Choi Feed

A PC-versus-Mac shootout by Popular Mechanics scores the Mac way ahead in both price and performance. PopMech compared desktops and laptops, and not only did the Macs run rings around their Windows counterparts, they were cheaper to boot. The conclusion:

Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot—and still save $100.

My, how times have changed. A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was the opposite: PCs were cheaper and faster.

Somehow though, I don’t think conventional wisdom will change. Macs will always be regarded as premium computers — thanks to their fab design and quality fit and finish — even if that’s not actually true.

This timelapse video of man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours is difficult to watch. The video accompanies an article in the New Yorker about elevators.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice-it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

The end of White's story is heartbreaking. On the plus side, the article also discusses a favorite social phenomenon of mine, how strangers space themselves in elevators.

If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the "touch zone"; seven square feet as the "no-touch zone"; and ten square feet as the "personal-comfort zone." Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range -- less than eighteen inches between people -- "intimate distance," the point at which you can sense another person's odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, "Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons."

(via waxy)

(link)

Whatever the market will bear. Did you know that Amazon.com charges you different prices for the same goods depending on who you are (and what your browser cookie shows?) This was news to me, but the WaPo and CNN reported it in 2005.
Some call it "price-customization" or "dynamic pricing;" others call it "price discrimination." The rest of us just want to know how to evade it.

Why Superman will always suck.

Really, what lessons do the Superman comics teach? It says that mankind is full of dull, pointless weaklings and evildoers who can only be stopped by a white ubermensch from another planet, who didn't work a day in his life in order to achieve his powers. Yeah, you could say he's a symbol of "hope," but not hope in human nature - hope in an all-powerful alien who saves the world daily so you don't have to get off your butt and act like a moral person. What sort of message is that?

(link)

This strange little item found its way into our inbox with no explanation or back-story.

We laughed.

Do 11-year-olds really have lawyers?

His handwriting is pretty good, too.

Young man, if you really exist, we're impressed for standing up for your consumer rights at so early an age. While the tone is juvenile, we appreciate the sentiment, although you should learn as you get older that while calling customer service people names might make you feel better, it's not nice and it's more than likely to encourage them to not solve your problem.

Dear Dumb Ass (An 11-Year-Old's Note To Geek Squad) [Digg] (Thanks, Matt from MN!)

Portishead in Portishead (your favorite band sucks), but after 10 years, fans are a little excited.

I'm stunned. Talk about honesty. Check out this story where a Borgtard exec tells a conference that the User Account Control in Vista was designed to irritate usrs. Money quote: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious." Congratulations, dudes from Redmond. On this one you've succeeded in a big way.

In some South Korean cities, it's so common to double park that car owners have nice stickers in their windows announcing their mobile phone numbers. I've seen people do this in the U.S. with hand-scribbled notes, but never as a permanent, designed sticker. Link (via Street Use)

I've just finished DMZ: Friendly Fire, the fourth collection for Brian Wood's incredible, next-gen war comic that is busily redefining the genre as something more relevant and important than it ever was before. In the DMZ storyline, America is plunged into civil war, a war between the redneck Free States movement and the authoritarian, Iraq-shocked US military. The two armies meet in New York, turning Manhattan into a giant, rent-asunder demilitarized zone, where only one reporter, the unlikely young Matty Roth, tells the real story of what goes on in the latest, endless war.

The DMZ stories manage to combine the tough, thrilling character of golden age war comics with sharp and complex analysis of the big questions underpinning the modern age of politicized, commercialized warfare.

In Friendly Fire, Matty is charged with covering the military tribunal for the squad who conducted the Day 204 Massacre in which nearly 200 peaceful protesters were gunned down by a hair-trigger force who thought they saw a gun (or did see a gun, or planted a gun). Wood's tight, super-focused storytelling never tells us what exactly happened on Day 204, and manages to make heroes out of the worst villains and villains out of the biggest heroes.

DMZ keeps getting better and better. Between this and books like The Walking Dead, Fables and Y: The Last Man, it feels like we're living in a renaissance of amazing comic book storytelling. Link

See also:
DMZ: graphic novel, a worthy successor to Transmetropolitan
DMZ Public Works: New collection of moving, thrilling graphic novel
Cory and DMZ's Brian Wood interviewed on iFanBoy
DMZ comic t-shirt

Link (via Sean Bonner)

io9's Annalee Newitz points to a post on that science fiction blog today which reveals that Iron Man fights on the side of proprietary software in a new comic book due out this summer.

"He's explicitly anti-Linux," she says. "Totally freakin weird!"

Link.

It will take you literally hours to get through this list of the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time (video often included). (thx, miguel)

(link)

bednarz writes "Cracking a power company network and gaining access that could shut down the grid is simple, a security expert told an RSA audience, and he has done so in less than a day. Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company's desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines at the unnamed power company, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new Chronotebook day planner takes a different approach to laying out your tasks and events—instead of representing your day in a boring sequence of lines or on a grid, it displays time on an axis, like an analog clock. Each page represents either the AM or PM, and you write your plans like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Check out more photos of the notebook after the jump.

The Chronotebook just won an Muji International Design Award, and weblog Cool Hunting reports it'll be on sale in the Muji store in the coming weeks. No word on pricing yet. Thanks, Alan!

Improv Everywhere turned a little league baseball game into a major league event. Jumbotron & all.
Improv Everywhere has been linked on MeFi before.

The airplane on a conveyor belt question was just recently settled and we're confronted with a related question: will a helicopter on a turntable take off? The image is short on details and likely a joke, but let's assume that the turntable will match the speed of the helicopter's rotor (and further that the rotor's speed is measured relative to the helicopter and the turntable's speed is relative to the ground, otherwise it doesn't make much sense). Will the helicopter take off? Does it matter which way the turntable is spinning relative to the rotor? (thx, daniel)

(Comment on this)

Steampunk Maker Jake von Slatt took exception to Merlin Mann's hilarious steampunk monologue and has followed it up with a video-response of his own, noting the upcoming steampunk anthology (which looks frankly awesome -- I have a copy on my desk and I've just skimmed it, but I had to slam it down before I got drawn into it at a time when I've got no spare leisure reading cycles) and Maker Faire. Link

Much love to the thousands of Apple faithful who've flooded my inbox with messages about this "Pwn to Own" contest where the Mac was the first machine to fall, with the Vista box next and the Linux box apparently surviving unscathed. Okay. Fair enough. We got pwned. First of all the contest was totally rigged and unfair for all sorts of reasons which I won't even bother to go into here. The fact is that Macs are by far the safest, most bulletproof machines on the planet, and that's been proven over and over again.

Anyway I urge you to check out this story and see what kind of computers the winning hackers use, and where they're planning to spend their money. Money quote: "I like Macs. I use Macs for everything." And what will he do with his $10,000 prize money? He'll buy more Macs. "I think Apple will get a large chunk of that money."

Nuff said, right?

Got a trampy little kid that isn't quite ready to get inked? No problem. Toys "R" Us has lower-back tattoo stickers for little miss thing.

We like how they're right next to the Hannah Montana and Minnie Mouse stickers.

IN ODDER NEWS: Lower Back Tattoo Stickers FINALLY Available For Kids At Toys 'R Us [Best Week Ever]
Lower Back Tattoos Now Available at Toys R Us [Cockeyed.com]