I've never ever had trouble opening my MacBook Pro in any airline seat... It seems to me 1" is plenty thin enough to be an airline workhorse... Any thinner IMHO is a bit pointless.
I agree with GP, overall the Lenovo is looking like the better machine. More ports (yay!), better resolution (a small bonus, IMHO), WiMax integration (meh right now, may become important later), and integrated disc drive (yay!), is a lot of pluses, considering its only penalties are being thicker, and having slightly less battery life.
About the only real place where the MBA wins over the X300 is the weight. Sure, 0.5 lbs don't seem like a lot, but then again, people said that about the 2 lb difference between the MacBook and MacBook Air. Weight does matter for people who are traveling with the device ALL DAY.
Oh come on, way to let zealotry get ahead of you. OSx86 is a hack project, not a stable distribution of any OS. One has enough trouble just getting the most basic functions to run, even with a machine spec'ed to emulate Mac hardware. Getting OS X running on run of the mill generic hardware is EXTREMELY difficult.
Mod parent down. It's like suggesting a Vista install for a Pentium 300. I'm sure with enough hackery you can get it to work, but the results will NOT be professional, nor will it be stable, and in any case it's far beyond the abilities of your average user - or even your average power user.
Hmm... So, thumb drive. Let's say you want to pull files off a disc and onto a USB drive with the MacBook Pro. Oops!
See, things would be wonderful if they were all Bluetooth, but they ain't. Bluetooth mice are expensive (the Mighty Mouse is a poor excuse for a mouse, IMHO), and the selection is very limited. The best mice in my experience are not Bluetooth, sadly.
Not to mention that this whole wireless thing that Apple is apparently touting doesn't quite work. My iPhone cannot sync wirelessly with my laptop, and that's aggravating, since now I need to have it use up a (precious, precious) USB port!
Us Mac users tend to bitch and moan about small inconveniences in the PC world - heavy, thick laptops, crappy power bricks, etc etc. There's no reason we should let Apple get away with this major inconvenience (i.e. lack of ports) just because they're Apple.
Ehhh... I'm a hardcore Mac user (MacBook Pro for me)... and I disagree. One of the things that really kills me about the MacBook Air is the TOTAL lack of ports. You know, Apple was the first one to jump on the USB bandwagon, using USB HID peripherals when everyone else was still shipping them with PS/2 ports. But now, they ship a laptop with only TWO ports? The ONE thing I hate about my MacBook Pro (and the MacBook) is that it only has two USB ports, necessitating ANY serious user to get a USB hub (oh great, ANOTHER thing in the laptop bag). And now we're looking at... ONE PORT?
That to me is a dealbreaker. Especially considering that in order to use the disc drive you must plug it directly into the laptop, meaning you cannot use ANY USB PERIPHERALS while using the disc drive. Have you heard anything so ludicrous in your life?
I appreciate that Apple is concerned about the form of our electronics and not just the function, but sometimes they do take it too far. When form compromises functionality, you know you're doing something wrong!
Don't apologize for Celine, she serves a useful purpose! It concentrates all the people with bad musical taste in the middle of the desert, for easy disposal if we feel like:) And think of Vegas as a quarantine... desert all around... seal off the roads and the rest of the world remains safe from her voice...
The trick with censorship is that it will always be a double-edged sword. For every hatemonger you squelch, the law will be perverted to squelchy a legitimate complaint. I for one would rather have some annoying, hateful folk about, than to quiet legitimate discontent.
Not to mention "freedom of speech" is not "freedom to speak what society in general feels is worthy and non-threatening". Freedom of speech should not come with caveats and exceptions. The only restraints on it should be where the speech is unjustly and materially causing damage to someone else (i.e. your right to free speech interferes with someone else's inalienable right).
News reporters obsessed with what sells and not what's important? That's true. But we only have ourselves (as a society) to blame. CNN wouldn't be goo-goo-ga-ga over Anna Nicole's death if people didn't actually care. If the world would like to hear about Britney over Middle Eastern politics, then that's what they will get. It's not as if there's some massive conspiracy to turn television into nothing but puerile celeb talk - TV's stupidity reflects our own stupidity.
But that's the antithesis of freedom of speech and freedom of creed. We all agree that Nazism is a Bad Thing, but the mark of a truly free society is to allow people to believe in these things, even if it is ostensibly bad.
