Sorry, I made a mistake. The $2480 one is with a 5400 RPM hard drive. So it'd probably end up around $2600. The prce difference scales with how high-end the components are; a RAM upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB costs a lot more from Apple ($400 more) than from Dell ($175 more).
Funny, I have found that the Macbook Pro 17" is cheaper than a comparably equipped Dell XPS M1710 17"
Of course Dell's high-end gaming laptop is going to cost more! A much more realistic comparison would be with the Dell Inspiron e1705. I set them up with the following config: 2.16 GHz processor, 2 GB 667 MHz RAM, 120 GB 5400 RPM HDD (available on the e1705, if not the XPS M1710), remote (added on the Dell), DVD burner, Bluetooth. The Dell came out to $2708; the Mac came out to $3099. With 1 GB of RAM and a 100 GB 7200 RPM HDD, the Dell comes to $2638 and the Mac comes to $2699. A lot closer. But that's the highest-end configuration of the Dell. If we start with the second-lowest and configure it the same, it comes to $2480. Pretty much no matter what you do, you get the same specs for $200-$400 less with a Dell.
This is probably my Apple fanboyism talking, but the MacBook (or, previously iBook) has always been competively priced. The entry level iBook was going for 1000 USD and included more standard features than any PC laptop did, for that price. I wouldn't say Apple is usually overpriced, maybe just their pro line. But then again, the pro line is targeted towards business and professionals. You'd expect to pay more.
Competitive on price? Yes. Competitive on performance? Not until Intel came out. My brother has an iBook G4 that cost (before the educational discount) around $1700, and I have a PC laptop that cost the same amount. Mine is a full 50% faster on processor-intensive tasks, and is much snappier in general desktop use.
No one who does audio processing on a computer uses the internal speakers, no matter what brand of computer it is.
No, not for production work, but it's nice to be able to get good audio quality out of the speakers. No one's expecting miracles, but it should be able to reproduce a normal range of sounds at a decent volume, without major distortion. My laptop, for example, completely ignores bass frequencies, and, if they're loud enough, they distort everything else and there's a little "gap" in the audio where the bass beat was. That is bad.
There are laptops with good sound quality--a friend of mine has the Dell Inspiron e1705, and it has pretty good sound. (It's a 17" widescreen, though, so it's got room for bigger speakers.)
Screen: Adam likes the bright screen, Thom dislikes the viewing angle (color distortion) problems
Speed: Both of them love it.
Speakers: Both agree, the speakers are too quiet and distort at loud volumes. Thom notes it has digital optical audio out.
Keyboard: Adam likes it, Thom finds the layout too cramped, calls it "form over function". Both like the backlighting.
Airport: Adam has no problems. Thom finds the reception worse than his iBook.
Heat: Both agree, it is too hot.
Rosetta: Both agree, it is awesome, but native apps are eagerly anticipated.
Build Quality: Both like it. Adam wants more USB ports.
Battery: Both agree, battery life is skimpy.
Running Windows: Thom says it's "a breeze", Adam doesn't plan to try it.
Frankly, I guess this points out that the MacBook Pro isn't "above" anything else. It's got its share of problems, and feelings are mixed about many features. Unlike the MacBook, though, the MacBook Pro isn't priced competitively with other brands. (The regular MacBook, surprisingly enough, since Apple is usually overpriced, matches up pretty well with PC manufacturers. It's hard to compare it directly because of the odd screen size, but it's only $100-$200 more than a PC, if even that.)
Also like children, the AIBOs initially started babbling aimlessly until two or more settled on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment, gradually building a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate.
How does this work? Is it a neural network, where sounds are associated with objects? That would make sense for the first part, but how does a neural network represent more complex ideas like "the red ball is behind the blue ball"? Or do the AIBO's not have thoughts that complex?
This seems a little hard to believe. I could believe that they programmed it to be able to speak and hear statements that are directly connected to thoughts, but I just can't see an AIBO learning, much less inventing, the syntax to be able to say something like "The red ball is behind you, rolling to the right." It just seems a little far-fetched.
What the article doesn't explain is at what level the language system is attached to the brain. Does it talk about raw thoughts, or specific ideas (like the ball)? Do AIBO's have "raw thoughts", or can they only think about what they were programmed to know about?
