5" hard disk necessarily compromises the size and weight.
(Your claimed battery life for the iPod is also way too short.)
Yes.
If your screen buzzes when dim you have a bad inverter board. Unlike the famous CPU whine, Apple was willing and able to fix this problem from the very beginning. If your machine has the bad inverter, send or take it back to Apple for repair.
You won't be able to get much work done...
The machine will automatically throttle itself back when the CPU reaches some high temperature (95 C?) and then turn itself off at 100C. Without fans running the CPU temperature will climb this high after only a few seconds of processor-intensive work.
However, I cannot hear the fans -- AT ALL -- over the hard drive when the fan speed is under 2000rpm. On the rare occasions when I can get the hard drive to spin down, I can only hear the fan noise as a slight whoosh if I stick my ear right next to the air outlet. Finding a way to get the hard drive to stay spun down -- as it would for hours at a stretch back in the OS 9 days, if you saved your work to a RAM disk -- would be the real breakthrough in making Mac laptops quiet.
There's no benefit in setting fan speed to 6000 at idle. Here are idle CPU1 temps for my MBP (after it's been running for at least 20 mins) at various speeds. Each MBP tends to get different results, so YMMV.
Default (1000rpm): 59-62 C
2000rpm: 49-51 C
2500rpm: 46-48 C
3000rpm: 42-44 C
3500-6000rpm: no change: 38-41 C
Note that the faster speeds DO make a difference when the MBP is doing intensive work, as it appears that setting the minimum speed to higher also causes the fan to ramp up more quickly. At sustained 100% CPU load the machine is always hot but the lowest temperature was reached when I set the minimum to 5000rpm: about 78-81 C.
On the outside, the machine is MUCH cooler when using any setting over 2500rpm. It really is a "laptop" now. And below 3000rpm the fans are barely audible. I don't know what Apple was thinking when they chose such a low default.
Been using smc and then smcFanControl since they showed up... battery life on my MBP doesn't seem appreciably different, not that it was any good to begin with, with the 7200rpm HD.
The best way to save battery is to dim the screen. At less than half brightness I can get nearly 3.5 hours in normal usage. At full brightness it's more like 2.5+.
With extensions, Firefox does pretty much anything that anyone could want in a browser. I'd like only two things from Firefox 3:
1. More stability and less memory usage. On both Windows and OS X, Firefox can swallow all your system resources if you leave it running long enough and do enough browsing. On my machines, the program also crashes, infrequently but regularly, most often when a page it's loading is corrupted by a network error. Spend the effort on finding memory leaks and bugs instead of adding gewgaws.
2. Without changing the functionality of the interface or its basic elements, make it prettier. The buttons look big, garish, and way too colorful; look at Safari for one example of a better way. (I use a skin to make my Firefox installs look much like Safari, but I think a more professional/more beautiful interface could inspire more people to switch.)
Let's get to work, mods... if ever there were a perfect candidate for (Score:5, Troll) this is it.
I mean, I'm sure there are places I could find how to get the wireless to work, but as it stands it was easier to shove the XP CD in and walk off for an hour than spend ages online trawling through forum threads with people screaming "pwned n00b" at the people asking questions.
So true. This is the worst thing about trying to get any Linux installation, even of an easy distro like Ubuntu, working on "existing" hardware (i.e. not hardware that you build after carefully reviewing compatibility lists). While forums can be a great source of information, they often assume a high level of knowledge and are not friendly to those learning the basics while trying to transition from Windows. Maybe not "pwned n00b," but "why didn't you read this man page? stop bothering us!" where the man page assumes knowledge of what the poster is trying to ask.
This is a symptom of a larger tension that will need to be addressed if Linux is ever going to work for ordinary consumers. Linux users, being geeks, take their ability to get the system working for granted, and are focused on cool applications. Yet what Linux needs to develop any substantial share is 1) more reliably trouble-free configuration, which might lead to enough of an installed base to provide an incentive to hardware manufacturers to develop 2) many, many more drivers.
I love using Ubuntu when it works. But when it doesn't, it's very, very frustrating; having 2 Macs in close proximity to the Ubuntu box brings the frustration into sharp relief. Suddenly it feels warmer and fuzzier to spend my time actually doing work than to be "using" (OK, fighting configuration issues with) F/OSS software.
Huh? MacBooks and MacBook Pros have exactly the same set of clamshell mode options. In either case the machine will run while closed if it thinks it has a keyboard and a mouse hooked up. Want to fool your MacBook? Use InsomniaX.
