My bad. Besides that, though, the point still stands - without the ability to type in the characters in question, we will be unable to visit sites that use characters beyond what we can type with our given keyboard.
Macs are pretty good about being able to easily access characters within the Western European alphabets (option+u gets you a German umlaut, followed by a, o or u), but it's a nightmare on Windows - a different nonsensical number sequence for each character (alt+0246 - or was it alt+0253?) I would be interested to know what Linux's options are.
Japanese won't mind, they've been romanizing their words for 500 years, thanks to Portuguese missionaries. The Japanese use four writing methods in their everyday lives already, so they're pretty flexible.
There are a lot more than just Chinese, Korean and Japanese to worry about. What about those scripts that are entered right-to-left instead of left-to-right? Do you have the ability to type in Sanskrit URLs?
The IDN is not a solution to the problem, it merely compounds it (and makes life more difficult for the guys responsible for the router tables.) Even with the animosity that some obviously feel towards the English language (and now the Roman alphabet, by association), it is at least a standard. It has the benefit of not including any special characters right off the bat, without losing the ability to transcribe most, if not all, of them.
Also, regardless of country, you're probably going to have those particular 26 characters on your keyboard (I'm typing this on a Japanese keyboard, no sweat.)
Someone willing to commit fraud is not automatically capable of murder.
Considering that the great majority of computer users on the web probably pirate software, music, and other forms of media every day, that makes us all criminals (at least, according to the RIAA.) Do you feel like killing anybody?
I understand that, as a parent, it's really hard to deal with the fact that your kids are developing hormones and may like to look at porn. The bigger, more legitimate worry is that they might start joining chat rooms and talking with people that might harm them.
As for the first item, I'd suggest you get over it. It's natural for kids to want to look at porn, and forbidding them isn't going to stop them from looking at it, it simply means they'll look for another way you simply don't know about, or go over to their friend's house and do it there.
As for the second point, simply explain to your kids that the same rules that apply to not taking rides from strangers applies to the Internet as well, and that they aren't to be giving out their personal information, etc.
Also, as far as surfing the internet goes, remember: if they're at home entertaining themeselves on the internet, at least they're not out doing other things that are guaranteed to do them physical harm (insert horrible mental image here.) Looking at sex is entirely different than having it.
My parents used to come down hard on my brother for using the internet to surf for porn, but I pointed out the very same things to them. He became angry and rebellious, but instead of stopping, simply found other routes, just as I predicted. He even went so far as to take the family car joy-riding a couple of times, which got him into worse trouble.
My parents finally decided to try things the other way. They sat him down, explained what their concerns were to him, and then - wonder of wonders - told him that they'd decided to trust him with the responsibility as long as he promised to be careful. They let him take the car out.
My parents found out later that, as he was filling the car up with gas, he proudly told the store clerk that he had the coolest parents in the world. And he did his best to not abuse their trust from that day on - because they treated him like an adult.
But that's what you're going to be up against with the average user. Trust me, as a Mac user, I've been fighting the same annoying generalizations for years.
I agree. LOTR definitely does not have a standard ending (especially when you consider that a lot of the "ending" is buried in the susequent appendices.) When does a story end? I think leaving the Scouring out is a good idea for movie purposes. The last part of the book could easily become another movie by itself.
here is no LiveEval version.. so you have to backup everything in your previous setup, install a copy of the new OS, sit through atleast an hour long OS install (if not longer) + download and find all of the apps to finish out the install (easily another hour if you have done it before) just to try it out.
Ironically, a Linux installation takes longer than a Windows installation. All of my Windows installations since Windows 98 SE, done with custom setup, have finished in thirty minutes or less. Of course, this does *not* count applying patches.
I agree that the "no apps installed, I got bored and left" excuse was just that. Windows doesn't come with much more without going out and downloading something. However, I would like to say that my most recent experience with Yellow Dog Linux for the Mac (no, not Fedora, but I'm talking about Linux vs. Windows), was an altogether pleasant one.
The only thing that sucked was its inability to detect my monitor or video card correctly, despite the fact that they were both very standard (a Sharp LCD and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro.) I was able to manually do so, but I'm not the norm. This kind of slip-up will kill it for the average user, which is why Linux people need to get on the ball and fix that sort of thing if they really want to see switchers sticking around.
If, on the other hand, you really don't care if people view Linux as the system of choice or not, then feel free to mock them for the fact that they're put off by basic things not working correctly. After all, not working right straight out of the box is a sure sign of a superior OS, right?
I don't think Apple is seriously planning on keeping up a schedule of one release per year (and even if they do, they can't; at some point, things will level off.) You don't have to apologize for Apple.