Oh, that reminds me... I set up Nagios on my school's network (just for the hell of it--I'm at a school where the sysadmin would appreciate the help instead of being scared about me knowing the intimate details of his networks and servers) and I used nmap to map out what servers, printers, and routers were on the network. I even managed to map out the point-to-point T1 we have to another office, and point out a couple bits of information that shouldn't have been lying around. Nmap is a great tool.
In IPv6, the MAC address is kept in the ethernet frame but also in the low 48 bits of the IP address.
No No NO! In IPv6 when stateless autoconfiguration is used the MAC address is stored in the lower 64 bits. First come the first three bytes of the MAC address, then 0xFF 0xFE, then the last three bytes. I can attest to this; my tunnel broker (SixXS) assigns 2001:4830:xxxx::1 to my router, but my other computers have 2001:4830:xxxx::AABB:CCff:feDD:EEFF (where the MAC is AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF). It is entirely possible to use another addressing scheme, and I expect that many enterprise users will, to avoid the problem of having to change their servers' DNS entries if the Ethernet cards get replaced or swapped. This is not to say, of course, that stateless autoconfiguration isn't the freaking coolest networking feature ever (okay, maybe the invention of the Internet itself was cooler).
Personally, I use nmap quite often to examine my own systems and make sure services are up or that firewalls are blocking the right ports. I also use tcpdump (and, for more complex tasks, ethereal) very often when debugging network problems. Kismet, of course, is a tool no geek should be without. On almost any long car trip, kismet+gpsd+gpsdrive are running, logging networks.
It's freaking awesome that all these tools are available for free. Three cheers for their authors.
Shows posted on the site received more than 11 million hits in the first month alone. From the article: 'An online exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. That compares with typical ad recall of about 40 percent for commercials viewed on television, industry sources said.
This doesn't surprise me one bit. I find that when I have a computer with me while I'm watching TV, I'm much more likely to visit an advertiser's page. I find myself poking at the product pages for products that I'd never buy, like the Toyota Yaris or internet services that compete with my own. This leads me to believe that, if TiVo really wants to fill the gap caused by ad-skipping, they should create interactive ads that viewers can poke and prod.
Yay. So now we need a feature in web site designers/blogging tools to label things. Word documents are islands of text, not interlinked hypertext media. Adding CC license tags to web pages and media files would be far more useful.
Because otherwise legislators would have no way to sneak their otherwise unpassable legislation into other bills and get it passed. It's akin to a filibuster in that it is an annoying thing to do practically, but the ability needs to be there for the rare cases when it's the only way to get something done. (I would argue, though, that filibusters are used for useful things, while sneaking unrelated amendments into bills is rarely used for anything that isn't evil.)
I agree with a sibling post that says line-item vetoes should be allowed if the line item is unrelated to the bill itself. I would go as far as to say that amendments to a bill should be required to be related. If they're not, they simply don't belong there. End of story.
Okay, so let's say everybody's wild guesses are right, and Google will, like all good web companies, eventually come out with a full-fledged online store system (Google Video, Google Base, and AdWords already prove that they have the transaction mechanism). Then, combine that with Cost-per-Action AdWords, and you have a foolproof way of preventing fraud (you're running the ads and the stores, so you can track conversions), an awesomely-integrated store solution. Add Analytics and it will be the coolest online store system ever.
Of course, letting people run online stores has little to do with "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful".
But never mind that. The next step is to integrate Google Book Search with Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, and then integrate Google Book Search itself with Amazon, so that users can find a book on Google and buy it through Amazon. Then integrate Blogger/Pages with Book Search, and buy a bunch of printers, so people can publish their own books, advertise them on Google, and buy printed copies of them, which Google will print and mail, perhaps using Amazon's infrastructure.
If Google and Amazon teamed up, they could probably take over the world.
Why would you want a "Creative Commons tool" for Office? Wouldn't it just be easier to add a page after the title page, like the copyright page, but instead explaining the license of the document? Why do you need a program to do it for you?
What would be far more useful would be a way to tag Creative Commons documents in web pages, and then if some search engine (Google? please?) would explicitly label Creative Commons results as such, and encourage people to listen to, view, combine, mash up (shudder), and otherwise use them.
