That said, I am still pro open source but, at my job, we are going to Windows 7 so I'd better learn it, kicking and screaming.
At my job, we're all learning linux, latex, openoffice and hiring programmers to get us off MS software all together. Granted, I'm the boss, so it makes it easier, but it is still a very gradual process. Also, my employees have started bringing in their personal laptops with Ubuntu on them -- I figure now is as good a time as any. Our IT department will try to get us to upgrade to Win7 but I will fight the upgrade train as much as politically sane to do, because I'm just not interested in learning it and I'm really tired of getting screwed by MS with every other OS. I keep XP around because lots of software runs only on it and nothing else, especially PCs that control equipment. These PCs will need to stay, but we no longer need dedicated windows desktops in the group, the last one is now dual-booting to debian. Everything else except the equipment drivers is mac or linux.
I think MS is playing nice with Apple to get back at Dell and HP for the netbook linux thing. If HP and Dell want to ship linux PC's, then MS is going to help Apple poach Dell's most profitable customers
How does doing that help Microsoft in any way? So they can laugh at Dell when they both end up like GM? Microsoft is seeing reductions in sales hand over fist in all divisions and is trying to increase their profit margin and maintain their monopoly any way they can. If that means licensing their stuff to Apple, so be it. As far as I know, Dell is MS' biggest customer, they want to help them sell more windows computers.
Even a public terminal would suffice to avoid the FBI, or a public wifi connection. Of course, the real fear in the U.S. is not the government, it's the corporations. Something like this would be great if we could use it to bypass ISP controls over the content we are seeing. The government couldn't care less what we look at on the interwebs as long as it isn't teaching us to be a terrorist or kiddie porn. The media corporations however, constantly try to keep us from accessing information, such as copyrighted material, put it behind pay-walls, make us pay to access certain sites (non net-neutrality).
The tin-foil hat crowd is out in force today -- don't you guys have some town-hall meetings to disrupt?
Interestingly enough, if you actually look in the TFA at the benchmarks they ran (Yeah I know, I had to click through a bunch of pages), it says this:
Windows 7 feels faster than Windows XP and Vista, but it turns out that's not always the case -- sometimes, it's the slowest of the three operating systems.
In fact, if you look at their benchmarks, they tested boot time, shutdown time, office performance, itunes encoding, cinebench and the only time that Win7 performance wasn't the same or slower was for the shutdown time. I find it strange that we have articles about how Win7 is the answer MS has been looking for except the actual data suggests the only thing it does any faster is that it shuts down more quickly.
This is useless, cnet even uses a classic line about win7, the one about how it feels faster. Apple fanbois are famous for using this line whenever there was a new release, regardless of whether there was a change in that particular software or not. More importantly, when did Apple and MS switch their positions? Apple was never the evil monopoly, and MS fans were never irrational fanbois, it was always reversed. When did that happen?
P.S. The reason 10.5 is slower on the PPC is because Apple didn't spend as much time optimizing it on the PPC chips, spending their time on the Intels instead. For Intel chips, 10.5 is faster than 10.4.
Just to emphasize here, according to the NYT, last month, in the middle of the worst recession in decades:
Apple recorded its best nonholiday quarter ever when other electronics makers were hurting because of a downturn in consumer spending.
They saw increasing revenue and profit in every single division of the company. Compare this to Microsoft, who last quarter saw:
On Thursday, the world's largest software company reported its worst fiscal year since it initially sold stock to the public in 1986. Year-over-year revenue and full-year sales of Microsoft's flagship Windows software dropped for the first time.
Microsoft saw billion dollar reductions in revenue in both the windows (Client) and office (Business) divisions, and it's xbox (entertainment) and search (on-line) divisions were actually in the red and are losing the company money.
Apple is not a "ship going down", this statement is demonstrably false, people are even calling it recession proof. You could say that about Microsoft however and not be contradicted by facts.
As a long time Apple customer, I can confidently state that you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. I've been using administering and using apple computers at work since the 90s and every single time I have had a defective product it has been replaced with only relevant questions asked. Never once have I ever been "screwed" by their "customer policy".
Why on this earth will a company want the consumer to be silent for rest of the life for asking a refund of a defective piece ?
