I'm glad I don't live in the U.S. Our (Canada) copyright law holds that a personal-use copy, or any "fair use" exempted copy, is NOT infringing. It may be unauthorized, but it does not infringe, because the law does not allow the copyright holder to control those particular rights.
That is, Canadian copyright doesn't use "fair use" as a defense to a charge of infringement, it actually reduces the rights of the copyright holder up front.
Doesn't stop the Canadian media companies from talking about illegal copies all the time. Sadly for them, there's very little illegal copying going on, and just about none done by private consumers. (Pirate DVDs mass-produced in Asia and sold 6 for $10 in Chinatown, that's different... but those copies aren't usually _made_ in Canada, they're imported.)
Don't forget, when you put all your redundant services on virtualized nodes on the same server, you've ADDED a failure mode that wasn't there before: the hypervisor.
Which means it is worse than you'd have just by playing tricks to get (say) several DNS servers on the same box. (Alright, multiple IPs on a single LAN card isn't that tricky.)
What I find virtual nodes for is trying configurations out; which can include running what should be separate physical machines on the same box. But that's Not Suitable For Production Use. (An example I'll be talking with my manager next week is several server nodes for a shared file system on a single server so I can test fail-over and data migration without having to get a hold of several boxes to test.)
Other posters already noted little bitty things that don't need a whole machine virtualize well already. Maybe it's a UNIX thing, but I already just run several things on the same node in that case. License server daemons, little departmental web server, low-use file server, they're all sitting on the same box.
I'd rather have a MacBook Pro for two things: the LED backlighting and the dedicated VRAM video card. I don't care for uses-system-memory video.
The other user-useful feature is the MBPs have FireWire 800, and a full-size DVI port so you don't need a sold-separately-dongle. (From my perspective, anyway.) Plugging the MacBook into the HDMI line on an HDTV is very nice, along with the digital optical audio out.
So I bought the MacBook and wedged it as full of RAM as it would go (4 GB) and put a new 250 GB SATA HDD in it because you can do that now ().
So far, I couldn't care less about the video card; but then, I haven't tried any of the really spiffy video tools. The fact that it's 10x to 40x faster than my 1.42 GHz iBook G4 is wonderful. And VMWare Fusion with Solaris, Win98, WinXP, Red Hat Enterprise, and Fedora is just a bonus.
For my needs, that $1000 just wasn't worth it. The MacBook is great. Except then I wanted a copy of Leopard for my old G4 Mini because it really is much nicer than Tiger... it's almost like they've got the fundamentals done and started working on the nice-to-haves.
Handbrake encoding at near-real-time isn't bad, either.
I didn't know about the recall, but I did know about www.fixyourownprinter.com, having previously repaired the worn outfeed rollers on my LaserJet 4M.
So I ordered up the 5L repair kit for my mom's machine a couple of years ago, and it's running like a champ to this day. The repair kit from fixyourownprinter is much better than the original ever was.
You know, it's funny you mention the VM thing... I was recently giving another go at getting Dungeon Keeper 2 to work on XP (which I've got in Boot Camp), and found this page on Microsoft's website.
One of things it points out is that Microsoft Virutal PC 2007 is a free downloadable application that can be used to run older operating systems at the click of a button.
But if that's the solution, I'll just use VMWare Fusion and stay in OS X.
Well, you might want to call the ambulance anyway and try driving the car....
A co-worker's car only made 300 meters after the Check Engine lamp came on. Then he needed a new engine. Had that been an emergency situation, he'd have been better off stopping where he could see a house number clearly and calling for an ambulance from there.
The great thing about Check Engine is you have no idea WHY.
Fortunately, nuclear reactors have better idiot lights. Like, say, "Oil Pressure" being a distinct indicator from "You Forgot The Gas Cap And We're Telling You Check Engine Even Though The Filler Pipe Is Far Away From The Engine Compartment Don't You Feel Like A Tool Now."
There's a brighter way to handle "show your work". Your teacher was an idiot.