If one were to install OS X on a toaster, it would be the size of a toaster oven but only make regular toast, it would be brushed metal (of course), it would have shiny blue LEDs and stuff, it would have only one large button labelled "toast" (no darkness settings--let's not confuse the user) and it would take twice as much power to make toast as any other toaster. But it would have a cool pulsating light pattern appear while making the toast, and if you left it plugged in 24/7, it would automatically clean the crumb tray.
This is exactly what geeks across America have been hoping for: a group intended to defend the consumer's side in privacy and intellectual property discussions. But there's no way they're going to succeed in politics when they've named themselves the "Pirate Party". I don't think I even need to ask whether they realize that they're giving their opponents fodder for later complaints and insults.
My own laptop got pretty close once. It didn't burst into flames, but probably could have.
It had been running at close to 95 or 100 degrees Celsius for a while. It's a Pentium M, and they're rated up to 100, but I still thought it was odd. Eventually, it got to the point where when it was set to 1.7 GHz, it spent most of its time throttled to around 1.3 or 1.4 GHz. I finally opened the thing up, and popped out the fan, to see if anything was wrong... The fan itself was fine, but there was a HUGE ball of fuzz made of fibers sucked into the fan. (It was tinted red, because I have red flannel sheets on my bed.) I took the fuzzball out, and it's been running a full 30 degrees cooler now. It barely reaches 60 or 65 at full speed, and runs the fan much less often and at lower speeds.
I agree that the calculators have gotten much worse.
I would partially disagree, however, about the printers... I have had an hp LaserJet 1320 for a while, and I like it so far. (That's a link to a review on my web site.) Their tech support was also very nice, at least the one time I needed to talk to them. I can't speak for the inkjets, as I religiously avoid recommending inkjets to people (like my dad, who bought the 1320), because they eat cartridges.
Sweet, laptop hovercraft! Give them side-mounted fans, too, and use WiFi for location, and suddenly you have a remote-control laptop that can fly! Think of the possibilities! Stolen? Just have it fly out of the thief's car and back to your doorstep! Need a hand free? Just put your laptop on a Virtual Shelf (TM) (patent pending) and it will hover at that height until you pick it up. (/me realizes this is Slashdot, and that his previous statement has a meaning he didn't indend. Too late now.)
Design for two audiences... your users and Googlebot. That's my motto.
Given that this article was published in the Wall Street Journal, I think Nielsen was (rightfully) assuming that his audience would be people who work on websites used by the general public, not the so-called "technocratic elite". Sure, if it's a coding blog, do what you want. Most of your users will figure it out, and the ones who can't don't matter. But if you're creating a web site for the general public, with wide appeal, you'll want it to be accessible to as many people as possible. If that means offering an email newsletter in addition to a news feed for people without newsreaders, or who prefer email, then so be it--it's not that much extra effort.
His web site is easily one of the most garish and unfriendly pages I've ever seen.
In his defense: while the page is butt-ugly, one of his major points about usability is that usability needs to have priority over design.
But I do agree with you. It's got that Stallman-esque "I am so pushy about my principles that it's annoying" feel. He's overapplied his own advice, to the point where his web site looks so generic that it has no unifying brand. I don't think he realizes that if every website stuck with a white or light background, dark or black text, blue/purple/red links, and relatively tame fonts, it would be almost impossible for web site owners to create a memorable brand. As he has pointed out, people don't read most of what websites contain, so wowing people with great prose won't help. All we have left is slogans, then? I would point out that my Slashdot T-shirt says "Bathing Geeks in its Soothing Green Light since Nineteen Ninety-Seven", not "Pestering Geeks with its Super-Cool Slogan, "News for Nerds, Stuff that MAtters" since Nineteen Ninety-Seven". People remember sites visually.
Anyway, no, I haven't worked with any servers. I'm just speaking from what I've seen of their laptops. They always seem a little clunky, and I've seen a few hardware problems. Maybe it's more that it offends my design sense than that they're actually fragile, but I dunno...
