eswangren

You're right in terms of the Air; it's a great deal for how well it's built. Almost every single other computer they offer is demonstrably overpriced based on specs.

For anyone who's interested I will be purchasing $1500 worth of hardware from newegg, assembling PC's, and selling them for only a 100% markup. And oh yeah, they'll be more powerful than this load of crap they want to sell you.

Yeah, I was just about to post the same thing. What a ridiculous rip-off. A 5770 card? Really, for that price I get a 5770? I just built a new PC for $1500 that blows it out of the water in every aspect but the CPU (I went with an i5 2500k quad-core @3.2Ghz, OC'd to 4.3). I like some things about Apple, I'm typing this on my iPhone, but I would never buy another PC from them unless I needed an ultra-portable laptop. They're just not worth the price tag.

And you could have been doing that all along simply by changing your theme.

Not to mention the fact that Scientology (the study of science?) is chock full of ridiculOus BS. Hell, at least some of the mainstream religions have a bit of history to back them up (i.e., Jesus did actually exist, whether or not you believe him to be the son of God).

Well, to be pedantic, there's no such thing as a "diablo 3" password, only a battle.net password. A WoW account is more lucrative.

Did we really need a study to tell us that women spend an inordinate amount of time sending text messages and stalking profiles on Facebook?

So let me get this straight. You have been playing Diablo III and will likely continue to play it through the end of the year. This is a game Blizzard should be "ashamed" of? A game that you will play for months on end? How many other games out there provide that amount of playtime? If it is so bad why are you playing it at all? You're ridiculous.

Says the guy who probably has 60+ hours in the game and "will continue to play it". How much do you think your $60 is worth exactly?

Yes, if only we could pay the bills with naive idealism.

If you're designing the UI first, you're not "hacking" anything.

It's TechCrunch, what did you expect? They're not exactly the pinnacle of journalism...

Ok, fine, it's hypocritical. There are worse things in the world than hypocrisy. I smoke cigarettes, yet I would advise others not to. I may be a hypocrit, but I'm not wrong. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Well, like most people on HN, I'm an engineer, and I just don't care. I want functionality and stability. You could have the ugliest icon ever and I just don't give a damn because it is irrelevant.

Just my $.02, and I realize this is anecdotal, but I don't give two craps what your icon looks like. If your app is good, I'll use it.

Well, no, but I see how what I said may cOme off that way. I gathered that you were a UI guy from statements you made. It seemed to me that you were trivializing programming as a whole by saying things like "do you think anything we do is that difficult?". Well yes, some things we do are terribly difficult and require far more knowledge than what may be gained by reading "teach yourself HTML + JavaScript" for a year.

I have no example of a skill that took "a lifetime to master" as I am only 28 years old and would not call myself a "master" of anything at this point. However, I can describe the last two projects I worked on.

One was implenting an image quality algorithm for a medical imaging system. I did not do this on my own, but I will wager that it was far more complex and involved than any UI code you last wrote. I had to understand the science behind the algorithm, implement it, and then make it fast (it is run on huge images).

My next project was optimizing a heap memory manager for the device which captures these images. Not PhD level physics here, but not trivial and not something I would expect a UX guy to do.

So yeah, I take a bit of offense when you lump all programmers into the same bucket. Not all programming is engineering IMO, and to compare writing a UI to writing a thread scheduler, a memory manager, a new programming language, etc. is just ridiculous.

I'm not saying that UI work is dumb simple. It is incredibly hard to get right, but that kind of complexity is not technical. It takes a certain kind of aptitude and knowledge to do work that is closer to the metal and closer to concepts taught in CS. Creating a UI is not CS, it is wiring up bits of code that other people wrote in a such a way to be useful to a non-programmer.

So yes, a UX guy could probably be writing his or her own UI's in about 6 months to a year. I would not hire this person into the group I work on because they will be overwhelmed by technical complexity that they simply won't be able to handle.

You're right, but let's not trivialize the difficulty of programming in general. Want to build a UI in .NET, HTML + JavaScript, or <insert UI framework here>? Sure, that sort of programming is relatively easy and not usually technically challenging. However, that is hardly all that we do.

I don't touch UI's in my day job. You make it sound as if all programmers code UI's and perform other relatively mundane tasks. That may be what you're used to, and yes, it is relatively easy work, but there are a bunch of people like me out there who design infrastructure at a low level so that you can more easily build software at a high level.

Ummm... No, no thanks. We're not all UI designers. We just hired a UX guys because I, as a systems engineer, am more valuable creating hardware interfaces than user interfaces. You still need guys like me making things work behind the scenes and that's where my time is best spent.

You can probably guess; Ubuntu. I wanted to check out Unity. I ended up going with Mont though. Windows 7 doesn't come bloated as far as I can tell, but I built the PC myself and installed an OEM version, so no third party bloat ware. I realize this is atypical.

Oh, that's weird; an OS that is built primarily for normal PC users doesn't run well on dated hardware? Who would have thought? Windows 7 is less bloated than the version of Linux I just installed (and removed) On my new desktop.