I am not a hipster (I grew up in/live in echo park, and I hate their parking spot taking/beard growing ways), but I have to say that most of the time, a mac is a good deal.

It just works.

Another reason is the bundled and subsidized software. iMovie and Final Cut Express are unmatched on PC. I LOL when I see the MS PC commercial that shows some woman buying a computer for video editing for less that 2 grand. What is she going to use to capture and edit video? Adobe's Premiere costs almost 2k.. iMovie is free, and is more than enough for 95% of home users. Need more features? Final Cut Express is subsidized, $99. Want to spend a shit load of money? get the full final cut package, it will cost the same amount as Premiere Pro.

I have never bought a mac. I have a retail license for windows xp pro that cost $150. I did this because, at the time, there was more open source video encoding software availible on Win32.

However, I will never upgrade to Vista, and will likely never upgrade to Windows 7. Linux desktops are mature enough for everyday use, especially since 95% of poeple ONLY use their web browsers (my sister-in-law has used her computer for 12 months and has not created a single document).

Need a document? Open Office is okay (not great), and works on Win32, Mac, and Linux. Open Office Base works very well.

Summary: most users would be better off with the closed hardware and subsidized software that comes with mac. Nerds should be using Linux 100% of the time. Microsoft should be severely punished for their OS blunders (home users chose them only because it is the de facto standard in busness, but the majority of businesses are still using XP, two years after Vista's introduction, so there is NO reason for home users to use Vista.)

The way wing-nuts portray Sweden as a bogeyman is the opposite of the truth. It's a nice place to live, really.

Time to LEARN THE F*CKING DIFFERENCE between USSR and Sweden:

classic USSR:
*Medium-Poor
*one-party Dictatorship
*No free speech
*State planning of entire economy - little or no entrepreneurship

Sweden:
*Affluent
*Democratic
*Freer speech and freer press than the USA according to Reporters Without Borders (Sweden ranked 7th while USA ranked 36th)
*Progressive income tax provides socialist services whilst the economy is still market-based and entrepreneurs are free to start new companies.
*No stupid laws written by religious-conservative-fundamentalists.
*Half the infant mortality and 3 years longer life expectancy than the USA.
*Less than half the murder rate of the USA [reference: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur-crime-murders 219/9M vs 16.2k/303M]
*Had the 2nd highest average math education scores in the world (USA was ranked 19th out of 21 industrialized countries). [Reference: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/98049.pdf]
*Fewer wasteful farm subsidies than the USA

Hey Dag, what's happening with that chipin indicator? Am I going crazy, or are we going backwards. I could swear it said 2K (18%) earlier today, and now it says 1.8K (15%).

Last shuttle boom over where I lived resulted in bits of shuttle (and other things) raining down on my town

When I heard about the tool bag my first thought was I could go down to the Home Depot and show them a nice $4 solution to keep a $2k tool bag from floating away, but it sounds like someone for got to tether it or something.

sadly i knew everything there as well.

i had alot of decks, but the most fun was squirrels. generally took a multiplayer game for it to work, but nothing like running over everyone with 2k+ squirrels.

"In a world full of sheep, you're a raging bull....."
Myself n' thinker247 are vying for the driver's seat, and partying our asses off down the Autobahn.........
What car am I???...right now I'm a MINI no turbo, 2K miles so far, so fuck it, guess I'm a Coopy.....ohhh, love that mileage, too-
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3117/2542957016_bbd50bfb68.jpg?v=0

My GF is getting a laptop soon. 2K is here limit what should we get?

I would like to put matlab, so something with some punch.

I was thinking about the new MacBook cause my boss got me one, and there is some good open source stuff. She doesn't want a mac though so... what do you recommend.

I said 'woah' right when I saw him holding it. You could vertically arrange a lot of these along a roof, especially a flat roof like a commercial building, or along the sides of whatever existing structures (parking garages, large buildings,etc.). Real-world ones would have to be made of something pretty sturdy; people wouldn't want to have to replace strips more than once a year, if that (and the the rest of the structure would have to be more robustly engineered as well).

A simplified, all-in-one system with arrays of these and arrays of solar panels coupled with the electronics and the batteries, installed and ready, starting at around $2k US would make some company very, very wealthy. Imagine if you could get a basic modular 'green' system installed for a few grand, and have more modular components added whenever money was available... maybe with a tax incentive...

Mac OS X, Linux, Windows (2K and higher), etc. all good to me.

exactly, I too will be waiting a year or so to install vista. I did the same with xp from win 2k. No reason to rush, i will let others suffer. Ditto re: games.

2k was the best stable thing they put out. Vista is hilariously bad. You know the right click on desktop -> change resolution, background, screen saver, etc. Well that is all gone. It's like 9 clicks and a confusing menu.

I'm hoping there is a rebellion and people demand XP and new machines. Sadly, I think M$ has deals to force Dell, HP, etc to preload Vista Home (total crap) on everything.

You need Vista Business to do anything, and even then it is missing the Media Center / DVD stuff..

in Italy it's all about the voice and the people know it. If you fuck up, get ready for some tomatoes...

Most people make fun of opera, but it's a very nice profession. The dude who got booed, probably made about 2K that night. Thats about average for a "cover."