That's funny, I'm 42, eating whatever the hell I want to, including probably more than my share of junk, but I get about 75 minutes a day of vigorous cardio exercise (I ride a bike 21 miles a day to/from work) and I feel like I'm 20.
Fast food is a huge problem. I eat a sandwich from Subway 3 or 4 times a month, apart from that I probably hit a fast food joint no more than 6 times a year. I don't even go to some fast food restaurants; McDonalds makes me wanna puke. But I do rather like Taco Hell and Subway.
yeah, I wouldn't be sorry to see HFCS disappear. Blech. Gimme good old fashioned sugar any day.
It's funny, I don't go to doctors because they never find anything wrong with me. The only trouble I've ever had are colds and flu, which they can do nothing about, and a stress fracture in my leg, for which the advice was "well, take it easy until it stops hurting."
OK, I have had strep throat twice. I went in and said "I have strep throat. Give me a prescription for some antibiotics." Had to pay $150 for the tests and whatnot so they'd give it to me.
It doesn't take long before "Yeah, you're sick. You'll get better on your own, there's nothing we can do to make it faster. Gimme 150 bucks." gets old.
Just because we have all this space doesn't mean we are obliged to use it in an idiotic fashion. Starting sometime around the 1940's, this country moved towards the sprawl design, where everything is build many miles apart, and people got as far from work as possible. Now we're left with the result, which is that in some parts of the country, it's practically impossible to live without a car. It probably IS impossible in some locations. This is not necessary. There's no good reason why anyone HAS to live 35 miles from where they work. It is the practical reality right now, because many people work in areas where there just isn't enough housing, but it doesn't have to be that way. At some point it will change, the question is how much hardship we have to go through on the way there.
I live about 10 miles from work, and I commute daily by bicycle. It's very practical, and when I consider the amount of time I DON'T have to spend on a treadmill every day staring at a wall, it's a good use of time as well. The other day I saw a short documentary about Copenhagen, and how much bikes are used there. I couldn't even finish watching it, the damn town is so beautiful it just depresses me how much we DON'T have what we COULD have.
I don't know about Apple's program, but in general electronics "recycling" involves shipping them to some impoverished country where people making practically nothing remove chips from boards by burning them over a coal fire to melt the lead/tin solder. As you can imagine, these people are not exactly working in healthy conditions. In fact, the report I was listening to recently said that the operations were polluting the area so badly that this little village by a river had to start importing bottled water because the river was now poisonous. It's also likely that the ground will be unable to support crops for hundreds of years (until the toxins ALL wash into the river and downstream to poison some other places). All in all, you're probably better dumping the stuff in a landfill here. At least in the US, landfills are contained areas that are monitored and controlled. Send them to a "recycler" and they'll get released into the environment in the worst possible ways.
I like to work 6AM to 2PM. I also bike commute 11 miles in a rural area so I have to admit that the "rush hour" that I'm avoiding is a 20-car lineup at one stoplight, and a bit of slowdown around the schools. Plus it's a lot more fun to ride in the dark (assuming you have good lighting).
Like you, I found that I can get a lot more stuff done before everyone else comes in and starts to bother me. It's not so bad now, but I started this 15 years ago when I was working at a place that sold computers over the phone. Once 8AM hit, you were on the phone constantly, and since we only had 3 employees, we were doing tech support, selling, building machines, installing software, and boxing up orders, often all at the same time. By coming in at 4AM, I got more actual work done before 8AM than I would normally have been able to do in a week.
Gee, I thought the $250 ticket price was the fault of the artists thinking their presence was worth $20,000 a night, combined with the music being so lame they need 200 support people and 4 million dollars worth of equipment to make the concert be a memorable experience.
They could replace all that money with some talent and still put on shows.
So I can put some handguns into luggage, but I need to cut out the words "this is a test" out of lead sheet and put it in the liner of my suitcase, so it'll show up on the x-ray.
