I'm not sure what you're referring to. Macbook and Macbook Pros are configured with Nvidia 9400M or 9600M chipsets. They may not be powerful but at least they are dedicated graphics solutions. Far superior to Intel Integrated graphics, and they provide working hardware acceleration for H.264/VC-1. The Intel G45 chipset does so - but only with MPC-HC - not for commercial blu-ray playback - and it had some corruption last I checked.
How mature - don't respond to any substantive point I made. Just claim that I am biased.
By the way, I've used Ubuntu 6.06, Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu 8.10, Debian Testing, Debian Stable (Sarge and Lenny) and several versions of Fedora. My sister has OS X, so I've setup printers and done some minor troubleshooting there as well. So, it's not as if I've only ever used Windows.
Yeah, but very few consumers have access to MSDN, and those users likely would be counted in the September figure with Beta/RC users.
In addition, I bet a lot of people haven't received or installed their Win 7 upgrade disks. I didn't get mine until the middle of November - about 3 weeks after retail release. I'm sure many people don't upgrade immediately. I will be upgrading my gf's laptop in a few weeks, for example.
Well, I personally upgraded all of my machines to Windows 7 x64. I was an XP holdout after hating Vista's slow performance (pre SP1). I began using Win 7 after the Beta was released and used it regularly from RC on. Now both of my systems are running Windows 7 x64 - one Professional and the other Home Professional. The Win 7 Professional x64 copy was obtained via the Yale MSDN Academic Alliance network, and the Home Premium copy was free with the purchase of a Vista laptop (that I immediately upgraded to Win 7 RC awaiting the retail release.)
As an MSDN user, I've actually been using the RTM since before the October, 22 launch. I've run into several kernel-level driver issues (BSOD when enabling jumbo frames on an Atheros PCI-E NIC fixed by reverting to the MS driver, Realtek audio driver refuses to release apps, preventing the system from shutting down, restarting, or going into standby - fixed by reverting to the MS driver or upgrading to the latest driver, and high kernel memory usage with an older Nvidia driver). Each bug was fixed by either using the recommended MS driver, installed by default during the install process, or by upgrading to the latest driver.
There are a number of features I like: - Feels as fast as XP with better UI - Meaningful 64 bit support (drivers for everything) compared to XP-64 and to a lesser extent, Vista 64 bit when it was released - Optimized for Core i7 systems (Core parking improved, doesn't bounce processes from core to core like Vista, uses less power) - Libraries are great (I have TV shows and Movies spread over many external TB drives which all show up in one library) - System indexing with the ability to search the remote index on a shared computer instantly - first time a search over a SMB network has been usable - File sharing performance greatly improved vs. XP
My favorite features at the moment are the improvements to networking. The Homegroup feature does make setting up a network easier. However, I like it due to the addition of remotely-accessible Libraries and instant searching of remote machines.
But the most significant networking improvement vis-a-v XP SP3 is the network throughput over SMB. SMB1 quite simply stinks. I would usually get 7-8 MB/sec transfer speeds in a 100 Mbit connection whereas I always got 11.5 MB/sec - fully saturing the line - with SMB2 in Win 7 - Win 7 transfers and Linux-Linux SFTP/SCP. You really need Vista/7 or Linux to take full advantage of Gigabit networking (OS X performance stinks based on some benchmarks I've seen). SMB2 can saturate a gigabit line at 115 MB/sec whereas at best you'll get around 40-50% usage in XP.
The limitation for me has been my hard drive speed. I've been able to transfer 10 GB movies at 95 MB/sec avg speeds from my laptop to Core i7 desktop using eSATA attached storage on the laptop. I got the identical speed transferring from the same hard drive attached via eSATA on the desktop to the internal SATA drive. RAM --> RAM transfers in jperf sustain 118 MB/sec (99.9% utilization), and I can do about 115 MB/sec if I have a large file in RAM and copy it over the network.
Overally, I'm quite pleased with Windows 7 and glad I upgraded.
You probably meant the 5850, which had an initial MSRP of $260 but is now selling at $300-310 due to supply issues. The 5870 is ATI's flagship card and had a MSRP of $380. It's currently on sale for $400-420.
Well, the problem is that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply at all in this situation. There is no state action. The 4th Amendment protects against encroachment by the federal government, and by incorporation via the 14th Amendment, also provides protection against state and local government actions.
However, the conduct here is being done by a private entity. In addition, they will almost certainly have consent to collect the information as part of the long form contracts you're required to sign to use their service. While the contracts can be attacked on grounds of adhesiveness and unfair surprise, the 4th Amendment simply does not apply.