The answer is that the company doesn't want that, this is typical sensationalist drivel characteristic of "news" organizations that are owned by Rupert Murdoch like the Times and Fox. The ipod was obviously out of warranty and Apple treated refunding the cost as an out of court settlement. Right or wrong, orders not to talk about the magnitude of the settlement are standard practice, you hear it on the news just about every single time a company settles with someone or an organization. Did Apple screw up? Yes, they should have paid for the ipod out of some other way, but if they did that, then they legally wouldn't be protected if this guy decided later he had some "emotional damage" from the incident or "discovered" some burns and decided to sue.
But then again, we should never let a little common sense and reason get in the way of a good witch burning! Apple is teh ev1l! MS rools! Steve Jobs is Satan!
"They're putting a life sentence on myself, my daughter and Ellie's mum, not to say anything to anyone. If we inadvertently did say anything, no matter what, they would take litigation against us. I thought that was absolutely appalling.
The father says "not to say anything to anyone". If you're familiar with logic, you'll note that the phrase "exploding ipod" is a subset of "anything". Basically, the guy and his daughter are acting hysterically, Apple gives them what they asked for (a refund) and since it was presumably outside of warranty they asked them not to talk about the settlement. I hate this kind of thing, but I do believe that this is a standard practice for settlements outside of court for ANY company not just Apple. The father is now reacting hysterically to this statement and the reporter has picked up on it in order to get some press.
But sensationalist headlines and bogus stories against companies like Apple who favor the democratic party are typical for "news" organizations like the Times and Fox who are both owned by News Corporation, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
And now besides the point, record labels aren't there just to rip people off. Artists actually need them.
Before advent of easy recording, just about every family that wanted to appear civilized owned a piano or some other musical instrument. That is, people used to play music themselves. I personally record my own music for my family and listen to a lot of bands of friends or ones that play small venues. You know, I listen to music that people can actually play. I'll never forget in high school going to one concert for some bands I liked quite a bit (U2 with the Pixes opening) and realizing that they sounded absolutely awful live and that the sound on their records has been manipulated to the point of being false. That was the day I stopped believing that the "current world" was the best solution. I don't need the RIAA, I can keep playing my own music and traditional, non-copyrighted music to my heart's content. I'm not alone in this. Don't believe me? Go spend a few hours on youtube.
The Apple and AT&T exclusivity agreement seems to be leveraging the relationship to their mutual advantage
Excuse me, but how is Apple benefiting from artificially limiting the uses and applications of the device they build? Profit-wise, Apple wants to sell more devices, and more useful apps will help them sell more devices. The only thing Apple is getting out of this relationship is a 3G network that is willing to implement their device specific features like visual voice mail. It wouldn't even surprise me if Apple themselves are the ones who called the FCC because AT&T is forcing them to remove all this stuff off their app store. AT&T has a strangle hold on Apple because if Apple loses its carrier, its totally SOL unless they want to start setting up cell phone towers.
Now that I think of it, this might be the reason that Apple removes all the Apps with profanity on them, because they're operating under a different set of regulations (i.e. the ones the FCC covers) with a mobile transmitter than with a normal computing device.
As I posted above, the mac version resides solely on the hard drive and NOT IN THE EFI, which means that it can be easily removed and does not come back. As another has posted, Apple isn't listed as a partner on the company's site and it is not pre-installed. Therefore, macs are fairly safe from this, even if you have it installed, you just have to remove it from your hard drive.
As the AC troll noted, Macs use EFI, not BIOS. That means that the mac software that the grandparent linked to does not survive a disk wipe or swap. That in turn means that the software running above is running only on the hard disk and not the bios, and is not persistent so you can get rid of it easily once installed by just reformatting (or presumably just deleting the files will do it as well).
I find it ironic that the slashdot moderators have gotten the moderation precisely wrong here. The great-grandparent AC was absolutely right, one solution to this rootkit is to own a mac since they don't use BIOS, they use EFI. But this is modded flamebait, and the misinformed grantparent who linked to the software is modded informative.
Heck, I don't even bother with that any more. It's easier to just plug in the ipod and use something like senuti for the mac or gtkpod on linux that lets you pull songs off the ipod and transfer the entire music collection. Fairly fast, easy, and don't have to worry about which songs you want, just transfer them all and sort them out later.
I read the linked interview, and then I read a few other related things and while that's certainly cause for concern, the real question is, why do we continually read about windows zombie nets, windows holes, etc.? To my knowledge there has only been one botnet on OS X, and even that required you to download a pirated version of some software and install it --and as far as I know, that vector for attack has been in continuous use for windows machines since windows 3.1.