Wow, that's interesting. It's misnamed though. Rather than "support websites" it should be called "commit impression fraud"
They could extend it just a bit more and add "commit click fraud"
Don't get me wrong, adblock is the first extension I load on a new install, but no way would I turn that on. If people aren't looking at ads, the advertisers should know that. If they think people are looking at ads and never clicking on them, then they conclude logically that web ads are not effective, and they devalue or totally stop using web ads.
It'll probably be the end of lots of free web content at some point, but that's OK by me, I'm willing to pay for the stuff I like. A lot of the stuff I view every day is totally in the "take it or leave it" category though. If it went pay, I'd drop it instantly.
That link went nowhere. I think you meant xinehq.de
I'll check it out. I'll be very happy if I can install and go.
In the past I've installed Linux, and what I've encountered is basically something like this: We would like to give you a DVD player, but it's not legal in the US. If you'd like to take your chances, you can try going here (link) and downloading the source, and building it yourself. Be sure to also build (this) module, and this one, and maybe this one too.
When I try to do all that, I wind up in a twisty maze of little dependencies, and 2 hours later after hunting for required libraries, resolving all kinds of path irregularities, maybe something that doesn't like the kernel I have installed, etc, etc, I say screw it and go put the DVD into my set-top box to watch.
I'll give this a try. If it's an RPM I can install, then put a DVD in and have it play, I'm happy.
if you don't get the ads, you're basically stealing their bandwidth.
I have a problem with people constantly using that "stealing" word. If someone puts a basket of apples on the sidewalk and says "please take one" and I do, I'm not stealing the apple. If they happen to place the apple on a table with a big advert plastered on the wall in front of it, and I don't care to look at the ad before taking the apple, I'm still not stealing apples. If the ad bothers me so much that I install a blinder on my glasses so I don't have to look at the hideous thing, I'm STILL not stealing apples.
LiveJournal took off and continues to grow based on their free accounts. A great many of my friends now have paid accounts, and absolutely love LJ and post there multiple times per day. But LJ probably wouldn't have taken off, and the would not continue to grow, without free accounts. Nobody would buy an account without trying it first, and also nobody wants a soapbox in a deserted part of town; you need the free accounts to give an audience to your LJ posts.
I personally won't buy an account because I don't really care much about LJ. I have a friends list that I read, but if I went to read and encountered a page that said "you need to shell out $5 for a lifetime membership in order to use LJ" I'd walk away forever.
They're free to set up any rules they want. If they feel that not viewing ads is stealing, then they're free to terminate my account. I won't cry. It's their site. They make the rules, and they live with what the new rules do to their revenue stream, positive or negative.
Lack of decent video drivers is the primary reason why even though I've tried Linux on my desktop about a dozen times, I never stick with it. The crappy video performance always finally drives me nuts and I give up and reinstall Windows.
I really want to move to Linux. If there were good video drivers, plus real, working, full-featured DVD player software (*), I'd probably move and stay.
(AFAIK, current DVD playing solutions for Linux don't play DVDs, they are just plumbing that pipes a video and audio stream into a decoder pair. Fine unless you actually want to use menus, special features, multi-angle, etc, etc.)
Well, if we were building sensible systems, we'd reprocess the fuel. We could reduce the waste to a fraction of the volume by doing that AND what we finally did throw away would be much lower level fuel.
As far as someone playing with the magic glowing glass, that's not an environmental disaster, that's a few people getting killed. Not to sound too crass about it, but people get killed all the time. I don't think it's a very good choice to not use nuclear power because a handful of idiots might get radiation poisoning in 1000 years, and instead continue to puke coal smoke into the air by the tons per day. Even if Yucca were breached, the stuff's still encapsulated and won't get into the water en masse and cause huge contamination anyway.
I'm pretty darned environmentally minded myself, to the point where I ride a bike 20 miles a day to keep from coughing out 20 pounds of CO2; and I've always been in favor of nuclear power. I wish we'd go to a decent FULL CYCLE nuclear system including fuel reprocessing. What we have now is like killing a cow just to get the flank steak, and throwing the rest away. Terribly inefficient.
It's precisely BECAUSE I want to leave the planet cleaner for future generations that I'm in favor of nuclear power.
I gotta believe that LCDs are going to be better on the environment.
