Ten years is old enough...for a computer

[Marko]

Of course, your statement that I'm expecting the pictures to reveal all of the devices capabilities is an example of this exaggeration. I stated no such expectation. What I did say was that the tidbit in question was never pictured nor described in any obvious way that I saw. I won't attempt to reveal all my exaggerations.

Of course, it would have been an exaggeration if I ever said something like that. But since I made no such statement, you have just revealed another one of your exaggerations. A perfect example of #1 from that list, actually.

One of the main problems with discussions like these is that people go into them with the notion that there are opponents, and that the objective is winning. The objective of a formal debate is winning, but also truth. This was not, of course, a formal debate. I would say the objective here is more like a martial-arts demonstration. The idea is that the mock battle entertainingly reveals how the moves are used in their context, without much chance of anyone actually getting hurt. In those demonstrations, the victory is staged and unimportant.

I will respectfully disagree with this entire notion. One of the main problems with discussions like these is that some people treat them as factual discussions on a given topic while others treat them as opportunities to play out a predetermined agenda and turn them into confrontations or battles. A natural objective of a discussion, even if it isn't necessarily on the level of a formal debate, is to find the factual truth, in which case all the participants "win", although I would rather use the term "gain".

Perfect example would be another thread running in parallel with this one in which someone asked which would be the best way to run Windows on a Mac. A discussion that followed has all the characteristics of a factual discussion and none of the characteristics of a battle. The net result will be an OP who will get the feedback he is looking for and a lot of other users who would learn a bit more about other possibilities.

This thread would be the opposite example - it started with a statement of a fait accompli, followed by a few questions mostly by participants who assumed they were entering a factual discussions, which in turn were responded to by several assertion completely unsupported by facts and from there quickly turned into a battle with all the "tools" for "winning the argument" from that list used in short order.

Starting a discussion with an objective to stage a mock battle is essentially a fancy name for trolling. It is anything but entertaining and it wastes a lot of everybody's time.

By the way, you can explain something I could not get from Apple's site: I thought it was the "magic mouse" that employed gestures, and that the standard mouse still has a button. How does one select choices without a button? Even on my iPhone, I have to press buttons on the screen, but then it has a touch screen which Macs do not have.

Paul already explained the previous mouse model, I will only add that there are no buttons on the iPhone screen and therefore you are not pressing any. What you are doing is touching the screen (that's why it's called "touch screen") and thus changing either the capacitance or the resistance of the area under the icon (i'm not sure which of these two systems is used on the iPhone). The same applies to the current mouse as well as to the stand-alone trackpad. I just recently tried the latter and was so impressed with it that I am going to add it to my system as a "left" device.

[Jon Shiu]

re: magic mouse, the whole thing actually acts as a (spring loaded) button. You just push down on it to click.

Jon

[Greg Miller]

[rdenney]

re: magic mouse, the whole thing actually acts as a (spring loaded) button. You just push down on it to click.

Ah. And the home button on my iPhone is not a button, nor are the virtual buttons I press on the touch screen.

I get it now.

Rick "glad we cleared that up" Denney

[rdenney]

This thread would be the opposite example - it started with a statement of a fait accompli...

...followed by statements complaining that no PC wrote Photoshop files as fast as Apples, and then it began.

It started out as a statement of a fait accompli, because that's what it was. And the performance was described in factual terms. I was not the person who brought up Apple computers, but I was not prepared to have the thousand bucks I just spent invalidated without some analysis. How much does one have to spend to load Photoshop files a bit faster? Not an insignificant amount, as it turns out, though there might be other things one gets with that that extra expenditure, which might or might not have value to them, and there might be some things they have to give up, which might or might not have value to them.

When you start a thread bragging about the Apple you just bought, and I come back and talk about the superiority of my PC over your brand new purchase, then you can complain about my argumentation techniques. In this case, the burden of factual presentation about Apples was on those advocating for it in my thread about PCs. But it took a hell of lot of goading on my part to pull those facts out into the open.

Rick "thinking this has gone far enough" Denney

[Marko]

When you start a thread bragging about the Apple you just bought, and I come back and talk about the superiority of my PC over your brand new purchase, then you can complain about my argumentation techniques.

Why would I want to do that? I bought not one but a few Apples since I joined this board and not once did I feel the need to brag about it, much less compare them to anything else in order to validate the decision.

In this case, the burden of factual presentation about Apples was on those advocating for it in my thread about PCs.

This is a very interesting logic - I never thought of factual presentation as a burden, but rather as a natural goal. If anything, I always thought about BS as a burden, the one worth avoiding at all cost.

Rick "thinking this has gone far enough" Denney

Indeed. Let's find something better to argue about. Or even better yet, let's find something not to argue about.

[Dave Jeffery]

For those of you that do decide to build your own computer(s) buy good cases, power supplies,
cooling fans and drives.

My internet computer is the third upgrade in a full size Google Gear ATX case. It has the
original Google Gear sticker on it. The power supply is a Corsair, the HP CD writer still
works flawlessly and is about 10 years old. The DVD burner is a top of the line Matsushita,
and two extra cooling fans are built into the case.

All I ever need to do to upgrade is to find the sweet spot in CPU performance vs. cost, and
once the CPU is selected pick out a full size Gigabyte ATX board with lots of slots, buy the
correct RAM and possibly a few drives. Just swap out the mobo, CPU and RAM and possibly buy
a few cheap cross over power connectors (eg. IDE to SATA).

If the case, power supply, and periferals are all high qulity upgrades are not that expensive.

I always partition the hard drives and install two OS's to dual boot on each drive, and mirror the
drives. The second OS is just a barebones installation on a small partition to store the registry
backup from the main OS.

The only time that I ever had trouble with a virus that I couldn't remove a quick boot into the second
OS to replace the backup registry of the main OS was quick and easy. I've never needed the mirrored
drive yet.

My oldest computer is for the internet only, and my newest editing box stays offline. As both boxes
are full size ATX cases I just upgrade the oldest box and shift the best drives to it and then just
use the older computer for the internet. I've been cycling computers like this for about 16 years after retiring a Dell that was not upgradable.

The most important ratings that I look at are for the hard drives and a few years ago the 650 gig
drives were rated the very best so I purchased them rather than larger 1 TB drives.

With great components and full size ATX cases it's not hard or very expensive just to swap out a mobo,
CPU and RAM as a unit, and most full size ATX mobos have all the newest connectors on the back.

I find upgrading to be very easy and not as expensive as buying a whole new box, drives etc. plus
No Bloatware!

[onnect17]

Just curious, there's anything I can do in the Macs I can't with a PC?

[paulr]

Just curious, there's anything I can do in the Macs I can't with a PC?

There's some software available only on Mac; some available only on PC. For most people it's a non-issue. It comes up if you need a specialized piece of software that exists only on one platform.

If you have a Mac set up to run both OSX and windows, you can do anything.

[Marko]

The question is less about what then it is about how you do it on each platform. Except gaming or a few very specialized applications, of course.

Since Macs switched to Intel architecture and being capable of running Windows natively, the issue has largely been reduced to the differences between the operating systems.