Have you ever even used a Mac for a substantial amount of time? I bet you haven't. As it is, as I said earlier in the thread, look at the summary from the article:
If my math is right, I said that the machines are at PARITY in six of the categories we've reviewed. The MacBook has an ADVANTAGE in thirteen categories, the Dell in nine, the Lenovo and Sony in eight apiece, and the white MacBook in seven.
As others have pointed out, there are things the author didn't consider such as the magsafe power connection and the backlit keyboard that no other laptop has. You may not think these kinds of things are worth $400, but others might, especially if they have a small child who likes to run through power cords stretched across pathways or if they have to use their laptop in the dark. So, you can say that mac users are just trying to come up with reasons why they paid more, but Apple builds things into their laptops that no other laptop maker has, Apple's operating system is something that no other laptop maker has. There's a price premium for these, you betcha, but some people think it's worth having these things. You saying that mac users are just trying to justify the cost of the laptop makes it sound like there's no reason for the extra cost, which is simply untrue.
I know this is slashdot and RTFA is a problem but here ya go:
If my math is right, I said that the machines are at PARITY in six of the categories we've reviewed. The MacBook has an ADVANTAGE in thirteen categories, the Dell in nine, the Lenovo and Sony in eight apiece, and the white MacBook in seven.
He didn't even count the magsafe connection for the power adaptor, so my count would put it at 14. So, instead of just called them the same specs, how about you actually point out why this guy spec comparison is wrong? But no, unsubstantiated assertions are insightful as long as you're bashing Apple, Microsoft or Google here at slashdot.
And you know something? I've used/administered several Dells -- they're $400 cheaper for a reason, it's called QA/QC and Dells lack it in my experience. Average lifetime of a Dell 3-5 years maybe with better luck on the monitors. Average lifetime of my Apple machines: 5-6 years. This is counting all warrantied replacement parts as included in the lifetime.
I'm curious, what version of OS X are you running? I've noticed that some things have gotten better with OS X versions, like less spinning cursor while the entire system chugs through some problems (like if you lost connection to a network drive before ejecting it). There does seem to be more bloat in the OS with each version though, I think it's marketing towards the average user more. What drives me nuts about Windows is that it is completely marketed towards the average user with all those little balloons in your taskbar and tooltips etc. and it's difficult to turn them off.* With OS X you can turn a lot of that off by command line options, but there isn't a comprehensive list of these options as far as I know.
Also, do you think the slowdown in XP is due to the registry becoming filled with outdated items? I seem to notice this using windows and I've wondered if it affects system performance.
* E.g., it once took me about 30 minutes to try and figure out how to get it to stop telling me my computer is at risk because I uninstalled the virus manager and turned off automatic updates because it's not connected to the internet. I believe that unplugging the network cable is far more secure than any software security and the machine in question was an instrument driver so didn't need any internet.
Thank you for your post! Nothing to do with UFOs but I had something very similar happen to me once or twice and I never knew what was it was. I always thought it was sleep apnea but the symptoms weren't quite right because I dream just fine, indicative of REM sleep, which is what is lacking during sleep apnea. From your post I just discovered that it's not apnea that I had, but sleep paralysis.
As for UFOs, I'm not dismissing extra-terrestrials entirely but I dislike how people who believe this stuff require that you sit there and listen to their diatribe about all the "evidence" and if you express doubt they try to give you more supposed "evidence" and become more agitated and convinced that convincing you is absolutely necessary. It reeks of paranoid delusion. If all these extra-terrestrials are visiting us, why don't they make it known more plainly? Come on, let's see the little green men already, "we come in peace" and all that. But they only appear when there is doubt as to what it is that we're looking at. That should be telling you something, that something is that all this "evidence" could possibly that the mind creates links where there are none.
A vote for a creationist or someone who thinks both is okay is a vote for the U.S. as a backwater religious theocracy. The fact that you seem to think that teaching both in the classroom is "okay" means YOU don't understand the difference between the separation between church and state, or that you don't understand that creationism or intelligent design is NOT science, it it religious dogma masquerading as science. It has no testable hypotheses, it does not teach critical thinking, and it has no place in the science classroom! It does not deserve to be taught both as Palin states and the fact that you think she is "being reasonable" means you fell for the religious propaganda.