The information is not being collected by the police for the purposes of an adversarial proceeding. If the police were collecting this information without your consent, there might be an issue. That's not to say federal or state privacy laws may not be applicable. However, the 4th Amendment certainly is not.
Sounds more like a BIOS issue. I've installed Windows 7 in both AHCI and IDE modes. Both work. The problem normally is that if you install in IDE mode and decide later to switch to native SATA (AHCI), you must change a registry setting or Windows won't boot properly as it won't have loaded the necessary SATA driver.
Have you upgraded your BIOS to the latest version? I actually found the Windows 7 install to be the easiest OS install I've ever done on Windows or Linux. All my hardware worked after booting. Gigabit LAN. Wireless setup during setup. SATA. eSATA. Audio drivers. They even had a fairly recent Nvidia driver allowing me to enter the system at 1920x1200 - not 800x600. I quickly updated my audio and video drivers and everything worked perfectly.
For many sources you can get 50% compression easily with FLAC or APE lossless audio. On many classical tracks, you can do nearly 66% lossless compression. Lossy audio compression schemes work by removing details that humans can't or are unlikely to hear anyhow. At 48 Kb/sec most people should be able to hear the difference, but we have known for a while that most people can't differentiate uncompressed PCM audio CD audio from 128 kb LAME encoded MP3s.
I thought I would describe my experience doing the same in XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7:
Windows XP: Connect HDMI to external display. Turn on machine. Manually select external monitor in NVIDIA settings. Sound outputted to TV automatically.
Windows Vista: Connect HDMI to external display. Manually select external monitor in NVIDIA settings. Manually select HDMI output in Control Panel (easy to do).
Windows 7: Connect HDMI to external display. Windows automatically switches to external display and outputs sound to TV. Disconnect to automatically return to PC speakers/laptop monitor. (Used Intel Integrated Graphics)
You can do a fresh install with an Upgrade disk. Just choose the custom install option and when the install finishes, "upgrade" over the current install. You really don't need to buy a Full Version. I've done several fresh installs with upgrade disks. This functionality is not advertised of course.
Dell's 15" laptops are cheaper because they use cheap parts (Dual-Core Pentiums vs. Core 2 Duos), less RAM, cheaper hard drives, and most importantly, they're huge, heavy, and have shit battery life. Less money is spent on design because there's more space for fans and airflow.
When you buy a 13" or even 14" laptop, you're paying for the reduced thickness, size, and weight, longer battery life, and higher quality parts.
And their prices on the 13.3" Macbooks aren't that great either. For $1,000 you get a 2.13 Ghz C2D, 13.3" 1280x800 16:10 screen, 2 GB of DDR2 800 RAM, a 160 GB Hard Drive, an Nvidia 9400M chipset, 802.11n wireless + Bluetooth, a 5 hour battery and 5 lb. size.
Here is what I got for $650 at Best Buy:
Asus U80A:
2.1 Ghz C2D 14.1" 16:9 LED 1366x768 screen 4 GB DDR2 800 320 GB Hard Drive Integrated Intel 4500MHD Graphics 802.11n Wireless, Gigabit Wired HDMI/VGA Out 4 lbs, 7 hour battery (6 hours normal usage with wifi + browsing, 8 hours without browsing)
So:
Pros: - Equivilant CPU - Double the RAM - Double the hard drive space - 1 lb. lighter - 2 hour longer battery life. - $350 Cheaper!
Cons: - No Bluetooth (added a USB bluetooth dongle for $15) - No dedicated graphics.
Nonetheless, you can't play games on a Mac anyhow so the dedicated graphics doesn't get you much. My Integrated Intel graphics can hardware decode 1080p H.264 in MPC-HC (Blu-Ray + x264 encodes) which is what I wanted.
With the ultra-bright 16:9 LED screen and hardware accelerated decoding, I can watch HD movies on battery which is great and the battery lasts all day. I've tested over 8 hours without wifi and 6+ with.
The article suggests that errors are less likely on systems with few DIMMS, those which are less heavily used, and that there was no significant difference among types of RAM or vendors, at least with regard to ECC RAM. Thus, laptop and desktop users, who likely only have 2 or 3 DIMMs and make only casual use of their systems have lower risk of errors. ECC RAM may in general be of much higher quality than non-ECC RAM, and thus more prone to error, but its usage is also less mission-critical. In addition, ECC RAM is usually used in systems with many DIMMs that are run 24/7/365.
Good news The study had several findings that are good news for consumers:
* Temperature plays little role in errors - just as Google found with disk drives - so heroic cooling isnâ€(TM)t necessary.
* The problem isnâ€(TM)t getting worse. The latest, most dense generations of DRAM perform as well, error wise, as previous generations.
* Heavily used systems have more errors - meaning casual users have less to worry about.