Because they are? Hell, I'm Canadian, I love my country, and even I have to admit that the USA does an immense number of things extremely well. Technology, for one - there is a reason that the majority of the world's tech R&D occurs in the USA, or is funded by the USA. The Americans have a strong history of "stealing" the best and brightest from all the countries of the world, and making them work for Uncle Sam. With promises of a better quality of life, freedom from persecution, and a culture where performance is rewarded, the US *is* the world leader in these things.
Of course, that is all changing somewhat suddenly now. Recent administrations have sabotaged scientific research funding for religious and partisan purposes, skilled immigrants are now the target of hatred, instead of being welcomed with open arms. Millions of Muslims are being socially ostracized and targeted for doing absolutely nothing except being non-Christian.
Don't get me wrong, America still does a lot right. But if you guys want to maintain your position as the grand superpower of the world, you need to seriously turn some of that shit around. It's already going to take DECADES to fix your foreign policy disaster, your economic fuckups, and restore scientific and technological integrity to your academia... so get started.
Oh, and more to the point, the USA *is* still among the best in freedom of speech. You know, they're the country where displaying Confederate flags is legal, KKK rallies are legal... whereas in, say, Germany, displaying any sort of Nazi symbolism is a good way to get hauled off to jail. This isn't a value judgment, just an observation that one land is clearly more free than the other, for better or for worse.
That's easy. Gain access to your friend's credit card account over the phone, by using only information you found out about him from the internet (birthdate, address, mother's maiden name, etc.). That will scare anyone shitless.
Right, whereas the iPhone is still getting more popular... the KRZR is a flop, so is the RAZR2... Nobody said Motorola wasn't successful before, but they've expended all of their successes by failing to keep up with the competition.
Don't underestimate the effect of supply chains. While a good supply chain can't save a bad product, a horrible one can actually make a great product unprofitable. That being said, I agree, I really doubt supply chain is really Motorola's problem. Their problem is not that they can't build these cheap enough, or build enough, or get them to stores quick enough - it's that NOBODY WANTS THEM.
LG used to be the newbie in the industry that's the butt of all the jokes. Now they are at the top, with customer satisfaction ratings just below Blackberry and iPhone, and that's amazing. Their devices are slick, look nice, with pretty easy UI (though I'm spoiled by my iPhone). I've played around with a few of them, and honestly if I didn't splurge for the iPhone I would've gotten an LG.
Motorola is anything but. When they came out with their MP3 phones, consumers were surprised to learn that using the music player app would bring battery life down to 5-6 hours, and it wasn't even able to play VBR MP3s! Given how many VBR MP3s are floating around on file sharing networks, a LOT of people were bitten. Their OS is slow, unresponsive, and buggy - I've had my V635 crash about once every couple of days while I owned it. I'm reluctant to even TRY a Moto product now, given my experiences with them, and it's hard to see a company like them burn away SO many years of customer loyalty and good will.
Actually, it's less about having multiple parties... and more to do with parliamentary procedure. In Canada, if the ruling party proposes a bill and is defeated, the entire government MUST RESIGN and an election is held. It only takes ONE bill to bring down the government and give the other guys a shot. The logic is that if the ruling party tables a bill that fails to pass, then clearly the ruling party is no longer in favor with the people. This has a tendency to keep out the most insane of laws.
And while we only have two "major" parties (the Liberals and Conservatives), there are plenty of "significant minority" parties out there. In controversial cases these guys actually do have a say, whereas in the US you're either Republican, Democrat, or you have no say at all.
I think the main reason for the saner laws in this parliament is due to the minority. If any party has a majority we'll get some pretty crazy bills passed through the House. IMHO we should just keep minority governments around forever - it keeps legislation sane and relatively nonpartisan.
I think mobile consumers have proven themselves savvy enough not to buy substandard "phone blank" devices. Why is Motorola in the rut they are in now? Well, years of making substandard devices (hardware quality was fine, software was not) that had no ergonomics physically nor mentally. They thought they could ride on their brand (which at one time was THE most powerful in the market) with mediocre phones. Consumers knew better.
For anyone to break into, or even survive in, the mobile market, they need to bring to the table something amazing, either by offering unprecedented feature sets, or simply making the gadget slick and stylish. A "blank phone" would accomplish neither of those things.
In the end, any serious competitor in this market is going to have to spend a LOT of money building their phones, no corner may be cut.
