Re: Buyer Beware
Improved performance is the often stated point of SSD. That includes whatever use case you happen to be interested in. Given the price premium of even the consumer gear, anything less is an obvious rip off.
2525 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2009
Even for my own "light consumer" use, I would be shocked and dismayed if I shelled out a ton of money for an allegedly faster SSD device and only got 75MB/s of sequential writes out of it.
Clearly, you can't just blindly trust the logo on the box and just assume that it will deliver on it's promises.
I am by no means a "freetard". I have quite a pile of purchased spinny disks. However, I am not made of money. The prices for BBC stuff on DVD is kind of outrageous. It's pretty much the most expensive stuff out there except for StarTrek. Although classic DrWho even has StarTrek DVDs beat.
That means that BBC material is low on my shopping list. That means that the greedy sods aren't making any money off me. Someone else is.
If it's not priced low enough to be an "impulse buy" then procrastination is the likely result.
If you're British, you were already forced to pay for this stuff. Charging you again is just double dipping. The old stuff should be liberated to the public domain anyways.
If you want to charge the rest of us that have never paid a TV license, then that's another matter.
> Highlander II or Freddy Got Fingered
This movie is why I use a PVR that can be hacked so that an unconditional black list of shows that shall never be recorded can be created. Some movies need a 4th thumbs down and a little black circle beside their name.
If you are advocating buying the extended warranty then you've just admitted that the product is crap and the vendor doesn't stand behind their product.
The $1800 laptop from the "quality" brand should already have a 3 year warranty.
If their stuff is really all that it is cracked up to be then it won't be a burden.
The beauty of going to Dell is that I am offered a different set of tradeoffs.
I am not limited to the one or two options that Apple presents. Dell has more than that by itself. Never mind the rest of the market.
Dell and friends will allow me to get EXACTLY what I want without paying an arm and a leg for it. I won't need to spend $2400 just to get a drive bay or expansion port.
As far as "Apple quality" goes: In my own experience they are the worst "brand name" I have ever dealt with.
> The explosions don't just happen at factories making Apple devices, here's an explosion at a factory making Sony laptops less than 6 months ago.
This only comes up when it's time to defend Apple against charges of exploitation and tends to be ignored any other time, specially when drawing direct comparisons between Apple product and Sony product. Facts are only acknowledged when they are convenient.
This is a little self evident. If mammals were in a position to take advantage of climate change and the fall of the dinosaurs, they needed to be around already and flourishing in the fringes in some niche that the dinosaurs were not well adapted for.
There's a wide range possible between zero mammals and dominating the planet.
On the one hand we have an entire family of interoperable operating systems that have been doing the heavy living for business and the Internet for decades. They have a time tested design and a stable common interface. They don't need to indulge in so much "game changing" because they got it right the first time (or at least close enough).
The "clone of minix" is just one example. Trying to belittle it won't erase the rest.
"server" and "game changer" kind of have no business together. If you don't understand this then you really have no clue about any of this.
The only advantage Windows ever had was the perception that it is the monopoly. That means that software is created for it that's not created for anything else. In any other aspect, it has always been inferior to all of it's rivals. Doesn't matter if it's 1988 or 2012.
Use Windows if you need to. Just don't kid yourself that it's worth anything on it's own.
If you design a system expecting it to be managed by trained monkeys, you will end up with a system that looks like it was managed by trained monkeys. There's really no getting around that. The superficial top layer of the interface is the least interesting aspect of the whole system. Being able to actually understand the system is what separates the competent NT admins from the ones that have to be rescued by Unix SAs.
Whipping out your tokens of conspicuous consumption on mass transit is asking to be mugged. Not that standing with a tablet is much better than standing with a netbook anyways. Then there's the whole issue of SPACE during rush hour. Anything you have room to use will likely be an inferior experience.
Design matters. However, there is no such thing as "perfection". The notion that there is and that it should be centrally enforced is a very destructive one.
Fanboys are fascists that have tunnel vision when it comes to Apple, Jobs, and the rest of the market.
You would think that the Cloud would be a great thing to use for a secondary off-site backup. However, I recently had a bad experience with this that highlights the basic problem of the Cloud in general. A remote backup provider just "went away" quietly without sufficient notice and no clear indication from the local client component that the remote service had gone away.
Fortunately, someone was being diligent and double checked things. Otherwise a really nasty situation may have ensued.
Any form of outsourcing is a loss of control. An external service could be interrupted suddenly for a wide variety of reasons. 3rd parties (see Apple iCloud) also like to get in the way.
The iPad is designed to be a glorified Tivo. No matter how many people like to pretend otherwise, such a machine is not a PC. It will not replace PCs due to lack of basic features and the fact that the tech is in control of the users.
