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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Will Smith
Published Letters: 14
"Upon hearing that an "Asian male" had shot students at Virginia Tech, I wondered if I had ever heard a breaking news story where the racial identification of a white male had been maybe the second word of the report. No, don't think so."
Right. It was weeks before we knew the race of the members of the Duke lacrosse team.....
There's nothing racist about reporting the two words used by the victims who survived the shooting to describe their attacker. "Asian" "male." The real mystery is why bloggers aren't attacking the perverse cult of English majors, or "creative" writing. Why are these people even allowed on campus? Eh?
Snarky, but true, description of the supreme sophist. Brooks is an unctious handwringer to power. Bye bye.
I thought it was obvious that the 17... "gaffe" was intentional -- Bush had the look of a standup comedian who had been rehearsing in the mirror, But why?
It strikes me that most of the whining here has come from those representing individual bad luck with a product, or geeks who ignore what most people actually do with their computers. Apple has always been good value for me. I'm typing this on a 400Mhz G3 iMac with a 20meg hard-drive and I'm running system 10.4 with no problem, and it does 100% of what I need to do with a computer (surf the web, use Office). A relative has a comparable Gateway from the same era--can you imagine it running Vista? No way. So she plods along with "Windows 98" having a miserable experience, picking up viruses, etc. etc. (I'm rather glad I didn't save a few bucks back in 2000 with a Gateway.) It's true in her humongous ugly beige case she could replace all the components, and ditch her elephantine monitor--except she's not a tech person and would have to pay people to do all that. What Apple does well is make products for people.
The technically inclined continue to miss the point. 99.99% of computer purchasers don't want to shop the back of the big fat parts magazines and then install new gizmos and widgets to keep their computer at the cutting edge of the specs, boasting in blogs about how they got X amount of speed for ten bucks cheaper than some other guy. The most important part of the computer is the part you operate with--the operating system. People who like Macs actually tend to like the operating system, and they don't care about all this stuff everybody's yammering on about.
My G3 iMac from 2000 can't be expanded--guess what--that doesn't matter if I don't need or want to expand it.
It's all what you do with it, anyway. The old-style shutterbugs who bored everybody about technical data about lens flare etc. usually took boring photographs. If I make a great video in five hours with an iMac and you make a crap video in four hours with a machine that cost $500 less who comes out ahead.... and maybe my video will be better because I spent my time reading a book or two and thinking about things rather than replacing all the parts in my computer (or slaughtering aliens or pretending to be Captain Flash or other semi-retarded activities certifiably better done on a PC.)
Sunspot: "they've actually exited the sub-$1000 market with these latest iMacs at a time when other vendors are offering PCs for less and less."
For some reason nobody's reported that simultaneous with the new iMac Apple has made the $599 mini now standard with a 120 gig hard-drive and 1 Meg of memory (up from 80 and 512) for the same price. Ditto the $799 mini with the Superdrive. So they haven't exited the sub $1000 market completely.
And truth is, most semi-affluent Americans don't really care about a couple of a hundred books if it means having a computer they don't have to fool with as much. I'm a lifelong (since early 80s) Apple user who's never used a PC much, and colleagues at work who hate computers constantly come to me with problems to solve on their PC's. These folks without computer aptitude would all benefit from the Mac operating system, even if it was only 5% easier to use.
Apple touts the hardware because Americans are used to thinking they have to buy stuff based on the specs. People buy cars based on how fast they can accelerate 0-60 even though the differences mostly don't matter at all.
Anonymous was pretty funny thinking that I meant great photographic artists with my reference to equipment enamoured "shutterbugs." I think though that anyone of a sufficient age who remembers that era knows who I mean, and exactly what boring or soft-core porn photos the repressed smucks produced. Now could anyone with such poor reading skills and lack of cultural range create a good video, even on a rilly rilly rilly fast machine he built himself? But back to the Mac Mini:
"2) Not nearly as easy to setup or as feature-laden as an iMac, since you have to attach a monitor and other devices by hand
It's small, but that isn't a huge advantage for most users, and its overall footprint is probably larger than that of the iMac, what with the separate monitor and all the cables and such you have to run out of it"
iMac set up. Plug keyboard into USB port. Plug Mouse into keyboard.
Mac Mini setup: Plug keyboard into USB port. Plug Mouse into keyboard. Plug monitor into Mini.
Maybe that's not nearly as easy, but it's not exactly hard to plug a monitor in. And "all the cables" wow--it's just a forest there. What the mini replaces, typically, is a big beige PC box---so the size savings are substantial, and the cableage the same. Anemic depends on what you want to use it for. Most users don't game and don't make movies. The point is well made though that Apple may be making a mistake by trading off profit per unit for market share -- but this year's bottom line affects all thinking when you're traded on Wall Street.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