The calculators, though, really are worse than they used to be. They're much more plastic and much less metal, and the user interface has been steadily cruftified without anyone taking a step back and reorganizing it so that it acts more like a graphing calculator and less like a scientific calculator with a pixel-addressable screen.
Nielsen says in this article that he prefers email newsletters to news feeds because "the email newsletter comes to you; it arrives in your in box, and becomes part of the one place you go to get information. That's the great strength." This is an interesting idea, but I don't think he realizes that it doesn't scale. Sure, a couple newsletters would work fine, but a few years back, I was subscribed to so many newsletters that I started filtering them into folders and essentially treating them just like feeds.
What I prefer to newsletters is user-requested content, where you can say "Send me an email when you write a new blog post/article/whatever about $SUBJECT". I'm not usually interested in everything a site has to offer, but if they're willing to pick out the things I would be interested in, I'm much more likely to want to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I made a mistake. The $2480 one is with a 5400 RPM hard drive. So it'd probably end up around $2600. The prce difference scales with how high-end the components are; a RAM upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB costs a lot more from Apple ($400 more) than from Dell ($175 more).
Of course Dell's high-end gaming laptop is going to cost more! A much more realistic comparison would be with the Dell Inspiron e1705. I set them up with the following config: 2.16 GHz processor, 2 GB 667 MHz RAM, 120 GB 5400 RPM HDD (available on the e1705, if not the XPS M1710), remote (added on the Dell), DVD burner, Bluetooth. The Dell came out to $2708; the Mac came out to $3099. With 1 GB of RAM and a 100 GB 7200 RPM HDD, the Dell comes to $2638 and the Mac comes to $2699. A lot closer. But that's the highest-end configuration of the Dell. If we start with the second-lowest and configure it the same, it comes to $2480. Pretty much no matter what you do, you get the same specs for $200-$400 less with a Dell.
Competitive on price? Yes. Competitive on performance? Not until Intel came out. My brother has an iBook G4 that cost (before the educational discount) around $1700, and I have a PC laptop that cost the same amount. Mine is a full 50% faster on processor-intensive tasks, and is much snappier in general desktop use.
No, not for production work, but it's nice to be able to get good audio quality out of the speakers. No one's expecting miracles, but it should be able to reproduce a normal range of sounds at a decent volume, without major distortion. My laptop, for example, completely ignores bass frequencies, and, if they're loud enough, they distort everything else and there's a little "gap" in the audio where the bass beat was. That is bad.
There are laptops with good sound quality--a friend of mine has the Dell Inspiron e1705, and it has pretty good sound. (It's a 17" widescreen, though, so it's got room for bigger speakers.)
Frankly, I guess this points out that the MacBook Pro isn't "above" anything else. It's got its share of problems, and feelings are mixed about many features. Unlike the MacBook, though, the MacBook Pro isn't priced competitively with other brands. (The regular MacBook, surprisingly enough, since Apple is usually overpriced, matches up pretty well with PC manufacturers. It's hard to compare it directly because of the odd screen size, but it's only $100-$200 more than a PC, if even that.)
How does this work? Is it a neural network, where sounds are associated with objects? That would make sense for the first part, but how does a neural network represent more complex ideas like "the red ball is behind the blue ball"? Or do the AIBO's not have thoughts that complex?
This seems a little hard to believe. I could believe that they programmed it to be able to speak and hear statements that are directly connected to thoughts, but I just can't see an AIBO learning, much less inventing, the syntax to be able to say something like "The red ball is behind you, rolling to the right." It just seems a little far-fetched.
What the article doesn't explain is at what level the language system is attached to the brain. Does it talk about raw thoughts, or specific ideas (like the ball)? Do AIBO's have "raw thoughts", or can they only think about what they were programmed to know about?
Oh, that reminds me... I set up Nagios on my school's network (just for the hell of it--I'm at a school where the sysadmin would appreciate the help instead of being scared about me knowing the intimate details of his networks and servers) and I used nmap to map out what servers, printers, and routers were on the network. I even managed to map out the point-to-point T1 we have to another office, and point out a couple bits of information that shouldn't have been lying around. Nmap is a great tool.
