Translated to MB diesel speak:

My 603 may be outdated by today's standards, but I can tweak the performance of my car by up to 25% (full load screw tweaked) with a slightly better turbo and a beefier cooling system with an intercooler and the EGT's only hit 1200°F at WOT

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Dale

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g1...MG_2277sig.jpg

1990 300D 2.5 Turbo -155k
2000 E430 - 103k
2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee Ecodiesel 4x4 - 11k
2014 VW Passat TDI SE - 7k Bro's Diesel
2006 E320 CDI - 128k Pop's Benz

Pre-glow - A moment of silence in honor of Rudolph Diesel

I'd rather I keep upgrading my computer than having to buy a new mac every couple years. That's a pretty big part of owning a nonmac.


I worked at CompUSA for a while in the tech shop. Some macs were okay to work on but in general they were horribly engineered. The laptops can be pretty bad too, adding memory should not take 20 minutes. It should take 1 minute.

That said, I loved the feel of the iBooks whenever I worked with one. Very solidly built compared to all the Toshibas and HPs and Compaq laptops. It really is comparable to sitting inside of a Mercedes and sitting inside of a cheesy 70's American sedan. The materials used and how the laptop feels is a huge indication of quality IMO. I dont know what material they use in the ibooks is but it is a beautiful thing compared to the creaky plastic crap on its competitors. I dont have a laptop but if I were to get one I'd consider an Ibook. You generally dont game on laptops anyway. Also there were definitely a lot more computers in there with windows software problems than macs with software problems. 99% of the time if there was a mac in the shop it was a hardware issue.

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1985 CA 300D Turbo , 213K mi

Like with PC's there are Macs with guts you can play with and there are Macs built like a turtle. Hooking-up externals is still easier with a Mac, though Winders XP offers a tremendous advance in that direction.

Paul's 3rd reason why folks don't switch to the Mac I think is the biggest: Platform-specific software wedded to Winders. I use 2 programs that are not on the Mac or would be sooo expensive to switch to the Mac that I'd rather not: ESRI's ArcMap and Leica's Imagine.

I think there's another reason that major corporations and the Gov is wedded to PC's--control. I remember in the beginning of the personal computer craze that one of the selling points for a massive 56K CP/M computer with an 8-inch floppy was that you could work off-line. You no longer had to contend with batch-processing and a dumb terminal. IT HATED it because they lost control of standardization and they had to hire a cadre of teenagers (practically) for PC upkeep--the IT professionals trained on keypunch, Hollerith cards, FORTRAN or COBOL. Real mens' computer science.

Slowly, slowly we have eased back into the dumb terminal mindset. Where I work the machine MUST be on the network to boot-up. Almost all programs are either authenticated or run from a server in another part of the United States. Everything that goes on the LAN is automagically backed-up as part of the permanent record. Local drives are only for scratch disk usage EXCEPT in my office because we deal with such large data files the IT guys simply cannot afford to copy every bleeding intermediary product so they grudgingly allow us to keep our expanding system of local drives.

The exception to this centralization and control is the Macintosh. http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/adclass/1984_mac_ad.html

When I got my first PC in 1983, I needed to run engineering software and the IBM standard at the time was the only box that could handle it. Yes, Apple came along with a decent machine and a lot of publishers, artists, etc found it to be better suited to their work, but I still had to use the machine that would interface with my engineering clients. I've never found a reason to change to the Mac. I don't have problems with the Windows environment that some seem to have.

I think it is great to have several good platforms to choose from and the PC vs Mac thing is good for all of us.

Nobody make the perfect unit. There is a bit of compromise in all of them.

just my $.02,
Wes

Since the debate is on, I'm surprised that no one mentioned Linux. If you want something stable, not to mention free, check out Ubuntu Linux. You can run it on a windows box and some Mac's and it's very user friendly. As far as Office apps, take a look at Openoffice. I'm Microsoft Certified and they send me licenses for all their products. I chose to use Openoffice instead of Microsoft office. There are versions for Linux, Mac's and Windows. At the house I have a Mac laptop and desktop, a couple of Linux boxes and four Windows laptops. I hate Windows but have to use it in my job. I'm Director of IT for a govt agency and get to play with all the new toys. I'm also responsible for a world-wide network running Unix boxes. Some of those haven't been rebooted in several years. Macs run on a flavor of open source unix by the way.

One thing I forgot to mention is that now this reason doesn't apply anymore.

With the intel based macs and program called Boot Camp, your mac turns into a windows machine and can run anything:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

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Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

Now why doesn't Babel Fish have that option?

The CPU in the Intel Macs are replaceable. They can use any off-the-shelf Core Solo/Duo or Core2 Duo/Quad.

Hattie, have you ever owned a TR-6? Or even driven one?

Just curious.

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Anders

1995 E300
2015 VW TDI Sportwagen 15K
1977 240D (197K)
2002 Subaru Legacy L Wagon (115k) (Wife's)
Gone but not forgotten:
2005 Buick LeSabre
1998 C230
1984 300D
1983 240D
1981 300SD
1974 240D
1974 Fiat 124 Spider
1968 Triumph TR250

You don't have to screw Jenna Jameson to know that she is a great lay.

find me a mac laptop for under 700 bucks that can run all of today's software, burn cd's and play dvds and then i'll switch. Till then, i'm perfectly happy restarting my gateway laptop once ever 2 weeks.
Ryan

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83 300SD.......sold
96 integra SE....sold
99 a4 quattro....sold
2001 IS300.......sold
2002 330i.........current.
2004 highlander limited....current.

Do too.

B

After 650 porn videos, it's probably like throwing a baseball bat into a cave.

Free to a good home:

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman

I had no clue what he was talking about until you posted that! Translate this computer stuff into MB and I can follow along!

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2006 CL500
2009 C300 4matic
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200