The _smart_ way is to give full marks for correct answers, and inform the students that partial marks will not be given if there is no intermediate work to mark. This is particularly useful in, say, solving simultaneous systems of equations. You _can_ do it on your HP-48, but if you screw it up, you and the HP get nothing. If you write out the steps and show you know where you're going, you can still get a passing mark with mechanical errors. (And a good description of what you think should be the approach can be good for a few marks, even if you can't recall the formulae.)
Unless, of course, the point of the test is to show you know the steps--but it should say in the question "show your work".
THAT would be a broken compiler. Not a strict compiler; it is actually non-conforming to the standard if it won't accept:
struct foo { int a; }; int main(int argc,char **argv) { struct foo bar; }
A conforming implementation must accept and correctly compile all strictly conforming programs.
Also, use of the '_t' suffix is not a good idea if it is a structure name and not a typedef; so continuing the above:
typedef struct foo foo_t;
(A certain blue three-letter company created a serious problem in a system header by incorrectly leaving the 'typedef' off of one of those. The result was a violation of the ANSI C++ One Definition Rule, and very strange crashes because GNU C++ ties global initialization to the name of the first global definition in a translation unit--and of course, system headers generally come before user code. It was wrong in C, also, because foo_t wasn't a typename, it was a global variable defined in every.o file, but you didn't get the crashes.)
I'm not a fan of Hungarian notation in general, but the '_t for typedef' meme is reasonably well-entrenched, and it does work with both K&R compilers (which have a single namespace for struct, enum, union and typedef) and ANSI/ISO compilers (which have separate namespaces), so that one I'm not complaining about.
Fortunately, I haven't had to deal with K&R C for a few years.
The Post Office actually got the discs there that quickly.
It's the same here in Canada with zip.ca; it's usually a single business day between my putting the DVD in a street-side mailbox and zip.ca saying, "We've received and shipped your DVDs." (We don't have Saturday mail delivery, but the sorting plant is running.)
Going by the changes they've made to the return envelope, they (zip.ca) have got small "receiving" stations all over the place where they take the inbound DVDs and register them as returned, and the bigger stations send out the next batch to you.
You'll find that, in Berne convention countries, copyright is automatic and does not require an explicit copyright notice.
This means copyright must be explicitly disclaimed if you really want to put something in the public domain. Simply posting it on a forum probably wouldn't do that, especially given the number of forum systems which say "Comments and postings are copyright by their authors" or something similar. (Lack of that message would not imply there is no copyright.)
However, unless 200 lines is a sizable percentage of the completed work, I wouldn't worry about it this close to shipping. It also depends on just what those 200 lines of code actually are; interface definitions aren't copyright-able, after all. So there might be fewer, perhaps many fewer, lines of actual creative work.
And the work itself may be based on something that is public domain....
And the author would be hard-pressed to claim a loss of revenue in this case, since he did post it publicly.
Copying code from random un-attributed sources without license agreements isn't a good idea. But for this one, I wouldn't try and fix it. Ignorance is bliss and you've lost that now, but you can always pretend and be happy.
And Option on a Mac has generated funny characters for years. There are both "dead" keys for accent combining, like Opt-e, Opt-^, and just-another-shift-state-keys, like Option-Shift-8 for a bullet, Option-Z for Omega, Option-O for a slashed O. (At least, in the Canadian keymap.)
If you've never been out of e-mail range for more than 72 hours......then I feel sorry for you. Take a vacation to somewhere the cellphone and Wi-Fi don't work. At least try it once in your life, anyway. Give it a week.
Bringing the laptop is OK, as long as you promise to only use it as a DVD player when it's raining outside.
In Toronto, the two main broandband providers have already whored their customers out to U.S. companies. Roger's (cable) uses Yahoo!, and Bell Sympatico (DSL, dial-up) uses MSN. This isn't just for e-mail, this is their whole "portal" thing.
Many Roger's customers were really pissed when they found everything dumped into Yahoo! Geocities, what with all the blacklists that drop e-mail when it sees a link into a geocities site.
There's no Canadian "portal provider" to speak of. Not at the scale of hotmail or gmail.