* No significant differences between vendors or DIMM types (DDR1, DDR2 or FB-DIMM). You can buy on price - at least for the ECC-type DIMMS they investigated.
* Only 8% of DIMMs had errors per year on average. Fewer DIMMs = fewer error problems - good news for users of smaller systems.
I didn't mention the Mac Mini. However, the Mini isn't a full-powered desktop. It uses low powered 2.13-2.26 Ghz Core 2 Duo CPUs which can't compete against higher-end desktop dual-core chips (E8400/8600 @ 3-3.2 Ghz) or Core 2 Quad/Core i7 chips.
Even assuming that is true, Apple ignores entire market segments. For example, Apple simply does not sell a mid to high-end "desktop" system. They have all-in-one iMac's which start at $1200 and offer 2.66-3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo chips and Workstation Mac Pro's which run high-end Intel Xeon Quad Core processors starting at $2500. They have totally ignored the high-performance desktop market.
Intel Xeon processors are meant for workstation and server systems where most programs are multithreaded. The Xeon systems can be run in 4 or 8-core configurations (8/16) threads and support up to 24 GB of FB-DIMM's per processor. The 3.2 Ghz Xeon CPU itself currently retails for $1600. This is not a mainstream desktop solution!
On the other hand, the iMac is very underpowered for the price. The $1200 system comes with a 2.66 Ghz Core 2 Duo, which is only slightly faster than a similarly priced Windows laptop. I just put together a $1000 desktop with a 2.8 Ghz Core i7-860, 4 GB DDR3 1600 @ 7-7-7-20, 1 TB WD Caviar Black, 802.11n wireless, a 630 W PSU, a high-end Cooler Master V8 cooler, a motherboard designed for overclocking, and a case with 3 120mm fans and a 140mm top-mounted fan to keep the system cool. If I wasn't OC'ing, I could have spend $800 for a Core i7 system or $600 for a Core i5 system.
The Core i7 chip I purchased is a good 3x faster than the 2.66 Ghz C2D in multi-threaded apps and at least 1.5x faster in single-threaded apps due to Turbo Boost and Hyper-threading. For multithreaded apps, hyper-threading can provide a 15-25% improvement in performance. In addition, the new Lynnfield Core i7's allow for extremely fast single-threaded performance due to Turbo Boost which allows higher clock speeds when unused cores are disabled. With 3-4 cores, the i7-860 runs at 2.93 Ghz, with 2 cores 3.33 Ghz, and with one, 3.46 Ghz.
In the past, it wasn't clear that a Quad Core was superior to a Dual Core chip for regular desktop or game usage as most desktop apps and games are either single-threaded or optimized for two cores (games). However, with the introduction of a more advanced Turbo Mode that can dynamically overclock the system by 533-666 Mhz (dual and single-core mode), there is never a situation where a Dual Core chip is faster.
Thus, Core i5/i7 Lynnfield CPUs crush even the fastest Core 2 Duo (E8600 @ 3.2 Ghz). My Core i7-860 is 2x faster than my old C2D 2.0 Ghz chip in single-threaded apps and 3.5-4.5x faster for multi-threaded apps. Turbo Boost makes the system feel noticeably faster. Application load times have halved. I can load 5 or 6 applications simultaneously and have them load in the same time as if I simply loaded one as the system dynamically overclocks the system and enables all 4 cores/8 threads for the few seconds that they're needed, and then parks them afterwards. Everything feels faster and I would not go back to a Dual Core chip.
In addition, the Core i7 architecture is highly optimized for certain uses. For example, High Definition video encoding is now 5x faster and decoding is 6-7x faster. High-bitrate L4.1 x264 encodes that used 80-100% CPU now use 10-15%.
Apple offers no Core 2 Quad or Core i7 systems. There is certainly a market for high-end desktops. Half of the Desktop systems I see at Best Buy run Core i7 chips - and that was before the lower cost Lynnfield processors were released last month. So, why isn't Apple offering Quad core desktops?
---------------- Also, I think your premise is false. If you want a 15" laptop the cheapest option offered by Apple costs $1700 as cheaper MacBooks have 13.3" screens. My 14" 1" thick 4 lb. 2.1 Ghz C2D laptop with a 7 hour battery life cost me $650. It's hard to justify this price difference even if the hardware is superior. Even the lower-end MacBooks which max out at 13.3" inch screens start at $1000.
I know what you mean. A few years back, I emailed a friend a paper I wrote on Mozart's life and within minutes, I began getting ads for vacations to Salzburg, Austria (Mozart's birthplace). Apparently, Google searched the text of the DOC file.
Fortunately, I haven't seen many ads, image or text based, while browsing in several years due to my use of FF + Adblock Plus.
