Joseph Gwinn wrote:

We seem to have achieved the perfect cyclic debate.

Mostly.

I will let you have
the last word after this.

Alrighty.


How can you be so sure that the allegation was true?

I watched their video of their tests and it was pretty obvious. One of
the CR spokespeople also made a passing semi admission that their test
was pretty extreme if I recall.

How did you know which video to believe?

It was the CR video that I saw that convinced me their "test" was far
outside real world parameters.

They may or may not have lied, however their sample, while relatively
large only represents the responses of their readers which is not a
valid sampling of the computer user population as a whole. Not seeing
the report I also don't know if it made any attempt to validate actual
hardware problems vs. user error.

So, go see the report. It would take quite the conspiracy for all those
people to have told the same lie.

Different groups of people can and do have different experiences than
those of a truly random sampling of the population. It's not a lie, it's
simply a function of a non-random sample and a sample consisting only of
CR subscribers who took the time to respond is not a random sample.

With that size of a statistical sample, the biases and lies will cancel
out, unless there is a massive conspiricy, and yet 80,000 people managed
to keep the secret perfectly. Seems a bit remote.

NeXT the company took the BSD core (which is open source) and added the
stuff (GUI, OO development system, etc) needed to make an operating
system for general use. The unexpected thing was that a major market
for NeXT was the Financial world, where people used NeXT machines to
develop and run complex financial models.

Dunno, I've been at a large bank the last 7+ years and I've not seen a
trace of anything NeXT, or anything Apple for that matter. Our server
counts are in the tens of thousands BTW.

Finance is not the same thing as banking. Think Wall Street and rocket
scientists.

A large bank includes those areas, retail, commercial, investment, high
value, trading, etc.

Yes, but the market was Wall Street rocket scientists, the sort of
people who will never work for a bank, with the possible exception of
Citibank.

I'm not sure of the latest rankings, but were are definitely in the top
10, probably top 5.

What is this "tech world"? Macs lasted where I worked well past the
nubus days. IT only managed to drive them out when Apple went throught
the bad patch, just before Jobs returned, bringing NeXT. IT was gunning
for a single platform for years, so Apple's problems were the excuse,
not the reason.

The "tech world" is those running technical applications, as opposed to
the "tech support world" supporting desktop machines.

In the 1980s I was on a radar project that was considering VAXs as the
main computer. But we got nowhere because the only SCSI controller
available for this computer was for the PDP-11 bus, with two adapters,
one to get to the BI bus, the other to get from BI to the system bus
(whose name I forget). The max theoretical bandwidth of this SCSI
controller was 100 kilobytes/sec (on the PDP-11 bus). My home machine
of the day, a Mac SE, did 600 kilobytes/sec. We planned to interface
the radar hardware by making it look like a big SCSI tape drive. I
looked at this Rube Goldberg setup, and decided that I would never
manage to get it to work. We never did figure out how to hook the VAX
to the radar, and gave up, instead using Harris computers. With a SCSI
interface to the radar.

Which model VAX? Perhaps SCSI was the wrong thing to look at as there
were parallel I/O cards available for Q-bus at least, DMA I think too.
They were used in a check processing system by Banktec and I'm sure
plenty of other applications.

Only with a random sample. Sample size alone does not guarantee an
unbiased result. Ask 80,000 people of religion X if they believe in god
X and you'll get a 100% positive response. Ask 80,000 people sampled at
random from the worlds population if they believe in god X and you'll
get perhaps a 20% positive response.

Somehow, I don't think this analysis is relevant to the subscribers of
Consumer Reports.

I think it is. I think the type of person who has faith in CR represents
one specific segment of the population. It certainly excludes the many
like myself who saw the bias in their reports prior and then discounted
them entirely after the rollover fiasco.



I just saw the CNN.com piece on the new Intel Macs. One thing semi Apple
related that I find troubling is the massive volume of money being
poured into essentially useless (certainly not practical) toys like MP3
players and cell phone ring tones. It points to the sad state of
personal financial managment / responsibility in this country that
people can pour that much money into useless junk and at the same time
not manage to pay their bills.

Pete C.