Not so crabbit now!

Why else would someone pay for a computer as ridiculously overpriced as Macs are?

I prefer Mac

because you can't get viruses (or at least then) and they look freaking awesome, they're much easier to use and much faster. PC is messy and all these background programs, i hate it. (i promise, i know what i am talking about, it's just late..)

lol. Macs can get viruses.

I'm not here to defend Windows though, and definitely not the shitty pre-installed software that often comes with it.

yeah, macs can but when i was little, they almost never did, because you had to literally wirte a password and download that shit yourself.

also mac works in a different way so viruses are erm... different.

Norc wrote:also mac works in a different way so viruses are erm... different.

Yeah, viruses have to be designed specifically for Windows or Macs (or any other OS), so the main reason Macs don't get viruses as often is because there are fewer of them so it's not as productive a use of virus-makers time to design shit to infect Macs. There are still Mac viruses out there, though.

yeah, i haven't said there weren't any also, it's easier to remove and detect viruses on mac, they're not "Hiding" in layers upon layers

A little town southeast of here.The things we do for entertainment!


LA CENTER, Wash. – A lawn chair balloonist who set out to break a world record for distance traveled landed in a South Washington forest Saturday afternoon just a few hours after he lifted off in his homemade flying contraption.

Joe Barbera celebrated his 60th birthday by taking off early Saturday morning outside his home in La Center. He landed in a tree 24 miles away. He was not hurt, but his chair was stuck about 80 feet off the ground in the middle of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

Barbera was able to reach his family by radio. Skamania County search and rescue teams got him safely down from the tree just before 5 p.m., about six hours after his landing.

KATU spoke with Barbera when he returned to his home on Saturday afternoon.

"Gravity happened," Barbera said. "Not too surprising. What didn't happen was wind. We kind of knew there was no wind today, but I wanted to do it because of my birthday flight anyway. We kind of gave up on the distance record because I wanted to do it today."

“It didn’t go quite as planned,” said Riley Barbera, Joe’s son. “But he got in the air. That’s really what we wanted.”

Riley Barbera said Joe’s chair was too heavy from the beginning, so he ditched some supplies to get off the ground. After that, his dad rose as high as 21,000 feet, which was much higher than he planned, so he purposely popped some of his balloons.
“He might not have set any world records, but he got to do some lawn chair ballooning,” said Riley Barbera.


Barbera and his friends were busy late Friday night filling up 100 helium balloons that they attached to the 60-year-old's lawn chair. It's been a lifelong dream for the half retired, half unemployed engineer.

“I've been thinking about this forever," Barbera told KATU on Friday. "Little by little, I've been working on the details.”

Barbera and his friends built it in his driveway in only one month. The planned liftoff was 4 a.m. Saturday, but Barbera took off about four hours later than he originally hoped.

His goal was to travel at least 268 miles, which would have been enough to break the world record. Barbera brought GPS trackers, video cameras, oxygen and sand ballast along for the ride. He planned on landing somewhere in Oregon, but landed in the middle of a dense forest.

"I was there for several hours," he said. "I took a nap."


I think it's interesting that 21,000 feet elevation is NOT a record for lawn chair ballooning!

They must only measure longways- not up the way.

I love this though- good on him- completely bonkers mind you but hey.

I love how he just had 'a nap' after crashing in a tree whilst awaiting rescue. Hats off to him.

There was a story like that over 10 years ago.  He drifted into LAX airspace, then over the ocean.  They sent a helicopter to get him, but the downdraft kept pushing him away.

Not sure if any of these are true, actually.  Possibly just viral story hoaxes.  That photo didn't seem to have enough balloons and that wasn't a lawn chair.

Eldorion wrote:Why else would someone pay for a computer as ridiculously overpriced as Macs are?

Easy, you get what you pay for.

When I was in graduate school I was doing all my research calculations on mainframe computers.  Unix.  Then I found out the new version of Mac was based on Unix.  To work on my thesis I bought a mac, transferred everything over, and with a few tweaks here and there i could use it as a mainframe computer, but still had all the benefits of a laptop operating system; one which in most (but not all!) cases is better than windows.

For me, once windows dumbed down and eventually ditched what was an excellent paint program it provided for free, the only real advantage was gone.  Much of it ended up in the windows and powerpoint software, but in the newer versions they even gutted that.

I really wish Apple would come up with something as sweet as that old paint program - the fact that it's largely vanished from the universe with no replacement makes me mad at everyone.

I've also heard that when you do a hardware comparison the Macs are not really overpriced.  Not being a hardware geek I've never bothered to do the comparison myself, but I know a couple PC people who did, and ended up buying macs.

For the generic (not necessarily unknowledgeable) computer user who doesn't have any exceptional hardware or software requirements* though, I don't get why you'd shell out for a Mac.  You can get a pretty good quality PC for a fraction of the cost of a new Macbook and then install Linux on it.  And if you think that Linux is only for the technical whizzes out there, get with the times.  There have been incredibly easy and user-friendly Linux distributions out there for years, many of which are completely free.

I'm not here to defend Windows -- it's annoying and shitty and I currently use it mostly out of laziness -- but there are options other than cheap crap and overpriced quality  That's Apple's strategy though: create a closed ecosystem and then charge out the ass for it.  They've done very well by that strategy, but I'm not interested in buying into it.  Other than my iPod: I will acknowledge that that was pretty brilliant when it was dominant last decade.  For better or worse though, I've been spoiled by smartphones into not carrying multiple electronic devices in my pocket when I leave the house.

*If you're into gaming, then you're obviously going to go with a PC.  If you do a lot of image or sound editing either professionally or as a serious hobby, then in that case a Mac is probably justified.  But both of those groups are minorities of computer users as a whole.

Yeah, the closed ecosystem is a bit annoying, but the trade-off is if you are only slightly computer savvy there's a whole Linux developer community out there that has been happily making modifications to their freeware so it works for Mac.  They are anything BUT a closed ecosystem, in fact inimical to it.

I like having the blend of the very tidy and protected and well working closed ecosystem, and then if I'm feeling adventurous (or cheap - Gimp I'm talking to you) I can open the magic closet door via my terminal window and romp among the linux community.

I do think only dedicated Linux users have a right to be smug.

halfwise wrote:There was a story like that over 10 years ago.  He drifted into LAX airspace, then over the ocean.  They sent a helicopter to get him, but the downdraft kept pushing him away.

Not sure if any of these are true, actually.  Possibly just viral story hoaxes.  That photo didn't seem to have enough balloons and that wasn't a lawn chair.

Not hoaxes. The guy who started the lawn chair gimmick  was Larry Walters who was prosecuted by the FAA back in 82.  You can google him.  Also check out Cluster Ballooning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_ballooning

Here's a better picture of Joe's rig. You'll see that the main lifting balloons are on a higher harness. The ones you were seeing in the first picture I posted were just the smaller ones for adjusting buoyancy.

You know, as an old hangglider guy this might be something for you to look into. You motorless aviation folks need to stick together!

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