On the other hand, I disagree with the people who bitch about the "Apple tax." You don't *have* to buy it. People bitch about security and "needing" the improvements to the OS, but that's all crap, too. Unless you're a corporate user, very few people on the Mac really need to worry about security. Contrary to popular belief, nobody really cares about your porn collection nearly as much as you do. For those of you who are self-employed, if your business is actually turning a profit, then this won't come as a big hit - should you actually need it.
As far as the corporations are concerned, $130 is a pretty good deal, and they don't *have* to upgrade past 10.3, for that matter.
I find most of the people who are bitching about the tax are those who plan on pirating it, anyway, and are just looking for some justification.
I signed up for the Technology Review newsletter and this was the first piece of actual email I've gotten. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Not only did it basically look like cheap spam to me, clicking on the unsubscribe link did *not* take me to an unsubscribe page, but instead to a main page with only a link to allow me to create an account. The whole thing read like a fantasy football league.
If this "great idea" is going to catch on, they're going to have to start by acting a little more professionally than your average penis enlargment spammer.
The NT 4.0 system had a nice little bit called the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that allowed it to be ported to different processors more-or-less easily.
Apple has fallen for what we could call the Microsoft syndrome, fallen in love with flashy graphics at the expense of a clean UI, and it shows.
This must be a hitherto-unknown Microsoft syndrome. If you were to ask the average person which platform was known for flashy graphics now or five years ago, which answer do you think you'd get?
Microsoft *still* has crappy graphics, even under XP. That's why they're promising a new graphics engine in Longhorn.
As TRUE Americans, we recognize that we live in a democracy *and* we would love to curtail somebody's freedom of speech? I'm confused.
Our government is one step below a dictatorship. A dictatorship assumes George Bush took absolute power of the government. Our government is way too inefficient to support that political model.
Ever try installing Gentoo, Mandrake or Yellow Dog Linux for the Mac? Forgetting entirely that you can compile and run most Open Source apps directly under OSX, not to mention desktop environments such as KDE, Gnome, etc.
The trick is if you installed 10.2.8 first. I discovered that the main reason 10.2.8 sucked so badly was because it corrupted my user account. On two systems. I redid my account to fix the problem, and the 10.3 update ran smoothly (albiet slowly on a PowerBook 400.) It checked *everything* for data corruption. Impressive.
So okay, if they have feature parity, why are they more expensive again? You realize that you're arguing the same line Mac users have as to why the extra price on their hardware is worth it, don't you?
BTW, DVD burner != SuperDrive. Might want to check your research.
One more feature parity requirement: you'll have to pay the extra for WinXP Pro. I didn't factor that in, but that's just going to raise the price some more.
Followed your link and configured a computer. To be fair, I standardized as much as possible (standard keyboard and mouse instead of wireless, approximately matching hard drive, matching video card, matching Ethernet) and got $2,752. Congratulations, your box *is* cheaper than the G5. You get 40GB less hard drive space, but they don't sell a 160GB drive, and I was going for fair.
Feel better now? One out of four machines is not only $150 cheaper, but offers feature parity. Thanks for pointing that out. Of course, I still can't use it as my main workstation, because it doesn't offer the ability to switch between languages OS-wide the way OSX does. Not a common requirement, but the kind of flexibility I can only get with OSX (you can get it from Microsoft, too, but you'll have to pay an extra $400.)
So I followed their links to the other PC sites and configured a few of them to match (as closely as possible) the basic dual G5 from Apple. Result: Apple, $2999. AlienWare: $3160. Voodoo PC: $3060. Falcon Northwest: $3179. Etc. I'd have done them all, but I have a life.
I tried to be as fair as possible. However, it was usually difficult or impossible to get matching optical drives (as in SuperDrive), and many models not only didn't offer Gigabit ethernet, they didn't offer Ethernet *at all.* They had modems, though. Optional (I didn't add them, so they'd cost you extra.) Good grief.
So lacking some of the features that the G5 comes with standard, the Athlon-based PCs came in more expensive. Same old game on the "PCs are cheaper" front. The Athlons may be faster, but they'll cost you.
Now how is that for fair? "Faster costs more money." That sounds like reason to me. You can have a really fast processor, but at the expense of giving up a few things you might want in order to be productive. Like the internet.
Question: how many Open Source applications can you compile under Windows? Don't worry, you don't have to compile; you can usually download a precompiled binary of the latest version, too. Well, that is, if you're not running Windows.