The big hazard AFAIK is lead. The glass in the tube in CRTs has a bunch of lead in it. Also if you look at the circuit boards, it has a lot of old-school big components with honkin' hunks of lead solder.
An LCD doesn't have the X-Ray danger than you need to be shielded from, so it doesn't need the lead for the screen. Also the circuit board is pretty much all VLSI surface mount chips and conductive traces (apart from the power supply, which is also pretty compact usually).
Unless there's a hazard other than lead in the LCD, I think it's a no brainer to go for the LCD. Especially since the price on them is so damn low these days. They're only about 2x what a CRT costs, and they draw less power so that will probably pay back before the thing croaks.
Lesse; say a 17" monitor, $200 for LCD instead of $100 for CRT. Say it draws 50 watts less, power @ 10 cents/KWH. $100 * 1KWY/0.10$ = 1000KWH saved for payback; @ 50 watts it'll take 1000/0.05 = 20,000 hours of operation to burn $100 less power. That's about 5 years at 12 hours a day, 330 days a year (hey, you have vacation days!). It should last that long. But I'm just guessing on the 50 watts.
Yes, I was considering building the machine, because I didn't realize until the guy pointed it out that I couldn't go out and buy the OS apart from the hardware.
I've never so much as pushed the "on" button on a Mac. I certainly didn't know how their licensing worked, and since this is the first time I've ever encountered an OS I couldn't just go buy without hardware, I was somewhat taken aback by it.
Apple therefore closed the door for me. $600 is too much money for me to put down to test out an OS just because some people say it's neat, and I think the screen shots are pretty, and it might be able to replace Windows. I'd like to escape Microsoft, but I'm not going to pay that kind of money for a maybe.
And you betray a infantile understanding of ethics and morality if you think not getting your way is justification for violating somebody else's IP and wishes for their property.
Did I say I'd DONE it? No, I said I WANTED to BUY OS X. I'm not going to move to Mac because honestly I'm not convinced that it can take over all my jobs. I'd like to play with it. If it turns out that OS X can do everything I need, I probably will buy a Mac eventually. But I'm not going to go out and buy a piece of hardware that's locked to an OS that I'm not sure I want to move to.
Therefore, as I said, Apple gets not a dime from me, and I don't get OS X.
So you're saying that Apple can't do what MS does?
A $500 profit seems pretty fat for a Mac Mini that sells for $599. If by the $100 profit on the option 2 that you mention you are assuming that OS X sold for $200 and cost $100, then Apple is getting hardware for free.
I don't really care what they price their OS at. If they're not capable of making the OS run on generic hardware, that's fine.
I'm also not asking for support. What I want to do is to build a machine on my own hardware to run OS X, buy the OS X, and if it doesn't work it's my problem because I'm running an unsupported system. I have no problem with that.
Heck, I might even be willing to buy their hardware, but I want any hardware I buy to be completely usable under other OSs. I wouldn't buy a machine that only runs Windows either, any more than I'd buy a trailer that could only haul lumber of a certain size.
I didn't say I'd actually gone out and stolen the OS. I said I *wanted* to run the OS. But I won't, because I can't get it legally. I'm not going to do it. I'd like to be running OS X but I don't want to buy even more hardware than I already have.
I realize they don't HAVE to sell it to me. But it seems to me that if a company has a product that people want, they should put a price on it and make it available. If there are externalities to selling the product separately then they should alter the price accordingly.
If they ever make it available, I'll buy it. If they don't, I won't run OS X. Pretty simple.
I was just arguing with a friend who happens to be an Apple employee about this. I was toying with the idea of building an OS X x86 compatible PC using the HCL on sourceforge. He said that by doing this I was stealing from his livelihood.
I said "No, I'm perfectly willing to buy OS X. Put it in the stores and I'll pay for it. Keep it locked to hardware and you won't see a dime from me. APPLE is stealing from your livelihood by not selling me what I want."