Mod parent up. This is something that people in the tech field gloss over FAR too often. When it comes down to cell phones, laptops, and all of these consumer electronics, the feature sets of each device is all about the same (bluetooth, WiFi, yadi yada, it's all there)... The only thing that the user interacts with that is DIFFERENT is the UI. The UI *is* the device. It is why Apple has succeeded, and why Motorola is desperate to rid itself of its mobile division.
Not to mention Alie nware can't make a cell phone if it meant their life. They can barely make laptops (the build quality isn't very good), and their case designs are generics from Asian suppliers, modified slightly to give it that distinct Alienware style at the top. I don't believe they have the engineering expertise to build a mobile system from the ground up - not when their status is merely a (substandard quality, overpriced) systems integrator.
Hell, the iPhone's only *real* advantage is its incredibly slick and easy UI. That Alienphone concept has a UI that looks convoluted enough that even a techie like myself will get lost.
The question is... if you're running a cheap card you're probably already pushing the card to its limits in new games, can you afford to give any cycles to PhysX?
So... clearly this guy knows WTF he's doing. So what's the secret here? We gotta be missing something... A guy like that doesn't just throw $100M around for nothing.
A bit of both I suppose. It's not every day you get to do a live-fire exercise of your satellite-attacking technologies... Not to mention it's not every day you get a real live test of just how good your satellite's anti-missile technologies are! Either way somebody in the military wins:P
Big chunks will no doubt re-enter the atmosphere relatively quickly, and they should be small enough that they will burn up completely in upon re-entry, which I think was the whole point of this exercise...
You're assuming that Comcast and the members of the government have an antagonistic relationship. This cannot be further from the truth. The government can and will let them raise the rates as high as possible without compromising votes in the next election.
Keep in mind that at the time of the American Revolution, about 35% of the population supported war against the British. Now think about how many people in America today would support insurrection against the current government. You don't have a chance in hell, unfortunately.
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I've never ever had trouble opening my MacBook Pro in any airline seat... It seems to me 1" is plenty thin enough to be an airline workhorse... Any thinner IMHO is a bit pointless.
I agree with GP, overall the Lenovo is looking like the better machine. More ports (yay!), better resolution (a small bonus, IMHO), WiMax integration (meh right now, may become important later), and integrated disc drive (yay!), is a lot of pluses, considering its only penalties are being thicker, and having slightly less battery life.
About the only real place where the MBA wins over the X300 is the weight. Sure, 0.5 lbs don't seem like a lot, but then again, people said that about the 2 lb difference between the MacBook and MacBook Air. Weight does matter for people who are traveling with the device ALL DAY.
Oh come on, way to let zealotry get ahead of you. OSx86 is a hack project, not a stable distribution of any OS. One has enough trouble just getting the most basic functions to run, even with a machine spec'ed to emulate Mac hardware. Getting OS X running on run of the mill generic hardware is EXTREMELY difficult.
Mod parent down. It's like suggesting a Vista install for a Pentium 300. I'm sure with enough hackery you can get it to work, but the results will NOT be professional, nor will it be stable, and in any case it's far beyond the abilities of your average user - or even your average power user.
Hmm... So, thumb drive. Let's say you want to pull files off a disc and onto a USB drive with the MacBook Pro. Oops!
See, things would be wonderful if they were all Bluetooth, but they ain't. Bluetooth mice are expensive (the Mighty Mouse is a poor excuse for a mouse, IMHO), and the selection is very limited. The best mice in my experience are not Bluetooth, sadly.
Not to mention that this whole wireless thing that Apple is apparently touting doesn't quite work. My iPhone cannot sync wirelessly with my laptop, and that's aggravating, since now I need to have it use up a (precious, precious) USB port!
Us Mac users tend to bitch and moan about small inconveniences in the PC world - heavy, thick laptops, crappy power bricks, etc etc. There's no reason we should let Apple get away with this major inconvenience (i.e. lack of ports) just because they're Apple.
Ehhh... I'm a hardcore Mac user (MacBook Pro for me)... and I disagree. One of the things that really kills me about the MacBook Air is the TOTAL lack of ports. You know, Apple was the first one to jump on the USB bandwagon, using USB HID peripherals when everyone else was still shipping them with PS/2 ports. But now, they ship a laptop with only TWO ports? The ONE thing I hate about my MacBook Pro (and the MacBook) is that it only has two USB ports, necessitating ANY serious user to get a USB hub (oh great, ANOTHER thing in the laptop bag). And now we're looking at... ONE PORT?
