It's the resolution for 4:3 tv shows. Movies tend to be the 16:9 ratio, and so you just get the 640 width and so that gives you 360 lines. I could be wrong, but don't DVDs still have 480 lines even when it's 16:9?
This story on Slashdot has that strange "lying" spin on it. Everywhere else I read this story, everyone just seems to be laughing hysterically at how pathetic Sony is. Watch the video and you'll understand.
If the point of this campaign was to make it look like the PSP had a big underground following for being cool, it has totally backfired. Who wants to own a PSP now if it means being associated with the character in this video?
I was thinking something along those lines too. The problem is I just went to Gamestop the other day and they had a demo Wii unit setup to play. The game on it was Excite Truck and it was hooked up to a LCD tv that might have been HD-capable. The connectors however were just the standard ones that come with the Wii and don't enable the progressive scan support. Because of this the graphics looked insanely bad. It was next to a game cube and the game cube's graphcis actually looked better (probably due to it using a small crt television that blurred out the jagged edges).
I really couldn't believe Nintendo would setup their kiosks like this. If I found the Wii to look bad compared to a game cube I can't imagine how bad it's going to look if next to an xbox 360 or a PS3. I'm not sure the $250 price tag can remove that bad taste from someone's mouth.
Also, I played Excite Truck and it really wasn't anything worthwhile. I assume they didn't have Wii sports in it because the Gamestop I was at was a very small store and they probably couldn't make it work in there. I'm really hoping it's not that they're trying to hide any problems with the Wiimote.
Doesn't the BSD license allow you to change the source code without releasing your changes to the public? I thought that was the main difference between the BSD licensed software and the GPL licensed software.
If that is correct, then a modified version of mklinux could be proprietary.
I would also suggest to you not to disregard something because it is said on Slashdot. What the post you replied to was saying is something I've been hearing in many places other than just Slashdot.
Many people who grew up playing video games have lost interest. The games have become too complicated and often force you to sit through 5-10 minutes of story telling before even letting you attempt to play. If you're not into remembering which button throws grenades, which shoots your gun, which brings up your inventory, which calls for backup, then you're S.O.L. with current games.
I agree that stupid things are said on Slashdot. I laugh every time there is a story on some device and people on Slashdot claim that nobody is interested in such a device unless they can upgrade the RAM or play Ogg Vorbis. However, I don't think the excitement over the Wii is the same as that.
People are excited for something fresh and new. They're also excited for something old and familiar. We do have to wait and see how the Wii actually functions before we can say for sure. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Wii takes off big. I decided on a whim to buy a Nintendo DS when the lite came out, and I've been playing it every single day since then. I'm constantly amazed at how people who have no interest in video games keep wanting to play Brain Age, or the mini games in Super Mario on my DS.
Hell, my grandma still plays Tetris every day on her old B&W gameboy. People want to play games, they're just not interested in learning how to control Halo.
I've heard from a few people who've tried using the PSP's web browser that inputting text is a pain in the ass. And since browsing the web and communicating is the primary usage of a device like that, they'd have to device some sort of keyboard or touchscreen for the PSP.
I'm guessing that's why you're seeing an entirely new product.
So they're adding half-baked features that don't work correctly? Come on.
My whole point was while Ubuntu and Suse are competing for the mindshare of us Linux users, RedHat sees us as little more than testers who they can dump non-working crap on.
And yes, maybe they're not hyped as much. The reason for that is Redhat has pretty much exited the community. They don't give a shit about what the average Linux user knows or thinks about them. That, my friend, is the entire point of this story.
I agree. I used RedHat in the early days and enjoyed it. I later moved on to Debian. Although it was more difficult (very little automagic configuration at the time), I found it more enjoyable to administer. This is almost entirely due to the existence of apt.
I still like to try out new distributions and new versions of old ones. However, the whole Fedora thing really turned me off. I did try it a few times, but it very much feels like an eternal beta. Every time I've tried Fedora there were insane problems that never ever should have made it to release. I'm not talking about Firefox crashing once in a while, I'm talking about Fedora not even booting because they decided they wanted to try out some special SE Linux stuff.
