Time Machine won't mean much when the HD fails. Back that azz up!

Actually - that's the exact scenario Apple talked about. HD goes down and with TIme Machine you can get all your stuff back. It backs up the system, files, apps - everything. That's almost verbatim from Apple's mouth.

What is the obsession with back-lit keys?

Do you actually look at the keyboard when you're typing?
It's ****ing great option while working at night in bed.

Actually, yes. I use my laptop as a portable desktop, and I do a lot of different things with my computer. My current PowerBook G4 is capable of some of them, but really not practical for many (scientific computing, ray-tracing molecular models, etc.). A current yonah-based MBP would certainly be faster, but it would still be a 32-bit processor, and like many other pro-users, I don't want to have to buy a new machine every year.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'd of thought buying the latest and fastest computer every year would be the first thing a 'pro-user' would do with his money.

If speed really is that important to all you 'pro-users' why are so many of you using older computers which are far slower than the current Macbooks that have been available for many months?

If I did something for a living which required heavy cpu processing, spending $1,000 updating it (cost price less resell price of old) would be the best $1,000 I could spend as I'd get the money back through increased productivity very quickly.

Hell yeah. There's a Radio Shack about 5 minutes from my house. This should keep me from having to stand in ridiculously long lines at the Apple Store. I hope that Best Buy does this too, if only because I've never had a bad phone activation experience there, and I can rack up the Reward Zone points.

If people bothered to read the software agreement, it's in section 4b that states that the location may be recorded.

(Well, I think so anyway)

When you are as HUGE as best buy, and you are selling a product as huge as the iPad, it makes sense to create a demand. People do this all the time. You can't get it now, so the second it becomes available to you, you buy it in fear that you might have to wait another month. This happens all the time with a lot of products.

That makes not much sense to me, for I as customer would just go to the next Store/Retailer/Whatever that might have an iPad. Best Buy isn't the only one out there.

But maybe I just can't see the greater idea behind this so called "strategy".

No it doesn't, not when people brag about how much they sleep aroundThat is their problem, not yours.

Your link supports the idea that Greek society supported pederasty. If they have such a failing what is to say they don't have other failingsYou could say the same about the Catholic church. My link was specifically in reply to being asked for evidence - actually proof - that Plato was a homosexual. As for supporting bad stuff, the US Constitution was once quite content to support slavery and the subordination of women, and so were many of the founding fathers, both of the early church and the USA.

rape and paedophilia both involve lack of consent. Although paedophilia has to do with that the mind is attracted to pre-pubescent children in the same way that homosexuality causes attraction to the same sex. Both cases are untreatable.What absolute bollocks! Homosexuality does not need treatment, since it is not a disease.

In the 70's:

Universal makes "Battlestar Galactica", and "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", fun Sci-Fi shows.

In the 90's and early 00's:

USA Networks launches the Scifi Channel. They get great shows such as "Stargate SG-1" and "Farscape". USA Network has some great shows as well, "Monk", "The Dead Zone", "Peacemakers"

That was then....

This is now...

NBC has nothing but crap and gets jeleous of cable networks such as USA.

NBC/Universal buys USA Networks.

NBC/Universal cancels the last season of "Farscape", and the new western, "Peacemakers". They attempt to cancel "Monk" and "The Dead Zone", but to no avail. They also attempt to cancel "Stargate SG-1" and replace it with "Stargate Atlantis", this fails too.

NBC/Universal "retells" "Battlestar Galactica" - sorry, it's all about skin and a drunk Col. Tigh - junk.

NBC/Universal now is "cleaning up" the Scifi Channel by putting on on its own shows, "Eureka" (it is good though).

NBC/Universal is cancelling "Stargate SG-1", at a con, one of its actors did mention that "Universal did let it go on for another 5 seasons".

NBC/Universal's #1 show on the Sci-Fi channel is Wrestling....

Universal is good for what again???