However, the "overwhelming majority of people" are unlikely to change the default setting to require SMS for logins as well as transactions.
Therefore, even a non-security conscious person should be very suspicious when their banking site asks them to authenticate via SMS due to a session timeout when they have never had to do so in the past and their only use of SMS in the past resulted from significant financial transactions.
Perhaps I expect too much from Joe Sixpack.:P
I think BoA is doing a reasonable job of securing its website with SMS authentication, the use of an EV certificate, and SiteKey. I agree, though, that the SMS authentication could be made more secure by stating the transaction in the message.
However, I think there's a bigger issue that's likely to confuse non-technical people. They display an image of a lock icon above the sign-in box. This suggests to users that the site is secure when in fact it has no significant whatsoever. Users need to use their browser to authenticate the authenticity of a website. Training users to rely on the existence of a lock icon on the web page itself is just asking for trouble.
Oh, and Bank of America uses an EV SSL cert making it particularly easy to verify that you're on the correct site. Any of the above behavior should cause a cautious individual to inspect the validity of the SSL certificate.
Not really. By default, SMS is not used to login; only to authenticate transactions. If you know you haven't requested any such transaction, you should immediately reject the authentication attempt, log out, and contact BoA.
To successfully transfer funds out of your account, they would need you to authenticate via SMS twice - once to login and once to authenticate the transaction. If you know you haven't authorized any transactions, you simply should refuse any further authentication attempts.
I suppose they could make it appear that the original attempt failed. However, that should raise enough suspicion to cause you to log off. In addition, they would have to correctly guess your SiteKey image to attempt the attack. When you login, Bank of America displays a unique image of your choosing to ensure you're at the authentic site.
They do! By default, anytime you add a BillPay account, modify BillPay settings, or make an electronic transfer of funds you're asked to authenticate via SMS for THAT transaction. SMS authentication is not merely used to login. It's used to authenticate any major financial transaction.
Oh and my 1 TB drive with USB 2.0 and eSATA ports cost me $80 - $20 MIR. $60 USD = 37 pounds. So, I could have purchased nearly 3 such drives for the price of this USB 3.0 drive. What a bargain!
USB 2.0's theoretical speed may be 480 Mbit/sec but I've never seen maintained transfer speeds above 30 MB/sec (240 Mbit). Usually I get between 20-25 MB/sec in real-world usage. On HD Tune, I get speeds of 30-32 MB/sec with USB and 100-110 MB/sec (800-880 Mbit/sec) over eSATA on the same 1 TB drive. Thus, USB 2.0 at best reaches half of it's theoretical speed.
At best USB 3.0 will offer speeds equivalent to eSATA.eSATA has been available for years and almost every mid to high-end motherboard now comes with an eSATA port. Furthermore, an Expresscard two-port eSATA card can be purchased for $40 on Newegg. Thus, USB 3.0 will only be useful when computers with USB 3.0 ports become standard. If you have to purchase a PCI/expresscard expansion card, why not just get an external drive with eSATA? Many drives now come with USB 2.0 + eSATA ports and can be purchased for the same or slightly more than USB only-drives.
I have a 14.1" 16:9 widescreen laptop with a 2.1 Ghz C2D, 4 GB of RAM and would actually prefer if my laptop didn't have a DVD drive. I've only used the drive once - to install Windows 7 Ultimate. In fact, when I need to install software from a DVD, I tend to use a 20x external DVD/4x Blu-Ray USB DVD drive as it's considerably faster and quieter than my internal drive. And this is a full-powered laptop.
Optical drives add weight and if placed inappropriately can lead to accidental openings which are both annoying and waste battery power. They are rarely used on full-powered laptops let alone netbooks which generally only run basic software.
If I need to install from a DVD, I do so from an external USB drive or optionally an ISO image on an external USB hard drive. However, most of the time, i'm installing software downloaded from the internet or stored on a local or networked disk.
Optical drives have uses but they also have considerable disadvantages. It's not clear to me that the weight, size, and unintended operation issues surrounding optical drives justify their use on small laptops, and certainly not on netbooks, when they are so infrequently used. When you're comparing 2 and 2.5 lb. machines the additional weight of an optical drive can be significant.
As an aside, when my sister's DVD burner in her Macbook Pro died, I bought her a 20x USB DVD drive for $40 rather than pay the $300 Apple wanted to fix the system out-of-warranty. I have not once heard her complain about the lack of an optical drive on her 15" Macbook Pro. In fact, she mentioned that she can burn DVDs much faster, and without the noise or vibration.