And? To me, a vote for someone who professes a belief in creationism is a vote for the U.S. as a backwater religious theocracy. Sometimes a single issue is important.
Among other things, Foxconn produces the Mac mini, the iPod and the iPhone for Apple Computer; Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer retailers Dell, Inc. 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 Amazon Kindle.[1][2] [3]...
later down it says:
Foxconn is one of the OEMs for iPod nanos, MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs and the iPhone. Foxconn is the OEM for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and Wii. Apple iPhones, Foxconn OEMs Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson cell phones.
So sure, they might make shitty products, but they make everyone's shitty products. Stop it with the irrational apple hate already...
You honestly thought that by buying a Zune you would avoid cheap products and poor QA/QC? Just seven stories below this one on the main page is one about how the MS decided to ship a bunch of defective Xboxes just so they could get their console out before Sony's. Your post was informative and interesting, and then you go and spoil it all at the end by claiming that you've avoided this whole mess by buying a Zune.
That's absolutely true, but when you have 90% marketshare or whatever it is MS has, you are in the position of power. As others have pointed out, MS needs only to keep people from switching and their growth will be whatever the growth in the PC industry is. Apple needs to convince people that their OS is the "better" one, which means they need to steal market share from MS. So, they put out attack ads. I hate to say it, but it works for politicians quite well, why shouldn't it work for computers?
Reaganomics has been adopted world wide and as such has produced the largest wave of economic expansion, on the planet, in human history. There's two problems with the USA right now.
No it hasn't. Two decades of cheap oil has produced economic expansion in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s, there has been very little economic expansion. I'm so sick of "conservatives" claiming that "liberal" policies are to blame for this or that evil when it's perfectly fucking clear that conservatives in this country would have us all learning that the world was created 6000 years ago and all fucking bankrupt due to their insistence on cutting taxes while increasing spending. Reagan did it, he left a $155 billion budget deficit to Bush, Sr., TWICE what Carter left. Bush, Sr. did it, he left a deficit to Clinton. Bush, Jr. is doing it too. Who didn't do it? Clinton. That's right. Bill Clinton, the man conservatives love to hate, was more fiscally responsible than any modern "conservative" president.
It does seem like a pretty good feature. Given Microsoft's fairly aggressive philosophy towards its competitors though, it's reasonable to be suspicious of their motives however and also suspicious they will misuse it. Yeah sure, it's a bit of damned if you and damned it you don't, but that's their reputation.
Looks like the microsoft schill moderators are out in force today... The above comment is a valid question, why is Jerry Seinfeld doing product placement now instead of pure comedy? And why is he doing it for Microsoft, or like he is doing here for HP. Does he not care, just who cuts him a check? Yeah, okay calling microsoft a crappy company is troll-ish, but it's also an opinion shared by many here.
I'll be pretty interested in seeing how this goes. I find both John Hodgman, the guy in the I'm a Mac and I'm a PC ads for Apple, and Jerry Seinfeld funny. Or at least, I found Seinfeld funny 10 years ago when Seinfeld was on. I haven't seen any of his newer stuff (the bee movie), will the guy still be funny?
John McCain's stance on copyright infringement is hypocritical. The reason is that he is currently being sued by Jackson Browne for copyright infringement because he used the song "Running on Empty" without permission. This looks to be yet another Republican professing high fallooting morals but who by his deeds is shown to believe that morality is for the populace and doesn't apply to him.
Colbert received a chilly reception from the audience.[14] His jokes were often met with silence and muttering, apart from the enthusiastic laughter of a few in the audience, such as Antonin Scalia's hearty laughter as Colbert teased him.[21] This was in stark contrast to the warm reception that Bush received at the event for his skit with impersonator Steve Bridges, which immediately preceded Colbert's monologue.[3][9]
What scares me is that you were modded "insightful". The executive producer of the The Daily Show, Ben Karlin (a former The Onion editor), is quoted as saying that the principal goal of the show is comedy. "If you have a legitimately funny joke in support of the notion that gay people are an affront to God, we'll put that motherfucker on!" source. It's just an example, but the Republican policy positions are much easier to make fun of, in this case due to their hypocrisy because several Republicans are homosexual.
