“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.” -- Michael Crichton

Good answer, thanks.

Thanks for the sincere and possibly good advice. I guess it's one of those "life's not fair" situations that I just have to deal with. It's probably only a matter of time before he's promoted to boss.

why do i feel more sorry for the pigs who catch it than the people?

"A re-buy of Office for Mac starts at $150"

For my old Windows machine I spent $200 on the Windows home version Office (2002, I think?) because my wife insisted on having Excel (for basic household budgeting).

When I bought my Mac, I tried the pre-installed eval version of iWork '09 and got my wife to play with the Numbers spreadsheet and we have not looked back.

iWork makes Office look *decidedly* dated in most respects. And iWork '09 only costs $79.

Me too. I bought a MacBook after Christmas, and since then I bought CSSEdit, Espresso, the recent MacHeist3 bundle, iWork, and I'm that close to buying OmniGraffle (except that one's a little too expensive and I'm getting by fine with the free eval version).

I can't remember the last time I actually *bought* software for my old Windows machine.

Mac OS X gets lots of press, but the people who build these great little software apps for Mac should get more praise.

Also, the point was a get multiple Windows vendors. To get two companies both developing and marketing Windows independently of each other. How much better could the product have been if this was going on for the past 10 years.

The first thing I do on a new Windows installation is open IE and download Firefox. How would I get Firefox without IE? That is truly marvelous insight!

Surely this decision is about 10 years too late and such a change would no longer be relevant to the industry.

IE was a massive money pit for Microsoft, and its only purpose was to protect Windows as the dominant application platform. It worked.

But with the rise of Web 2.0 and hand helds like Blackberry and iPhone, Windows is no longer the dominant application platform -- no one is actually building applications for Windows anymore, as far as startups are concerned, it's a "dead" platform.

Therefore whether Windows ships with IE or not is now moot. No one (with the exception of Opera) is trying to make money that way anymore. That ship has sailed.

I like the approach of casually rating the performance of common tasks (copying files, zipping files, installing Office, and so on).

But what I'd like to see is the tasks rated with the time it took, not just ranked 1, 2, 3. I mean, is the difference from #1 to #3 just a couple seconds, or it is minutes? 10 seconds versus 13 seconds to copy 100 megs is negligible, but if it's 10 seconds versus 110 seconds, then that's something care about!

Also, do all the tests on the same hardware. And so the tests for Mac Leopard and Snow Leopard too. NOW that would be a cool article!

It's the exact same plot as Jurassic Park, only substitute dinosaurs with robots. Exact same plot.

This is a stupid comment. GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, SURVIOR, CAST AWAY, LOST -- "exact same plot". JURASSIC PARK is about genetic science, DNA, dinosaurs, some Chaos Theory and a little bit of computer engineering. WESTWORLD is about grown men wanting to live out a wild west fantasy.

The second and third books after Jurassic Park were so bad that I don't think I even finished them, that's the second point, it was obvious he was writing books to get made into Spielberg movies.

You don't know what you are talking about.

There was only one sequel to the novel JURASSIC PARK. It was called LOST WORLD, and LOST WORLD the movie bares little resemblance to the novel. JURASSIC PARK 3 was a movie, not a book.

Besides, Crichton was as much about movies as he was about novels. Crichton wrote the screenplay for WESTWORLD and TWISTER, he wrote and directed COMA and THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, and he created ER. It's no wonder his written work has appeal as movie and tv projects.

Focusing on whether the consensus view is necessarily correct or not has nothing to do

Crichton's point is it doesn't matter how many people *think* he's is wrong about climate change, it only takes one person to *prove* him wrong. Science isn't consensus, and nothing has been proven. Every computer model has been shown inaccurate, and now the environmental lobby are explaining away our years of stable weather and record low hurricanes as the result of lack of sunspots.

with the irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing and the likely probability that humans are causing it completely or contributing to it.

I've been around for a while, and I've seen this happen before. Now that the Republicans are out of the White House, expect the climate change crisis to conveniently fade away from the public consciousness. Everything will be hunky dory for about eight years until another Republican gets elected and then the next great fabricated crisis will raise its head -- maybe they'll say we're running out of clean water, or that the rubber we use in tires is evil or something, and those damn Republicans won't spend the billions of dollars needed to make the problem go away! -- and it'll get pounded into the minds of young people and the environmentally sensitive until the next Democrat gets elected and everyone will breath another big sigh of relief and move on.

While I have very fond memories of how cool it was to read Jurassic Park the first time

JURASSIC PARK is still a very strong novel. Probably one of the best techno-thrillers ever. It holds up. As does A CASE OF NEED, DISCLOSURE, SPHERE, PREY, and TRAVELS was a fascinating autobiography.

my opinion is that the guy was a hack, a very very clever one, but a hack nonetheless.

A HACK? Your opinion is wrong. Crichton was thought-provoking and insightful, and he was a gifted story-teller

He won't be remembered as one of the "great authors", in my opinion.

Do tell.