> All of the resellers I have dealt with were complete crap.
It seems unfair to tar them all with such a generalization. But the Apple resellers do bring to mind John Wheeler's observation that all electrons behave identically because "they are all one and the same electron." I wonder. Maybe there are maket forces which cause (or caused) them to act that way.
My latest reseller horror story was an iBook repair. Quoted ten days, still in the shop a month later. "Well sir, you have a special model. It has a 14 inch screen." And "I could get it done if I weren't talking to you now." (The repair had been subcontracted to an off-site shop.)
Apple started my PowerBook warranty from the date of manufacture. What else could they do? They had no way to know when the retailer sold it to me. They did change it to date of purchase after I faxed them the dated receipt.
What MacAdam is complaining about, I think, are (a) the unrealistic default start and (b) hassles with Apple process to adjust the start to "date of purchase." And on those points I agree. No retail venue short of a used car dealership places as much bureacracy between itself and its customers as does Apple.
Toshiba and Hitachi do publish spec sheets for their drives. They're even on this new Internet thing. Toshiba spec sheet for the 1.8" 40 GB drive claims 250G (for how long?) while operating, 1000G when not operating. Hitachi 4GB microdrive is 200G for 1 msec (operating), 2000G for 1 msec (non-operating).
But truckers do pay *use tax* on all that fuel they carry into California to consume. Don't they?:-)
Re:Thinking of Switching to a OSX for a laptop
on
Fix a Troubled Mac
·
· Score: 1
> all the laptops I buy
Gee, how many do you need?:-) Apples just run, mostly, depending on how hard you push them. You can check out the support boards at apple.com for grousing about battery controller software, hinges, dead motherboards, wrong permissions, bad RAM (usually not Apple's RAM) and the occasional program which dies with a "System Error."
Of course all most of those troubles are history now that Apple has release MacOSX 10.3.4. You will be the proud owner of a mostly new set of problems.:-)
I've had the same Apple laptop for 3 1/2 year and expect to keep it another year or two. You do want to get the AppleCare 3 year warranty. Service is (even more) expensive otherwise. Of seven Apple laptops in my immediate family, two or three have needed motherboard replacement.
IIRC, Intel will only execute from the Code Segment. This has been true since the 8086. It's hard to fault Intel if certain OS's (Linux, and the current incarnations of Windows) map code, data, and stack to the same segment.:-)
In other words, the distance we should be concerned with is "focal point to screen", not "projector to screen." True, but not significant unless we get some really wild lens designs. Even then they just achieve a small, bright picture. May as well use a regular LCD display if that's what you want.:-)
"I" *used* to mean "inexpensive," as popularized by David Patterson et al. in the 1988 paper "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)." But nowadays, the hope (as opposed to the reality) that multiple RAID components do not conspire to fail in unison has made "independent" a more important attribute.
> Why is it so difficult to find decent software names?
When Amtrak needed a name for its new double-deck passenger cars in 1980 it held an employee naming contest. Twenty names (Vistaliner, Astraliner, and others) were declared "winners" and forwarded for legal review. Every one of the 20 had some sort of encumbrance. Amtrak finally found "Superliner," which for some reason no one else wanted.:-)
Good heavens, don't. That is what made this document really odd. The first column sold me on Open Office (yes, I am a sucker for a decent sales pitch). The paper as a whole has a style which you might find in academia:
1. Here was the state of the art. Good, huh?
2. But look, our new techniques are so much better! But in Word's case part 2 had a bunch of obvious holes which have been pointed out here. And the whole approach seems inappropriate - weird, really - when used to defend an entrenched product against a rising competitor.
In the Justice Department's anti-trust suit against IBM the government found an IBM strategy document with the notation "Telex -> dying company." In some context (perhaps it was the 1956 consent decree) IBM was not supposed to specifically plan to kill its competition. Perhaps SCO is hoping to find something along those lines. I hardly think that Sam Palmisano or Irving Wladawsky-Berger would be so incautious.