I don't want to buy hardware. I have hardware. I want my hardware to be fungible and able to run any OS I care to put on it this week. I want to be able to choose what I want from the vast variety of what's available, and not have to choose from just what Apple thinks will satisfy me. I'm not going to buy hardware that's priced above market for no reason that I care about (I don't care how pretty it looks, and I don't care about some (mythical, as far as I can tell) higher level of reliability. I just want to run the software and OS that I decide to run.
It's sometimes said that PC users buy machines to run applications; Apple users buy machines to run the OS. I think that Apple is afraid to put the OS on the market standalone, because in lieu of hardware sales income, they would be charging more than MS charges for Windows, and they'd draw comparisons.
That seems fine to me. It is a better OS, so it's OK for it to cost more.
Apple has to some extent maintained the "ease of use" paradigm in the same way that GUIs are easy to use; they restrict choice. If you give people less choice, they are less confused. If they want to enter the larger market, they need to figure out how to continue to deliver their historic strengths while moving into a position of giving the users the wider variety of choices that they are used to in other OSs.
FWIW, it's probably at least as important to recommend against purchasing them (as you are doing here) as to personally boycott them.
Oh, I do. A whole lot of people come to me for recommendations. Just in wireless routers alone, I have probably directly recommended about a dozen or more in the last year. I can guarantee you that NONE of those have been for Belkin equipment, and I wouldn't recommend them if they were free and were giving out candy bars with them.
Since hearing about the extent of this problem on NPR Science Friday a few months ago, I've decided to just hang on to my stuff until there's some decent way to get it REALLY recycled.
I mostly reuse computer cases, just swapping out mainboards. Mainboards and old PCI cards can stack pretty compactly. It's the couple of old dead CRTs that are really taking up the space.
I'll take them somewhere when I can be confident that they'll be handled in a sane manner. They'll probably still be in my basement in 20 years, knowing how fast things move in the environmental regulation area, particularly internationally.
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive
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Then the firewall starts flagging you because you're keeping an SSL connection open for a long time, which is easy to detect and different than normal https surfing, and you get an email asking what the hell you're doing, and would you like to come over and discuss it with management. Thanks, just using gmail works for me.
... And if anyone from Belkin is listening, I have not bought one single piece of Belkin equipment since, not even a cable.
It's been tough at times, sometimes Belkin is the only local choice, or has the best match to my needs that's readily available. But I decided that if it comes down to giving Belkin a dime or waiting a week, I get over to Newegg and order something from there instead.
I gave up on D-Link long ago. Granted, their stuff isn't total crap like it was 10-15 years ago, but it's still not good.
Re:PINE + PortaPuTTY + Thumb Drive
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Our company has firewalls that inspect packet contents. They will (and have in the past) detect SSH even running on other ports, and in that case you're in even more trouble for circumvention.
I was approaching 200 pounds and resolved to reverse that trend, so I started running on the treadmill at work, got to 4 miles a day. The problem is, it's deadly dull even with music, and then I got a stress fracture in my shin and had to stop for a while.
So I bought a decent bike and started commuting 21 miles round trip a day. It's now my favorite part of the day, I get about 70 minutes a day to de-stress and to do my creative thinking that I normally only had a 5 minute shower a day to do it in.
I find I get a (perhaps perverse) sense of pleasure in riding in all kinds of weather; below-zero (F) temps, 40-MPH headwinds, rain storms, whatever. If you're well equipped (rain gear and lighting) it's great fun. The first year it's tough to keep motivated, but once I got in shape, I found that on the days that I drove, I ALWAYS wished I would have ridden instead, and I NEVER wished I'd driven when I rode in. Now I simply don't drive unless I absolutely have to.
I get to work, and back home again, feeling like superman and ready to do anything. Also as an environmentalist I like the fact that every day I ride I kick out 20 pounds less CO2 into the atmosphere.
At 42 after 2 years of riding I'm in better shape than I ever have been. I hope to continue riding daily until I'm physically unable to anymore, which could be a long time since people who keep up that level of activity often continue to ride into their 80's and 90's; regular aerobic exercise is better than anything else to make you feel great and not wind up a drooling wreck in a rest home at 70.