Save the integrated graphics and lack of ExpressCard 34 support, you are only losing cosmetics by going from MBP to MacBook. I should know -- there is one of each in my household.
I've always been fascinated with the divergence of opinion on this. It's possibly the single area where a differing interface decision between Windows (and most X11 WMs) and OS X causes the most debate and passionate responses on both sides.
Personally, I generally like having email and document windows as tall as possible (or as necessary to avoid scrolling), but I don't see any reason why they should be as wide as my 1440-pixel-wide laptop screen (let alone my 1920-pixel-wide desktop). I want to see the most information in the least window space.
Working on my laptop, I usually have all my windows staggered, so I can grab a corner of any one with the mouse. Expose should in theory be more efficient than this method (and I use it when there are just too many windows open to stagger), but I've been a predominantly Mac user since 1985 and old habits die hard. Since you can't grab a corner of a window when it's hidden behind another full-screen window, auto-maximizing in Windows has always driven me nuts, and whenever I've worked in a Windows environment everyone makes fun of me for having all these little windows which I never maximize...
On topic, I absolutely agree that more screen real estate = more productivity. With a 2560x1600 screen (and, to be clear, I think it's pixels, not size, that makes the difference), most users can have all their normal windows open, at a size that allows them to see almost all context, without any overlap and without feeling "crammed." For me at least that saves a lot of time and distraction context-switching.
If you're performing an operation within the Finder that hits some sort of bottleneck (ie. a slow network link, unresponsive storage device, etc.), the entire system grinds to a halt.
Absolutely true. I guess I don't take this into account too much anymore since I now run the very multithreaded Path Finder and only touch the Finder when I hit a "show download" link in Safari without thinking.
Unless he is spending all his time in the Finder, I'm pretty baffled by parent. I have a dual 1.8 G5 (the slowest multiprocessor model) with 3 GB of RAM. It's slow to boot and finish the login process, but once that is actually done, it's very responsive and quick in basically all operations. My laptop is a 2.16 MBP with 2 GB of RAM and is blindingly fast at everything (including logging in). Either parent is spending all his time waiting for the Finder to mount network shares, his machines have a configuration problem, or he has only used machines without enough RAM.
I quite like using OS X, but I have been very disappointed with its performance, even on relatively fast machines like my mum's G5 iMac, dual-processor G5 PowerMacs and Core Duo Minis (although my Mini is memory constrained with only 512MB). On my 1Ghz/768MB iBook, it's frustratingly slow to use more than one app at a time (and even the one can get chunky).
Not enough memory.
Just like Aero, Aqua is a huge memory hog. I'm happy to pay for additional memory as part of the "OS X premium," but the frustrating part is when older machines can't physically accept enough memory. I realize that those of you who created a VR world on your 16k calculator watch will keel over dead at the ugliness of these memory requirements, but I really don't care.
On a PowerPC machine, the sweet spot for everyday use with 3-6 apps open at once is around 1.25GB. On an Intel machine, memory requirements are higher. For OS X use without any virtualization, at least 1.5GB is needed; if you want to run Parallels and do anything useful (i.e. at least 512MB on the Windows side) you need 2GB. If, like on your Mini, you have integrated graphics, you pretty much want 2GB no matter what.
If you have enough memory, the CPU performance of the machine is far less important. A 400MHz PowerMac G4 with the max 2 gigs of RAM doesn't feel snappy (menus draw a little slowly, etc.) but it launches apps quickly, swaps between them quickly, and has no problem with all the eye candy. It would be less frustrating to use than a Core Duo Mini with 512MB RAM, and certainly better than a 600MHz P3 trying to run Aero.
Doh. Already posted some drivel about trucks elsewhere in this thread and therefore can't moderate you up.
If high gas prices really did not affect people's choices over the long term, Europe and the U.S. would look the same. Instead, there are much tighter city centers, much better public transport, and much smaller cars. The key is that people won't instantly adapt -- they'll adapt when they buy a new car or move. Obviously this will take many years population-wide.
Except that companies use big vehicles occasionally. Not all Ford F-350's are recreational vehicles you know.
1. Businesses, just like individuals, should pay the costs associated with the damage they cause to the environment. For physically visible or audible pollution we've long recognized this through nuisance law. Why should greenhouse-effect pollution be different just because you can't see it and it affects the whole world rather than your neighbors?
I know you'll tell me that if we make businesses pay these costs they won't be "competitive." I really hope that at some point we can stop racing to the bottom in both environmental and labor standards; it's not necessary, as demonstrated by the success of the U.S. economy in spite of already-higher labor and environmental costs.