I was intrigued when they first started selling the green PCs, because gOS was running e17. I thought that was pretty cool since that was the first distro. I knew of besides e-live that was based on e17. Since they've switched to gnome they've lost some of that uniqueness and I haven't kept up. I still think it's pretty cool that everex selling their PCs with gOS on it at a major retailer (walmart) though.
Long answer: Meh... There's really just the consolation that maybe Americans at least were never all that science savvy to begin with so the current state is nothing new. A more rigorous science education would probably be better.
I'd say a good start on that is to get the fucking religious dogma masquerading as science out of the schools. You know what I mean: intelligent design.
A good second step would be to hire more teachers who are actually good at science and math, but that would mean increasing the salaries and that probably won't happen. It used to be that intelligent women would do fulfill this need because of few career options but nowadays women can go on to science based careers not just in education. I've taught earth science to elementary education majors, very few of them found math and science to be enjoyable, but instead feared it. I can only presume they would transfer this to their students.
On the other side, I have had people who have laughed at me when I asked them if they ran a Mac for their analytical computing needs, claiming they aren't "real" computers. So it's not a "creative" vs. "analytical" type of people, I would say that all people tend to be biased towards their preferred platform and the stereotypes of those platforms. (Incidentally, there's a lot of good reasons to run Macs to use as a desktop because they natively use the same host of software the big linux or unix clusters do such as X11 and sshfs, etc. with no need for cygwin.)
There's a difference. Apple had a visionary at the helm when it turned around, in particular the second coming of Steve Jobs (love or hate the guy, you have to admit he has vision). Having a visionary is important for turning around a big company because they have to fight off the corporate goons that drown every decent idea in marketing nonsense and bureacracy. For Microsoft, Bill Gates has been decreasing his role at MS for some time now. Do you see any other visionaries at Microsoft?
That said, to point out a counter-example,IBM seems to have changed its tune as well without some sort of outspoken visionary.
There is a correlation between crime rate and lead exposure, a known neurological poison. I'd say a better inflammatory question to have asked, is "Did IT staff give themselves lead poisoning from handling IC boards made with lead solder all these years?" This might explain the BOFH reputation, the guy had lead poisoning. It would also explain why there are so many strange people in the IT industry, e.g. all the paranoid, conspiracy theorists and here on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, there are things the author didn't consider such as the magsafe power connection and the backlit keyboard that no other laptop has. You may not think these kinds of things are worth $400, but others might, especially if they have a small child who likes to run through power cords stretched across pathways or if they have to use their laptop in the dark. So, you can say that mac users are just trying to come up with reasons why they paid more, but Apple builds things into their laptops that no other laptop maker has, Apple's operating system is something that no other laptop maker has. There's a price premium for these, you betcha, but some people think it's worth having these things. You saying that mac users are just trying to justify the cost of the laptop makes it sound like there's no reason for the extra cost, which is simply untrue.
He didn't even count the magsafe connection for the power adaptor, so my count would put it at 14. So, instead of just called them the same specs, how about you actually point out why this guy spec comparison is wrong? But no, unsubstantiated assertions are insightful as long as you're bashing Apple, Microsoft or Google here at slashdot.
And you know something? I've used/administered several Dells -- they're $400 cheaper for a reason, it's called QA/QC and Dells lack it in my experience. Average lifetime of a Dell 3-5 years maybe with better luck on the monitors. Average lifetime of my Apple machines: 5-6 years. This is counting all warrantied replacement parts as included in the lifetime.
I'm curious, what version of OS X are you running? I've noticed that some things have gotten better with OS X versions, like less spinning cursor while the entire system chugs through some problems (like if you lost connection to a network drive before ejecting it). There does seem to be more bloat in the OS with each version though, I think it's marketing towards the average user more. What drives me nuts about Windows is that it is completely marketed towards the average user with all those little balloons in your taskbar and tooltips etc. and it's difficult to turn them off.* With OS X you can turn a lot of that off by command line options, but there isn't a comprehensive list of these options as far as I know.