The other problem is I really don't see any progress from the Fedora camp. It seems like whenever I hear of a new feature getting bundled into a distro, it's always Ubuntu or Suse. I don't know what the hell Fedora has going on.
And here's the real point to all my rambling: I currently went through the process of buying managed servers for a company I work for. They only had the option of RHEL for linux servers, and I was stuck with it. But I really do not enjoy it. I am very much a Debian/Ubuntu user, and would prefer one of those. If there was a choice of some Ubuntu Server, you better believe I would have gone with that.
bottom line is, it feels like tivo rushes this type of thing out the door and risks distancing themselves from the only people who are still rooting for them. writers have been sounding their death knell for a while now. where's the series 3 box? are there enough compelling features to push me to upgrade to it, if it ever comes out? what are their engineers and developers doing in their spare time, then, since we haven't seen a new product in eons? do they really not have the available time to write a five star product instead of a weak little three star app that almost cuts it?
It seems to me they're doing the opposite of rushing anything. They announced this a very long time ago and we're just now seeing it. Transcoding is a very simple thing, and there are programs all over the web to do it. So why then does it take Tivo so long to add this feature? Why are mac users STILL waiting for TivoToGo support. What has it been? A year? Two years?
I don't think the problem is that Tivo doesn't have their priorities straight. I think the problem is they are talentless hacks. Whoever the programmers were that started the Tivo product must not be around anymore. The people doing it now seem incapable of getting anything completed on a reasonable timeframe. And when they do finally get it completed it's almost always very crappy.
I'm at the point where I wish someone would come along and make a nice DVR box for like 300 bucks that just acts as a VCR with a hard drive. I don't need to rate my shows. I don't need to get every rerun of Family Guy that airs on any channel at any time. All I need to do is be able to easily record shows without swapping tapes/DVDs. And the best part is I wouldn't have to pay for this stupid service fee. Especially when I see all these new features unavailable to me as a Mac/Linux user.
Seriously, this is exactly what they should do if they're worried about their content being uploaded to the internet. I would much rather have some sort of watermark that is invisible to me than to have restrictive DRM that forces me to used Windows or any particular device. I still can't watch the TivoToGo stuff on my mac or my linux machine, so at least they're starting to go in the right direction. One day maybe I'll be able to use the services I'm paying Tivo for.
All the comments seem to be focused on the open source aspect, which is cool and very important. However, did anyone actually watch this movie?
I watched it the other day (I think it was on digg or boing boing or something). I thought it was insanely bad. It was like I came in halfway through some crazy anime. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I couldn't even begin to figure out what the characters were suppose to be feeling or thinking.
This has a cool factor going for it, but man it was painful to watch. The 3D work was well done as far as textures and models, but the animation seemed really awkward and bad.
I don't think anyone should be patting themselves on the backs too hard yet. If this is what the open source model can produce for entertainment, then I don't think Pixar has much to fear.
However, the possibility for movie remixes should be pretty cool.
No fan of Microsoft here, but I think Dvorak really misunderstands the problem. Yeah, Vista slipped, and that probably sucks for Microsoft. Not sure it's really the death of Microsoft.
I think what we're really seeing is that Microsoft is a much further thinker than Dvorak is. Not that outhinking Dvorak is really a hard accomplishment. What amazes me is that Dvorak thinks Microsoft is just making an enemy out of Google because they're successful. I think Microsoft is much smarter than that.
What is Google's business model? Advertising. What does Google create? Just about everything. Google is looking at old products and businesses and thinking about how to make them free of cost but full of ads. This definitely should scare Microsoft.
Google has search, mail, and now calendar. What happens when they get a word processor, spreadsheet, and a presentation program? And what happens when consumers look at the money they are paying for MS Office when they are no longer using it?
If Microsoft doesn't at least consider being able to switch to an ad-supported services company, then I think this might just happen and then Microsoft truly will be dead in the water.
However, for some reason John Dvorak sees Microsoft competing with Google as purely a distraction. I think Dvorak needs to be thinking on a grander scale.
I thought this too until I read the story slashdot linked to. What you are describing are burried stories. As far as I can tell, you can still search for burried stories and you can view them if you want to.