2. The truck market in the U.S. is out of kilter. The vast majority of trucks here are far bigger and less efficient than they should be. Because of historically higher fuel prices almost everywhere else in the world, far more efficient work vehicles, which perform their missions just as well as ours, are commonplace outside of this country. And most personal-use trucks are just wasteful; for every F-350 that actually tows a 10k lb. fifth wheel, there are nine that just take up two spots in mall parking lots.
Personally, I think the way to solve the problem is by basing registration fees on a combination of fuel economy and vehicle weight. Such a system would rapidly encourage the import (or domestic production) of lighter, much more efficient work trucks, and make people think about whether they will really use the capabilities of huge personal trucks. These would help to solve both the original environmental problem and your above objection at once.
First of all, do the MBPs come with big enough hard drives to even hold all that music?!
They come with a FireWire port. You can also get a SATAe Expresscard if you want one. I'll buy a 160GB Seagate 7200.2 the day it ships, so I can at least keep the compressed music on the MBP along with my documents and a Windows partition...
I don't have nearly as much. Therefore, just because the feature wouldn't be useful to you doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful to me.
Fair enough. I just wanted to point out that with built-in transcoding iPod syncs will not be the quick and painless operations they are now, even with small amounts of music. Honestly, I'd like the feature too. I'd probably just let my old G5 crank on the transcoding for a few days.
I hope you have some patience when you're synchronizing that iPod...
On my 2.16GHz Core Duo MBP, iTunes, partly because it's broken (will only use one core), took a little over two days to transcode about 170GB of lossless music to 192Kbps VBR AAC. Now I just keep two copies of each file and play the lossless one on the computer and the 192Kbps one on the iPod.
Maybe after a few more generations of CPUs it will be a realistic option to transcode while syncing.
As a subscriber, I've been using it for quite a while...
I had to use it on IE6 at work for a while. It had its quirks (mostly cosmetic; some headers displayed as white on white) but nothing that prevented me from reading, expanding, contracting, etc. or posting to comment threads. (For what it's worth, I've also had (more minor) issues with both Safari and Firefox on OS X.)
Try using it and see if you can live with the b0rkage. Especially if you are in an IE-only situation, you probably can.
The vouchers are not being suggested as a magic bullet for creating more good schools.
Their purpose is to divorce the problem of good schools from the (now intimately related) problem of completely unaffordable housing. While there would still be difficult competition to get into the best schools, that competition would not start with winning a bidding war for a house in an exclusive neighborhood. Instead, it could be determined by other factors... say, with preference for poor but engaged parents, or by random lottery, or what have you.
The vouchers won't change the problem of a shortage of good education. The hope is that they might prevent people from driving themselves into bankruptcy in a quest to get their kids a decent education.
Give me a break -- you don't need a ginourmous home (with the huge loan payment that goes with it) to achieve your goals. You're more than welcome to put a ginourmous McMansion on your list of things that you'll buy to flaunt your wealth when you do make it.
Uh, no, that's not what's happening.
The reason people's home loans are so huge has nothing to do with the size or opulence of the homes they're buying. It has to do with schools.
With the current system of schooling, a parent wanting his/her child to have any realistic shot at a good college has two choices: 1) join a bidding war with every other parent in the country to get a house -- usually a modest one -- in the few towns/neighborhoods that have decent public schools, or 2) pay the money saved by not living in that neighborhood for tuition at an expensive private school and transportation to reach it.
Of course, since it's parents who are in this situation, and they have 1) all the extra expenses of childrearing and 2) more frequent schedule disruptions and 3) more fragile health, with a greater probability of illness either for themselves or their kids, the financial stretch from a good-school neighborhood or a private school is doubly taxing.
Interestingly for someone who's often considered a liberal scholar, Prof. Warren has suggested geographically flexible school vouchers as a solution to this problem. Despite my (much more overt) liberalism I'm inclined to agree, if we can avoid providing special support to religious schools and keep exclusive communities from somehow circumventing the system.
As for the car loans, I'm more inclined to agree with you, but society doesn't agree with either of us... it labels parents who don't have their kids riding around in the latest monster van or SUV as irresponsible. I'm not sure I can fault parents for giving into that level of pressure.
Student loans is where we'll probably disagree the most. I think it's a real indictment of our society if only those with lucrative future careers can get good educations -- shouldn't we have well-educated social workers, teachers, etc.? The solution, loan-forgiveness programs for those in lower-paying careers that benefit the public, seems obvious to me, but then again (Oh my God!) that might be a *government program*. (The horror!)