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That's funny, I'm 42, eating whatever the hell I want to, including probably more than my share of junk, but I get about 75 minutes a day of vigorous cardio exercise (I ride a bike 21 miles a day to/from work) and I feel like I'm 20.
Fast food is a huge problem. I eat a sandwich from Subway 3 or 4 times a month, apart from that I probably hit a fast food joint no more than 6 times a year. I don't even go to some fast food restaurants; McDonalds makes me wanna puke. But I do rather like Taco Hell and Subway.
yeah, I wouldn't be sorry to see HFCS disappear. Blech. Gimme good old fashioned sugar any day.
It's funny, I don't go to doctors because they never find anything wrong with me. The only trouble I've ever had are colds and flu, which they can do nothing about, and a stress fracture in my leg, for which the advice was "well, take it easy until it stops hurting."
OK, I have had strep throat twice. I went in and said "I have strep throat. Give me a prescription for some antibiotics." Had to pay $150 for the tests and whatnot so they'd give it to me.
It doesn't take long before "Yeah, you're sick. You'll get better on your own, there's nothing we can do to make it faster. Gimme 150 bucks." gets old.
Just because we have all this space doesn't mean we are obliged to use it in an idiotic fashion. Starting sometime around the 1940's, this country moved towards the sprawl design, where everything is build many miles apart, and people got as far from work as possible. Now we're left with the result, which is that in some parts of the country, it's practically impossible to live without a car. It probably IS impossible in some locations.
This is not necessary. There's no good reason why anyone HAS to live 35 miles from where they work. It is the practical reality right now, because many people work in areas where there just isn't enough housing, but it doesn't have to be that way.
At some point it will change, the question is how much hardship we have to go through on the way there.
I live about 10 miles from work, and I commute daily by bicycle. It's very practical, and when I consider the amount of time I DON'T have to spend on a treadmill every day staring at a wall, it's a good use of time as well. The other day I saw a short documentary about Copenhagen, and how much bikes are used there. I couldn't even finish watching it, the damn town is so beautiful it just depresses me how much we DON'T have what we COULD have.
I don't know about Apple's program, but in general electronics "recycling" involves shipping them to some impoverished country where people making practically nothing remove chips from boards by burning them over a coal fire to melt the lead/tin solder.
As you can imagine, these people are not exactly working in healthy conditions. In fact, the report I was listening to recently said that the operations were polluting the area so badly that this little village by a river had to start importing bottled water because the river was now poisonous. It's also likely that the ground will be unable to support crops for hundreds of years (until the toxins ALL wash into the river and downstream to poison some other places).
All in all, you're probably better dumping the stuff in a landfill here. At least in the US, landfills are contained areas that are monitored and controlled. Send them to a "recycler" and they'll get released into the environment in the worst possible ways.
I like to work 6AM to 2PM. I also bike commute 11 miles in a rural area so I have to admit that the "rush hour" that I'm avoiding is a 20-car lineup at one stoplight, and a bit of slowdown around the schools. Plus it's a lot more fun to ride in the dark (assuming you have good lighting).
Like you, I found that I can get a lot more stuff done before everyone else comes in and starts to bother me. It's not so bad now, but I started this 15 years ago when I was working at a place that sold computers over the phone. Once 8AM hit, you were on the phone constantly, and since we only had 3 employees, we were doing tech support, selling, building machines, installing software, and boxing up orders, often all at the same time. By coming in at 4AM, I got more actual work done before 8AM than I would normally have been able to do in a week.
Gee, I thought the $250 ticket price was the fault of the artists thinking their presence was worth $20,000 a night, combined with the music being so lame they need 200 support people and 4 million dollars worth of equipment to make the concert be a memorable experience.
They could replace all that money with some talent and still put on shows.
So I can put some handguns into luggage, but I need to cut out the words "this is a test" out of lead sheet and put it in the liner of my suitcase, so it'll show up on the x-ray.