The story linked to by slashdot gives you the links of the two stories the guy put up, and digg.com claims they do not exist. A really interesting thing is that this url: http://digg.com/technology/Suspicious_Digging_ goes to an error page, yet the title of the page shows "Suspicious Digging?" Notice the question mark at the end, which is not in the URL. Also, if you make up a fake story name like http://digg.com/technology/this_story_does_not_exi st you'll see a blank page without the error message.
I don't know if this is normal behavior. Seems like someone actually deleted the stories.
Did any of you people complaining about Ubuntu being Gnome-only stop to think that maybe that's why it's successful? I mean all the distros until now have either been both, or have favored KDE (Suse, Mandrake/Mandriva).
Along comes a distro that is very much in line with the Gnome philosophy of keeping things simple and clean. It gets popular and now you complain about it not using KDE?
KDE's philosophy seems to be giving the user as much configuration as possible. KDE is a very cool desktop with a lot of power, but it is going in a totally different direction than Ubuntu.
Let Ubuntu be Ubuntu. Stop trying to push your own preferences on to people.
I love Apple products. I'm really in to this simple and sleek style, and OS X rocks my world. However, I couldn't believe it when I was reading this blurb about how great Apple's support is. What a joke.
I recently purchased an intel mac mini. I bought it with the intention of using it as a media center (podcasts/vidcasts/music). The day I received it I began setting it up when I noticed the fan spin up to a very loud volume. Immediately I opened up activity monitor to figure out what was putting so much load on my system. There was nothing. The CPU usage was fluctuating between 0-3%.
I shrugged my shoulders and ignored it. A little bit later it did it again. Turns out, it does it every 5 minutes. The system will be dead silent for 5 minutes and then the fan will begin to spin, slowly at first but increasing in speed until it is very loud noise that I can hear on the other end of my house.
Thinking this couldn't possibly be correct, I phoned up apple support. What a joke. I had to reset my PMU about 10 times because that is apple's phone support's solution for everything. I even spent about 8 minutes with one guy as he had me try over and over again to boot into Open Firmware with a certain key sequence. He was absolutely positive that I must be pressing the wrong keys until I brought up the fact that the intel macs use EFI, not open firmware.
So their phone support sucks, but that's not the real problem. I think the majority of computer literate users don't expect the phone support to actually solve the problem for them. The problem is the only solutions they would offer me is to bring it to a local technician, drive 60 miles to the closest apple store, or BUY APPLECARE so that they could send a technician to my home.
I obviously chose to bring it to a local technician. Turns out the local technician doesn't know jack about apple computers. Somehow they're certified, but they don't know squat. I realized this the instant I brought my mac mini to the place and they oooh'ed and awww'ed over how small a mac mini was. They had never seen a mac mini! They went on to ask me questions about it and I brought up Front Row. They look puzzled and I asked them if they knew what Front Row was, to which they replied no. I realized there was no way in hell these people were going to be able to fix a mac, they didn't even have basic user knowledge of them.
I called them two days later to see what the status was, but the technician wasn't there so they didn't know. They told me they'd have him call me the next day to let me know. Of course he didn't, so I called him. The guy basically didn't have any status to give me, he wasn't even sure if the problem was there because "he had a lot of other computers there," and he couldn't hear if the fan was on or not in my mac mini. He told me he could run some diagnostic software on it, but that he has been trying to download it from apple and their connection keeps screwing up. I told him in the nicest voice I could fake that I'd just come and pick it up since he can't figure out if there was even a problem.
After I picked up my machine, I phoned apple to let them know what terrible technicians they had sent me to, and to ask if I can just send it to someone who would actually be able to fix the problem. Turns out, I can't. There is apparently no way for apple's phone support to allow me to send a mac mini in to be fixed. Even if I had purchased the applecare, they would still only send a technician to my house (I'm betting it'd be from that same crappy local technician shop). The only other solution for me is to drive for an hour, drop off my mac mini at an apple store, drive home, and then repeat when my machine is ready to be picked up.
Like I said, what a joke. This is terrible support and I'm amazed that there can be an entire slashdot story devoted to their support being great. Has april fools started early? I just bought a brand new broken computer from Apple and they won't let me send it back to be fixed. Yeah, great support.
