Pugwash

It's a natural cycle. We're the product of parents that were stoned in the 60s and we're now parents. We're reacting to our upbringing and the kids are rebelling. It's life. We, the kids of the hippies, are pushing this vapid culture on our kids. The message they're getting is the message we're giving them. You can't blame anyone but us. How old were people here when they had their first drink or their first [censored]? Younger than we'd like our kids to have been, inevitably, but it's ok because we were more responsible? How different are we to this generation? I reckon the sooner the US gets away from over-protective neo-con christianity the better. Contraception isn't abortion, abstinence doesn't work, God isn't a substitute for good parenting.

Sure, but could you tell by looking at the 10/20 on the subdial? That's my point.

I used Parallels, but I didn't see the problems you're describing. Small window? You know it runs full-screen on Parallels if you want, right? Also, with Coherence, you can have floating windows. I use VMWare Fusion these days, but Parallels is perfectly decent.

And 40 years ago, it was legal to discriminate on race and smoking was good for you. It's not all downhill.

You close programs? When a Mac is first installed, it's unfortunately very slow for the first few hours, which I think is bad planning. It's slow because it's pre-binding and running spotlight (the mdimport process) on the filesystem. The down side is people when they first get a Mac think it's slow and then it suddenly gets faster a few hours later for no apparent reason. One advantage though, is once it's all stabilised, you can launch Firefox and just leave it running. Closing all the windows reduces it to a very, very low profile. Never quit applications unless they're MS Office or Photoshop.

That's like saying you can shoot people if you disagree with them. Sure, it happens, but it's not at all legal and where proved is crushed. Oh, and proposing a ban isn't the same as banning. What is happening, however, is that it's already illegal to show your underwear in some states. It's a bit silly, but if you accept there should public decency laws, all you're doing is negotiating where the line is drawn. You've already accepted that lawmakers can decide what's acceptable to wear and from then on, it's all haggling.

That's the point. Can you tell which dial is the genuine? Looking at the 10 and 20, I can't.

...and there's a way to get both of these working in your favour in Firefox. If you set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0, you'll get a faster-feeling Firefox. It starts rendering pages as soon as the HTML is available, much like IE on Windows. There are a few other tweaks, but that'll do for a start. You can find the settings by typing about:config in the address bar.

Precious Time. Oh, and it's got a genuine dial and The Zigmeister serviced the movement.

I don't get what you mean ...

Bzzzzt. The Pentium (from the Pentium Pro onwards) has a 36-bit memory bus. This is how Linux can address over 4GB on an i686 system. Windows XP is hard-coded to 2GB of memory and uses pages to go over, but each application, can only uniquely access 2GB. Stupid, eh?

I have to disagree. I have 2GB RAM and assign 512MB to Windows XP. When I do that, I find that applications run at full-speed. Windows Media Player and IE sites run exactly as you'd hope, and the application windows integrate very well with my OSX windows. If you throw enough memory at it, over 1GB in your Mac, then you'll find it's as good as a slightly lesser PC. If you've got a decent graphics card in your Mac, you can play PC games.

Yeah, I've had that on OSX for a few years. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/filevault/

AND ANOTHER THING ... Vista had three actually interesting features touted during development. WinFS, Monad (Windows Powershell) and the full DX10 GUI. None of those made it into the final version as advertised, although the GUI got feature-crippled and became Aero/Avalon, it didn't get anywhere near as good as it was in development. WinFS and Monad got scrapped, with promises of eventually being released as a patch. The three pillars of Vista (WinFS, Indigo and Avalon) were either scrapped or neutered to the point that when Vista was released, it was a slowed-down (due to constant DRM polling) XP with a GUI and nagware built-in. Even Dell, a usually compliant Windows reseller, eventually told Microsoft that they would need to offer XP as an opition. They switched 100% to Vista as their only install, but had to back down on this stance as the public voted against it with their wallets. VISTA == TEH SUXX0RZ

Woah. Hold it right there. The security features are obtrusive and don't actually add any security. All they do is pop up and annoy you to make you think they're doing something. There is no separation of userland and system space, so if you install some applications as the user, it'll install them without enough permission to be useful. You need to uninstall them and re-run the installer as Admin. Secondly, the so-called security dialogues are merely warnings as opposed to a security feature. You run an installer, it'll ask you whether or not you want to install it, but it'll not actually verify your credentials (a simple yes/no dialogue is all that appears) and allow anyone at the keyboard to just click through to admin privs. You don't even need privilege escalation sploits. Vista is no more secure than XP: it just pretends to be secure more often just so you think it's more secure. Much like an Anti-virus that needs to pop up a warning every so often just to make you think it's earning its retail price, XP needs to offer a veneer of security to make you think it's better. Oh, and the DRM 'features', even when not being used, use clock cycles to make sure you're not 'stealing' something. Even if you never intend to use your PC as a media centre, you can rest assured your PC isn't as fast as it could be simply because it's had DRM shoe-horned into the kernel. Twunts.

Not quite. He never had exclusivity, but he gets the Taiwanese replicas before other dealers and charges a premium until they hit the regular distribution chains. Eddie has always made money off supposed exclusivity that turns out to merely be a few weeks of advance. In some cases, the customers get them at the same time as they would have done from a regular dealer, only at the premium price. Nothing against Eddie, but them's the facts.

I don't know anyone that's willingly switched to Vista and stayed there, for what it's worth.

It'll run it today. http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/ http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/ http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Yes, it is. Even in genuine watches. Natural sapphire is cloudy or coloured. Synthetic, lab-grown sapphire is clear. It's still sapphire, but it's man-made. Sometimes, however, dealers have been known to use the term 'synthetic sapphire' to mean 'mineral glass', but I believe this practice is mostly over.

The best answer, of course, would be to ask "What's your budget?" and then find the best bang for buck, based on the buyer's needs. I'd try very hard not to say "Get a Mac" too.

Out of those two machines, I'd suggest rethinking the Dell and getting a Dell Core 2 Duo. I mean, sure, I love my Mac and thanks to VMWare Fusion have XP on OSX as well, but if you're in the dell price bracket, get a dell... dude.

Surely you mean 1080i ...

It's what I do for a living ... and I'm still cheaper than the licenses for Server2003.

MCI Worldcom was kicking ass in the 90s, though. It wasn't until 2003 that the shares died.