True, the PC still has more games than the Mac. A lot of the really good ones are on the Mac, but there are a few that have fallen through the cracks that are just a real shame, too. However, that's what my PS2 is for. I don't fork out $500 where $200 will suffice. Talk about your overpriced game consoles. Plus, my PS2 "just works," never has driver conflicts, and never has funky hardware wizards.:)
As far as the hardware working or not on each platform, it's easy to point out cases of things failing on the PC or the Mac, but people seem to forget the possibility that it's the idiots running the machines that's the problem.
If there's another reason you bought your PC (like work), then that's a different conversation all together. Nine times out of ten, you will be more productive on a Mac, simply because you're not messing around with all of the bugs and glitches that comes with owning a PC.
A well-run PC is a beautiful thing (my old Dell P3/450 was an awesome machine), but that only counts for the 10% of the population who actually have a clue about keeping it well-tuned. With a Mac, you have to really work at it to screw it up. This is a good thing, the last time I checked.
Yes, you can buy a PC that "just works" for $500. Emphasis on the "just," as in "barely." First thing you'll have to do is upgrade the memory, followed by the video card, and hope that the integrated sound on the motherboard isn't crap. But that's why you bought a cheap PC, right? For the flexibility of being able to upgrade? Except now you've just bumped up the price of your $500 PC to $800, and you still don't have a monitor. Oh, and you'll have to settle for the sluggish performance of your two-years-out-of-date processor. Yep, real cost effective, that. Don't worry, you can always fork over $500 next year and get something new.
I can fork out money on my overpriced Mac and keep it running for five years, with upgrades. Divide the price tag by number of years and my total cost of ownership just went down dramatically. Just about even, really, except that I get to start out with a real powerhouse instead of settling for "just barely" the way the $500 PC owner did.
How does "just letting evolution happen" ensure the United States' continued success? The United States got to being where it is by being ruthless entrepeneurs - all of which, at some point or another, came from another country.
Powerful, rich countries have risen and dwindled. The US, too, will one day give way to another younger, more vital power. That's evolution for you. That doesn't mean we have to help things along in the meantime by offering our head on a plate.
If he charged $25 an hour and worked a 40-hour work week, he'd be earning $52,000 a year while being still in college. If he only worked 20 hours a week, he'd still walk away with $26,000 in "mad money."
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Just goes to show that for every wannabe artist who creates trash, there is someone else who will think it's art.
My bad. Besides that, though, the point still stands - without the ability to type in the characters in question, we will be unable to visit sites that use characters beyond what we can type with our given keyboard.
Macs are pretty good about being able to easily access characters within the Western European alphabets (option+u gets you a German umlaut, followed by a, o or u), but it's a nightmare on Windows - a different nonsensical number sequence for each character (alt+0246 - or was it alt+0253?) I would be interested to know what Linux's options are.
Japanese won't mind, they've been romanizing their words for 500 years, thanks to Portuguese missionaries. The Japanese use four writing methods in their everyday lives already, so they're pretty flexible.
There are a lot more than just Chinese, Korean and Japanese to worry about. What about those scripts that are entered right-to-left instead of left-to-right? Do you have the ability to type in Sanskrit URLs?
The IDN is not a solution to the problem, it merely compounds it (and makes life more difficult for the guys responsible for the router tables.) Even with the animosity that some obviously feel towards the English language (and now the Roman alphabet, by association), it is at least a standard. It has the benefit of not including any special characters right off the bat, without losing the ability to transcribe most, if not all, of them.
Also, regardless of country, you're probably going to have those particular 26 characters on your keyboard (I'm typing this on a Japanese keyboard, no sweat.)
There you go. That's why you put in the author's name at the end, so I don't wind up feeling like a goof. :)
Now I need to go buy the book. I've only read, "Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul."
And while you're at it, you might want to do tribute to the author and mention that this is an excerpt from a Terry Pratchett novel.
Someone willing to commit fraud is not automatically capable of murder.
Considering that the great majority of computer users on the web probably pirate software, music, and other forms of media every day, that makes us all criminals (at least, according to the RIAA.) Do you feel like killing anybody?
I'll be more impressed when people actually do quit because of this, instead of just thinking about it.
Don't feel bad, it's the reality of the paycheck.
I understand that, as a parent, it's really hard to deal with the fact that your kids are developing hormones and may like to look at porn. The bigger, more legitimate worry is that they might start joining chat rooms and talking with people that might harm them.
As for the first item, I'd suggest you get over it. It's natural for kids to want to look at porn, and forbidding them isn't going to stop them from looking at it, it simply means they'll look for another way you simply don't know about, or go over to their friend's house and do it there.
