But surely it is only snapshotting up to the Windows Log In screen?
By far the longest portion of the boot time is the post login shenanigans - waiting for the desktop to appear, and then starting up your usual applications.
In the meantime I've lost the time I use to grab a drink in the morning at work, and made shutdown far longer (and it takes long enough already).
I don't know how someone who has a mortgage that is 1x gross income can have payment problems. Nor how anyone can call a $50k mortgage "a massive amount of debt". Debt is getting a loan to buy a new car that loses 25% value on its first journey. Debt is buying useless trinkets and gadgets on the credit card without a means to pay it off at the end of the month. Debt is borrowing $50k to get a degree in equine studies. Debt is buying a double wide trailer in Tornado Alley and getting a $50k loan to pay for it.
More likely the mortgage company is making him pay up before he retires, which is around 5 to 10 years from his post.
The posters point is that it saves on his personal time because he doesn't have to hand-hold his family members through using or fixing the machine. Even a mere few hours a year of doing this could be worth more to the poster than the extra cost of the Mac.
Uninstalling apps? Delete the icon in the Applications folder. Done. Installing == drag icon into Applications folder. No need to nasty installer tools.
And for the geeks, the fact that there is a full Unix underneath simply means that it's nicer than Windows. Hence all the Linux geeks I know who buy Macs when they realise they don't have time to waste messing with building or fixing their own systems.
The fact that so many people buy Macs despite the higher price tag shows that there are many people who still find that price good value for what they are getting. The value for them encompasses far more than a bare list of features for the least price.
But that means you need to buy your new MacBook and a new HD camcorder at the same time, you can't make your existing non-USB camcorder last a few more years. This raises the cost enough that you'll think twice about the purchases.
Never mind all the Firewire audio equipment, and other Firewire setups. They might not be pro, but now their choice is pay a lot, or buy a PC. I think an ExpressCard slot on the MacBook would have gone a long way, if they could have found a place to put it.
DisplayPort can tunnel HDMI and DVI signals with a cheap adaptor (if Mini DisplayPort is a standard, then adaptors will appear for much cheaper than Apple's soon enough). It needs an active adaptor for VGA and dual-link DVI however (including in-line hardware for conversion).
It supports higher resolutions and bit-depth, unless you are using HDMI 1.3a.
Even the full size DisplayPort, err, port is about the same size as a HDMI port.
I don't personally think that having components that react to the mouse pointer being in their vicinity is that clever an idea, or should be patented (but that's the fault of the patent system), but I think that this patent is defensive so that another entity cannot come along and clone the behaviour of the dock, which I imagine Apple probably put quite a lot of time and effort into.
We haven't had cheap 1GB memory sticks for 10 years you know! What you call "a little memory" would have been a significant expense back then. What's half an hour of MPEG1 (what you could encode simply back then)? 500MB? So you add in your 500MB, CPU, Chipset, Video Encoder and Decoder... yeah.
The first TiVo has IIRC a 40GB hard drive and 64MB of RAM. It had to have a mechanism to record and read at the same time reliably from different areas of the hard drive because it didn't have an in-memory cache of the content.
You're talking about another issue, not the issue of "rewind, pause, fast forward" as functions in themselves which this patent isn't about, but whether the technology in this patent is actually valid. Which probably goes beyond "pause, rewind, fast forward of live TV", and indeed it specifies how they do it (buffers, etc).
If you can show a system from 1996 that invalidates this patent, then I'm sure that Dish networks would be willing to pay you well for your time to help their case.
But the touchscreen system should only record one vote per user.
There's no way it should register 1500 extra votes, regardless of random input being entered from static electricity or flies, moths or cicadas wandering across the touchscreen / input device.
After the vote has been registered for a user, no more votes should be allowed until the terminal is activated for the next voter.
That doesn't mean that the PS4 is coming out in 2016 however. Sony are quite happy to overlap their console releases and have a low-end console that's cheap and cheerful with loads of cheap games, and a high end console with the premium content. PS4 will probably come out in 2011 or 2012.
I'm sure they have, I'm sure some of them have tried it, and I'm also more than certain that only a small portion of those people got it to work correctly - which means that all services, networks, wireless, etc, are restored correctly upon waking up.
Unless they were using Macs, where I'm sure that 95%+ of such people have never had problems with sleep or hibernate working correctly.
2) They replaced the equipment, at a cost of a grand. Whether or not this was a like-for-like replacement or better is unanswered.
Whether or not he got his personal data back is another question, as anyone knows it is the time invested in generating your own data that is the real value in your PC. I hope he had a backup.
Knowing the British police I expect he'll be arrested for some non-related data on the hard drive like some MP3s.
One thing that shall be understood is that driving a car on a public highway is **NOT** a private act, and thus expectations of household privacy cannot apply.