And in the only "me too" lawsuit of that era which IBM did not win outright, CDC acquired a bunch of IBM memos through disclosure. IBM and CDC settled out of court, with IBM selling its service business (Service Bureu Corporation) to CDC and promising not to re-enter the service market for many years. I wonder what CDC found in those memos.
> He has obviously seen a magician to the same trick I do.
Note that Peris Diaconis had a hand in this. A brief biography states that he was a magician for eight years, running away from home at age 14 to join a magic act.
There are any number of scripting languages which work well at the top level. Fewer work well as an "embedded" language. Three which fall into that category are Tcl, REXX and AppleScript. (Someone else mentioned DCOP.) Of those, Tcl is libre. There's probably a libre version of REXX floating around somewhere, but it doesn't matter too much. I would pick Tcl. Take a look at how DFS and Expect have embedded Tcl. Expect can also use Perl, but Perl isn't quite as seamless in that space.
AppleScript, although not free, is interesting for two reasons. (1) It uses Open Scripting Architecture, which separates the language syntax from the execution engine. (2) It has been used from the start for scripting GUI-like interactions, which is the kind of "macro" language which the original poster had in mind.
>> it makes Slashdot readers look like a mob of freeloaders.
>I don't know how to break this to you, but...
They say that "truth is an absolute defense against libel." If it is also an absolute defense against copyright infringement, then the original poster may be home free.;-)
Radio Shack currently sells a small digital clock with an analog display.
The nice thing about an analog display is that 4:19 looks a lot like 4:20, as it should. Conversely, on a digital display 2:32 looks a lot like 3:23, which it should not.
I quit wearing a watch about 20 years ago. Now I'm holding out for a digital mechanism and analog display, applied as a tattoo.
> the bit-order is going to have to be switched (different endians). This is not fast on a good day
That's byte order, not bit order.
Even on a bad day dealing with byte-reversed integers on a PPC requires just two instructions: Load Byte Reversed and Store Byte Reversed. These replace the Load and Store which PPC uses for native data.
Floating point load/store would suffer, though. You would have to use the integer unit to reverse the bytes, as there is no Load/Store Float Byte Reversed.
Note that data in a PPC register has no endianness, because PPC registers, unlike PPC memory, do not provide byte or bit addressability. (The original POWER processor have an "extract bit" instruction which extracted a bit at (big-endian) position n in a register. This instruction was not carried forward to the PPC.)
> [John Allen] revolutionized the hobby because he was a professional photographer
His college training was in art, and he made some good investments which left him financially independent at a young age. Both of those help. Those and a sense of humor.
>I've always presumed such layouts are not attempts to faithfully duplicate the layout of the rail line
True. A 40 mile run in N-scale would be 1/4 mile of track. Most people don't have that much space. Nor do they want to spend the hour or so that it would take a train to travel that distance. Modelers use "selective compression" to show only the most interesting parts of the line, and a "fast clock" (typically 10x normal time) to get a full day's railroading done in an hour or two.
> how do I give my share, including lawyer fees, for lawyers I did not hire, back to MS.
For the non-lawyer part, file a claim. Then endorse the resulting check over to Microsoft.
As for the lawyer part, I don't know. I'm still waiting for reimbursement to cover all the roads I have never used (but you have), not to mention three or four military adventures which I don't remember authorizing. Chalk it up to overhead.
Try looking (or asking) on usenet boards to see what other people like. I order small quantities (10 to 500) of this sort of stuff from Americal. In this case, though, their usable CD cases max out a 4 CDs. Their 6 CD case doesn't have nubs for front or back cover inserts. But they are careful enough to warn you about that.
Slashdot Mirror
> I can never get sarcasm to work right on slashdot.
It's the net in general. Without visual and audio cues it is really hard to differentiate sarcasm from ignorance or stupidity.
> All of the resellers I have dealt with were complete crap.
It seems unfair to tar them all with such a generalization. But the Apple resellers do bring to mind John Wheeler's observation that all electrons behave identically because "they are all one and the same electron." I wonder. Maybe there are maket forces which cause (or caused) them to act that way.