As for the second point, simply explain to your kids that the same rules that apply to not taking rides from strangers applies to the Internet as well, and that they aren't to be giving out their personal information, etc.
Also, as far as surfing the internet goes, remember: if they're at home entertaining themeselves on the internet, at least they're not out doing other things that are guaranteed to do them physical harm (insert horrible mental image here.) Looking at sex is entirely different than having it.
My parents used to come down hard on my brother for using the internet to surf for porn, but I pointed out the very same things to them. He became angry and rebellious, but instead of stopping, simply found other routes, just as I predicted. He even went so far as to take the family car joy-riding a couple of times, which got him into worse trouble.
My parents finally decided to try things the other way. They sat him down, explained what their concerns were to him, and then - wonder of wonders - told him that they'd decided to trust him with the responsibility as long as he promised to be careful. They let him take the car out.
My parents found out later that, as he was filling the car up with gas, he proudly told the store clerk that he had the coolest parents in the world. And he did his best to not abuse their trust from that day on - because they treated him like an adult.
But that's what you're going to be up against with the average user. Trust me, as a Mac user, I've been fighting the same annoying generalizations for years.
I agree. LOTR definitely does not have a standard ending (especially when you consider that a lot of the "ending" is buried in the susequent appendices.) When does a story end? I think leaving the Scouring out is a good idea for movie purposes. The last part of the book could easily become another movie by itself.
Ironically, a Linux installation takes longer than a Windows installation. All of my Windows installations since Windows 98 SE, done with custom setup, have finished in thirty minutes or less. Of course, this does *not* count applying patches.
I agree that the "no apps installed, I got bored and left" excuse was just that. Windows doesn't come with much more without going out and downloading something. However, I would like to say that my most recent experience with Yellow Dog Linux for the Mac (no, not Fedora, but I'm talking about Linux vs. Windows), was an altogether pleasant one.
The only thing that sucked was its inability to detect my monitor or video card correctly, despite the fact that they were both very standard (a Sharp LCD and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro.) I was able to manually do so, but I'm not the norm. This kind of slip-up will kill it for the average user, which is why Linux people need to get on the ball and fix that sort of thing if they really want to see switchers sticking around.
If, on the other hand, you really don't care if people view Linux as the system of choice or not, then feel free to mock them for the fact that they're put off by basic things not working correctly. After all, not working right straight out of the box is a sure sign of a superior OS, right?
I don't think Apple is seriously planning on keeping up a schedule of one release per year (and even if they do, they can't; at some point, things will level off.) You don't have to apologize for Apple.
On the other hand, I disagree with the people who bitch about the "Apple tax." You don't *have* to buy it. People bitch about security and "needing" the improvements to the OS, but that's all crap, too. Unless you're a corporate user, very few people on the Mac really need to worry about security. Contrary to popular belief, nobody really cares about your porn collection nearly as much as you do. For those of you who are self-employed, if your business is actually turning a profit, then this won't come as a big hit - should you actually need it.
As far as the corporations are concerned, $130 is a pretty good deal, and they don't *have* to upgrade past 10.3, for that matter.
I find most of the people who are bitching about the tax are those who plan on pirating it, anyway, and are just looking for some justification.
When will humanity evolve to the point where they'd rather pay than get it for free?
I signed up for the Technology Review newsletter and this was the first piece of actual email I've gotten. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Not only did it basically look like cheap spam to me, clicking on the unsubscribe link did *not* take me to an unsubscribe page, but instead to a main page with only a link to allow me to create an account. The whole thing read like a fantasy football league.
If this "great idea" is going to catch on, they're going to have to start by acting a little more professionally than your average penis enlargment spammer.
The NT 4.0 system had a nice little bit called the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that allowed it to be ported to different processors more-or-less easily.
As TRUE Americans, we recognize that we live in a democracy *and* we would love to curtail somebody's freedom of speech? I'm confused.
Our government is one step below a dictatorship. A dictatorship assumes George Bush took absolute power of the government. Our government is way too inefficient to support that political model.
Ever try installing Gentoo, Mandrake or Yellow Dog Linux for the Mac? Forgetting entirely that you can compile and run most Open Source apps directly under OSX, not to mention desktop environments such as KDE, Gnome, etc.
And you give people advice for a living?
The trick is if you installed 10.2.8 first. I discovered that the main reason 10.2.8 sucked so badly was because it corrupted my user account. On two systems. I redid my account to fix the problem, and the 10.3 update ran smoothly (albiet slowly on a PowerBook 400.) It checked *everything* for data corruption. Impressive.