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Ah, I thought you were talking about their current rather than future offerings.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. Macbook and Macbook Pros are configured with Nvidia 9400M or 9600M chipsets. They may not be powerful but at least they are dedicated graphics solutions. Far superior to Intel Integrated graphics, and they provide working hardware acceleration for H.264/VC-1. The Intel G45 chipset does so - but only with MPC-HC - not for commercial blu-ray playback - and it had some corruption last I checked.
How mature - don't respond to any substantive point I made. Just claim that I am biased.
By the way, I've used Ubuntu 6.06, Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu 8.10, Debian Testing, Debian Stable (Sarge and Lenny) and several versions of Fedora. My sister has OS X, so I've setup printers and done some minor troubleshooting there as well. So, it's not as if I've only ever used Windows.
Yeah, but very few consumers have access to MSDN, and those users likely would be counted in the September figure with Beta/RC users.
In addition, I bet a lot of people haven't received or installed their Win 7 upgrade disks. I didn't get mine until the middle of November - about 3 weeks after retail release. I'm sure many people don't upgrade immediately. I will be upgrading my gf's laptop in a few weeks, for example.
Well, I personally upgraded all of my machines to Windows 7 x64. I was an XP holdout after hating Vista's slow performance (pre SP1). I began using Win 7 after the Beta was released and used it regularly from RC on. Now both of my systems are running Windows 7 x64 - one Professional and the other Home Professional. The Win 7 Professional x64 copy was obtained via the Yale MSDN Academic Alliance network, and the Home Premium copy was free with the purchase of a Vista laptop (that I immediately upgraded to Win 7 RC awaiting the retail release.)
As an MSDN user, I've actually been using the RTM since before the October, 22 launch. I've run into several kernel-level driver issues (BSOD when enabling jumbo frames on an Atheros PCI-E NIC fixed by reverting to the MS driver, Realtek audio driver refuses to release apps, preventing the system from shutting down, restarting, or going into standby - fixed by reverting to the MS driver or upgrading to the latest driver, and high kernel memory usage with an older Nvidia driver). Each bug was fixed by either using the recommended MS driver, installed by default during the install process, or by upgrading to the latest driver.
There are a number of features I like:
- Feels as fast as XP with better UI
- Meaningful 64 bit support (drivers for everything) compared to XP-64 and to a lesser extent, Vista 64 bit when it was released
- Optimized for Core i7 systems (Core parking improved, doesn't bounce processes from core to core like Vista, uses less power)
- Libraries are great (I have TV shows and Movies spread over many external TB drives which all show up in one library)
- System indexing with the ability to search the remote index on a shared computer instantly - first time a search over a SMB network has been usable
- File sharing performance greatly improved vs. XP
My favorite features at the moment are the improvements to networking. The Homegroup feature does make setting up a network easier. However, I like it due to the addition of remotely-accessible Libraries and instant searching of remote machines.
But the most significant networking improvement vis-a-v XP SP3 is the network throughput over SMB. SMB1 quite simply stinks. I would usually get 7-8 MB/sec transfer speeds in a 100 Mbit connection whereas I always got 11.5 MB/sec - fully saturing the line - with SMB2 in Win 7 - Win 7 transfers and Linux-Linux SFTP/SCP. You really need Vista/7 or Linux to take full advantage of Gigabit networking (OS X performance stinks based on some benchmarks I've seen). SMB2 can saturate a gigabit line at 115 MB/sec whereas at best you'll get around 40-50% usage in XP.
The limitation for me has been my hard drive speed. I've been able to transfer 10 GB movies at 95 MB/sec avg speeds from my laptop to Core i7 desktop using eSATA attached storage on the laptop. I got the identical speed transferring from the same hard drive attached via eSATA on the desktop to the internal SATA drive. RAM --> RAM transfers in jperf sustain 118 MB/sec (99.9% utilization), and I can do about 115 MB/sec if I have a large file in RAM and copy it over the network.
Overally, I'm quite pleased with Windows 7 and glad I upgraded.
You probably meant the 5850, which had an initial MSRP of $260 but is now selling at $300-310 due to supply issues. The 5870 is ATI's flagship card and had a MSRP of $380. It's currently on sale for $400-420.
Well, the problem is that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply at all in this situation. There is no state action. The 4th Amendment protects against encroachment by the federal government, and by incorporation via the 14th Amendment, also provides protection against state and local government actions.
However, the conduct here is being done by a private entity. In addition, they will almost certainly have consent to collect the information as part of the long form contracts you're required to sign to use their service. While the contracts can be attacked on grounds of adhesiveness and unfair surprise, the 4th Amendment simply does not apply.
The information is not being collected by the police for the purposes of an adversarial proceeding. If the police were collecting this information without your consent, there might be an issue. That's not to say federal or state privacy laws may not be applicable. However, the 4th Amendment certainly is not.