Also, do you think the slowdown in XP is due to the registry becoming filled with outdated items? I seem to notice this using windows and I've wondered if it affects system performance.
* E.g., it once took me about 30 minutes to try and figure out how to get it to stop telling me my computer is at risk because I uninstalled the virus manager and turned off automatic updates because it's not connected to the internet. I believe that unplugging the network cable is far more secure than any software security and the machine in question was an instrument driver so didn't need any internet.
Thank you for your post! Nothing to do with UFOs but I had something very similar happen to me once or twice and I never knew what was it was. I always thought it was sleep apnea but the symptoms weren't quite right because I dream just fine, indicative of REM sleep, which is what is lacking during sleep apnea. From your post I just discovered that it's not apnea that I had, but sleep paralysis.
As for UFOs, I'm not dismissing extra-terrestrials entirely but I dislike how people who believe this stuff require that you sit there and listen to their diatribe about all the "evidence" and if you express doubt they try to give you more supposed "evidence" and become more agitated and convinced that convincing you is absolutely necessary. It reeks of paranoid delusion. If all these extra-terrestrials are visiting us, why don't they make it known more plainly? Come on, let's see the little green men already, "we come in peace" and all that. But they only appear when there is doubt as to what it is that we're looking at. That should be telling you something, that something is that all this "evidence" could possibly that the mind creates links where there are none.
A vote for a creationist or someone who thinks both is okay is a vote for the U.S. as a backwater religious theocracy. The fact that you seem to think that teaching both in the classroom is "okay" means YOU don't understand the difference between the separation between church and state, or that you don't understand that creationism or intelligent design is NOT science, it it religious dogma masquerading as science. It has no testable hypotheses, it does not teach critical thinking, and it has no place in the science classroom! It does not deserve to be taught both as Palin states and the fact that you think she is "being reasonable" means you fell for the religious propaganda.
And? To me, a vote for someone who professes a belief in creationism is a vote for the U.S. as a backwater religious theocracy. Sometimes a single issue is important.
later down it says:
So sure, they might make shitty products, but they make everyone's shitty products. Stop it with the irrational apple hate already...
You honestly thought that by buying a Zune you would avoid cheap products and poor QA/QC? Just seven stories below this one on the main page is one about how the MS decided to ship a bunch of defective Xboxes just so they could get their console out before Sony's. Your post was informative and interesting, and then you go and spoil it all at the end by claiming that you've avoided this whole mess by buying a Zune.
That's absolutely true, but when you have 90% marketshare or whatever it is MS has, you are in the position of power. As others have pointed out, MS needs only to keep people from switching and their growth will be whatever the growth in the PC industry is. Apple needs to convince people that their OS is the "better" one, which means they need to steal market share from MS. So, they put out attack ads. I hate to say it, but it works for politicians quite well, why shouldn't it work for computers?
Reaganomics has been adopted world wide and as such has produced the largest wave of economic expansion, on the planet, in human history. There's two problems with the USA right now. No it hasn't. Two decades of cheap oil has produced economic expansion in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s, there has been very little economic expansion. I'm so sick of "conservatives" claiming that "liberal" policies are to blame for this or that evil when it's perfectly fucking clear that conservatives in this country would have us all learning that the world was created 6000 years ago and all fucking bankrupt due to their insistence on cutting taxes while increasing spending. Reagan did it, he left a $155 billion budget deficit to Bush, Sr., TWICE what Carter left. Bush, Sr. did it, he left a deficit to Clinton. Bush, Jr. is doing it too. Who didn't do it? Clinton. That's right. Bill Clinton, the man conservatives love to hate, was more fiscally responsible than any modern "conservative" president.
It does seem like a pretty good feature. Given Microsoft's fairly aggressive philosophy towards its competitors though, it's reasonable to be suspicious of their motives however and also suspicious they will misuse it. Yeah sure, it's a bit of damned if you and damned it you don't, but that's their reputation.