If Apple has about 8-10% of the usage share of PCs, shouldn't 8-10% of the stories we read be about OS X vulnerabilities? We almost never see them. As others in this thread have noted, this particular vulernability in this article is across the board, linux, os X and windows, so I'll give you that one and that OS X vulnerabilities may be underreported. But I'm not the first to observe this and various theories I've read include that Apple sells more laptops that are inherently mobile thus unattractive to malware writers, the vulnerability writing software hasn't been written for OS X yet, Apple tends to patch things more quickly, and that Apple is more litigious so nobody wants to talk about any found vulnerabilities. I don't think any of these things are really on the mark though. Maybe the virus writers just buy commodity hardware and don't want to bother spending the extra money for a mac.
In any case, most models show that even a rather dramatic altering of CO2 emissions will not alter the course of climate change for a minimum of 200 years. Even if we stopped now, the glaciers are still going to melt. The CO2 is already in the air.
All of this is to say that we shouldn't bother doing anything at all. Here's the kickers though, 1) as the GP stated, if we don't find another portable fuel source from oil especially, we're in big trouble. The reason is that demand of oil has outstripped production, which is why we had $147/barrel oil a few summers ago. The only reason oil isn't that way now is because the economy collapsed. The second the economy recovers, oil is going right back up. The reason that production can't continue to be increased is because there isn't a lot of easy to find oil left in the ground. Oil production in the U.S. peaked in the 1970s and no matter what the republicans chant about more drilling, or how many ANWRs they open up, it's not going to change that. Mexico's oil production is in the process of collapsing, and Saudi Arabia is struggling to maintain its production levels. Iraq is a big mystery so far, but the rumor from the oil patch guys is that there's about half the oil they hoped would be there because Hussein damaged a lot of the reservoirs which interferes with the ability to recover oil from them.
2) As for CO2 levels, if we don't reduce our CO2 emissions, it's safe to say that the damage will be worse. So, before Bush was elected we had the chance with the Kyoto accord to choose between minimal damage and damage, now we have the choice to choose between some damage and more damage. I agree that not everything we are doing will help, e.g. hydrogen fuel cells and ethanol from corn are just a waste of energy. Cellulosic ethanol has a bit better chance, nuclear is a good option, solar is iffy, but wind could possibly be a big help. The Great Lakes alone have enough wind to power the entire country.
The bottom line is, yes we've already put a lot of CO2 in the air, but unless we find something else that works, all those magnificent highways may become to expensive to use and in any case the economy and our entire way of life could be struggling because of the geopolitical shifts that climate change causes, e.g., some land that was good for crops is no longer so, but other land that has the right climate for crops in the new age doesn't have good soil, millions of people forced to become refugees due to rising sea levels, most of those are going to be poor (rich people just buy a new house elsewhere), increased hurricane activity in the gulf, also wrecking tremendous amounts of infrastructure and killing lots of people, permafrost melting (turning the extreme poles turning unlivable goo in the summer --there's already one siberian town that is sinking into the mud), the list just goes on and on of the potential problems with continuing to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Yet another post by an anti-apple person who has obviously never even used a mac on a regular basis. The function keys have an extra meta control that allows you to manually control the screen and keyboard light levels. Speaking as someone who has rebuilt three laptops, I can tell you the single piece aluminum frame has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the number of screws. Maybe it's just me, but I don't expand laptops often enough to worry about the number of screws. On a desktop I could see this being the case, because that could get regularly expanded or upgraded. Strangely enough, to get the cover off on mac desktops you don't have to remove ANY screws, there's a lever that you pull up and you pull the case door off. I have two batteries for my current laptop, and I find it annoying except for maybe two or three times a year. For the amount of time I spend lugging the extra battery around and remembering to swap them out to keep them balanced, it's not worth the trouble.
Macs are great, if you never want to do maintenance or make your own decisions (I realize the irony of that statement).
All three laptops I've rebuilt are macs. Also, all were over five years old when I did it, which should show you another reason why everybody except slashdotters think a mac is a "premium" laptop -- they often do last for five years. Lastly, I even run linux on one of my older mac laptops (still running, built in 1999), from the amount of "my own decisions" that I regularly make running, it's not an advantage, it's a detriment.