Sounds more like a BIOS issue. I've installed Windows 7 in both AHCI and IDE modes. Both work. The problem normally is that if you install in IDE mode and decide later to switch to native SATA (AHCI), you must change a registry setting or Windows won't boot properly as it won't have loaded the necessary SATA driver.
Have you upgraded your BIOS to the latest version? I actually found the Windows 7 install to be the easiest OS install I've ever done on Windows or Linux. All my hardware worked after booting. Gigabit LAN. Wireless setup during setup. SATA. eSATA. Audio drivers. They even had a fairly recent Nvidia driver allowing me to enter the system at 1920x1200 - not 800x600. I quickly updated my audio and video drivers and everything worked perfectly.
For many sources you can get 50% compression easily with FLAC or APE lossless audio. On many classical tracks, you can do nearly 66% lossless compression. Lossy audio compression schemes work by removing details that humans can't or are unlikely to hear anyhow. At 48 Kb/sec most people should be able to hear the difference, but we have known for a while that most people can't differentiate uncompressed PCM audio CD audio from 128 kb LAME encoded MP3s.
I thought I would describe my experience doing the same in XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7:
Windows XP: Connect HDMI to external display. Turn on machine. Manually select external monitor in NVIDIA settings. Sound outputted to TV automatically.
Windows Vista: Connect HDMI to external display. Manually select external monitor in NVIDIA settings. Manually select HDMI output in Control Panel (easy to do).
Windows 7: Connect HDMI to external display. Windows automatically switches to external display and outputs sound to TV. Disconnect to automatically return to PC speakers/laptop monitor. (Used Intel Integrated Graphics)
You can do a fresh install with an Upgrade disk. Just choose the custom install option and when the install finishes, "upgrade" over the current install. You really don't need to buy a Full Version. I've done several fresh installs with upgrade disks. This functionality is not advertised of course.
Dell's 15" laptops are cheaper because they use cheap parts (Dual-Core Pentiums vs. Core 2 Duos), less RAM, cheaper hard drives, and most importantly, they're huge, heavy, and have shit battery life. Less money is spent on design because there's more space for fans and airflow.
When you buy a 13" or even 14" laptop, you're paying for the reduced thickness, size, and weight, longer battery life, and higher quality parts.
And their prices on the 13.3" Macbooks aren't that great either. For $1,000 you get a 2.13 Ghz C2D, 13.3" 1280x800 16:10 screen, 2 GB of DDR2 800 RAM, a 160 GB Hard Drive, an Nvidia 9400M chipset, 802.11n wireless + Bluetooth, a 5 hour battery and 5 lb. size.
Here is what I got for $650 at Best Buy:
Asus U80A:
2.1 Ghz C2D
14.1" 16:9 LED 1366x768 screen
4 GB DDR2 800
320 GB Hard Drive
Integrated Intel 4500MHD Graphics
802.11n Wireless, Gigabit Wired
HDMI/VGA Out
4 lbs, 7 hour battery (6 hours normal usage with wifi + browsing, 8 hours without browsing)
So:
Pros:
- Equivilant CPU
- Double the RAM
- Double the hard drive space
- 1 lb. lighter
- 2 hour longer battery life.
- $350 Cheaper!
Cons:
- No Bluetooth (added a USB bluetooth dongle for $15)
- No dedicated graphics.
Nonetheless, you can't play games on a Mac anyhow so the dedicated graphics doesn't get you much. My Integrated Intel graphics can hardware decode 1080p H.264 in MPC-HC (Blu-Ray + x264 encodes) which is what I wanted.
With the ultra-bright 16:9 LED screen and hardware accelerated decoding, I can watch HD movies on battery which is great and the battery lasts all day. I've tested over 8 hours without wifi and 6+ with.
The Macbook doesn't seem like a great deal to me.
The article suggests that errors are less likely on systems with few DIMMS, those which are less heavily used, and that there was no significant difference among types of RAM or vendors, at least with regard to ECC RAM. Thus, laptop and desktop users, who likely only have 2 or 3 DIMMs and make only casual use of their systems have lower risk of errors. ECC RAM may in general be of much higher quality than non-ECC RAM, and thus more prone to error, but its usage is also less mission-critical. In addition, ECC RAM is usually used in systems with many DIMMs that are run 24/7/365.
Good news
The study had several findings that are good news for consumers:
* Temperature plays little role in errors - just as Google found with disk drives - so heroic cooling isnâ€(TM)t necessary.
* The problem isnâ€(TM)t getting worse. The latest, most dense generations of DRAM perform as well, error wise, as previous generations.
* Heavily used systems have more errors - meaning casual users have less to worry about.
