Apple's Mac - the ghostbuster's choice Apple's Mac has long been the go-to machine of choice for creative designers and photographers. Scientific apps such as A/G Blast contribute to our understanding of the world around us. And now a tip from MacDailyNews points us to another creative realm in which the Mac is expanding human knowledge: investigation of the …
Think Apple has a long way to go to catch up to Acorn's BBC Micro from the 80s.
In 1984-87, Ken Webster in Dodleston, UK, believed himself to be in contact with someone called Tomas Harden from the 16th-century, along with other characters including some claiming to be from the future - one of them being known as 2109 (or 2105). The messages are purported to have been left - somehow through the space-time continuum - on a humble BBC Model B fitted with an Acorn DFS upgrade. They were found on the editing screen of the ROM-based word processor EDWORD and within EDWORD files created on disk (or appended to them). Ken detailed the curious case in his now out-of-print book The Vertical Plane [1989 Grafton Books, ISBN: 0-586-20476-8], two episodes of a BBC 1 documentary series presented by Carol Vorderman [Out Of This World, 20 August 1996 & 27 August 1996] and in a Fortean Times article, [The Vertical Plane - FT108].
There are no ghosts, spirits, phantasms, aliens*, alien spacecraft*, no alien abductions or any of that crap. It's all in their head.
Unexplained != Trans-dimensional Beings from the Dark Beyond (or whatever)
I guess if you are deluded enough to believe in that crap, you are deluded enough to pay through the nose for a basic laptop. :oP
*Well, not here anyway
...and we should not leap to some complex and fantastical conclusion when something more prosaic (and as yet, unknown) may be lurking. Waking dreams, weather phenomenon, etc. The universe is strange enough without inventing more crap.
As for the price gibe....you did see the ":oP" didn't you?
I agree with that, but believing in something because of experience is fairly acceptable, even if your senses are being fooled (I have Narcolepsy syndrome and suffer from Waking Dreams and Sleep Paralysis, so I tend to experience some very weird things which my brain tells me are real), or through misinterpretation / lack of education.
Otherwise we're entering the realm of the metaphysical and Descartes, which is for another forum entirely!
And apologies - my sarcasm sense doesn't work in forums, e-mail, IMs, or IRC...! I think it's a lot to do with some in-built smiley filter I seem to have evolved over the years.
Is there a constructive purpose to claiming Macs are "3 times over the odds", or any other excessive criticism of Mac users?
At the end of the day, everybody has choice, which is great. I would never want to feel coerced into purchasing a product because it's the only real option available - it stifles competition and creates price hikes.
Personally, I use a Mac as my primary home and enterprise machines because it provides me with what I want: an open source and standards-based desktop system with the simplicity and power of a state-of-the-art user-experience. It comes packed with much more than Microsoft Windows does off-the-shelf, and allows me a great deal of freedom on how I manage my personal information and the choice of software I use.
Ironic, I know. I haven't bought an iPhone because I won't get that level of freedom, despite developing on it, and feeling the user experience is highly polished. Plus, I would hate to help encourage Apple to remove support for non-iPhone mobile devices in the future on their desktop OS.
I have over a dozen other OS variations on virtual machines for development purposes, and can honestly say Microsoft Windows 7 is a big improvement (not that Vista set the bar too high, but XP Professional was a decent OS IMO). I still prefer the Mac, despite Windows being my primary OS series for years, and idolizing Bill Gates whilst still at college.
I don't use Linux as my primary OS because I'm tired of the amount of effort I have to go through to perform some tasks, but I like that too. I briefly moved over when Windows was finally annoying me far too much.
The point is, celebrate having choice, and that people are exercising theirs, rather than using every Windows and OS X article to throw jibes over the wall. It's more than a tad boring now.
And I'm posting anonymously for once because of my admission of Gates being my college idol...
Pro-open source.
Pro-open standards.
Pro-competition.
Not really. When I looked at them I'd say they were (give or take) about right, but the tag appears to be about 1.5 times the cost of a similar Windows laptop (it will vary from OEM to OEM). You have to consider the build quality (which I am told is good) and thus discount all the low-end makers (e.g. Dell), then you have to consider the nVidia graphics card and other hardware spec (and discount entry-level machines) and finally consider the after sales support (which I am told is good).
So maybe you do appear to pay "over the odds", but you get what you pay for to a large extent I think.
I didn't by a Mac in the end...I decided I didn't need a laptop after all.
It's was a joke in context of the article.
I am trying to say, that although I am a serious Mac user and Jobs Evangelist ( you did see the line under my joke about owning 4 of them? ) I am not so far up my own fundament that I can still laugh at myself!
Jeez you lot, lighten up a little!
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