That to me is a dealbreaker. Especially considering that in order to use the disc drive you must plug it directly into the laptop, meaning you cannot use ANY USB PERIPHERALS while using the disc drive. Have you heard anything so ludicrous in your life?
I appreciate that Apple is concerned about the form of our electronics and not just the function, but sometimes they do take it too far. When form compromises functionality, you know you're doing something wrong!
Don't apologize for Celine, she serves a useful purpose! It concentrates all the people with bad musical taste in the middle of the desert, for easy disposal if we feel like :) And think of Vegas as a quarantine... desert all around... seal off the roads and the rest of the world remains safe from her voice...
The trick with censorship is that it will always be a double-edged sword. For every hatemonger you squelch, the law will be perverted to squelchy a legitimate complaint. I for one would rather have some annoying, hateful folk about, than to quiet legitimate discontent.
Not to mention "freedom of speech" is not "freedom to speak what society in general feels is worthy and non-threatening". Freedom of speech should not come with caveats and exceptions. The only restraints on it should be where the speech is unjustly and materially causing damage to someone else (i.e. your right to free speech interferes with someone else's inalienable right).
News reporters obsessed with what sells and not what's important? That's true. But we only have ourselves (as a society) to blame. CNN wouldn't be goo-goo-ga-ga over Anna Nicole's death if people didn't actually care. If the world would like to hear about Britney over Middle Eastern politics, then that's what they will get. It's not as if there's some massive conspiracy to turn television into nothing but puerile celeb talk - TV's stupidity reflects our own stupidity.
But that's the antithesis of freedom of speech and freedom of creed. We all agree that Nazism is a Bad Thing, but the mark of a truly free society is to allow people to believe in these things, even if it is ostensibly bad.
Because they are? Hell, I'm Canadian, I love my country, and even I have to admit that the USA does an immense number of things extremely well. Technology, for one - there is a reason that the majority of the world's tech R&D occurs in the USA, or is funded by the USA. The Americans have a strong history of "stealing" the best and brightest from all the countries of the world, and making them work for Uncle Sam. With promises of a better quality of life, freedom from persecution, and a culture where performance is rewarded, the US *is* the world leader in these things.
Of course, that is all changing somewhat suddenly now. Recent administrations have sabotaged scientific research funding for religious and partisan purposes, skilled immigrants are now the target of hatred, instead of being welcomed with open arms. Millions of Muslims are being socially ostracized and targeted for doing absolutely nothing except being non-Christian.
Don't get me wrong, America still does a lot right. But if you guys want to maintain your position as the grand superpower of the world, you need to seriously turn some of that shit around. It's already going to take DECADES to fix your foreign policy disaster, your economic fuckups, and restore scientific and technological integrity to your academia... so get started.
Oh, and more to the point, the USA *is* still among the best in freedom of speech. You know, they're the country where displaying Confederate flags is legal, KKK rallies are legal... whereas in, say, Germany, displaying any sort of Nazi symbolism is a good way to get hauled off to jail. This isn't a value judgment, just an observation that one land is clearly more free than the other, for better or for worse.
I sure hope you didnt' drop it on your neighbour's ln...
That's easy. Gain access to your friend's credit card account over the phone, by using only information you found out about him from the internet (birthdate, address, mother's maiden name, etc.). That will scare anyone shitless.
Right, whereas the iPhone is still getting more popular... the KRZR is a flop, so is the RAZR2... Nobody said Motorola wasn't successful before, but they've expended all of their successes by failing to keep up with the competition.
Don't underestimate the effect of supply chains. While a good supply chain can't save a bad product, a horrible one can actually make a great product unprofitable. That being said, I agree, I really doubt supply chain is really Motorola's problem. Their problem is not that they can't build these cheap enough, or build enough, or get them to stores quick enough - it's that NOBODY WANTS THEM.
LG used to be the newbie in the industry that's the butt of all the jokes. Now they are at the top, with customer satisfaction ratings just below Blackberry and iPhone, and that's amazing. Their devices are slick, look nice, with pretty easy UI (though I'm spoiled by my iPhone). I've played around with a few of them, and honestly if I didn't splurge for the iPhone I would've gotten an LG.