I know slashdotters love this kind of sentiment, but this is a pretty inane thing to say and the poster and the people who modded this insightful have never actually looked at a mac laptop's features carefully. Just off the top of my head, here is a list of stuff that is included in mac laptops that you don't find in the "average" PC:
easy removal of power connector in case of tripping accelerometers to shut the hard drive off if the laptop falls backlit keyboards that have a sensor to automatically come on automatic screen dimming at low light levels single piece aluminum frame construction for less stress on the motherboard (the most common point of failure of a laptop, in my experience) custom battery arrangement to maximize useful lifetime but leave a smaller dimensional footprint.
I'm sure there are others that I'm missing but the very idea that mac laptops aren't "premium" is ridiculous. You can argue that the set of features that you get are not worth the price, but one can make the same argument about "premium" cars as well and has nothing to do with if the object itself has a feature set above and beyond the average.
After all this noise and bullshit about how many hundreds of MS patents that linux violates, it would be rather ironic if Microsoft was found guilty of incorporating GPL code into their proprietary applications. I almost wish they would have been sued, because maybe then it would get Ballmer to STFU.
The F-14 did the same thing when it was first deployed until the Navy worked the bugs out of it. Once they did it was arguably the best carrier-borne air superiority aircraft of all time.
I'm blowing my mod points to respond, but I had to: The way things are going, the F-22 will never get the bugs worked out because it's NEVER been used in combat. According to the NYT article:
But the F-22 has never been used in war, and the Pentagon's focus has shifted to simpler weapons needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So great, we've already spent billions of dollars on a plane that is not helping us win the wars we are currently fighting. Fat lot of good it will do us to have incredible advantage to fight against China or someone else in the future if we lose our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The time to stop worrying about the future is when it started impinging on your ability to cope with the present. The F-22 is designed for a war that hasn't happened, but for the price of ONE F-22 ($97 million), we can buy nearly NINE A-10 Warthogs ($11.7 million each), which actually do help us win our current wars. The F-22 should have been canceled, and more so, 187 should never have been bought in the first place.
Yes. The grandparent has his or her work cut out for them because the wikipedia page shows just how hard it is to avoid Foxconn:
Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Inc.; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo;the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, and the Amazon Kindle.[2][3] [4]
Bottom line.. if you like electronic devices, you have to go some way to avoid Foxconn. Apple is known for its secrecy, but we documented evidence that Apple was involved in this intimidation in anyway, you have to assume that Foxconn, and only Foxconn is responsible.
There is another good reason to wait to see if you will buy a game or not -- to see if it's any good. There's a couple of titles that I have picked up repeatedly in a place like Best Buy or Target and turned them over in my hands trying to figure out if the game is any good or not. 90% of the time I walk out without purchasing it, because 50 bucks is too much to risk on something that might be good or might be crap. Reviews can't really be trusted nowadays since reviewers can be bought and that usually means I wait until the game is well received and has an expansion pack before I get it.
Vista was shoved down our throats, while 7 takes into consideration what people need and want.
Say what? You in for a rude awakening when 7 is actually released. It will be "shoved down your throat" more so than Vista ever was, especially if it is moderately successful. The only reason for 7's existence and XP's continued presence is because of the awful press (in my opinion, justified) and that companies and home users basically rebelled against Vista. The key is to watch for Win7 only features like in directX enhancements to try, as well as that you will not be able to purchase a new computer without Win7. These are the ways that MS will induce people to buy the new OS.
Given that 40-50% of the releases were bad or worse, why are you even considering still buying MS software? Would you buy another auto from a company that sold you your last one that turned out to be a lemon? No, of course not, you'd buy something with a better reputation for quality. It doesn't matter if the new model of that manufacturer is of better quality, you'd buy something else because you wouldn't want to take the chance and you wouldn't want to reward that company with another sale.
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At my job, we're all learning linux, latex, openoffice and hiring programmers to get us off MS software all together. Granted, I'm the boss, so it makes it easier, but it is still a very gradual process. Also, my employees have started bringing in their personal laptops with Ubuntu on them -- I figure now is as good a time as any. Our IT department will try to get us to upgrade to Win7 but I will fight the upgrade train as much as politically sane to do, because I'm just not interested in learning it and I'm really tired of getting screwed by MS with every other OS. I keep XP around because lots of software runs only on it and nothing else, especially PCs that control equipment. These PCs will need to stay, but we no longer need dedicated windows desktops in the group, the last one is now dual-booting to debian. Everything else except the equipment drivers is mac or linux.
You know the old marketing slogan, "Only losers use drugs" right? The drug users have their own version, "Only users lose drugs."