(note: I might have my timing off, like the Farscape cancellation, but I think Scifi might have seen it coming with that series cancellation).

Now you've got some skills. I especially like the shadowing, reflections and detail on the back side. Very nice.

I agree with your size assessment.

Actually, our designs are quite close, differing primarily in cosmetics. What I'm refering to is my earlier design, (which I suspect you missed) not boncellis'. boncellis wished to see a wider, flatter version for use in home entertainment, so I conjured that 2nd one up for visualization. While that form factor has grown on me somewhat, I still like the taller version, as I had done earlier, and you've shown here, as well.

Here's my initial design, from earlier in this thread.
http://img92.imageshack.us/img92/9648/macandmacminipx9.jpg
The size of mine is a little smaller (narrower) - I wanted the whole thing less than 8" wide, though it could go back a little deeper, i.e. not necessarily square.

Also, see possible/hoped for product specs earlier in the thread.

Personally, I think I still prefer the smoother Mini-like skin than the perforated look of the Pro, but I'm just quibbling.

Thanks for the imagery.

-Dan

Thank you. I had fun doing it. Although I realized later that my MP is missing the Apple Logo on the side. Oh well.

I did see your earlier design, actually. I had though that it was meant to be the same footprint as the Mac Mini. Seeing it again, I can see that I was mistaken. By comparison, my design is 10"W x 11"D x 4"H. I think to bring it down to the MP 8.1"W, it would have to be made taller, to be reasonable.

Also, in the vein of quibbling, I think that the perforated look of the MP allows for much better cooling, and therefore hotter components, such as extra boards, faster processors, higher-end GPU, etc. That's the reason I went with it... :)

Maybe now I should draw a scene with the Mac++, a keyboard, a mouse, and an ACD. What do you think?

... those who understand binary and those who do not.

Just sell Merom as "64 bit", that's twice as much as "32 bit".

64 bits is not twice as big as 32 bits.... it's 2^32 (roughly 4.3 billion) times as big. Just like 1000 is not twice as big as 10.

33 bits would be twice as big as 32 bits.

But yes, you're right, the important thing here is not that merom is 20% faster (or 20% more power efficient), it's that it's 64 bit.

Leopard will be 64 bit, and you can bet that once leopard is the shipping OS, there will be 64 bit only software that you will want to run. That's why it's worth having a Core 2 Duo system.

Cheers

2) okay, they can pretend to get marriedNo, you are absolutely wrong., They can get married like any other couple where the laws allow. Marriage is not a special preserve of any religion. You cannot just commandeer it.

No, I'm not kidding. To the Catholic Church sex outside of a valid sacramental marriage is fornicationWho cares what Catholic dogma claims? It's an irrelevance.

Last time I checked when the vast majority of people did such behavior it was with the opposite gender not the same.So what is the problem? Are you against variation?

Do you have proof that Plato was a repressed homosexual?No, not proof
"Homosexuality," Plato wrote, "is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce." This attitude of Plato's was characteristic of the ancient world, and I want to begin my discussion of the attitudes of the Church and of Western Christianity toward homosexuality by commenting on comparable attitudes among the ancients.

To a very large extent, Western attitudes toward law, religion, literature and government are dependent upon Roman attitudes. This makes it particularly striking that our attitudes toward homosexuality in particular and sexual tolerance in general are so remarkably different from those of the Romans. It is very difficult to convey to modern audiences the indifference of the Romans to questions of gender and gender orientation. The difficulty is due both to the fact that the evidence has been largely consciously obliterated by historians prior to very recent decades, and to the diffusion of the relevant material.

Romans did not consider sexuality or sexual preference a matter of much interest, nor did they treat either in an analytical way. An historian has to gather together thousands of little bits and pieces to demonstrate the general acceptance of homosexuality among the Romans.