I'm no fan of Dell, but I gotta admit that when my girlfriend had problems with her Dell laptop they didn't waste any time in sending her a box that she could ship her computer in.
command+` cycles through windows of the same program command+w seems to close every window I've ever encountered
I do agree that keyboard navigation does suck in the mac though. GNOME is probably one of the best desktops I've used in terms of keyboard accessability. XP does a pretty good job too.
A bit defensive are we? I'm pretty sure he was just mentioning that Gnome has made a lot of progress on its memory usage. My guess is that at one time or another Gnome used more memory than Windows XP, so he sees the fact that it is now lower than Windows XP as a sign of improvements.
I really don't think he was trying to claim that Gnome is now better than Windows XP because of this one measurement. Nobody is going to steal your prescious Windows XP box from you so calm down.
I'm pretty sure it's identical to my powerbook except it's thinner. The powerbooks are not brushed metal either. Perhaps you're thinking of the GUIs for iTunes, iChat, Safari, etc.
I've been glancing back and forth between the image on the website and my powerbook that's sitting next to me, and I can't figure out why people are saying this new intel one looks bad. It's just thinner. I'm a little disappointed, I always like to see new designs being tried out.
Aren't you forgetting the fact that they lowered prices only in the areas they had competition. They leveraged the higher prices in the other areas with no competition. So they gouged customers where there wasn't competition so they could kill off competition in other areas so they could in turn gouge those customers.
The more we regulate, the more we see the number of companies in a given market trend towards 1. ...
I don't believe that monopolies are more than temporary unless they are given the power of monopoly through government licensing and regulations.
Huh? Isn't the reason we have these regulations because we've learned from history that the exact opposite of what you're saying is true? Did the government somehow kill competition for standard oil to give them a monopoly? Seriously, I'm asking. Perhaps you know something I don't.
It seems the cool new thing is to blame a company's woes on health care costs, and government regulation. The people who do this tend to ignore that there are a crap-load of companies doing fine with the same costs. Simply because they make products people want to buy. Then there are other companies making crap products who want to blame their dying company on the government. GM -- I'm looking at you.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the resolution for 4:3 tv shows. Movies tend to be the 16:9 ratio, and so you just get the 640 width and so that gives you 360 lines. I could be wrong, but don't DVDs still have 480 lines even when it's 16:9?
This story on Slashdot has that strange "lying" spin on it. Everywhere else I read this story, everyone just seems to be laughing hysterically at how pathetic Sony is. Watch the video and you'll understand.
If the point of this campaign was to make it look like the PSP had a big underground following for being cool, it has totally backfired. Who wants to own a PSP now if it means being associated with the character in this video?
I was thinking something along those lines too. The problem is I just went to Gamestop the other day and they had a demo Wii unit setup to play. The game on it was Excite Truck and it was hooked up to a LCD tv that might have been HD-capable. The connectors however were just the standard ones that come with the Wii and don't enable the progressive scan support. Because of this the graphics looked insanely bad. It was next to a game cube and the game cube's graphcis actually looked better (probably due to it using a small crt television that blurred out the jagged edges).
I really couldn't believe Nintendo would setup their kiosks like this. If I found the Wii to look bad compared to a game cube I can't imagine how bad it's going to look if next to an xbox 360 or a PS3. I'm not sure the $250 price tag can remove that bad taste from someone's mouth.
Also, I played Excite Truck and it really wasn't anything worthwhile. I assume they didn't have Wii sports in it because the Gamestop I was at was a very small store and they probably couldn't make it work in there. I'm really hoping it's not that they're trying to hide any problems with the Wiimote.
Doesn't the BSD license allow you to change the source code without releasing your changes to the public? I thought that was the main difference between the BSD licensed software and the GPL licensed software.
If that is correct, then a modified version of mklinux could be proprietary.
No, a widescreen would be.... wide.
This is the same 4:3 aspect ratio that the iPod has. What exactly about it is widescreen to you?
I would also suggest to you not to disregard something because it is said on Slashdot. What the post you replied to was saying is something I've been hearing in many places other than just Slashdot.
Many people who grew up playing video games have lost interest. The games have become too complicated and often force you to sit through 5-10 minutes of story telling before even letting you attempt to play. If you're not into remembering which button throws grenades, which shoots your gun, which brings up your inventory, which calls for backup, then you're S.O.L. with current games.
