Driveway planter?

I wrestled with that question a couple of years ago when I ordered my Prius. Living on a Minnesota lake, I use my '95 Ford Explorer (4WD) every spring to launch my pontoon boat and again every fall to trailer the boat to winter storage. Sometime this month I'll be pulling a 16' trailer load of trash to the recycle dump. Last winter I drove it continuously for a week during a period when 4WD was necessary to get up my driveway. It's in excellent condition with leather, good paint, new tires etc and probably worth $4000.00 to $6000.00. Cost another $500.00/year for insurance and plates.

Doing the math, I found it to be considerably cheaper to keep the Explorer and buy a Prius than to purchase a Highlander hybrid and sell the Explorer. Yes, I could beg a neighbor's assistance with the boat but the driveway problem is more difficult to overcome.

I still have my Passat but haven't driven it for at least six months. I am just waiting for my buyer to sell his car.

I really thought I'd drive both cars, but I ended up thinking it was just silly to get 16 mpg when I could get over three times that. There are things I don't like about the Prius, but its mileage overcomes those thoughts. (Ask me again in the summer, when I'm wishing it wasn't a hatchback and that it had a roof vent though!)

Sure. Our 1985 Volvo station wagon is a daily driver. Since I do my own maintenance it takes an average of about a dollar a day in parts to keep it going, with the 239K mile mark coming up. Insurance is low, registration is low, depreciation is nil and it gets 20-24 mpg depending on whether I use it for more than the 3 mile commute. I have used it dozens of times in the last month for hauling large or heavy loads, including a handful of loads of old carpet and padding to the dump. Next week I'll pick up about 800 lbs of paving stones on sale and take several loads of vinyl flooring to the dump. All told, it has racked up about 4K miles in the last year. Low cost, high value... the interior is in terrible shape but I just can't let it go. I love the Prius but need the wagon.

Mike

Sure. I have no intention of getting rid of my 1992 Mazda Miata /or/ my 2006 Avalon, which offers supreme comfort on long trips. Just drove the Avalon on a 3,000 mi. round-trip from MD to TX at steady 75 mph speeds and steady 32 mpg highway -- and that's with seat cooling turned on!

Incidentally, I got my Prius today. You will laugh to see what it replaced. Hint: 13mpg city. . I loved it anyway, but I don't have room for four cars.

Davoud

davidillig.com is a non-commercial, family-safe web site.

Page won't load but I did go to your homepage. Mind me asking what camera you used for the flower? and bee?

Welcome to the club! It's always fun seeing someone I know from other newsgroups turn up here.

Mike Rosenberg kindly replied:

Thank you! Same here. Especially a fellow Machead, of course!

Davoud

Mike beat me to the welcome, so add mine to his.

-- Michelle

Mike Rosenberg kindly replied:

To which Davoud replied:

Then Michelle Steiner kindly added:

Ditto, ditto, ditto, including the Machead bit!

Davoud

Oh no! Now my friends might not only find out that I am hanging out with liberals, but that I am hanging out with Macheads! My reputation is shot.

Oh well. You guys are worth it.

Mike

So you might as well buy a Mac and vote Green. You won't even have to give up your Windows software; the new Macs can run them very well.

Yeah, but if you are going to run Windows, why bother with a Mac?

Kari

Michael Pardee replied:

You have erred on two fronts. I'm not a "liberal," though I freely admit that I don't know what the word means. I think that I am a Progressive, and I make no move to deny it when when I am called a leftist. But I'm a sarcastic leftist who believes that the USA has two economic systems: free-market capitalism for the middle classes and the poor and socialism for the wealthy. Pick a system -- I don't really care which, -- and apply it to everyone.

You're way too kind about my worth. I am not even worth the proverbial value of the elements of which I am made, because, as a practical matter, the cost of isolating those elements from my carcass would be higher than their market value. Better to sell my bones by the pound for glue-making.

You're right about the Machead bit. It tends to go with the progressive-intelligentsia part. At least that's what a /Microsoft/ survey reported.

Davoud

As a user of Windows XP Pro SP2 and Mac OS X I think (I hope!) I can answer that in a non-partisan, non-flame-inciting way.

There is some good software available for Windows that is not available for the Mac. If you're mainly a Windows guy you could compile a more complete list than I can. Autocad is an important app that comes to mind, and I don't mean to suggest that's the only one.

There is some good software available for the Mac that is not available for Windows. If you're mainly a Windows guy I can compile a more complete list than you can. Aperture, Final Cut Studio; Keynote, Shake, Soundtrack, /Microsoft/ /Entourage/ , (yes, Virginia, MS makes an e-mail client for the Mac OS that is better than anything it makes for Windows,) and I don't mean to suggest those are the only ones.

I think the point is that if you want to run all those great Windows apps /and/ all of the great Mac apps /and/ the zillion tons of Linux/Unix apps, and run them all natively, and run them all on one hardware platform, and run a whole bunch of them simultaneously, a consensus is arising (among pro-level Windows users in particular) that Macintosh hardware is the best solution yet devised.

I did my best to keep it non-partisan, without harping on the fact that Mac OS X has /never/ been penetrated in spite of millions of sophisticated attempts.

Davoud

Because you can run both Mac and Windows.

Further, tests at PC magazine show that Windows XP runs faster on a Mac duo than on a PC with the same processor and speed.

Because on a PC you're limited to Windows and Linux, but on a Mac you can run the Mac OS, too.

Sure, but how well does it run Microsoft "Bob?"

Or - more to my uses - how well does it run the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET programming suite?

Mike

Undetermined. Parallels' web site says this:

It says "any version of Windows", so that should include Bob, but Bob isn't specifically listed.

And, if you're interested in Linux or Unix, or even OS/2:

If that suite runs under one of those OSs, I see no problem.

Apple's current solution (although rumor has it that the next version of OS X will include virtualization instead of or in addition to) is to boot into Windows, but only Windows XP home or professional, and not be able to run Mac OS and Windows at the same time. We should be finding out more about it in August, when Apple hosts its annual Developers Conference.

I guess that I haven't really found a need for apps that I can't get on Windows or Linux. I had no intention of flaming anyone and I hope no one took it that way.

Kari