Tracking someone's movements in public is clearly an activity that infringes the privacy expectations someone has when going about their business, even if that business is done in public entirely.
The infringement is in the act of tracking, not the individual instances of data capture at each camera. The government should not be allowed to gather this information on innocent people, and certainly not to store this data for who knows how long.
This is all but inevitable. The only power there is will be that of limiting the invasion of privacy that a person reasonably has on their day to day business. Tracking someone in their car clearly is an invasion of privacy, even if they are in public, because that's not normal behaviour - you don't know where people have come from and where they are going when you see them in public, you see them in that instant doing a small portion of their daily movement.
However the infrastructure could be used in a responsible manner if the tracking is only granted by a judge for specific cars.
I can see where it would be useful for a stolen car - until the number plate is changed anyway. Thieves will get clever though, switching number plates early, putting the hot number plate on another car, etc. Of course these cameras could still track certain cars by model/colour if the camera network is dense enough..
Average road speed cameras are already in the UK. I don't know if they only keep records of transgressing cars, or if they keep a record of every car that goes past. I bet they record aggregate information - average speeds of vehicles going through at different times of the day and so on. The problem of these cameras, and systems in general, is that they aren't reactive to road conditions at the time, and they also are put in places with artificial speed restrictions, or even obscured speed limit signs. Revenue collection is the primary aim.
Good point. I'll remember to call over the manager to complain prior to the gut ripping action.
(I do also believe that consumers do have a little responsibility to do basic research beforehand, but in this case you would expect a $500 printer to last a few years if used sensibly, and in addition I'm sure that it would have been recommended by the store to him at the time of purchase)
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But surely it is only snapshotting up to the Windows Log In screen?
By far the longest portion of the boot time is the post login shenanigans - waiting for the desktop to appear, and then starting up your usual applications.
In the meantime I've lost the time I use to grab a drink in the morning at work, and made shutdown far longer (and it takes long enough already).
I don't know how someone who has a mortgage that is 1x gross income can have payment problems. Nor how anyone can call a $50k mortgage "a massive amount of debt". Debt is getting a loan to buy a new car that loses 25% value on its first journey. Debt is buying useless trinkets and gadgets on the credit card without a means to pay it off at the end of the month. Debt is borrowing $50k to get a degree in equine studies. Debt is buying a double wide trailer in Tornado Alley and getting a $50k loan to pay for it.
More likely the mortgage company is making him pay up before he retires, which is around 5 to 10 years from his post.
I hope that you can make overpayments without penalty on that! Or that the fixed interest rate is lower than your bank's savings rate...
The posters point is that it saves on his personal time because he doesn't have to hand-hold his family members through using or fixing the machine. Even a mere few hours a year of doing this could be worth more to the poster than the extra cost of the Mac.
Uninstalling apps? Delete the icon in the Applications folder. Done. Installing == drag icon into Applications folder. No need to nasty installer tools.
And for the geeks, the fact that there is a full Unix underneath simply means that it's nicer than Windows. Hence all the Linux geeks I know who buy Macs when they realise they don't have time to waste messing with building or fixing their own systems.
The fact that so many people buy Macs despite the higher price tag shows that there are many people who still find that price good value for what they are getting. The value for them encompasses far more than a bare list of features for the least price.
But that means you need to buy your new MacBook and a new HD camcorder at the same time, you can't make your existing non-USB camcorder last a few more years. This raises the cost enough that you'll think twice about the purchases.
Never mind all the Firewire audio equipment, and other Firewire setups. They might not be pro, but now their choice is pay a lot, or buy a PC. I think an ExpressCard slot on the MacBook would have gone a long way, if they could have found a place to put it.
DisplayPort can tunnel HDMI and DVI signals with a cheap adaptor (if Mini DisplayPort is a standard, then adaptors will appear for much cheaper than Apple's soon enough). It needs an active adaptor for VGA and dual-link DVI however (including in-line hardware for conversion).
It supports higher resolutions and bit-depth, unless you are using HDMI 1.3a.
Even the full size DisplayPort, err, port is about the same size as a HDMI port.
Apple need to update the Mini. They will use the NVIDIA 9400M chipset I imagine, but no discrete graphics.
I agree about Mini DisplayPort - either ship with an adaptor, or include a HDMI in addition (as HDMI -> DVI cables are cheap still).
I expect that they will drop Firewire.
I wouldn't be surprised if they got rid of the SODIMM slot and put the 2GB on the motherboard directly.
I don't personally think that having components that react to the mouse pointer being in their vicinity is that clever an idea, or should be patented (but that's the fault of the patent system), but I think that this patent is defensive so that another entity cannot come along and clone the behaviour of the dock, which I imagine Apple probably put quite a lot of time and effort into.
We haven't had cheap 1GB memory sticks for 10 years you know! What you call "a little memory" would have been a significant expense back then. What's half an hour of MPEG1 (what you could encode simply back then)? 500MB? So you add in your 500MB, CPU, Chipset, Video Encoder and Decoder ... yeah.
