Marketoids hate simple comparisons.

Why do you think they created all of those nearly identical products??

The answer is...to confuse you.

When you are confused, you are more likely to rely on emotion, rather than logic.

Buy the brand, buy the extras, etc...

I really, really hate shopping for laptops...

Defense contractor's revenue down.

Plan to introduce an exciting new product.

So, I look at what I use frequently

AutoCad, Photoshop, Illustrator, Altium, Visual Studio, AVR Studio and all of the other various specialized device interfaces, like Home Theater Master MX-850

All are Windows only. And PLEASE don't tell me there are open source alternatives..even when they exist, they are pale imitations of the originals

About the only stuff I could do on Linux is, Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office.

Should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.

Apple is worse than Microsoft ever was. And I am no fan of Microsoft.

For years, the environmentalists have believed that it was necessary to exaggerate.

If they said "Here is a problem we should try to solve", they believed they would be ignored.

So instead they scream "THIS PROBLEM THREATENS OUR SURVIVAL!!! WE NEED TO SOLVE IT NOW!!!!".

After years of hearing this, the public recalibrates their bullshit sensors.

And yes, I consider myself an environmentalist. I just wish the rest of us were more honest.

Two drives in the computer. Several times a day, copy changed files from one to the other using a .bat file and xcopy.

Mozy online backup, twice a day.

One removable drive. Several times a month, copy changed files to it using a .bat file and xcopy..then take it out and put it on the shelf.

Unless you are on a very limited budget, don't reuse old drives for primary backup.

Drives are cheap. Buy a new 1.5TB drive as your primary backup.

If you really want to be careful, use your old drives for secondary backup

I probably have 30 drives on my shelf after years of backups.

Is the ITER project good science?

Or, is it a politically motivated, pork laden boondoggle?

When audio recording was first invented, quality was awful, but people loved it, because it was new and exciting, and nothing like it had ever existed before..

Year after year, quality improved.

We expected that someday, recorded music would become indistinguishable from live performance.

Then everything changed.

Convenience became more important than quality.

Storing 5000 mediocre quality recordings on an ipod became the norm.

Combine that with the excessive compression used to fight the loudness war, and it really makes an old-school audiophile sad.

How about, if the system makes a mistake, an innocent person could suffer hours, maybe days of inconvenience.

Worst case, they could die.

An example would be something like this, feel sick, get in the car to go to the hospital, need gas, get refused because the system made a mistake, days later, finally get to the doctor, doctor says "if only we had found this sooner, we could have saved you"

I know it's a crappy example, but I think it still makes the point. The innocent always suffer.