Wow, that's interesting. It's misnamed though. Rather than "support websites" it should be called "commit impression fraud"
They could extend it just a bit more and add "commit click fraud"
Don't get me wrong, adblock is the first extension I load on a new install, but no way would I turn that on. If people aren't looking at ads, the advertisers should know that. If they think people are looking at ads and never clicking on them, then they conclude logically that web ads are not effective, and they devalue or totally stop using web ads.
It'll probably be the end of lots of free web content at some point, but that's OK by me, I'm willing to pay for the stuff I like. A lot of the stuff I view every day is totally in the "take it or leave it" category though. If it went pay, I'd drop it instantly.
That link went nowhere.
I think you meant xinehq.de
I'll check it out. I'll be very happy if I can install and go.
In the past I've installed Linux, and what I've encountered is basically something like this:
We would like to give you a DVD player, but it's not legal in the US. If you'd like to take your chances, you can try going here (link) and downloading the source, and building it yourself. Be sure to also build (this) module, and this one, and maybe this one too.
When I try to do all that, I wind up in a twisty maze of little dependencies, and 2 hours later after hunting for required libraries, resolving all kinds of path irregularities, maybe something that doesn't like the kernel I have installed, etc, etc, I say screw it and go put the DVD into my set-top box to watch.
I'll give this a try. If it's an RPM I can install, then put a DVD in and have it play, I'm happy.
if you don't get the ads, you're basically stealing their bandwidth.
I have a problem with people constantly using that "stealing" word. If someone puts a basket of apples on the sidewalk and says "please take one" and I do, I'm not stealing the apple. If they happen to place the apple on a table with a big advert plastered on the wall in front of it, and I don't care to look at the ad before taking the apple, I'm still not stealing apples. If the ad bothers me so much that I install a blinder on my glasses so I don't have to look at the hideous thing, I'm STILL not stealing apples.
LiveJournal took off and continues to grow based on their free accounts. A great many of my friends now have paid accounts, and absolutely love LJ and post there multiple times per day. But LJ probably wouldn't have taken off, and the would not continue to grow, without free accounts. Nobody would buy an account without trying it first, and also nobody wants a soapbox in a deserted part of town; you need the free accounts to give an audience to your LJ posts.
I personally won't buy an account because I don't really care much about LJ. I have a friends list that I read, but if I went to read and encountered a page that said "you need to shell out $5 for a lifetime membership in order to use LJ" I'd walk away forever.
They're free to set up any rules they want. If they feel that not viewing ads is stealing, then they're free to terminate my account. I won't cry. It's their site. They make the rules, and they live with what the new rules do to their revenue stream, positive or negative.
Lack of decent video drivers is the primary reason why even though I've tried Linux on my desktop about a dozen times, I never stick with it. The crappy video performance always finally drives me nuts and I give up and reinstall Windows.
I really want to move to Linux. If there were good video drivers, plus real, working, full-featured DVD player software (*), I'd probably move and stay.
(AFAIK, current DVD playing solutions for Linux don't play DVDs, they are just plumbing that pipes a video and audio stream into a decoder pair. Fine unless you actually want to use menus, special features, multi-angle, etc, etc.)
Well, if we were building sensible systems, we'd reprocess the fuel. We could reduce the waste to a fraction of the volume by doing that AND what we finally did throw away would be much lower level fuel.
As far as someone playing with the magic glowing glass, that's not an environmental disaster, that's a few people getting killed. Not to sound too crass about it, but people get killed all the time. I don't think it's a very good choice to not use nuclear power because a handful of idiots might get radiation poisoning in 1000 years, and instead continue to puke coal smoke into the air by the tons per day. Even if Yucca were breached, the stuff's still encapsulated and won't get into the water en masse and cause huge contamination anyway.
I'm pretty darned environmentally minded myself, to the point where I ride a bike 20 miles a day to keep from coughing out 20 pounds of CO2; and I've always been in favor of nuclear power. I wish we'd go to a decent FULL CYCLE nuclear system including fuel reprocessing. What we have now is like killing a cow just to get the flank steak, and throwing the rest away. Terribly inefficient.
It's precisely BECAUSE I want to leave the planet cleaner for future generations that I'm in favor of nuclear power.
I gotta believe that LCDs are going to be better on the environment.