No No NO! In IPv6 when stateless autoconfiguration is used the MAC address is stored in the lower 64 bits. First come the first three bytes of the MAC address, then 0xFF 0xFE, then the last three bytes. I can attest to this; my tunnel broker (SixXS) assigns 2001:4830:xxxx::1 to my router, but my other computers have 2001:4830:xxxx::AABB:CCff:feDD:EEFF (where the MAC is AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF). It is entirely possible to use another addressing scheme, and I expect that many enterprise users will, to avoid the problem of having to change their servers' DNS entries if the Ethernet cards get replaced or swapped. This is not to say, of course, that stateless autoconfiguration isn't the freaking coolest networking feature ever (okay, maybe the invention of the Internet itself was cooler).
Personally, I use nmap quite often to examine my own systems and make sure services are up or that firewalls are blocking the right ports. I also use tcpdump (and, for more complex tasks, ethereal) very often when debugging network problems. Kismet, of course, is a tool no geek should be without. On almost any long car trip, kismet+gpsd+gpsdrive are running, logging networks.
It's freaking awesome that all these tools are available for free. Three cheers for their authors.
This doesn't surprise me one bit. I find that when I have a computer with me while I'm watching TV, I'm much more likely to visit an advertiser's page. I find myself poking at the product pages for products that I'd never buy, like the Toyota Yaris or internet services that compete with my own. This leads me to believe that, if TiVo really wants to fill the gap caused by ad-skipping, they should create interactive ads that viewers can poke and prod.
Yay. So now we need a feature in web site designers/blogging tools to label things. Word documents are islands of text, not interlinked hypertext media. Adding CC license tags to web pages and media files would be far more useful.
I've seen it--it's called EPIC 2014. It's funny, but also a bit scary.
Because otherwise legislators would have no way to sneak their otherwise unpassable legislation into other bills and get it passed. It's akin to a filibuster in that it is an annoying thing to do practically, but the ability needs to be there for the rare cases when it's the only way to get something done. (I would argue, though, that filibusters are used for useful things, while sneaking unrelated amendments into bills is rarely used for anything that isn't evil.)
I agree with a sibling post that says line-item vetoes should be allowed if the line item is unrelated to the bill itself. I would go as far as to say that amendments to a bill should be required to be related. If they're not, they simply don't belong there. End of story.
Okay, so let's say everybody's wild guesses are right, and Google will, like all good web companies, eventually come out with a full-fledged online store system (Google Video, Google Base, and AdWords already prove that they have the transaction mechanism). Then, combine that with Cost-per-Action AdWords, and you have a foolproof way of preventing fraud (you're running the ads and the stores, so you can track conversions), an awesomely-integrated store solution. Add Analytics and it will be the coolest online store system ever.
Of course, letting people run online stores has little to do with "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful".
But never mind that. The next step is to integrate Google Book Search with Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, and then integrate Google Book Search itself with Amazon, so that users can find a book on Google and buy it through Amazon. Then integrate Blogger/Pages with Book Search, and buy a bunch of printers, so people can publish their own books, advertise them on Google, and buy printed copies of them, which Google will print and mail, perhaps using Amazon's infrastructure.
If Google and Amazon teamed up, they could probably take over the world.
Pardon my insane, rambling comments. I'm bored.
Why would you want a "Creative Commons tool" for Office? Wouldn't it just be easier to add a page after the title page, like the copyright page, but instead explaining the license of the document? Why do you need a program to do it for you?
What would be far more useful would be a way to tag Creative Commons documents in web pages, and then if some search engine (Google? please?) would explicitly label Creative Commons results as such, and encourage people to listen to, view, combine, mash up (shudder), and otherwise use them.
If one were to install OS X on a toaster, it would be the size of a toaster oven but only make regular toast, it would be brushed metal (of course), it would have shiny blue LEDs and stuff, it would have only one large button labelled "toast" (no darkness settings--let's not confuse the user) and it would take twice as much power to make toast as any other toaster. But it would have a cool pulsating light pattern appear while making the toast, and if you left it plugged in 24/7, it would automatically clean the crumb tray.
This is exactly what geeks across America have been hoping for: a group intended to defend the consumer's side in privacy and intellectual property discussions. But there's no way they're going to succeed in politics when they've named themselves the "Pirate Party". I don't think I even need to ask whether they realize that they're giving their opponents fodder for later complaints and insults.