I agree that stupid things are said on Slashdot. I laugh every time there is a story on some device and people on
Slashdot claim that nobody is interested in such a device unless they can upgrade the RAM or play Ogg Vorbis. However, I don't think the excitement over the Wii is the same as that.
People are excited for something fresh and new. They're also excited for something old and familiar. We do have to wait and see how the Wii actually functions before we can say for sure. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Wii takes off big. I decided on a whim to buy a Nintendo DS when the lite came out, and I've been playing it every single day since then. I'm constantly amazed at how people who have no interest in video games keep wanting to play Brain Age, or the mini games in Super Mario on my DS.
Hell, my grandma still plays Tetris every day on her old B&W gameboy. People want to play games, they're just not interested in learning how to control Halo.
I've heard from a few people who've tried using the PSP's web browser that inputting text is a pain in the ass. And since browsing the web and communicating is the primary usage of a device like that, they'd have to device some sort of keyboard or touchscreen for the PSP.
I'm guessing that's why you're seeing an entirely new product.
So they're adding half-baked features that don't work correctly? Come on.
My whole point was while Ubuntu and Suse are competing for the mindshare of us Linux users, RedHat sees us as little more than testers who they can dump non-working crap on.
And yes, maybe they're not hyped as much. The reason for that is Redhat has pretty much exited the community. They don't give a shit about what the average Linux user knows or thinks about them. That, my friend, is the entire point of this story.
I agree. I used RedHat in the early days and enjoyed it. I later moved on to Debian. Although it was more difficult (very little automagic configuration at the time), I found it more enjoyable to administer. This is almost entirely due to the existence of apt.
I still like to try out new distributions and new versions of old ones. However, the whole Fedora thing really turned me off. I did try it a few times, but it very much feels like an eternal beta. Every time I've tried Fedora there were insane problems that never ever should have made it to release. I'm not talking about Firefox crashing once in a while, I'm talking about Fedora not even booting because they decided they wanted to try out some special SE Linux stuff.
The other problem is I really don't see any progress from the Fedora camp. It seems like whenever I hear of a new feature getting bundled into a distro, it's always Ubuntu or Suse. I don't know what the hell Fedora has going on.
And here's the real point to all my rambling: I currently went through the process of buying managed servers for a company I work for. They only had the option of RHEL for linux servers, and I was stuck with it. But I really do not enjoy it. I am very much a Debian/Ubuntu user, and would prefer one of those. If there was a choice of some Ubuntu Server, you better believe I would have gone with that.
I agree. There is absolutely no new information here. Everything is the same old crap that we've known since E3, written up in the same old style.
This is the kind of crappy article that I expect on digg. I thought having editors on slashdot prevented this kind of non-news from being posted.
Oh well, I guess it's just a slow news day.
It seems to me they're doing the opposite of rushing anything. They announced this a very long time ago and we're just now seeing it. Transcoding is a very simple thing, and there are programs all over the web to do it. So why then does it take Tivo so long to add this feature? Why are mac users STILL waiting for TivoToGo support. What has it been? A year? Two years?
I don't think the problem is that Tivo doesn't have their priorities straight. I think the problem is they are talentless hacks. Whoever the programmers were that started the Tivo product must not be around anymore. The people doing it now seem incapable of getting anything completed on a reasonable timeframe. And when they do finally get it completed it's almost always very crappy.
I'm at the point where I wish someone would come along and make a nice DVR box for like 300 bucks that just acts as a VCR with a hard drive. I don't need to rate my shows. I don't need to get every rerun of Family Guy that airs on any channel at any time. All I need to do is be able to easily record shows without swapping tapes/DVDs. And the best part is I wouldn't have to pay for this stupid service fee. Especially when I see all these new features unavailable to me as a Mac/Linux user.
Good!
Seriously, this is exactly what they should do if they're worried about their content being uploaded to the internet. I would much rather have some sort of watermark that is invisible to me than to have restrictive DRM that forces me to used Windows or any particular device. I still can't watch the TivoToGo stuff on my mac or my linux machine, so at least they're starting to go in the right direction. One day maybe I'll be able to use the services I'm paying Tivo for.