My latest reseller horror story was an iBook repair. Quoted ten days, still in the shop a month later. "Well sir, you have a special model. It has a 14 inch screen." And "I could get it done if I weren't talking to you now." (The repair had been subcontracted to an off-site shop.)
Apple started my PowerBook warranty from the date of manufacture. What else could they do? They had no way to know when the retailer sold it to me. They did change it to date of purchase after I faxed them the dated receipt.
What MacAdam is complaining about, I think, are (a) the unrealistic default start and (b) hassles with Apple process to adjust the start to "date of purchase." And on those points I agree. No retail venue short of a used car dealership places as much bureacracy between itself and its customers as does Apple.
The really old (about 1994) IBM 5.25" drives could take a 5 foot drop onto a concrete floor.
Toshiba and Hitachi do publish spec sheets for their drives. They're even on this new Internet thing. Toshiba spec sheet for the 1.8" 40 GB drive claims 250G (for how long?) while operating, 1000G when not operating. Hitachi 4GB microdrive is 200G for 1 msec (operating), 2000G for 1 msec (non-operating).
But truckers do pay *use tax* on all that fuel they carry into California to consume. Don't they? :-)
> all the laptops I buy
:-) Apples just run, mostly, depending on how hard you push them. You can check out the support boards at apple.com for grousing about battery controller software, hinges, dead motherboards, wrong permissions, bad RAM (usually not Apple's RAM) and the occasional program which dies with a "System Error."
:-)
Gee, how many do you need?
Of course all most of those troubles are history now that Apple has release MacOSX 10.3.4. You will be the proud owner of a mostly new set of problems.
I've had the same Apple laptop for 3 1/2 year and expect to keep it another year or two. You do want to get the AppleCare 3 year warranty. Service is (even more) expensive otherwise. Of seven Apple laptops in my immediate family, two or three have needed motherboard replacement.
IIRC, Intel will only execute from the Code Segment. This has been true since the 8086. It's hard to fault Intel if certain OS's (Linux, and the current incarnations of Windows) map code, data, and stack to the same segment. :-)
In other words, the distance we should be concerned with is "focal point to screen", not "projector to screen." True, but not significant unless we get some really wild lens designs. Even then they just achieve a small, bright picture. May as well use a regular LCD display if that's what you want. :-)
> I is for Independent.
"I" *used* to mean "inexpensive," as popularized by David Patterson et al. in the 1988 paper "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)." But nowadays, the hope (as opposed to the reality) that multiple RAID components do not conspire to fail in unison has made "independent" a more important attribute.
> Why is it so difficult to find decent software names?
:-)
When Amtrak needed a name for its new double-deck passenger cars in 1980 it held an employee naming contest. Twenty names (Vistaliner, Astraliner, and others) were declared "winners" and forwarded for legal review. Every one of the 20 had some sort of encumbrance. Amtrak finally found "Superliner," which for some reason no one else wanted.
> Never mention the name of your competitor
Good heavens, don't. That is what made this document really odd. The first column sold me on Open Office (yes, I am a sucker for a decent sales pitch). The paper as a whole has a style which you might find in academia:
1. Here was the state of the art. Good, huh?
2. But look, our new techniques are so much better!
But in Word's case part 2 had a bunch of obvious holes which have been pointed out here. And the whole approach seems inappropriate - weird, really - when used to defend an entrenched product against a rising competitor.
> Who defines what is "indecent" or "profane"?
For "profane", which is today's topic, consult your dictionary. Mine says "1. not connected with religion or religious matters; secular."
> Kids that age do not need to be asking their parents what words like that mean.
In the context ("really fucking brilliant"), it means "very much not". How hard is that?