"Perfection" means something different to everyone.
> 3) Would you tell someone who'd spend $2k on a cartier watch they could have bought 200+ casios with that? Actually you probably would.
It helps to have a clue in these things lest you get taken advantage of.
> 5) It's his money.
Yes, and we retain the liberty to call him a fool too.
Exactly.
There are diminishing returns when it comes to bleeding edge high end hardware but you can still get some pretty powerful kit for not much money. If you hit that sweet spot, you can still have a very powerful machine that will stand the test of time and you don't have to spend 10K on it or even $3600.
The GPL only has problems co-existing with those companies that go out of their way to make problems. The situation with VLC is a perfect example of this. Apple doesn't need to be jerks about Free Software. They choose to be. They choose to give their customers only one means to install software and then to impose conditions at odds with Free Software.
The GPL is really only a problem with people that have a toddler's view of ownership.
> Yes, on what planet is Dell "tier one" at anything.
The one where cheap PC kit outperforms proprietary RISC and clustered solutions are the norm. Even old school Unix shops ditch "little iron" for clustered solutions to avoid being reamed on hardware costs.
If you don't do any back office computing you might not notice that Dell does more than sell cheap consumer desktops.
MacPorts isn't another repository. It's an entirely different framework.
It's not comparable at all. You don't have a single management interface or a single tracking and dependency database.
Half a dozen disjoint products is not comparable to a Linux package manager. Neither is the Apple app store really. However, it's a lot closer to apt-get than MacPorts is.
None of the Apple Corp or 3rd party options allow a 3rd party vendor like Adobe to tie into the package management system directly like Linux tools can.
Tools vs Product.
The KISS principle is simply unnecessary. The n00b consumer won't pay attention to the stickers anyway. They will just buy something that's sitting in Best Buy. They may or may not even care if it has the current version of Windows. They won't check the pedigree of the box. They simply don't care.
People choose to remain blissfully unaware. That includes these silly little stickers.
"innovation" is fine so long as it's not forced down everyone's throats. That is the Microsoft way. That's also how Apple does things. Bold experiments are fine so long as they don't trash the status quo. The fact that this is easy to do in Linux is why un-loved aspects of X11 are so handy.
Defaults should be sane, useful, usable, and represent the widest use case.
Unix does have some notion of UI guidelines.
> where you need to know details of the terminal line to install / remove certain applications.
Like what? Stuff that's bleeding edge and hasn't been fully released to the public yet?
That's an artifact of an open development process. It doesn't mean what you are trying to claim it does.
> The requirement is only that it never have been done THAT WAY before.
This is precisely the sort of crap that Thomas Jefferson rejected as far too obvious and trivial when he was serving as America's first patent clerk.
You don't get a patent for a mousetrap made out of oak rather than pine.
it's time to get Jeffersonian on these people.
The fanboys need to create their own reality regardless of what they actual facts are.
As others have said, this kind of approach would not cut it in any other area. Who cares if Apple leads in overpriced PCs. The bulk of the market does not belong to them.
The same is true of phones.
There is simply no need for this mindless "Apple is unstoppable" propaganda. What kind of future are these people pining for really? Are they hoping at a 2nd chance to out-Microsoft Microsoft?
If you don't actually call it out by name then the rest of us have no reason to believe it exists at all.
Otherwise, we have no reason to believe that you have a single favorite app. Never mind dozens.
Stuff that's just littering the app store that you have no really knowledge of really doesn't count though.
This is the problem with leaving gun discussions to people that refuse to know anything about guns. It's like having Apple users design electronics. If you are willfully ignorant, perhaps you should just STFU. I don't have a clue. You don't even want one.
One important characteristic of hollow point rounds is that they don't ricochet.
That whole "exploding bullet" thing ensures that you don't have stray rounds flying off and hitting something or someone that was not intended.
Some might view the lack of stray bullets bouncing around as a safety feature.
This new variant of Ubuntu actually reminds me of Mint in some ways. In some respects you could describe it as a less uptight set of packaging rules. They could just make regular desktop Ubuntu a little more "mint-y" and have pretty much the same effect. No separate version needed. No need to remove things that a corporate user might find use for (productive or otherwise).
The real hurdle on the corporate desktop is accommodating MIcrosoft-centric standards and otherwise being a drop in replacement for the machines you' are trying to displace. Adding a JDK and Flash really doesn't address that.
I have used multiple nvidia based machines for years in a variety of situations in some pretty demanding situations and never had the desktop freeze once. This includes a lot of use of 10.04.
There are things that I would fault Canonical for. Lack of solid nvidia support is not one of them.