* No significant differences between vendors or DIMM types (DDR1, DDR2 or FB-DIMM). You can buy on price - at least for the ECC-type DIMMS they investigated.
* Only 8% of DIMMs had errors per year on average. Fewer DIMMs = fewer error problems - good news for users of smaller systems.
I didn't mention the Mac Mini. However, the Mini isn't a full-powered desktop. It uses low powered 2.13-2.26 Ghz Core 2 Duo CPUs which can't compete against higher-end desktop dual-core chips (E8400/8600 @ 3-3.2 Ghz) or Core 2 Quad/Core i7 chips.
Even assuming that is true, Apple ignores entire market segments. For example, Apple simply does not sell a mid to high-end "desktop" system. They have all-in-one iMac's which start at $1200 and offer 2.66-3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo chips and Workstation Mac Pro's which run high-end Intel Xeon Quad Core processors starting at $2500. They have totally ignored the high-performance desktop market.
Intel Xeon processors are meant for workstation and server systems where most programs are multithreaded. The Xeon systems can be run in 4 or 8-core configurations (8/16) threads and support up to 24 GB of FB-DIMM's per processor. The 3.2 Ghz Xeon CPU itself currently retails for $1600. This is not a mainstream desktop solution!
On the other hand, the iMac is very underpowered for the price. The $1200 system comes with a 2.66 Ghz Core 2 Duo, which is only slightly faster than a similarly priced Windows laptop. I just put together a $1000 desktop with a 2.8 Ghz Core i7-860, 4 GB DDR3 1600 @ 7-7-7-20, 1 TB WD Caviar Black, 802.11n wireless, a 630 W PSU, a high-end Cooler Master V8 cooler, a motherboard designed for overclocking, and a case with 3 120mm fans and a 140mm top-mounted fan to keep the system cool. If I wasn't OC'ing, I could have spend $800 for a Core i7 system or $600 for a Core i5 system.
The Core i7 chip I purchased is a good 3x faster than the 2.66 Ghz C2D in multi-threaded apps and at least 1.5x faster in single-threaded apps due to Turbo Boost and Hyper-threading. For multithreaded apps, hyper-threading can provide a 15-25% improvement in performance. In addition, the new Lynnfield Core i7's allow for extremely fast single-threaded performance due to Turbo Boost which allows higher clock speeds when unused cores are disabled. With 3-4 cores, the i7-860 runs at 2.93 Ghz, with 2 cores 3.33 Ghz, and with one, 3.46 Ghz.
In the past, it wasn't clear that a Quad Core was superior to a Dual Core chip for regular desktop or game usage as most desktop apps and games are either single-threaded or optimized for two cores (games). However, with the introduction of a more advanced Turbo Mode that can dynamically overclock the system by 533-666 Mhz (dual and single-core mode), there is never a situation where a Dual Core chip is faster.
Thus, Core i5/i7 Lynnfield CPUs crush even the fastest Core 2 Duo (E8600 @ 3.2 Ghz). My Core i7-860 is 2x faster than my old C2D 2.0 Ghz chip in single-threaded apps and 3.5-4.5x faster for multi-threaded apps. Turbo Boost makes the system feel noticeably faster. Application load times have halved. I can load 5 or 6 applications simultaneously and have them load in the same time as if I simply loaded one as the system dynamically overclocks the system and enables all 4 cores/8 threads for the few seconds that they're needed, and then parks them afterwards. Everything feels faster and I would not go back to a Dual Core chip.
In addition, the Core i7 architecture is highly optimized for certain uses. For example, High Definition video encoding is now 5x faster and decoding is 6-7x faster. High-bitrate L4.1 x264 encodes that used 80-100% CPU now use 10-15%.
Apple offers no Core 2 Quad or Core i7 systems. There is certainly a market for high-end desktops. Half of the Desktop systems I see at Best Buy run Core i7 chips - and that was before the lower cost Lynnfield processors were released last month. So, why isn't Apple offering Quad core desktops?
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Also, I think your premise is false. If you want a 15" laptop the cheapest option offered by Apple costs $1700 as cheaper MacBooks have 13.3" screens. My 14" 1" thick 4 lb. 2.1 Ghz C2D laptop with a 7 hour battery life cost me $650. It's hard to justify this price difference even if the hardware is superior. Even the lower-end MacBooks which max out at 13.3" inch screens start at $1000.
I know what you mean. A few years back, I emailed a friend a paper I wrote on Mozart's life and within minutes, I began getting ads for vacations to Salzburg, Austria (Mozart's birthplace). Apparently, Google searched the text of the DOC file.
Fortunately, I haven't seen many ads, image or text based, while browsing in several years due to my use of FF + Adblock Plus.
