Registered: Oct 1999
Location: College Station, TX
Posts: 143

I admit to being a machead since the fat mac days - I still have it, complete with signatures of the original team cast inside the case. It seems to me that there's a lot of shifting ground in this discussion.

Gameboy talks about home users preferring cheaper PCs. I think that while that's true, the area that's led my AAPL stock to increase 500% since I bought it (didn't buy enough, alas) around the time Jobs came back is mainly the iMac. As much as it annoys the hardcore computer geeks, Apple has guessed correctly that there is a large part of the market that wants pretty cases more than blazing graphics cards. The low end iMacs are going for ~$800. Visor fans certainly shouldn't underestimate the value of attractive cases!

However, don't write off the iMacs just because they're cute. The not-so-upgraded iMacs that were just announced are more computer than most of us need most of the time. I'm going to order a new DV special edition for about $1700 with a 500 MHz G3, 256M RAM and a 30G HD.

I just went to the Dell page and customized a system for about $1500 with similar specs, I guess...I don't know enough about PCs to really tell what's similar but its the same RAM and HD with a 667 MHz Pentium III. This is cheaper but not enough cheaper for me to get excited.

Foo fighter talks about mid-range PCs being $1000 so presumably he either has better sources than Dell or is looking at an iMac DV equivalent as being the high end of midrange.

If I was doing high end image processing all the time, I'd probably get a G4.

At the high end for scientific computing, I'd probably go with PCs instead of G4s to get bang for the buck...but not GHz Athlons running Windows 2000...I'd be going for clusters of multiprocessor machines running Linux. A lot of my friends who do things like computational chemistry or NMR spectroscopy are building Linux clusters.

There's a book out there called "In the beginning was the command line" by Neal Stephenson. A student loaned it to me recently and it's pretty entertaining even if it gets kind of bogus at the end.

Stephenson compares computers to cars. In his analogy,

Windows machines are station wagons
Macs are hermetically sealed Euro-sedans
BeOS machines are inexpensive but fully functional Batmobiles
Linux is a free M1 tank that goes 100 mph, never breaks down, sips gas like a moped and you can drive one away for free.

The MS buyers ignore the others because they want tech support. When the Linux boosters point out that they essentially make house calls and fix your machine while you're asleep, the response is:

"Stay away from my house, you freaks!"

Registered: Mar 2000
Location: NJ
Posts: 517

homer:
The new mouse works exactly like any other mouse except you click and the whole thing kind of slants forward. To click and drag, you click and hold the mouse down and drag it. It is more of a tilting action rather than a normal mouse button going down, but it is so similar that you hardly notice the difference.