The big hazard AFAIK is lead.
The glass in the tube in CRTs has a bunch of lead in it. Also if you look at the circuit boards, it has a lot of old-school big components with honkin' hunks of lead solder.
An LCD doesn't have the X-Ray danger than you need to be shielded from, so it doesn't need the lead for the screen. Also the circuit board is pretty much all VLSI surface mount chips and conductive traces (apart from the power supply, which is also pretty compact usually).
Unless there's a hazard other than lead in the LCD, I think it's a no brainer to go for the LCD. Especially since the price on them is so damn low these days. They're only about 2x what a CRT costs, and they draw less power so that will probably pay back before the thing croaks.
Lesse; say a 17" monitor, $200 for LCD instead of $100 for CRT. Say it draws 50 watts less, power @ 10 cents/KWH. $100 * 1KWY/0.10$ = 1000KWH saved for payback; @ 50 watts it'll take 1000/0.05 = 20,000 hours of operation to burn $100 less power. That's about 5 years at 12 hours a day, 330 days a year (hey, you have vacation days!). It should last that long. But I'm just guessing on the 50 watts.
Yes, I was considering building the machine, because I didn't realize until the guy pointed it out that I couldn't go out and buy the OS apart from the hardware.
I've never so much as pushed the "on" button on a Mac. I certainly didn't know how their licensing worked, and since this is the first time I've ever encountered an OS I couldn't just go buy without hardware, I was somewhat taken aback by it.
Apple therefore closed the door for me. $600 is too much money for me to put down to test out an OS just because some people say it's neat, and I think the screen shots are pretty, and it might be able to replace Windows. I'd like to escape Microsoft, but I'm not going to pay that kind of money for a maybe.
And you betray a infantile understanding of ethics and morality if you think not getting your way is justification for violating somebody else's IP and wishes for their property.
Did I say I'd DONE it? No, I said I WANTED to BUY OS X. I'm not going to move to Mac because honestly I'm not convinced that it can take over all my jobs. I'd like to play with it. If it turns out that OS X can do everything I need, I probably will buy a Mac eventually. But I'm not going to go out and buy a piece of hardware that's locked to an OS that I'm not sure I want to move to.
Therefore, as I said, Apple gets not a dime from me, and I don't get OS X.
So you're saying that Apple can't do what MS does?
A $500 profit seems pretty fat for a Mac Mini that sells for $599. If by the $100 profit on the option 2 that you mention you are assuming that OS X sold for $200 and cost $100, then Apple is getting hardware for free.
I don't really care what they price their OS at. If they're not capable of making the OS run on generic hardware, that's fine.
I'm also not asking for support. What I want to do is to build a machine on my own hardware to run OS X, buy the OS X, and if it doesn't work it's my problem because I'm running an unsupported system. I have no problem with that.
Heck, I might even be willing to buy their hardware, but I want any hardware I buy to be completely usable under other OSs. I wouldn't buy a machine that only runs Windows either, any more than I'd buy a trailer that could only haul lumber of a certain size.
I didn't say I'd actually gone out and stolen the OS. I said I *wanted* to run the OS. But I won't, because I can't get it legally. I'm not going to do it. I'd like to be running OS X but I don't want to buy even more hardware than I already have.
I realize they don't HAVE to sell it to me. But it seems to me that if a company has a product that people want, they should put a price on it and make it available. If there are externalities to selling the product separately then they should alter the price accordingly.
If they ever make it available, I'll buy it. If they don't, I won't run OS X. Pretty simple.
Apple is a hardware company selling hardware I don't want.
They also happen to have an excellent piece of software that I do want. But they won't sell it to me.
I was just arguing with a friend who happens to be an Apple employee about this. I was toying with the idea of building an OS X x86 compatible PC using the HCL on sourceforge. He said that by doing this I was stealing from his livelihood.
I said "No, I'm perfectly willing to buy OS X. Put it in the stores and I'll pay for it. Keep it locked to hardware and you won't see a dime from me. APPLE is stealing from your livelihood by not selling me what I want."