He was at -1 Troll when I looked at him, his initial level is 2.
Looks like the microsoft schill moderators are out in force today... The above comment is a valid question, why is Jerry Seinfeld doing product placement now instead of pure comedy? And why is he doing it for Microsoft, or like he is doing here for HP. Does he not care, just who cuts him a check? Yeah, okay calling microsoft a crappy company is troll-ish, but it's also an opinion shared by many here.
I'll be pretty interested in seeing how this goes. I find both John Hodgman, the guy in the I'm a Mac and I'm a PC ads for Apple, and Jerry Seinfeld funny. Or at least, I found Seinfeld funny 10 years ago when Seinfeld was on. I haven't seen any of his newer stuff (the bee movie), will the guy still be funny?
John McCain's stance on copyright infringement is hypocritical. The reason is that he is currently being sued by Jackson Browne for copyright infringement because he used the song "Running on Empty" without permission. This looks to be yet another Republican professing high fallooting morals but who by his deeds is shown to believe that morality is for the populace and doesn't apply to him.
source
What scares me is that you were modded "insightful". The executive producer of the The Daily Show, Ben Karlin (a former The Onion editor), is quoted as saying that the principal goal of the show is comedy. "If you have a legitimately funny joke in support of the notion that gay people are an affront to God, we'll put that motherfucker on!" source. It's just an example, but the Republican policy positions are much easier to make fun of, in this case due to their hypocrisy because several Republicans are homosexual.
I was intrigued when they first started selling the green PCs, because gOS was running e17. I thought that was pretty cool since that was the first distro. I knew of besides e-live that was based on e17. Since they've switched to gnome they've lost some of that uniqueness and I haven't kept up. I still think it's pretty cool that everex selling their PCs with gOS on it at a major retailer (walmart) though.
No.
Long answer: Meh... There's really just the consolation that maybe Americans at least were never all that science savvy to begin with so the current state is nothing new. A more rigorous science education would probably be better.
I'd say a good start on that is to get the fucking religious dogma masquerading as science out of the schools. You know what I mean: intelligent design.
A good second step would be to hire more teachers who are actually good at science and math, but that would mean increasing the salaries and that probably won't happen. It used to be that intelligent women would do fulfill this need because of few career options but nowadays women can go on to science based careers not just in education. I've taught earth science to elementary education majors, very few of them found math and science to be enjoyable, but instead feared it. I can only presume they would transfer this to their students.
On the other side, I have had people who have laughed at me when I asked them if they ran a Mac for their analytical computing needs, claiming they aren't "real" computers. So it's not a "creative" vs. "analytical" type of people, I would say that all people tend to be biased towards their preferred platform and the stereotypes of those platforms. (Incidentally, there's a lot of good reasons to run Macs to use as a desktop because they natively use the same host of software the big linux or unix clusters do such as X11 and sshfs, etc. with no need for cygwin.)
Well how do we know that it's not a club of people who really believe in the flat-earth, but are passing it off as a joke in order to avoid scrutiny?
Maybe people pay the "huge premiums" for Apple products might just be in order to avoid having to be bothered by headlines like that.... ya think?
Thank you for your informative post -- I had no idea who was at the helm of IBM.
There's a difference. Apple had a visionary at the helm when it turned around, in particular the second coming of Steve Jobs (love or hate the guy, you have to admit he has vision). Having a visionary is important for turning around a big company because they have to fight off the corporate goons that drown every decent idea in marketing nonsense and bureacracy. For Microsoft, Bill Gates has been decreasing his role at MS for some time now. Do you see any other visionaries at Microsoft?
That said, to point out a counter-example,IBM seems to have changed its tune as well without some sort of outspoken visionary.
There is a correlation between crime rate and lead exposure, a known neurological poison. I'd say a better inflammatory question to have asked, is "Did IT staff give themselves lead poisoning from handling IC boards made with lead solder all these years?" This might explain the BOFH reputation, the guy had lead poisoning. It would also explain why there are so many strange people in the IT industry, e.g. all the paranoid, conspiracy theorists and here on slashdot.