"If words like this get into everyday speech, we'll have nothing left for special occasions." - Michael Flanders
In the Justice Department's anti-trust suit against IBM the government found an IBM strategy document with the notation "Telex -> dying company." In some context (perhaps it was the 1956 consent decree) IBM was not supposed to specifically plan to kill its competition. Perhaps SCO is hoping to find something along those lines. I hardly think that Sam Palmisano or Irving Wladawsky-Berger would be so incautious.
And in the only "me too" lawsuit of that era which IBM did not win outright, CDC acquired a bunch of IBM memos through disclosure. IBM and CDC settled out of court, with IBM selling its service business (Service Bureu Corporation) to CDC and promising not to re-enter the service market for many years. I wonder what CDC found in those memos.
> He has obviously seen a magician to the same trick I do.
Note that Peris Diaconis had a hand in this. A brief biography states that he was a magician for eight years, running away from home at age 14 to join a magic act.
There are any number of scripting languages which work well at the top level. Fewer work well as an "embedded" language. Three which fall into that category are Tcl, REXX and AppleScript. (Someone else mentioned DCOP.) Of those, Tcl is libre. There's probably a libre version of REXX floating around somewhere, but it doesn't matter too much. I would pick Tcl. Take a look at how DFS and Expect have embedded Tcl. Expect can also use Perl, but Perl isn't quite as seamless in that space.
AppleScript, although not free, is interesting for two reasons. (1) It uses Open Scripting Architecture, which separates the language syntax from the execution engine. (2) It has been used from the start for scripting GUI-like interactions, which is the kind of "macro" language which the original poster had in mind.
>> it makes Slashdot readers look like a mob of freeloaders.
;-)
>I don't know how to break this to you, but...
They say that "truth is an absolute defense against libel." If it is also an absolute defense against copyright infringement, then the original poster may be home free.
Radio Shack currently sells a small digital clock with an analog display.
The nice thing about an analog display is that 4:19 looks a lot like 4:20, as it should. Conversely, on a digital display 2:32 looks a lot like 3:23, which it should not.
I quit wearing a watch about 20 years ago. Now I'm holding out for a digital mechanism and analog display, applied as a tattoo.
That would make sense, but I'm not aware of any cross-endian instructions which would not also have worked in a G5. Can you tell us what they were?
> the bit-order is going to have to be switched (different endians). This is not fast on a good day
That's byte order, not bit order.
Even on a bad day dealing with byte-reversed integers on a PPC requires just two instructions: Load Byte Reversed and Store Byte Reversed. These replace the Load and Store which PPC uses for native data.
Floating point load/store would suffer, though. You would have to use the integer unit to reverse the bytes, as there is no Load/Store Float Byte Reversed.
Note that data in a PPC register has no endianness, because PPC registers, unlike PPC memory, do not provide byte or bit addressability. (The original POWER processor have an "extract bit" instruction which extracted a bit at (big-endian) position n in a register. This instruction was not carried forward to the PPC.)
> [John Allen] revolutionized the hobby because he was a professional photographer
His college training was in art, and he made some good investments which left him financially independent at a young age. Both of those help. Those and a sense of humor.
>I've always presumed such layouts are not attempts to faithfully duplicate the layout of the rail line
True. A 40 mile run in N-scale would be 1/4 mile of track. Most people don't have that much space. Nor do they want to spend the hour or so that it would take a train to travel that distance. Modelers use "selective compression" to show only the most interesting parts of the line, and a "fast clock" (typically 10x normal time) to get a full day's railroading done in an hour or two.
> how do I give my share, including lawyer fees, for lawyers I did not hire, back to MS.
For the non-lawyer part, file a claim. Then endorse the resulting check over to Microsoft.
As for the lawyer part, I don't know. I'm still waiting for reimbursement to cover all the roads I have never used (but you have), not to mention three or four military adventures which I don't remember authorizing. Chalk it up to overhead.
Try looking (or asking) on usenet boards to see what other people like. I order small quantities (10 to 500) of this sort of stuff from Americal. In this case, though, their usable CD cases max out a 4 CDs. Their 6 CD case doesn't have nubs for front or back cover inserts. But they are careful enough to warn you about that.