All the comments seem to be focused on the open source aspect, which is cool and very important. However, did anyone actually watch this movie?
I watched it the other day (I think it was on digg or boing boing or something). I thought it was insanely bad. It was like I came in halfway through some crazy anime. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I couldn't even begin to figure out what the characters were suppose to be feeling or thinking.
This has a cool factor going for it, but man it was painful to watch. The 3D work was well done as far as textures and models, but the animation seemed really awkward and bad.
I don't think anyone should be patting themselves on the backs too hard yet. If this is what the open source model can produce for entertainment, then I don't think Pixar has much to fear.
However, the possibility for movie remixes should be pretty cool.
I thought Windows XP home edition didn't support multiple processors. Maybe they changed that, or maybe it supports dual cores.
No fan of Microsoft here, but I think Dvorak really misunderstands the problem. Yeah, Vista slipped, and that probably sucks for Microsoft. Not sure it's really the death of Microsoft.
I think what we're really seeing is that Microsoft is a much further thinker than Dvorak is. Not that outhinking Dvorak is really a hard accomplishment. What amazes me is that Dvorak thinks Microsoft is just making an enemy out of Google because they're successful. I think Microsoft is much smarter than that.
What is Google's business model? Advertising. What does Google create? Just about everything. Google is looking at old products and businesses and thinking about how to make them free of cost but full of ads. This definitely should scare Microsoft.
Google has search, mail, and now calendar. What happens when they get a word processor, spreadsheet, and a presentation program? And what happens when consumers look at the money they are paying for MS Office when they are no longer using it?
If Microsoft doesn't at least consider being able to switch to an ad-supported services company, then I think this might just happen and then Microsoft truly will be dead in the water.
However, for some reason John Dvorak sees Microsoft competing with Google as purely a distraction. I think Dvorak needs to be thinking on a grander scale.
I thought this too until I read the story slashdot linked to. What you are describing are burried stories. As far as I can tell, you can still search for burried stories and you can view them if you want to.
The story linked to by slashdot gives you the links of the two stories the guy put up, and digg.com claims they do not exist. A really interesting thing is that this url: http://digg.com/technology/Suspicious_Digging_ goes to an error page, yet the title of the page shows "Suspicious Digging?" Notice the question mark at the end, which is not in the URL. Also, if you make up a fake story name like http://digg.com/technology/this_story_does_not_exi st you'll see a blank page without the error message.
I don't know if this is normal behavior. Seems like someone actually deleted the stories.
Did any of you people complaining about Ubuntu being Gnome-only stop to think that maybe that's why it's successful? I mean all the distros until now have either been both, or have favored KDE (Suse, Mandrake/Mandriva).
Along comes a distro that is very much in line with the Gnome philosophy of keeping things simple and clean. It gets popular and now you complain about it not using KDE?
KDE's philosophy seems to be giving the user as much configuration as possible. KDE is a very cool desktop with a lot of power, but it is going in a totally different direction than Ubuntu.
Let Ubuntu be Ubuntu. Stop trying to push your own preferences on to people.
I love Apple products. I'm really in to this simple and sleek style, and OS X rocks my world. However, I couldn't believe it when I was reading this blurb about how great Apple's support is. What a joke.
I recently purchased an intel mac mini. I bought it with the intention of using it as a media center (podcasts/vidcasts/music). The day I received it I began setting it up when I noticed the fan spin up to a very loud volume. Immediately I opened up activity monitor to figure out what was putting so much load on my system. There was nothing. The CPU usage was fluctuating between 0-3%.
I shrugged my shoulders and ignored it. A little bit later it did it again. Turns out, it does it every 5 minutes. The system will be dead silent for 5 minutes and then the fan will begin to spin, slowly at first but increasing in speed until it is very loud noise that I can hear on the other end of my house.
Thinking this couldn't possibly be correct, I phoned up apple support. What a joke. I had to reset my PMU about 10 times because that is apple's phone support's solution for everything. I even spent about 8 minutes with one guy as he had me try over and over again to boot into Open Firmware with a certain key sequence. He was absolutely positive that I must be pressing the wrong keys until I brought up the fact that the intel macs use EFI, not open firmware.
