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Verizon PCMCIA Card Just Works
Apple God writes "I was a friend's house and he showed me his Verizion PCMCIA card for internet access. On a whim, I put it in my PowerBook, and it recognized the card and prompted me for authorization to configure the system for use with the card. I entered my password, and was surprised to see an icon in the menu bar for it. I clicked on this icon and selected connect, it worked! I had internet access. Here is a picture of the card that I used. When we checked Verizon's page, they only listed Windows compatibility. To make matters sweeter, my friend was shocked that it 'just worked' because he had to install drivers in XP before it would work."
Whether or not a piece of hardware "just works" depends on what drivers were included in the OS. It's quite likely your XP installation(/media) is much older than your OSX one.
Nevertheless, nearly every piece of hardware I try on my XP box works first go. I certainly don't expect exotic hardware that wasn't released before XP, like my digital TV tuner, to work without installing drivers. But by the time the next Windows release is due, I expect this hardware to be not so exotic anymore, and that drivers will be included.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
"This is rarely the case wtih my XP box. slashdot is not "apple biased" it's "anti MS.." get it straight. "
Pity it isn't pointed out enough that if *nix/OSX doesn't have the driver, they're typically SOL until somebody cooks up one.
I'm going to get scorched pretty heavily for saying this, but there are upsides to MS's monopoly.
"Derp de derp."
Jeeze, the thing just worked, to quote the key phrase of this thread. At that moment, I knew I'd not be going back to solaris or linux anytime soon. After a year with the box, I've yet to plug in anything and find it not working right away.
Apple wants you to think that the GUI is the best thing about their OS, but that's wrong. The GUI is OK, mind you, but it's more awkward than GNOME in some respects. But the hardware support, that's the jewel.
I must be doing something wrong because we've had quite a bit of difficulty getting USB data cables (one for a nokia, one for a moto) to work with OS X (10.3.4)
I've had to resort to using Quicklink Mobile from Smith-Micro to get our staff's cell phones to transmit data. Mind you, QLM works very well and is worth the cost, but I don't like being dependent upon them for cables -- especially if one dies and I can't just hit the Verizon store or other retailer to buy a replacement.
The problem, as I've been told, is that USB drivers for these cables are not written for Mac. (Hence, the need for QLM's drivers and their supplied cable.)
Does anyone know anymore about USB drivers and USB cell phone data cables for Mac?
the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed - w. gibson
I noticed this a lot with my new Mac. After eight years of using Microsoft products, I buckled down and bought a dual 1.8Ghz G5 a few weeks ago.
:)
Every time I plug something into it, it just works. I bought a Formac TVR video capture unit, and plugged it in. No drivers, it recognized it just fine and Toast even let me capture off it. My new mouse worked perfectly. I plugged in my USB printer, and it didn't even bother prompting me about it - I was simply suddenly able to print documents from anywhere.
I love this thing
Mike
Or it may only have an Amiga driver... and the joke is on both of us.
How fast is this service? I've used my T-Mobile phone with my PowerBook over bluetooth (irda a few years back) and it has always been dirt slow. Is this card faster than modem speeds?
You may have noticed that in the article that motivated the discussion it was noted that the XP-owning friend needed to install drivers for his Verizon card, while the Mac didn't.
Lots of devices work out of the box in XP. Many others don't. You are very fortunate because 7 out of your 8 devices worked. That is not the case, by far, of most XP users, for whom only around half work out of the box.
The point of the parent post is that the proportion of devices that "just work" for MacOS X is vastly superior. Of course we would need to make a serious poll to confirm it, but in my experience it is, by very far, true.
I'm sorry, but in order for you to understand this you would need to get a Mac and use it extensively for two or three months. But your bias/needs/etc won't allow you to do that, so you are condemned.
I bought a playstation 2 adapter to USB for my G5. It said it was only compatable with Windows XP. It also came with a floppy disk full of drivers.
I plug it into my Mac.... And it worked. *shrug*
By reading this sig, you agree to be bound by all terms and conditions I choose.
i was a little concerned when I hooked up my printer to my mac because it was kind of old. I hooked up the usb cable and nothing happened. I thought, oh crap. I hit print and... it just spit out the page. i couldn't believe it. in fact.. it did something that i thought was so smart... it printed the pages in reverse order so when I took them out of the printer they were in the correct order. Always when i print on xp it prints page 1, then 2, then 3... so i have to rearrange them... not the case in osx.. they printed out reverse so I didn't need to arrange them.. that is one of the many things that always impress me when i use osx.