I don't want to buy hardware. I have hardware. I want my hardware to be fungible and able to run any OS I care to put on it this week. I want to be able to choose what I want from the vast variety of what's available, and not have to choose from just what Apple thinks will satisfy me. I'm not going to buy hardware that's priced above market for no reason that I care about (I don't care how pretty it looks, and I don't care about some (mythical, as far as I can tell) higher level of reliability. I just want to run the software and OS that I decide to run.
It's sometimes said that PC users buy machines to run applications; Apple users buy machines to run the OS. I think that Apple is afraid to put the OS on the market standalone, because in lieu of hardware sales income, they would be charging more than MS charges for Windows, and they'd draw comparisons.
That seems fine to me. It is a better OS, so it's OK for it to cost more.
Apple has to some extent maintained the "ease of use" paradigm in the same way that GUIs are easy to use; they restrict choice. If you give people less choice, they are less confused. If they want to enter the larger market, they need to figure out how to continue to deliver their historic strengths while moving into a position of giving the users the wider variety of choices that they are used to in other OSs.
FWIW, it's probably at least as important to recommend against purchasing them (as you are doing here) as to personally boycott them.
Oh, I do. A whole lot of people come to me for recommendations. Just in wireless routers alone, I have probably directly recommended about a dozen or more in the last year. I can guarantee you that NONE of those have been for Belkin equipment, and I wouldn't recommend them if they were free and were giving out candy bars with them.
Since hearing about the extent of this problem on NPR Science Friday a few months ago, I've decided to just hang on to my stuff until there's some decent way to get it REALLY recycled.
I mostly reuse computer cases, just swapping out mainboards. Mainboards and old PCI cards can stack pretty compactly. It's the couple of old dead CRTs that are really taking up the space.
I'll take them somewhere when I can be confident that they'll be handled in a sane manner. They'll probably still be in my basement in 20 years, knowing how fast things move in the environmental regulation area, particularly internationally.
Then the firewall starts flagging you because you're keeping an SSL connection open for a long time, which is easy to detect and different than normal https surfing, and you get an email asking what the hell you're doing, and would you like to come over and discuss it with management.
Thanks, just using gmail works for me.
... And if anyone from Belkin is listening, I have not bought one single piece of Belkin equipment since, not even a cable.
It's been tough at times, sometimes Belkin is the only local choice, or has the best match to my needs that's readily available. But I decided that if it comes down to giving Belkin a dime or waiting a week, I get over to Newegg and order something from there instead.
I gave up on D-Link long ago. Granted, their stuff isn't total crap like it was 10-15 years ago, but it's still not good.
Our company has firewalls that inspect packet contents. They will (and have in the past) detect SSH even running on other ports, and in that case you're in even more trouble for circumvention.
I was approaching 200 pounds and resolved to reverse that trend, so I started running on the treadmill at work, got to 4 miles a day. The problem is, it's deadly dull even with music, and then I got a stress fracture in my shin and had to stop for a while.
So I bought a decent bike and started commuting 21 miles round trip a day. It's now my favorite part of the day, I get about 70 minutes a day to de-stress and to do my creative thinking that I normally only had a 5 minute shower a day to do it in.
I find I get a (perhaps perverse) sense of pleasure in riding in all kinds of weather; below-zero (F) temps, 40-MPH headwinds, rain storms, whatever. If you're well equipped (rain gear and lighting) it's great fun. The first year it's tough to keep motivated, but once I got in shape, I found that on the days that I drove, I ALWAYS wished I would have ridden instead, and I NEVER wished I'd driven when I rode in. Now I simply don't drive unless I absolutely have to.
I get to work, and back home again, feeling like superman and ready to do anything. Also as an environmentalist I like the fact that every day I ride I kick out 20 pounds less CO2 into the atmosphere.
At 42 after 2 years of riding I'm in better shape than I ever have been. I hope to continue riding daily until I'm physically unable to anymore, which could be a long time since people who keep up that level of activity often continue to ride into their 80's and 90's; regular aerobic exercise is better than anything else to make you feel great and not wind up a drooling wreck in a rest home at 70.