However, the "overwhelming majority of people" are unlikely to change the default setting to require SMS for logins as well as transactions.
:P
Therefore, even a non-security conscious person should be very suspicious when their banking site asks them to authenticate via SMS due to a session timeout when they have never had to do so in the past and their only use of SMS in the past resulted from significant financial transactions.
Perhaps I expect too much from Joe Sixpack.
I think BoA is doing a reasonable job of securing its website with SMS authentication, the use of an EV certificate, and SiteKey. I agree, though, that the SMS authentication could be made more secure by stating the transaction in the message.
However, I think there's a bigger issue that's likely to confuse non-technical people. They display an image of a lock icon above the sign-in box. This suggests to users that the site is secure when in fact it has no significant whatsoever. Users need to use their browser to authenticate the authenticity of a website. Training users to rely on the existence of a lock icon on the web page itself is just asking for trouble.
Oh, and Bank of America uses an EV SSL cert making it particularly easy to verify that you're on the correct site. Any of the above behavior should cause a cautious individual to inspect the validity of the SSL certificate.
Not really. By default, SMS is not used to login; only to authenticate transactions. If you know you haven't requested any such transaction, you should immediately reject the authentication attempt, log out, and contact BoA.
To successfully transfer funds out of your account, they would need you to authenticate via SMS twice - once to login and once to authenticate the transaction. If you know you haven't authorized any transactions, you simply should refuse any further authentication attempts.
I suppose they could make it appear that the original attempt failed. However, that should raise enough suspicion to cause you to log off. In addition, they would have to correctly guess your SiteKey image to attempt the attack. When you login, Bank of America displays a unique image of your choosing to ensure you're at the authentic site.
They do! By default, anytime you add a BillPay account, modify BillPay settings, or make an electronic transfer of funds you're asked to authenticate via SMS for THAT transaction. SMS authentication is not merely used to login. It's used to authenticate any major financial transaction.
Oh and my 1 TB drive with USB 2.0 and eSATA ports cost me $80 - $20 MIR. $60 USD = 37 pounds. So, I could have purchased nearly 3 such drives for the price of this USB 3.0 drive. What a bargain!
Two points-
USB 2.0's theoretical speed may be 480 Mbit/sec but I've never seen maintained transfer speeds above 30 MB/sec (240 Mbit). Usually I get between 20-25 MB/sec in real-world usage. On HD Tune, I get speeds of 30-32 MB/sec with USB and 100-110 MB/sec (800-880 Mbit/sec) over eSATA on the same 1 TB drive. Thus, USB 2.0 at best reaches half of it's theoretical speed.
At best USB 3.0 will offer speeds equivalent to eSATA.eSATA has been available for years and almost every mid to high-end motherboard now comes with an eSATA port. Furthermore, an Expresscard two-port eSATA card can be purchased for $40 on Newegg. Thus, USB 3.0 will only be useful when computers with USB 3.0 ports become standard. If you have to purchase a PCI/expresscard expansion card, why not just get an external drive with eSATA? Many drives now come with USB 2.0 + eSATA ports and can be purchased for the same or slightly more than USB only-drives.
I have a 14.1" 16:9 widescreen laptop with a 2.1 Ghz C2D, 4 GB of RAM and would actually prefer if my laptop didn't have a DVD drive. I've only used the drive once - to install Windows 7 Ultimate. In fact, when I need to install software from a DVD, I tend to use a 20x external DVD/4x Blu-Ray USB DVD drive as it's considerably faster and quieter than my internal drive. And this is a full-powered laptop.
Optical drives add weight and if placed inappropriately can lead to accidental openings which are both annoying and waste battery power. They are rarely used on full-powered laptops let alone netbooks which generally only run basic software.
If I need to install from a DVD, I do so from an external USB drive or optionally an ISO image on an external USB hard drive. However, most of the time, i'm installing software downloaded from the internet or stored on a local or networked disk.
Optical drives have uses but they also have considerable disadvantages. It's not clear to me that the weight, size, and unintended operation issues surrounding optical drives justify their use on small laptops, and certainly not on netbooks, when they are so infrequently used. When you're comparing 2 and 2.5 lb. machines the additional weight of an optical drive can be significant.
As an aside, when my sister's DVD burner in her Macbook Pro died, I bought her a 20x USB DVD drive for $40 rather than pay the $300 Apple wanted to fix the system out-of-warranty. I have not once heard her complain about the lack of an optical drive on her 15" Macbook Pro. In fact, she mentioned that she can burn DVDs much faster, and without the noise or vibration.
It may be possible at some point, but as of a few months ago, Moonlight did not support the features necessary to watch movies on Netflix.