How does doing that help Microsoft in any way? So they can laugh at Dell when they both end up like GM? Microsoft is seeing reductions in sales hand over fist in all divisions and is trying to increase their profit margin and maintain their monopoly any way they can. If that means licensing their stuff to Apple, so be it. As far as I know, Dell is MS' biggest customer, they want to help them sell more windows computers.
Even a public terminal would suffice to avoid the FBI, or a public wifi connection. Of course, the real fear in the U.S. is not the government, it's the corporations. Something like this would be great if we could use it to bypass ISP controls over the content we are seeing. The government couldn't care less what we look at on the interwebs as long as it isn't teaching us to be a terrorist or kiddie porn. The media corporations however, constantly try to keep us from accessing information, such as copyrighted material, put it behind pay-walls, make us pay to access certain sites (non net-neutrality).
The tin-foil hat crowd is out in force today -- don't you guys have some town-hall meetings to disrupt?
*Ahem* I assume you meant: This drives me absolutely Kangarooshit Kooky.
In fact, if you look at their benchmarks, they tested boot time, shutdown time, office performance, itunes encoding, cinebench and the only time that Win7 performance wasn't the same or slower was for the shutdown time. I find it strange that we have articles about how Win7 is the answer MS has been looking for except the actual data suggests the only thing it does any faster is that it shuts down more quickly.
This is useless, cnet even uses a classic line about win7, the one about how it feels faster. Apple fanbois are famous for using this line whenever there was a new release, regardless of whether there was a change in that particular software or not. More importantly, when did Apple and MS switch their positions? Apple was never the evil monopoly, and MS fans were never irrational fanbois, it was always reversed. When did that happen?
P.S. The reason 10.5 is slower on the PPC is because Apple didn't spend as much time optimizing it on the PPC chips, spending their time on the Intels instead. For Intel chips, 10.5 is faster than 10.4.
They saw increasing revenue and profit in every single division of the company. Compare this to Microsoft, who last quarter saw:
Microsoft saw billion dollar reductions in revenue in both the windows (Client) and office (Business) divisions, and it's xbox (entertainment) and search (on-line) divisions were actually in the red and are losing the company money.
Apple is not a "ship going down", this statement is demonstrably false, people are even calling it recession proof. You could say that about Microsoft however and not be contradicted by facts.
The answer is that the company doesn't want that, this is typical sensationalist drivel characteristic of "news" organizations that are owned by Rupert Murdoch like the Times and Fox. The ipod was obviously out of warranty and Apple treated refunding the cost as an out of court settlement. Right or wrong, orders not to talk about the magnitude of the settlement are standard practice, you hear it on the news just about every single time a company settles with someone or an organization. Did Apple screw up? Yes, they should have paid for the ipod out of some other way, but if they did that, then they legally wouldn't be protected if this guy decided later he had some "emotional damage" from the incident or "discovered" some burns and decided to sue.
But then again, we should never let a little common sense and reason get in the way of a good witch burning! Apple is teh ev1l! MS rools! Steve Jobs is Satan!
The father says "not to say anything to anyone". If you're familiar with logic, you'll note that the phrase "exploding ipod" is a subset of "anything". Basically, the guy and his daughter are acting hysterically, Apple gives them what they asked for (a refund) and since it was presumably outside of warranty they asked them not to talk about the settlement. I hate this kind of thing, but I do believe that this is a standard practice for settlements outside of court for ANY company not just Apple. The father is now reacting hysterically to this statement and the reporter has picked up on it in order to get some press.
But sensationalist headlines and bogus stories against companies like Apple who favor the democratic party are typical for "news" organizations like the Times and Fox who are both owned by News Corporation, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Before advent of easy recording, just about every family that wanted to appear civilized owned a piano or some other musical instrument. That is, people used to play music themselves. I personally record my own music for my family and listen to a lot of bands of friends or ones that play small venues. You know, I listen to music that people can actually play. I'll never forget in high school going to one concert for some bands I liked quite a bit (U2 with the Pixes opening) and realizing that they sounded absolutely awful live and that the sound on their records has been manipulated to the point of being false. That was the day I stopped believing that the "current world" was the best solution. I don't need the RIAA, I can keep playing my own music and traditional, non-copyrighted music to my heart's content. I'm not alone in this. Don't believe me? Go spend a few hours on youtube.