So their phone support sucks, but that's not the real problem. I think the majority of computer literate users don't expect the phone support to actually solve the problem for them. The problem is the only solutions they would offer me is to bring it to a local technician, drive 60 miles to the closest apple store, or BUY APPLECARE so that they could send a technician to my home.
I obviously chose to bring it to a local technician. Turns out the local technician doesn't know jack about apple computers. Somehow they're certified, but they don't know squat. I realized this the instant I brought my mac mini to the place and they oooh'ed and awww'ed over how small a mac mini was. They had never seen a mac mini! They went on to ask me questions about it and I brought up Front Row. They look puzzled and I asked them if they knew what Front Row was, to which they replied no. I realized there was no way in hell these people were going to be able to fix a mac, they didn't even have basic user knowledge of them.
I called them two days later to see what the status was, but the technician wasn't there so they didn't know. They told me they'd have him call me the next day to let me know. Of course he didn't, so I called him. The guy basically didn't have any status to give me, he wasn't even sure if the problem was there because "he had a lot of other computers there," and he couldn't hear if the fan was on or not in my mac mini. He told me he could run some diagnostic software on it, but that he has been trying to download it from apple and their connection keeps screwing up. I told him in the nicest voice I could fake that I'd just come and pick it up since he can't figure out if there was even a problem.
After I picked up my machine, I phoned apple to let them know what terrible technicians they had sent me to, and to ask if I can just send it to someone who would actually be able to fix the problem. Turns out, I can't. There is apparently no way for apple's phone support to allow me to send a mac mini in to be fixed. Even if I had purchased the applecare, they would still only send a technician to my house (I'm betting it'd be from that same crappy local technician shop). The only other solution for me is to drive for an hour, drop off my mac mini at an apple store, drive home, and then repeat when my machine is ready to be picked up.
Like I said, what a joke. This is terrible support and I'm amazed that there can be an entire slashdot story devoted to their support being great. Has april fools started early? I just bought a brand new broken computer from Apple and they won't let me send it back to be fixed. Yeah, great support.
I'm no fan of Dell, but I gotta admit that when my girlfriend had problems with her Dell laptop they didn't waste any time in sending her a box that she could ship her computer in.
command+` cycles through windows of the same program
command+w seems to close every window I've ever encountered
I do agree that keyboard navigation does suck in the mac though. GNOME is probably one of the best desktops I've used in terms of keyboard accessability. XP does a pretty good job too.
"2) Gnome is not attempting to copy os x, but create a new desktop environment. So your metric (closer to Mac OS) is a false one."
Your metric of being a douchebag is a true one.
A bit defensive are we? I'm pretty sure he was just mentioning that Gnome has made a lot of progress on its memory usage. My guess is that at one time or another Gnome used more memory than Windows XP, so he sees the fact that it is now lower than Windows XP as a sign of improvements.
I really don't think he was trying to claim that Gnome is now better than Windows XP because of this one measurement. Nobody is going to steal your prescious Windows XP box from you so calm down.
I'm pretty sure it's identical to my powerbook except it's thinner. The powerbooks are not brushed metal either. Perhaps you're thinking of the GUIs for iTunes, iChat, Safari, etc.
I've been glancing back and forth between the image on the website and my powerbook that's sitting next to me, and I can't figure out why people are saying this new intel one looks bad. It's just thinner. I'm a little disappointed, I always like to see new designs being tried out.
Aren't you forgetting the fact that they lowered prices only in the areas they had competition. They leveraged the higher prices in the other areas with no competition. So they gouged customers where there wasn't competition so they could kill off competition in other areas so they could in turn gouge those customers.
iChat is already compatible with google talk:a nswer=24076
http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?
I don't believe that monopolies are more than temporary unless they are given the power of monopoly through government licensing and regulations.
Huh? Isn't the reason we have these regulations because we've learned from history that the exact opposite of what you're saying is true? Did the government somehow kill competition for standard oil to give them a monopoly? Seriously, I'm asking. Perhaps you know something I don't.
It seems the cool new thing is to blame a company's woes on health care costs, and government regulation. The people who do this tend to ignore that there are a crap-load of companies doing fine with the same costs. Simply because they make products people want to buy. Then there are other companies making crap products who want to blame their dying company on the government. GM -- I'm looking at you.