Similarly, my ISP offers two plans for the same price: a "low latency" package with a 100GB monthly transfer cap, and an "unlimited" package where they don't guarantee the latency. Choose your poison. (And, since they're reasonably competent, the two packages link to different bulk providers. I'm not dealing with a telephone or cable company.)
Am I the only one who things an always-exposed keyboard is just a pain? I use a belt holster, and without a "flip"-type phone, the buttons would get pressed all the time.
I even had a flip-phone with buttons that were accessible through the flip--and holding one down (by, say, sitting down on the subway) would unlock the phone and start calling entries your incoming call log.
What point is a flip-closed-keypad-lock that can be canceled without opening the flip?
That one was a POS in many other ways, and the telco got to replace it per their warranty terms....
I know my newer WRT54GS (rev 3) came with Wi-Fi disabled. But there was no interlock to prevent you from turning Wi-Fi on while still leaving the password and SSID at the defaults. I _think_ admin access over Wi-Fi was disabled by default. Mind you, now that they don't use Linux any more, I'll bet they're re-inventing all the old problems.
If you used the Secure Easy Setup, then it _would_ set a random-scribble SSID and some strange level of security that I couldn't figure out. So I had to re-configure after that "I wonder what this button does?"
My BEFSW11 (remember 802.11b?) came with "p0wn me" as the default.
Heh. Reminds me of the second hard disk I ever owned; it was a 33 MB RLL drive with "NFG" in big black marker scrawled over the top case.
It was $20 at the surplus store, and I thought, cool, motors and magnets and I can do something silly with the platters, that's easily $20 of fun.
On a lark, I plugged it in to my Amiga 2000... and it spun up. So I crimped together the right signal cables for a second ST-506 drive and hooked up the lines. And the controller was able to get the heads to track zero... Hmmm.
I _had_ to try and format it now, right? Well, I only had an MFM controller, so that's 20 megabytes, but that plus my 40 megger would be a big help.... It low-level formatted fine. Partitioned fine. Took a filesystem format fine....
Not trusting it, I ran a disk analyzer on it for 3 days. No errors. Not even the ones in the bad block sticker on the cover.
Maybe the drive wouldn't work on an RLL controller, or someone used the wrong RLL settings for the drive; but I used that "NFG" drive for 10 years as my main document storage disk. (I also did regular backups, but I do that even if the drive doesn't say NFG.)
Not as much fun was when my mom's steam iron "broke", and my grandfather bought her a nice new one with auto-shutoff for Christmas one year. I took the old one, poured white vinegar in it and let it stand for 30 minutes. Been working fine ever since. I needed an iron for University, but not often enough to want to spend money on one. And my mom really was happier with the lighter model, and much less nervous about burning the house down with the automatic shutoff.
Oh yeah. I did a high school co-op term with a structural engineering firm (which is a specialization under civil engineering).
Some days the air would turn blue from the swearing at some architect's latest vision. "Glass walls AND no interior columns? What will hold it up?" "They want WHAT round?" "Cantilever the elevator shafts? That doesn't even make sense!"
There was one architecture firm whose LOGO took 45 minutes for the plotter to grind out. The actual drawing could be completed in a measly 15 or 20 minutes. (This was 1988, and it was one of those plotters where the pen moves back and forth over a drum, and the drum moves the entire sheet of paper or mylar for the other axis. My job was to abort the plot when the paper skewed.... I like to think there's a building that's only standing because I was able to get the plotter to hold together long enough for the support columns to be plotted on top of their footings. Of course, the engineers would have to verify the plots and sign off before they could be used, but a boy can dream....)
I'll stick with Donald Norman's assertion: "Something that hard to use? It must have won a design award."
That may have been true for the all-in-ones, but the NuBus machines were very upgradeable. NuBus was fast enough for video cards; and the Toolbox ROM knew how to negotiate with the cards to determine if onboard video or slot video was connected, and cards could store their own settings in system PRAM. (Parameter RAM; like the "CMOS RAM" on PCs. Apple generally labels things by function, not technology. Most of the time. Sort of.)
They just happened to use SIMM memory when PCs were still using socketed DIP chips. "Processor Direct" slots for accelerators were common; they were basically the 68000 or 68020 bus exposed in a special slot connector.
