Read my post again. I am not disputing that Dell has more variety; that is a clear no brainer.

My point is that even though Dell has more variety, doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have any. The two do not correlate. Your original assertion was that because Apple has no sub-$1k gaming laptop that they had no variety. Well, you actually said "little actual variety" (direct quote), despite having demonstrably different product lines that are physically different from one another in pretty marked ways - some are laptops, one is the size of a few CDS, one is designed to be expandable, the other has a screen built in but is a desktop. They also sell phones and music players.

The fundamental raw product lines are reasonably similar to Dell - Inspiron/Latitude in laptops for example, with a large array of configurations of those base products (far more than with the MacBook and MacBook Pro configs, but still based on a small subset of designs).

As to whether "gaylordest" is a word, however, is perhaps a discussion for another time. Maybe it's a word in high school.

Again, since your level of discourse appears to only go so high that "gaylordest" is actually a word in your vocabulary, I will repeat that I am not saying that Apple has more variety than Dell, nor did I ever state or imply that in earlier posts.

I won't speculate on this but, in spite of what the reply above seems to imply, I doubt it's out of concern for the users.

It might be doable but it would definitely count as the use of "intermediary translation ... tool" and so be clearly forbidden. Now in practice I don't think Apple is going to carefully examine all apps to check whether they do it and I'm not even certain that wxWidgets falls into this category anyhow. Unfortunately being uncertain that it does not is quite enough to dissuade anybody from even considering it. And this is even better than FUD because while there certainly is fear and uncertainty, there is no doubt whatsoever that Apple won't hesitate to prohibit any "portable cross-platform C++ frameworks" if it ever decides it would be beneficial to it.

You've got to admire Apple even if you find what they do as hateful as I do. They do know how to play the game and their progressive developer lock-in works better than anything Microsoft ever dreamt about (but now they will try to copy Apple, of course -- initially with lesser success but sooner or later they will get there too). And if all this evokes herds of lemmings to me this is surely just my own personal problem...

Interestingly enough nobody seems to have mentioned this gem yet. To summarize, Apple has decided to forbid

Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool

While this is clearly aimed squarely at Adobe and their Flash compiler I can't help wondering what does it mean even for C++ libraries such as Qt or wxWidgets (that I'm personally most interested in) as, with a bit of bad faith (that Apple doesn't seem to luck), they could be construed to be "intermediary compatibility layers" too. And this definitely seems to exclude using Perl, Python, Ruby or anything else.

If anybody had any doubts about Apple openness, this should hopefully be enough to dispel them (although whom am I kidding... there will surely be people able to justify this as well).

No, it hasn't. But this might be explained by the fact that Firefox doesn't
use GTK+.

And the rest of your comment is about as accurate...

Go ahead and try them. If convicted, pull their patents and let other companies provide the product.

Considering that they are not manufacturing anything nor paying for shipping, warehouses (including workers), etcetera. If I thought the authors were getting more out of it then I might not bristle as much but I have no illusion that anyone but the publisher is benefiting from the price hike. As long as there are libraries, if won't be a problem. As an aside, I wonder how long it will take before publishers challenge libraries in court?

Especially if you're a private military contractor in Iraq.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5xT1DGJMoQ

There's parody on this in Finland's main paper today. "The organically grown lamb you ordered arrived as an attachment."

Every responsible home computer owner should have no problem spending a few bucks to have a EAL7-certified system with full hard drive encryption built. Everything else is an invitation to hackers and getting sent to prison for having child porn is really your fault if you don't take your security seriously.

Of course that's just to defend from the people who somehow managed to penetrate the meter-thick bunker door to enter your house (superterranean homes are dangerously irresponsible) and evaded the multiply redundant security cameras, IR detectors and tripwires without waking you.


If your home and computer system can't withstand a concerted all-out attack by any combination of any agencies or armies on the planet you really deserve what you get.

I just hope they keep practicing their regular navigation/IFR from time to time, or they might get completely lost or at least partially blind.

Yes I am, but it was responsibility for someone else, not myself. On the handful of occasions that my older brother and I were left to our own devices, we got into a lot more mischief. I would never have thought to steal a couple of beers from my friends dad, ride bikes down to the swamp, and get drunk when watching my 10 year old sister and 12 year old brother. However, that was my first experience with beer my 16th summer when my younger siblings were at a camp for the week and my parents were working. Same thing for my first time smoking weed.

Long answer: You will ALWAYS have (even low-end) musician sound cards with analog inputs. Since the very point of those sound cards is, to have really good A/D converters. (Often lots of them, and pretty expensive ones too.)

Reality still is analog. Speakers are, Microphones are. And will always be, as long as they exist in reality.
And the only difference from a microphone jack and a line-in jack is the amplification. Which is configurable to whatever you like on any serious sound card anyway. :) /me still loves his trusty old DMX 6fire 24/96. :) (I also have a Audigy and a onboard one. And when I switch back and forth, both sound like totally distorted crap.)

Nope.. all those figures were completely misquoted by the media. Every private astronaut who has flown through Space Adventures has paid between 30 and 35 million to Energia.. Dennis Tito (because of his previous failed attempts with Mircorp) and Greg Olson (because of his health issues) have paid between 50 and 55 million. And none of these figures include the travel to and from Star City, or the time they've had to take off work for training there - which is quite significant, when you consider that it is their sheer earning power that makes them able to afford the trip in the first place. And don't forget all the people who have paid for the preliminary training but flunked the medical.

That said, the price is coming down.. Energia is planning to increase production of Soyuz so they can have a dedicated private astronaut flight a year. Presumably when suborbital flights start up we'll see an increased interest in orbital. Competition in the form of SpaceX (and maybe others) should also have an effect.

Uuum, you can easily survive outer space while completely nude, for at least 30 seconds. It was already done, and NASA even has a FAQ about it. (In short: Keep your mouth OPEN and everything DRY, or you will burst and freeze. But if done right, you only get a swelling of your fingers and face, which returns to normal in a couple of hours. Btw: Radiation is the main problem.)
Which makes some seemingly unrealistic movies pretty realistic and cool.

No one is arguing about whether you'll get distortion if you feed a line level signal into a mic level input, fail to check your levels, and don't enable AGC. The same is likely true for a mic input cranked all the way open.

That said, given that some microphones can exceed line level output by themselves without a preamp (the maximum output of a CAD M9, for example, is +8dBV), it should be possible if you set things up correctly to feed a line level signal into any decent mic input. In some pro gear, they don't even bother to take the preamp out of the signal path for line level inputs; the preamps have to be able to handle that level of input anyway.

That said, I'm talking about relatively high end gear set up by somebody who is paying attention. When you deal with low end gear that has no padding or trim on the input side of the preamp, no gain adjust on the preamp, and limited headroom in the preamp, you almost certainly have to turn down the output of the device providing the line level signal. Even then, it can be done, though. You just have to do it right.

So yes, the line level input is gradually going away, and for precisely the reason stated.