The Warren study used lax criteria in order to come up with that specious bit of causation. Essentially if you had missed one week in the last two years due to medical problems or had more than $2000 in unpaid medical bills that was "medical bill causation". If someone had $100K in unsecured debt and another $100K in student loans with a single unpaid ER bill (which could easily exceed $2000), for the purposes of the Warren study you could conclude that the medical bill caused the bankruptcy. WTF!?
Except that the vast majority of the people in Warren's study were not in the situation you imply. One of the important lessons offered by her body of work is that it is *not* huge frivolous debt that is keeping people so close to the edge, but student loans, home loans and car loans -- all of which are necessary for people to have a decent shot at achieving their goals in today's world. If you want to go through Warren's data and knock out the people who had unmanageable credit-card debt for frivolous reasons before their medical emergency, you will lose a few of those 74%, but I expect (without actually doing the work) that the number of those bankrupted by medical bills who 1) had insurance and 2) were carrying "responsible" or necessary debt would still be over 60%.
The point here is that morally condemning people for failure to pay debt, without knowing their circumstances, is unjust. That injustice is compounded when the condemnation comes in the context of applying for jobs, because those being condemned are exactly those trying the hardest to improve what is probably a pretty dismal situation. The tendency to morally condemn debtors is as old as society, but needs to be reevaluated in a world where such high levels of debt are a prerequisite to success for the majority.
My take is that Prof. Warren is a very good judge of public opinion and used the "perfect storm" of bankruptcy reform and rapidly rising health care costs to turn out a study that rocketed her into the public eye.
Having had the singularly good fortune to study with Professor Warren, I find this comment absurd. Whatever criticisms can be applied to her work -- and there is no question it has produced considerable controversy -- it's clear that publicity for herself is not high on the list of her motivations.
Or have a group study it for us, publish their findings, and having the people make informed choices.
This approach sometimes works OK when a well-known magazine helps you decide which $50 DVD player is the best value. But it breaks down quickly when things get more complicated.
First, industry associations often will publish their own materials, and a consumer seeking to educate him/herself may not have any way to tell the difference between a truly independent review and industry publicity. Second, any review or comparison that is exacting enough to capture all the important details in complicated transactions or on complicated products is going to lose the comprehension of readers who just don't want to spend time and effort on the subject. "Informed choices" these days require a truly staggering amount of knowledge. Don't believe me? Let your uncle Bob buy a PC on his own, even after he does an amount of research that seems appropriate to him at a level he understands, and see what he brings home. Now realize how often you are doing exactly the same thing in other areas. Scary.
In such complex environments, abuses become easier to hide. The purpose of consumer regulation is not to enforce that everyone get the best value all of the time -- we don't need to regulate against your uncle Bob bringing home a $1000 Pentium 4 box with integrated video -- but to prevent egregious abuses and anticompetitive behavior by companies with huge, impossible-to-change market-power and information advantages.
I don't really understand how fighting to have verifiably independent professionals on our side, which might actually protect us, is "stupidly passive" where beating our head against incomprehensible small print without any help or possibility of getting a different outcome is not. I can only conclude that you, like many, many others in the US, are fetishizing anything done by a single individual while rejecting collective action out of hand, regardless of the actual effectiveness of either course of action in any particular situation.
educate the people to start participating in the free market
Hmmm, let's see. To run my daily life I deal with...
So what I need to do is drop my life's plans and ambitions (to say nothing of my job) in order to spend years learning about every little detail of each of these businesses or regulatory entities. Even if I do that, I will still have less knowledge about any one of them than any of the thousands of professional staff who have spent their careers learning the details.
Face it. There is no way even the smartest, most willing-to-learn consumer can prevent himself/herself from being at an information disadvantage in modern society. If the consumer actually wants to live a life instead of constantly learning about uninteresting subjects, the information disadvantage will be worse. If we want to take advantage of the possibilities modern technology and finance offer us, we need to protect the consumer -- not because he/she is "lazy" but because it's *impossible* for him/her to learn all the details.
There are now only two alternatives to regulation, as imperfect a tool as it is:
1. large companies and government bureaucracies that are able to screw consumers at will thanks to superior knowledge, or
2. reverting to a world simple enough for everyone to know all the details... uh, no thanks, I like having cars, computers, electricity, and plentiful food.
Power Mac G5
OS X.4.7
3GB physical RAM
64MB swap file, which has never grown bigger since I added the extra RAM
...so, no, at least on OS X there's no point in having 6GB swap files.