Excuse me, but how is Apple benefiting from artificially limiting the uses and applications of the device they build? Profit-wise, Apple wants to sell more devices, and more useful apps will help them sell more devices. The only thing Apple is getting out of this relationship is a 3G network that is willing to implement their device specific features like visual voice mail. It wouldn't even surprise me if Apple themselves are the ones who called the FCC because AT&T is forcing them to remove all this stuff off their app store. AT&T has a strangle hold on Apple because if Apple loses its carrier, its totally SOL unless they want to start setting up cell phone towers.
Now that I think of it, this might be the reason that Apple removes all the Apps with profanity on them, because they're operating under a different set of regulations (i.e. the ones the FCC covers) with a mobile transmitter than with a normal computing device.
As I posted above, the mac version resides solely on the hard drive and NOT IN THE EFI, which means that it can be easily removed and does not come back. As another has posted, Apple isn't listed as a partner on the company's site and it is not pre-installed. Therefore, macs are fairly safe from this, even if you have it installed, you just have to remove it from your hard drive.
As the AC troll noted, Macs use EFI, not BIOS. That means that the mac software that the grandparent linked to does not survive a disk wipe or swap. That in turn means that the software running above is running only on the hard disk and not the bios, and is not persistent so you can get rid of it easily once installed by just reformatting (or presumably just deleting the files will do it as well).
I find it ironic that the slashdot moderators have gotten the moderation precisely wrong here. The great-grandparent AC was absolutely right, one solution to this rootkit is to own a mac since they don't use BIOS, they use EFI. But this is modded flamebait, and the misinformed grantparent who linked to the software is modded informative.
Heck, I don't even bother with that any more. It's easier to just plug in the ipod and use something like senuti for the mac or gtkpod on linux that lets you pull songs off the ipod and transfer the entire music collection. Fairly fast, easy, and don't have to worry about which songs you want, just transfer them all and sort them out later.
I read the linked interview, and then I read a few other related things and while that's certainly cause for concern, the real question is, why do we continually read about windows zombie nets, windows holes, etc.? To my knowledge there has only been one botnet on OS X, and even that required you to download a pirated version of some software and install it --and as far as I know, that vector for attack has been in continuous use for windows machines since windows 3.1.
If Apple has about 8-10% of the usage share of PCs, shouldn't 8-10% of the stories we read be about OS X vulnerabilities? We almost never see them. As others in this thread have noted, this particular vulernability in this article is across the board, linux, os X and windows, so I'll give you that one and that OS X vulnerabilities may be underreported. But I'm not the first to observe this and various theories I've read include that Apple sells more laptops that are inherently mobile thus unattractive to malware writers, the vulnerability writing software hasn't been written for OS X yet, Apple tends to patch things more quickly, and that Apple is more litigious so nobody wants to talk about any found vulnerabilities. I don't think any of these things are really on the mark though. Maybe the virus writers just buy commodity hardware and don't want to bother spending the extra money for a mac.
All of this is to say that we shouldn't bother doing anything at all. Here's the kickers though, 1) as the GP stated, if we don't find another portable fuel source from oil especially, we're in big trouble. The reason is that demand of oil has outstripped production, which is why we had $147/barrel oil a few summers ago. The only reason oil isn't that way now is because the economy collapsed. The second the economy recovers, oil is going right back up. The reason that production can't continue to be increased is because there isn't a lot of easy to find oil left in the ground. Oil production in the U.S. peaked in the 1970s and no matter what the republicans chant about more drilling, or how many ANWRs they open up, it's not going to change that. Mexico's oil production is in the process of collapsing, and Saudi Arabia is struggling to maintain its production levels. Iraq is a big mystery so far, but the rumor from the oil patch guys is that there's about half the oil they hoped would be there because Hussein damaged a lot of the reservoirs which interferes with the ability to recover oil from them.
2) As for CO2 levels, if we don't reduce our CO2 emissions, it's safe to say that the damage will be worse. So, before Bush was elected we had the chance with the Kyoto accord to choose between minimal damage and damage, now we have the choice to choose between some damage and more damage. I agree that not everything we are doing will help, e.g. hydrogen fuel cells and ethanol from corn are just a waste of energy. Cellulosic ethanol has a bit better chance, nuclear is a good option, solar is iffy, but wind could possibly be a big help. The Great Lakes alone have enough wind to power the entire country.