On the Mac, I've had the same problem with the HD, but I didn't get shunted to some TUI to download the latest version before I could use the GUI.
8/8 devices work. I installed the dell specific drivers for a few little extra options in the control panel.
And my "needs" "condemn" me?
How about "I don't have $2k to drop on a Mac I won't get any use out of"?
$500 and I can build a top of the line PC.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
"A third-party video driver still depends on the generic video port driver."
Bad example. Both the video driver and video miniport are card specific. In fact, the first line of your link is:
"NT-based operating system video miniport drivers are adapter-specific, kernel-mode drivers."
You've also got it neatly backwards, miniports are card specific, drivers are often not. SCSI host adaptors have a card-specific miniport, but the driver is generic and provided by microsoft.
The real reason for the miniport/driver split for video is that NT used to be a microkernel. The miniport ran in kernel-land, and the driver ran in csrss.exe. In NT4 and later, they both run in the kernel, but any process (including, but not limited to csrss.exe) can call down to them.
Same when I plugged a Sony BA1 USB Bluetooth dongle into my iBook...
:)
On Windows you need to start an install CD which copies half a dozen drivers (BT interface, several VCOM ports and lots of crap), 2 Windows hotfixes and a BT front-end application. Of course you also need to restart your PC. Overall, installing this thing on Windows takes about 10 minutes.
On OSX, the dongle is recognized instantly. No questions asked. Plug it in, it works. Fire up the Bluetooth Assistant, pair devices, that's it.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Low high-end != top of the line.
Top of the line means biggest, best, fastest on the market.
The Radeon 9800 Pro, while an extremely good card, is no longer the top of the line from ATI. 1 GB of PC3200 RAM is not top of the line, when you consider most boards that support that much can support up to 4 GB of RAM. A P4 3.0 GHz is not top of the line from Intel, the 3.6 GHz is. Etc.
"Top of the Line" is not subjective, it means the top of the line products available by the manufacturers; your list does not include them. And to build a PC is to build one from scratch, not transfer old parts to it.
So you've got $439 spent on a non-top of the line PC, you have $61 left for everything else on my list, minus shipping costs, so figure $41-$51 left.
If you need to run software that's only available in Solaris, you are condemned to buy from Sun. If you need SW that's only available for MacOS X, you need to buy from Apple.
Similarly, if you, like many others, need to run SW only available on Windows NT and successors, you are condemned to buy (or pirate) from Microsoft and from PC vendors. So yes, your needs condemn you. Because even if you would rather use Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, etc, you can't.
You can get excellent Macs for far less than that. Of course, you may actually have some needs that condemn you to pay that much (or to stick to PCs). But most people don't really need the expansion slots, the special graphic cards and the separate monitor. In most cases these features go unused (of course this may not be your case).
Here is where your biases condemn you. You are so entrenched in believing that what you need to do can't be done on a Mac, that you haven't even verified if the tools you use (or excellent substitutes for them) exist on the Mac. I know a lot of people who think that they wouldn't be able to do their work on a Mac, but it turns out that they simply didn't know that they can. Of course, some people actually need things that don't have Mac equivalents, and these are the ones that are condemned. But there are far less people in that situation than you think.
No, you can't. To build a real top of the line PC you need more than $1000. The AC in a parallel thread involuntarily demonstrated this.
Now $1000 is far less than the price of an equivalent Mac (or Dell, HP, IBM, etc). But it so happens that you enjoy building PCs so much that it's almost a hobby for you. For other people with the necessary technical skills, this "joy" wears out very soon and becomes a nuisance. In our case, you have to count the time selecting and gathering the parts, assembling them, and testing and correcting the work as lost productivity time. And those lost hours mean hundreds of dollars to us. And don't forget that most people don't even have the technical skills needed.
But don't worry: as long as you stay far away from Macs and don't even try to see what you are missing, you will be OK. As an old friend once said, "sometimes ignorance is a privilege".