Dogger Blue's Profile

"Dogger Blue, there’s bad and then there’s bad." Well I've had several mice whose scroll wheels lasted no more than six months before requiring a cleaning -- which is always a difficult and annoying process. I haven't heard any claims for the Mighty Mouse that are significantly quicker to clog than this. When one of your other scroll wheel mice happens to clog quickly (dust is rather random you know), do you blame the brand manufacturer and start writing articles against them, or do you just think, "Hmm. That was quick. I'd better clean it pretty thoroughly or it'll happen pretty quickly again." I stand by my comments that the problem is with the whole concept of a scroll wheel, which is bound to fail in every mouse I've ever used, sooner or later. Many times, sooner. I haven't noticed any particular being especially vulnerable. I don't find "there's bad and then there's bad" to be a great counterpoint. It simply makes it clear that although all scroll wheels fail, you've decided to take this particular failure personally.

Okay, Reality Check time. Every scroll wheel on every mouse I have ever used for any length of time eventually gets 'clogged' -- and by clogged I mean it stops working -- half of them I have discovered upon disassembly stopped working because a hair from my caveman-like fingers got traps in the working, not exactly a "clog" but since I regularly shed little hairs from my hands and there are millions of other people out there like me, this is a design flaw in all scroll wheels. Once I identified hair and dust as the main problem rather than grime, I started solving the problem with my scroll wheel mice (none of them is Mighty Mouse) by just lifting it to my mouth blowing a strong jet of air into it. Moving around the dust and/or hairs is not as good as clearing them, but it usually works for a few weeks to a month. The Mighty Mouse looks a little bit harder to blow of jet of air into, but make no mistake here: the main problem is that the scroll wheel itself is a flawed idea that must eventually die and be replaced by something else. I hate scroll wheels. I hate the fact that I get used to them and they ALWAYS eventually screw me over. It's like an addiction. The Mighty Mouse is probably even worse because it feels so nice to use it that losing it is going be a bitch (and AGAIN -- INEVITABLE). What happens to the whole idea of a mouse with almost NO MOVING PARTS! The industry gave us that with laser tracking and then inexplicably took it back forcing us to replace ball roller maintenance with scroll wheel maintenance. HELLO! I don't want to have to do any maintenance on my mouse!!!! This is not an Apple-specific issue (though maybe the MM craps out a little faster, I don't know, my mice crap out pretty fast though). The whole mouse industry is brain-dead on this! Give me touch-senstivie scrolling or give me death!

"Knowing that I already have a Users folder and the multiple Library folder(s), it seemed reasonable to delete it." Obviously using a definition of "reason" that has been heretofore unknown to me.

Actually, the iDont.com site DOES try to give reasons for why the iPod is bad. They think to sites that criticise the iPod especially on its cumbersome and expensive battery replacement system. (Of course, you can get third party batteries for the iPod, but they don't mention that. And yes it is a difficult procedure but replacing the battery on the Sansa player is not exactly a piece of cake, you have to undo a bunch of tiny screws. It's still easier than the iPod though because there is an expectation that the user will do the replacing.) They also make brief reference to "restrictive formats", which is of course laughable, because the iPod plays at least as many open formats as the Sansa, and although the only DRM paid for tracks available on the iPod lock you into iTunes, the only DRM paid for tracks available on the Sansa lock you into Windows Media Player, so this is a complete wash. So yes the advertising is misleading and contains misleading claims. But you can't say they didn't TRY to criticise the iPod itself. And crying foul over their mocking of iPod users is just hypocritical, because Apple does that in spades. It's all fair game. What's good for the goose, etc... DB.

Little math lesson for you. If the platform with 95% market share has 114,000 viruses, how many virus would you expect there to be on a platform with 5% market share? Purely by the numbers, that is. The answer is: 114000 / 95 * 5 = 6000 (not 1200)

Adobe would be totally shooting itself in the foot to give Mac users the finger and tell them to buy a copy of Windows. That is fairytale-land, never gonna happen. That's just them opening up the door wide open to a competitor in a professional market that they currently dominate. DB.

Okay, it was a cheap shot. But it really is annoying the way nobody ever spells Apple's products correctly. You should know better by now than to trust any variation not found on apple.com or on the product itself.. And actually, Chris, you are the talent around here. At least you can string a halfway decent sentence together. It's more pleasing to read someone who writes above a fifth grade level, which is more than I can say for some of your colleagues. Call me 'elitist' I suppose. Not sure where 'angry' or 'zealot' came from. From the shotgun approach I suppose, which some people use in place of actual intelligence.

You didn't really address the upgradeability factor at all. All of your arguments apply at any time in the last 15-20 years of computer history. It has always been possibly to get equivalent speed from external devices as from internal ... high-speed SCSI card, anyone? Etc., etc... The reason people like an easily upgradeable box has nothing to do with that, and never did, so your narrow counterargument is completely irrelevant. Simply put, people who like to expand internally like to do so because (a) for obvious reasons they want to keep the physical collection of satellite devices to a minimum, (b) it's simply useless and wasteful to keep powering internal devices which have been superseded and will no longer be used, and (c) it's cheaper, usually by more than half (duh!). Yes, there are some advantages to getting an external device but absolutely nothing has changed about this trade-off today vs. ten years ago. On any computer equipped with the high-speed interfaces of the day (i.e. FireWire or SCSI), speed of interface has *never* a particularly significant reason for going with an internal device. (In fact, with some flavours of SCSI that were popular in towers, the truth has been quite the opposite.) Therefore, there will always be a big box (big enough for additionnal bays) and your theory is plainly bunk.