My own laptop got pretty close once. It didn't burst into flames, but probably could have.
It had been running at close to 95 or 100 degrees Celsius for a while. It's a Pentium M, and they're rated up to 100, but I still thought it was odd. Eventually, it got to the point where when it was set to 1.7 GHz, it spent most of its time throttled to around 1.3 or 1.4 GHz. I finally opened the thing up, and popped out the fan, to see if anything was wrong... The fan itself was fine, but there was a HUGE ball of fuzz made of fibers sucked into the fan. (It was tinted red, because I have red flannel sheets on my bed.) I took the fuzzball out, and it's been running a full 30 degrees cooler now. It barely reaches 60 or 65 at full speed, and runs the fan much less often and at lower speeds.
Let this be a lesson: fans need cleaning.
I agree that the calculators have gotten much worse.
I would partially disagree, however, about the printers... I have had an hp LaserJet 1320 for a while, and I like it so far. (That's a link to a review on my web site.) Their tech support was also very nice, at least the one time I needed to talk to them. I can't speak for the inkjets, as I religiously avoid recommending inkjets to people (like my dad, who bought the 1320), because they eat cartridges.
Sweet, laptop hovercraft! Give them side-mounted fans, too, and use WiFi for location, and suddenly you have a remote-control laptop that can fly! Think of the possibilities! Stolen? Just have it fly out of the thief's car and back to your doorstep! Need a hand free? Just put your laptop on a Virtual Shelf (TM) (patent pending) and it will hover at that height until you pick it up. (/me realizes this is Slashdot, and that his previous statement has a meaning he didn't indend. Too late now.)
Given that this article was published in the Wall Street Journal, I think Nielsen was (rightfully) assuming that his audience would be people who work on websites used by the general public, not the so-called "technocratic elite". Sure, if it's a coding blog, do what you want. Most of your users will figure it out, and the ones who can't don't matter. But if you're creating a web site for the general public, with wide appeal, you'll want it to be accessible to as many people as possible. If that means offering an email newsletter in addition to a news feed for people without newsreaders, or who prefer email, then so be it--it's not that much extra effort.
In his defense: while the page is butt-ugly, one of his major points about usability is that usability needs to have priority over design.
But I do agree with you. It's got that Stallman-esque "I am so pushy about my principles that it's annoying" feel. He's overapplied his own advice, to the point where his web site looks so generic that it has no unifying brand. I don't think he realizes that if every website stuck with a white or light background, dark or black text, blue/purple/red links, and relatively tame fonts, it would be almost impossible for web site owners to create a memorable brand. As he has pointed out, people don't read most of what websites contain, so wowing people with great prose won't help. All we have left is slogans, then? I would point out that my Slashdot T-shirt says "Bathing Geeks in its Soothing Green Light since Nineteen Ninety-Seven", not "Pestering Geeks with its Super-Cool Slogan, "News for Nerds, Stuff that MAtters" since Nineteen Ninety-Seven". People remember sites visually.
Hey, what's the [sic] for?
Anyway, no, I haven't worked with any servers. I'm just speaking from what I've seen of their laptops. They always seem a little clunky, and I've seen a few hardware problems. Maybe it's more that it offends my design sense than that they're actually fragile, but I dunno...
The calculators, though, really are worse than they used to be. They're much more plastic and much less metal, and the user interface has been steadily cruftified without anyone taking a step back and reorganizing it so that it acts more like a graphing calculator and less like a scientific calculator with a pixel-addressable screen.
Nielsen says in this article that he prefers email newsletters to news feeds because "the email newsletter comes to you; it arrives in your in box, and becomes part of the one place you go to get information. That's the great strength." This is an interesting idea, but I don't think he realizes that it doesn't scale. Sure, a couple newsletters would work fine, but a few years back, I was subscribed to so many newsletters that I started filtering them into folders and essentially treating them just like feeds.
What I prefer to newsletters is user-requested content, where you can say "Send me an email when you write a new blog post/article/whatever about $SUBJECT". I'm not usually interested in everything a site has to offer, but if they're willing to pick out the things I would be interested in, I'm much more likely to want to see it.