Hard News: Mac Ouch
154 Responses
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Re: Bruce Sterling @ Webstock, it's amusing to think of an American out-ironying Kiwis. Part of the problem in the room was that Bruce's delivery was so deadpan, his laconic Texan drawl so steady, that you couldn't tell whether he really meant it or not. Was he ripping Web 2.0 a gaping new orifice, or was he having fun playing with words? I think the discomfort in the room came from the fact that it was very difficult to know whether one was watching a witch-burning or a comedy roast.
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<quote>Can we ban the currency speculators already? I'm actually quite serious about this.<quote>
Would seem unreasonable, but we should never forget that it was the much lauded Labour Party who set that beast adrift.
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Re: MagnumMac ... I've recently found a guy who imports refurbed Macs from Australia and sells them here direct and via TradeMe. We've bought several from him and are very happy. He's a trained Mac technician, and does repair work too (fixed J's cup-of-watered machine for 1/3 the cost of Renaissance's quote). I'm avoiding NZ's official outlets for Apple hardware now, it's just insane how much more expensive they are than they have to be.
(email me if you want the guy's contact info. I don't get kickbacks, but it would still feel like I crossed the boundary between information and advertising if I posted his details here)
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That white-shell one looks like the best deal these days - same CPU, GPU, RAM amount (although different type) etc as the unibodies but at a more realistic price.
And my cheapo Dell infuriates me in a way my old iBook never did... -
does repair work too (fixed J's cup-of-watered machine for 1/3 the cost of Renaissance's quote).
Oh ouch. I wish I'd known that when our G4 MacBook blew it's mobo a couple of years ago. Magnum wanted $1800 to fix a machine that only cost us $1300 so we became a Mac-free household for the first time in years, and haven't yet gone back.
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Edit above to read: "G4 iBook".
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The new Stuff layout is OK, although I'm intrigued that they've gone for a tall skinny layout when all the computers I seem to encounter have short wide screens. I'd like to be able to drag some content boxes into the empty white voids!
Also: The grey H2 headings in the boxes on the RHS have no left hand whitespace in all pages but the front one (Firefox 3.0.6, Vista).
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George, how do you suggest we set the rate for the NZ currency? By government fiat, with the rate determined by whether farmers or Mac buyers currently have the ear of government?
That was tried by most developed states for quite a few years. It had numerous problems - the main one being that the official rate became out of line with what the currency was really worth, creating numerous difficulties. Also, the required exchange controls became ridiculous - to the extent that Brits in the 1970s were limited to taking no more than GBP100 on holiday with them, for instance.
Not to mention black markets, etc..
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I hope Mr Sterling had moved past irony when he said this;
I've never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I'm bored with the deceit. I'm tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I'm disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I'm up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.
The cure for panic is action. Coherent action is great; for a scatterbrained web society, that may be a bit much to ask. Well, any action is better than whining. We can do better.
I find it very moving, even in drawly US tone which sounds like Deputy Dawg in my head.
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Re: Stuff customisation
The customisations allowed are very limited. My main bugbears :
- there is no way to get rid of that stupid slide show thingy on the top right.
- there is no screen size setting, so a quarter of the page is off the screen to the right
- there is no way to cancel images and just get a compact listing of headlines (too much stuff to have to scroll down past)
- the customised news feed is pretty useless because it is so difficult to limit it to what you want, without excluding what you do want. For example, if you want to keep up with Rallying, then "Rally" will get you stories whenever there's a protest rally, or the sharemarket rallies. Adding terms to include car and driver, just leads to missing stories that don't happen to mention these terms. Ideally, you should be able to specify the section that the term refers to (eg Rally [Sports] for rallying, Rally [Business] for sharemarket rallies, and Rally [National] for protests.
- the customised news feed does not seem to have an age filter, showing stories that are months old. I'd have thought a 1 week cut off would be about right, but why not let people pick the number of days that they are interested in.Points for effort, but the site is less useable for me now than it used to be, because it requires much more scrolling to scan the headlines.
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George, how do you suggest we set the rate for the NZ currency? By government fiat, with the rate determined by whether farmers or Mac buyers currently have the ear of government?
I'm suggesting no such thing. It was before my time, but I have a strong impression of the postwar and Muldoon era, and how that caused a great deal of frustration and hardship.
I do think however that the Government could impose limits on very large transactions. A large company converting (say) over $1million would simply have to register the transaction with the Government, and this could be done in a non-intrusive way. Those who do this commercially for companies would have no problems, but those who simply gamble money (as they do quite openly and obviously now) would find themselves shut out. No system is perfect, and there might be some issues to be resolved in my proposal, but I stand by my statement that the current system harms the NZ economy, perhaps significantly.