The bottom line is, yes we've already put a lot of CO2 in the air, but unless we find something else that works, all those magnificent highways may become to expensive to use and in any case the economy and our entire way of life could be struggling because of the geopolitical shifts that climate change causes, e.g., some land that was good for crops is no longer so, but other land that has the right climate for crops in the new age doesn't have good soil, millions of people forced to become refugees due to rising sea levels, most of those are going to be poor (rich people just buy a new house elsewhere), increased hurricane activity in the gulf, also wrecking tremendous amounts of infrastructure and killing lots of people, permafrost melting (turning the extreme poles turning unlivable goo in the summer --there's already one siberian town that is sinking into the mud), the list just goes on and on of the potential problems with continuing to increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
All three laptops I've rebuilt are macs. Also, all were over five years old when I did it, which should show you another reason why everybody except slashdotters think a mac is a "premium" laptop -- they often do last for five years. Lastly, I even run linux on one of my older mac laptops (still running, built in 1999), from the amount of "my own decisions" that I regularly make running, it's not an advantage, it's a detriment.
I know slashdotters love this kind of sentiment, but this is a pretty inane thing to say and the poster and the people who modded this insightful have never actually looked at a mac laptop's features carefully. Just off the top of my head, here is a list of stuff that is included in mac laptops that you don't find in the "average" PC:
easy removal of power connector in case of tripping
accelerometers to shut the hard drive off if the laptop falls
backlit keyboards that have a sensor to automatically come on
automatic screen dimming at low light levels
single piece aluminum frame construction for less stress on the motherboard (the most common point of failure of a laptop, in my experience)
custom battery arrangement to maximize useful lifetime but leave a smaller dimensional footprint.
I'm sure there are others that I'm missing but the very idea that mac laptops aren't "premium" is ridiculous. You can argue that the set of features that you get are not worth the price, but one can make the same argument about "premium" cars as well and has nothing to do with if the object itself has a feature set above and beyond the average.
After all this noise and bullshit about how many hundreds of MS patents that linux violates, it would be rather ironic if Microsoft was found guilty of incorporating GPL code into their proprietary applications. I almost wish they would have been sued, because maybe then it would get Ballmer to STFU.
I'm blowing my mod points to respond, but I had to: The way things are going, the F-22 will never get the bugs worked out because it's NEVER been used in combat. According to the NYT article:
So great, we've already spent billions of dollars on a plane that is not helping us win the wars we are currently fighting. Fat lot of good it will do us to have incredible advantage to fight against China or someone else in the future if we lose our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The time to stop worrying about the future is when it started impinging on your ability to cope with the present. The F-22 is designed for a war that hasn't happened, but for the price of ONE F-22 ($97 million), we can buy nearly NINE A-10 Warthogs ($11.7 million each), which actually do help us win our current wars. The F-22 should have been canceled, and more so, 187 should never have been bought in the first place.
Bottom line.. if you like electronic devices, you have to go some way to avoid Foxconn. Apple is known for its secrecy, but we documented evidence that Apple was involved in this intimidation in anyway, you have to assume that Foxconn, and only Foxconn is responsible.
Yeah, and then when that doesn't work, she'll resign from blob shooting, claiming that it is a "superficial political blood sport" and "I know when it's time to pass the ball for victory."
There is another good reason to wait to see if you will buy a game or not -- to see if it's any good. There's a couple of titles that I have picked up repeatedly in a place like Best Buy or Target and turned them over in my hands trying to figure out if the game is any good or not. 90% of the time I walk out without purchasing it, because 50 bucks is too much to risk on something that might be good or might be crap. Reviews can't really be trusted nowadays since reviewers can be bought and that usually means I wait until the game is well received and has an expansion pack before I get it.
Say what? You in for a rude awakening when 7 is actually released. It will be "shoved down your throat" more so than Vista ever was, especially if it is moderately successful. The only reason for 7's existence and XP's continued presence is because of the awful press (in my opinion, justified) and that companies and home users basically rebelled against Vista. The key is to watch for Win7 only features like in directX enhancements to try, as well as that you will not be able to purchase a new computer without Win7. These are the ways that MS will induce people to buy the new OS.
Given that 40-50% of the releases were bad or worse, why are you even considering still buying MS software? Would you buy another auto from a company that sold you your last one that turned out to be a lemon? No, of course not, you'd buy something with a better reputation for quality. It doesn't matter if the new model of that manufacturer is of better quality, you'd buy something else because you wouldn't want to take the chance and you wouldn't want to reward that company with another sale.