One of the few imperial writers who does appear to make some sort of comment on the subject in a general way wrote, "Zeus came as an eagle to god like Ganymede and as a swan to the fair haired mother of Helen. One person prefers one gender, another the other, I like both." Plutarch wrote at about the same time, "No sensible person can imagine that the sexes differ in matters of love as they do in matters of clothing. The intelligent lover of beauty will be attracted to beauty in whichever gender he finds it." Roman law and social strictures made absolutely no restrictions on the basis of gender. It has sometimes been claimed that there were laws against homosexual relations in Rome, but it is easy to prove that this was not the case. On the other hand, it is a mistake to imagine that anarchic hedonism ruled at Rome. In fact, Romans did have a complex set of moral strictures designed to protect children from abuse or any citizen from force or duress in sexual relations. Romans were, like other people, sensitive to issues of love and caring, but individual sexual (i.e. gender) choice was completely unlimited. Male prostitution (directed toward other males), for instance, was so common that the taxes on it constituted a major source of revenue for the imperial treasury. It was so profitable that even in later periods when a certain intolerance crept in, the emperors could not bring themselves to end the practice and its attendant revenue.

Gay marriages were also legal and frequent in Rome for both males and females. Even emperors often married other males. There was total acceptance on the part of the populace, as far as it can be determined, of this sort of homosexual attitude and behavior. This total acceptance was not limited to the ruling elite; there is also much popular Roman literature containing gay love stories. The real point I want to make is that there is absolutely no conscious effort on anyone's part in the Roman world, the world in which Christianity was born, to claim that homosexuality was abnormal or undesirable. There is in fact no word for "homosexual" in Latin. "Homosexual" sounds like Latin, but was coined by a German psychologist in the late 1 9th century. No one in the early Roman world seemed to feel that the fact that someone preferred his or her own gender was any more significant than the fact that someone preferred blue eyes or short people. Neither gay nor straight people seemed to associate certain characteristics with sexual preference. Gay men were not thought to be less masculine than straight men and lesbian women were not thought of as less feminine than straight women. Gay people were not thought to be any better or worse than straight people-an attitude which differed both from that of the society that preceded it, since many Greeks thought gay people were inherently better than straight people, and from that of the society which followed it, in which gay people were often thought to be inferior to others.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/1979boswell.html

The most celebrated account of homosexual love comes in Plato's Symposium, in which homosexual love is discussed as a more ideal, more perfect kind of relationship than the more prosaic heterosexual variety. This is a highly biased account, because Plato himself was homosexual and wrote very beautiful epigrams to boys expressing his devotion. Platonic homosexuality had very little to do with sex; Plato believed ideally that love and reason should be fused together, while concern over the body and the material world of particulars should be annihilated. Even today, "Platonic love" refers to non-sexual love between two adults.

Behind Plato's contempt for heterosexual desire lay an aesthetic, highly intellectual aversion to the female body. Plato would have agreed with Schopenhauer's opinion that "only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex".
http://www.newstatesman.com/199908230009

Only if you have an active subscription on all of them. That's the number the graph behind the link shows.
That may be, but I highly doubt every infant, elderly folks, and the poverty stricken all have cell phones. If that's the case, then I'd have to say that there are a lot of people who's financial priorities are kinda messed.

The Radio Shack in my city just received their pre-order shipment. They got 2. They had a total of 6 pre-orders.

Because Apple customers care about Apple and they want the best and reasonable services from it. Unfortunately, this is not the current case.

I am sure most people agree that Apple's current way of handling the battery replacements leaves lots of rooms for improvements, particularly in non-US areas.

We also shouldn't feel good just because Dell also does not handle it too well. After all, Dell has more batteries to replace and has a shorter period of time for preparations. Supposingly, Dell provides bargain PCs, while Apple tends to charge a premium for their products. Can't Apple customers deserve better services? Shouldn't Apple be better? Should we all lower our expectations from Apple and ask for a cheaper price instead?

You might want to determine whether the way Apple treats its non-US customers is due in part to Apple's negligence or hurdles for doing business in these non-US nations.