Depends on how long the path is, whether or not you know the path off-hand, and whether or not you make a mistake typing it in.
So okay, if they have feature parity, why are they more expensive again? You realize that you're arguing the same line Mac users have as to why the extra price on their hardware is worth it, don't you?
BTW, DVD burner != SuperDrive. Might want to check your research.
One more feature parity requirement: you'll have to pay the extra for WinXP Pro. I didn't factor that in, but that's just going to raise the price some more.
Followed your link and configured a computer. To be fair, I standardized as much as possible (standard keyboard and mouse instead of wireless, approximately matching hard drive, matching video card, matching Ethernet) and got $2,752. Congratulations, your box *is* cheaper than the G5. You get 40GB less hard drive space, but they don't sell a 160GB drive, and I was going for fair.
Feel better now? One out of four machines is not only $150 cheaper, but offers feature parity. Thanks for pointing that out. Of course, I still can't use it as my main workstation, because it doesn't offer the ability to switch between languages OS-wide the way OSX does. Not a common requirement, but the kind of flexibility I can only get with OSX (you can get it from Microsoft, too, but you'll have to pay an extra $400.)
So I followed their links to the other PC sites and configured a few of them to match (as closely as possible) the basic dual G5 from Apple. Result: Apple, $2999. AlienWare: $3160. Voodoo PC: $3060. Falcon Northwest: $3179. Etc. I'd have done them all, but I have a life.
I tried to be as fair as possible. However, it was usually difficult or impossible to get matching optical drives (as in SuperDrive), and many models not only didn't offer Gigabit ethernet, they didn't offer Ethernet *at all.* They had modems, though. Optional (I didn't add them, so they'd cost you extra.) Good grief.
So lacking some of the features that the G5 comes with standard, the Athlon-based PCs came in more expensive. Same old game on the "PCs are cheaper" front. The Athlons may be faster, but they'll cost you.
Now how is that for fair? "Faster costs more money." That sounds like reason to me. You can have a really fast processor, but at the expense of giving up a few things you might want in order to be productive. Like the internet.
Question: how many Open Source applications can you compile under Windows? Don't worry, you don't have to compile; you can usually download a precompiled binary of the latest version, too. Well, that is, if you're not running Windows.
:)
True, the PC still has more games than the Mac. A lot of the really good ones are on the Mac, but there are a few that have fallen through the cracks that are just a real shame, too. However, that's what my PS2 is for. I don't fork out $500 where $200 will suffice. Talk about your overpriced game consoles. Plus, my PS2 "just works," never has driver conflicts, and never has funky hardware wizards.
As far as the hardware working or not on each platform, it's easy to point out cases of things failing on the PC or the Mac, but people seem to forget the possibility that it's the idiots running the machines that's the problem.
If there's another reason you bought your PC (like work), then that's a different conversation all together. Nine times out of ten, you will be more productive on a Mac, simply because you're not messing around with all of the bugs and glitches that comes with owning a PC.
A well-run PC is a beautiful thing (my old Dell P3/450 was an awesome machine), but that only counts for the 10% of the population who actually have a clue about keeping it well-tuned. With a Mac, you have to really work at it to screw it up. This is a good thing, the last time I checked.
Yes, you can buy a PC that "just works" for $500. Emphasis on the "just," as in "barely." First thing you'll have to do is upgrade the memory, followed by the video card, and hope that the integrated sound on the motherboard isn't crap. But that's why you bought a cheap PC, right? For the flexibility of being able to upgrade? Except now you've just bumped up the price of your $500 PC to $800, and you still don't have a monitor. Oh, and you'll have to settle for the sluggish performance of your two-years-out-of-date processor. Yep, real cost effective, that. Don't worry, you can always fork over $500 next year and get something new.
I can fork out money on my overpriced Mac and keep it running for five years, with upgrades. Divide the price tag by number of years and my total cost of ownership just went down dramatically. Just about even, really, except that I get to start out with a real powerhouse instead of settling for "just barely" the way the $500 PC owner did.
How does "just letting evolution happen" ensure the United States' continued success? The United States got to being where it is by being ruthless entrepeneurs - all of which, at some point or another, came from another country.
Powerful, rich countries have risen and dwindled. The US, too, will one day give way to another younger, more vital power. That's evolution for you. That doesn't mean we have to help things along in the meantime by offering our head on a plate.
I agree with the parent.
If he charged $25 an hour and worked a 40-hour work week, he'd be earning $52,000 a year while being still in college. If he only worked 20 hours a week, he'd still walk away with $26,000 in "mad money."
You people are so high. Use a caculator.