The first TiVo has IIRC a 40GB hard drive and 64MB of RAM. It had to have a mechanism to record and read at the same time reliably from different areas of the hard drive because it didn't have an in-memory cache of the content.
But a Mac isn't a VHS recorder.
You're talking about another issue, not the issue of "rewind, pause, fast forward" as functions in themselves which this patent isn't about, but whether the technology in this patent is actually valid. Which probably goes beyond "pause, rewind, fast forward of live TV", and indeed it specifies how they do it (buffers, etc).
If you can show a system from 1996 that invalidates this patent, then I'm sure that Dish networks would be willing to pay you well for your time to help their case.
The patent doesn't relate to having a dock.
It relates to having a dock of icons that resize dynamically depending on the location of mouse cursor.
Presumably most of the /. discussion is not aware of this (because of the appalling standards of editing here) and is thus pointless...
Not any old plain dock, but one in which the icons resize depending on how close the mouse cursor is.
The algorithm is supplied, so you could implement a different algorithm I guess to get around it.
The patent is clearly to stop another OS replicating exactly the behaviour of the Mac OS X dock, i.e., UI copycat situations.
Show me a VCR that can continue to record live TV and allow you to view, pause, fast forward and rewind it at the same time.
But the touchscreen system should only record one vote per user.
There's no way it should register 1500 extra votes, regardless of random input being entered from static electricity or flies, moths or cicadas wandering across the touchscreen / input device.
After the vote has been registered for a user, no more votes should be allowed until the terminal is activated for the next voter.
That doesn't mean that the PS4 is coming out in 2016 however. Sony are quite happy to overlap their console releases and have a low-end console that's cheap and cheerful with loads of cheap games, and a high end console with the premium content. PS4 will probably come out in 2011 or 2012.
I'm sure they have, I'm sure some of them have tried it, and I'm also more than certain that only a small portion of those people got it to work correctly - which means that all services, networks, wireless, etc, are restored correctly upon waking up.
Unless they were using Macs, where I'm sure that 95%+ of such people have never had problems with sleep or hibernate working correctly.
Well, maybe he has an innocent photo of one of his children in underwear or naked.
Or a kinky 'extreme porn' picture of him and his wife.
Or some literature that, whilst being legal, would get him 42 days internment.
and so on...
1) They took his computer.
2) They replaced the equipment, at a cost of a grand. Whether or not this was a like-for-like replacement or better is unanswered.
Whether or not he got his personal data back is another question, as anyone knows it is the time invested in generating your own data that is the real value in your PC. I hope he had a backup.
Knowing the British police I expect he'll be arrested for some non-related data on the hard drive like some MP3s.
I'm glad I don't have any 1cm thick business cards in my wallet.
One thing that shall be understood is that driving a car on a public highway is **NOT** a private act, and thus expectations of household privacy cannot apply.
Tracking someone's movements in public is clearly an activity that infringes the privacy expectations someone has when going about their business, even if that business is done in public entirely.
The infringement is in the act of tracking, not the individual instances of data capture at each camera. The government should not be allowed to gather this information on innocent people, and certainly not to store this data for who knows how long.
This is all but inevitable. The only power there is will be that of limiting the invasion of privacy that a person reasonably has on their day to day business. Tracking someone in their car clearly is an invasion of privacy, even if they are in public, because that's not normal behaviour - you don't know where people have come from and where they are going when you see them in public, you see them in that instant doing a small portion of their daily movement.
However the infrastructure could be used in a responsible manner if the tracking is only granted by a judge for specific cars.
I can see where it would be useful for a stolen car - until the number plate is changed anyway. Thieves will get clever though, switching number plates early, putting the hot number plate on another car, etc. Of course these cameras could still track certain cars by model/colour if the camera network is dense enough..
Average road speed cameras are already in the UK. I don't know if they only keep records of transgressing cars, or if they keep a record of every car that goes past. I bet they record aggregate information - average speeds of vehicles going through at different times of the day and so on. The problem of these cameras, and systems in general, is that they aren't reactive to road conditions at the time, and they also are put in places with artificial speed restrictions, or even obscured speed limit signs. Revenue collection is the primary aim.
64 bit downloads on the torrent page, but not the image page. How odd!
http://www.gotbsd.net/
Also appears to include Linux compatibility out of the box. Will have to give this a go sometime.
Good point. I'll remember to call over the manager to complain prior to the gut ripping action.
(I do also believe that consumers do have a little responsibility to do basic research beforehand, but in this case you would expect a $500 printer to last a few years if used sensibly, and in addition I'm sure that it would have been recommended by the store to him at the time of purchase)
Maybe these Windows Gurus will wear red and blink a lot.
I actually feel as if I made a difference to somebody's life now :D