Motorola is anything but. When they came out with their MP3 phones, consumers were surprised to learn that using the music player app would bring battery life down to 5-6 hours, and it wasn't even able to play VBR MP3s! Given how many VBR MP3s are floating around on file sharing networks, a LOT of people were bitten. Their OS is slow, unresponsive, and buggy - I've had my V635 crash about once every couple of days while I owned it. I'm reluctant to even TRY a Moto product now, given my experiences with them, and it's hard to see a company like them burn away SO many years of customer loyalty and good will.
Actually, it's less about having multiple parties... and more to do with parliamentary procedure. In Canada, if the ruling party proposes a bill and is defeated, the entire government MUST RESIGN and an election is held. It only takes ONE bill to bring down the government and give the other guys a shot. The logic is that if the ruling party tables a bill that fails to pass, then clearly the ruling party is no longer in favor with the people. This has a tendency to keep out the most insane of laws.
And while we only have two "major" parties (the Liberals and Conservatives), there are plenty of "significant minority" parties out there. In controversial cases these guys actually do have a say, whereas in the US you're either Republican, Democrat, or you have no say at all.
I think the main reason for the saner laws in this parliament is due to the minority. If any party has a majority we'll get some pretty crazy bills passed through the House. IMHO we should just keep minority governments around forever - it keeps legislation sane and relatively nonpartisan.
I think mobile consumers have proven themselves savvy enough not to buy substandard "phone blank" devices. Why is Motorola in the rut they are in now? Well, years of making substandard devices (hardware quality was fine, software was not) that had no ergonomics physically nor mentally. They thought they could ride on their brand (which at one time was THE most powerful in the market) with mediocre phones. Consumers knew better.
For anyone to break into, or even survive in, the mobile market, they need to bring to the table something amazing, either by offering unprecedented feature sets, or simply making the gadget slick and stylish. A "blank phone" would accomplish neither of those things.
In the end, any serious competitor in this market is going to have to spend a LOT of money building their phones, no corner may be cut.
Mod parent up. This is something that people in the tech field gloss over FAR too often. When it comes down to cell phones, laptops, and all of these consumer electronics, the feature sets of each device is all about the same (bluetooth, WiFi, yadi yada, it's all there)... The only thing that the user interacts with that is DIFFERENT is the UI. The UI *is* the device. It is why Apple has succeeded, and why Motorola is desperate to rid itself of its mobile division.
Not to mention Alie nware can't make a cell phone if it meant their life. They can barely make laptops (the build quality isn't very good), and their case designs are generics from Asian suppliers, modified slightly to give it that distinct Alienware style at the top. I don't believe they have the engineering expertise to build a mobile system from the ground up - not when their status is merely a (substandard quality, overpriced) systems integrator.
Hell, the iPhone's only *real* advantage is its incredibly slick and easy UI. That Alienphone concept has a UI that looks convoluted enough that even a techie like myself will get lost.
The question is... if you're running a cheap card you're probably already pushing the card to its limits in new games, can you afford to give any cycles to PhysX?
So... clearly this guy knows WTF he's doing. So what's the secret here? We gotta be missing something... A guy like that doesn't just throw $100M around for nothing.
A bit of both I suppose. It's not every day you get to do a live-fire exercise of your satellite-attacking technologies... Not to mention it's not every day you get a real live test of just how good your satellite's anti-missile technologies are! Either way somebody in the military wins :P
Big chunks will no doubt re-enter the atmosphere relatively quickly, and they should be small enough that they will burn up completely in upon re-entry, which I think was the whole point of this exercise...
You're assuming that Comcast and the members of the government have an antagonistic relationship. This cannot be further from the truth. The government can and will let them raise the rates as high as possible without compromising votes in the next election.
Keep in mind that at the time of the American Revolution, about 35% of the population supported war against the British. Now think about how many people in America today would support insurrection against the current government. You don't have a chance in hell, unfortunately.
Lies! Back bacon is delicious, and so is whale blubber and pemmican.
Btw, don't come up here please. You fucked up your country, don't come here and fuck up ours :(
So do you, as a coder. When you create a piece of software you want to continually get paid for it each time someone wants a copy, no?
But wait, you coded that app 6 months ago! You greedy bastard, how dare you desire profit for something you have already done?!