Given that NZ is run by a currency trader at the moment, I don't think that we're likely to see this given any serious consideration before 2011, but opposition parties should consider it.
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I should say that I was stung by the .49 dollar this morning to the tune of a few hundred dollars, so I'm more than a little personally interested in the matter.
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It's not just the Macs that have got ouchy, either; the other half and I were looking at new laptops, only to discover that getting something functionally equivalent to his 1.73 Ghz dual-core/2 GB RAM Asus, bought last July, would cost probably more than he'd paid for it. Last July. And that's not even looking at *upgrading*. (Well, you can get extra HD space for the same price, but that's so cheap now it's barely a consideration.) There does seem to be a gap opening up in the market between the big, heavy-duty laptops - the 15" + type - and the netbooks, leaving the mid-range laptops difficult to find for a good price, but the exchange rate bears a lot of the blame.
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I'm more miffed about the rising relative price of Amazon's dead-tree books, rather than the Apple digital variety (let alone Kindle...)
Should have taken the chance and placed my orders a year ago!
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Waiting for a US crew to get around to finally charging my card for an order - long since delivered - while watching our dollar edge ever lower, was painful. Thankfully was only a few hundred dollars, so not too painful, but still.
Like with oil, where the speculators seem to be responsible for far more price fluctuation than any "real" conditions are, I feel like the system just isn't working quite right.
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Those who do this commercially for companies would have no problems, but those who simply gamble money (as they do quite openly and obviously now) would find themselves shut out.
I figure you'll agree with that to the extent you disagree with market efficiency theory. The dollar moves around whether you are allowed to trade it or not. But the less trading, the less clear it is what the current perceived value is. Does that lend itself to more or less wild swings? It seems to me that it would mean less swings, but they could potentially be a lot wilder.
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drawly US tone which sounds like Deputy Dawg
Popular culture certainly has a lot to answer for in the "southerner = ridiculous/stupid" area.
Sigh. I miss buying cheap things from America. Plus we're planning a mega-Christmas-trip around the USA and even a Holiday Inn (!) in DC for three days is starting to look like a major financial investment. Still, it could be worse. When I moved to the USA in 1998 our dollar was hovering around 40 US cents... ack.
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Stuff redesign: I don't think it's too bad, but the first thing I did after signing up was trying to get rid of the opinion poll, and it turns out you can't. That's just wrong. I'd also like to have the option to get rid of the most viewed and editor's picks sections, but apparently they just have to stay.
Speaking of which, I notice that the "Girl, 13, sends 300 hundred pictures" article has disappeared from most viewed after eight months or so. I bet you that was secretly the whole point of the redesign.
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Jon Stewart on CPAC. Simultaneously funny and incredibly depressing.
Also, Kindle be damned, Faber's giving books away.
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Gareth: One important difference between the old plastic MacBook and the new aluminium one is that the plastic one is, well, plastic. It means that, after a few years, the plastic on the areas where you put pressure start to chip -- the heel of my right palm has chipped off a two inch strip of plastic along the edge of my once beautiful macbook, and the light grey plastic that faces the screen is beginning to lift up in that corner. It's a sad sight, and one that you'll avoid with an aluminium laptop (although there may be other problems with those down the line). When it happened I'd had it for about two and a half years, and it gets a lot of use.
It probably won't be a major concern, especially if you're buying in New Zealand dollars and there's a big price difference, but its something you should be aware of. Of course, I have an inbuilt wear and tear multiplier and destroy pretty much everything that comes into my possession (I smashed an iPod into pieces today), so it might not apply to you, but I've seen enough other white macbooks with sellotape over the bottom righthand corner to know that it's not just me.
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(I smashed an iPod into pieces today)
Pics or it didn't happen.
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Stuff redesign:
I'm using Firefox 3 on WinXP Sp3. I tried to move the Stuff "Top Stories" RSS feed to my Live Bookmark toolbar (so I can just drop down a list of headlines and go to the ones I want)
Now Firefox just always tells me that the "Live Bookmark feed failed to load"
The PublicAddress RSS feed and the NZherald RSS headlines feed work perfectly well so I don't think it is me...
Any ideas?
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well I'm in the US now, seems I can get the same amount for a $ as I got yesterday .... oh wait ....
seriously though there are swings and roundabouts here - those of us who earn the US$ that you've been spending have been hurting - my consulting income went down ~30% over the past few years - now it's come back (and a little bit more, don't know how long that will last)
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Pics or it didn't happen.
I'd post pics but I also smashed the LCD screen of my camera.
True story.
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