Original iMac sales said, "we don't want to mess with it, we want it to work." But even those had accessible DIMM slots; you needed a nickel to get at the slots, though.
Heck, not only do I not mind paying for a satellite radio subscription, I _ALSO_ don't mind paying for an Internet radio subscription; in my case, Digitally Imported and SKY.FM.
In both cases, they work like the radio or TV: You turn it on, it plays. You pick the channel (stream, whatever), and you get whatever they want to send on that channel.
There's NOTHING equivalent to many of the di.fm and sky.fm channels on terrestrial radio in Toronto; and there's nothing equivalent to what I listen to on my XM radio, either. JACK-FM is the closest if I only have an FM radio; but the radio in my car is either playing the AM news/traffic station, the iPod, MP3 CDs, or the XM radio.
Heck, I can even use my SkyFi XM radio in the office--there's a terrestrial repeater tower somewhere at just the right angle to reach my desk.
But why would I wand the dispose-ability of a subscription service with the hassle of picking things of a real purchase? That's like the worst of both worlds. I'll pay for either a service or for particular songs that I can keep: not a mix of the two.
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I'm glad I don't live in the U.S. Our (Canada) copyright law holds that a personal-use copy, or any "fair use" exempted copy, is NOT infringing. It may be unauthorized, but it does not infringe, because the law does not allow the copyright holder to control those particular rights.
That is, Canadian copyright doesn't use "fair use" as a defense to a charge of infringement, it actually reduces the rights of the copyright holder up front.
Doesn't stop the Canadian media companies from talking about illegal copies all the time. Sadly for them, there's very little illegal copying going on, and just about none done by private consumers. (Pirate DVDs mass-produced in Asia and sold 6 for $10 in Chinatown, that's different... but those copies aren't usually _made_ in Canada, they're imported.)
Don't forget, when you put all your redundant services on virtualized nodes on the same server, you've ADDED a failure mode that wasn't there before: the hypervisor.
Which means it is worse than you'd have just by playing tricks to get (say) several DNS servers on the same box. (Alright, multiple IPs on a single LAN card isn't that tricky.)
What I find virtual nodes for is trying configurations out; which can include running what should be separate physical machines on the same box. But that's Not Suitable For Production Use. (An example I'll be talking with my manager next week is several server nodes for a shared file system on a single server so I can test fail-over and data migration without having to get a hold of several boxes to test.)
Other posters already noted little bitty things that don't need a whole machine virtualize well already. Maybe it's a UNIX thing, but I already just run several things on the same node in that case. License server daemons, little departmental web server, low-use file server, they're all sitting on the same box.
I'd rather have a MacBook Pro for two things: the LED backlighting and the dedicated VRAM video card. I don't care for uses-system-memory video.
The other user-useful feature is the MBPs have FireWire 800, and a full-size DVI port so you don't need a sold-separately-dongle. (From my perspective, anyway.) Plugging the MacBook into the HDMI line on an HDTV is very nice, along with the digital optical audio out.
So I bought the MacBook and wedged it as full of RAM as it would go (4 GB) and put a new 250 GB SATA HDD in it because you can do that now ().
So far, I couldn't care less about the video card; but then, I haven't tried any of the really spiffy video tools. The fact that it's 10x to 40x faster than my 1.42 GHz iBook G4 is wonderful. And VMWare Fusion with Solaris, Win98, WinXP, Red Hat Enterprise, and Fedora is just a bonus.
For my needs, that $1000 just wasn't worth it. The MacBook is great. Except then I wanted a copy of Leopard for my old G4 Mini because it really is much nicer than Tiger... it's almost like they've got the fundamentals done and started working on the nice-to-haves.
Handbrake encoding at near-real-time isn't bad, either.
"I'm trying to use the AirDisk on my Airport Extreme base station with System 7.5 on my Performa 6300CD. What do I click on in Chooser?"
Thought that was Chicago. As in, "Going to Chicago? Set your clock back 2 years." It was originally supposed to ship in '93.
I didn't know about the recall, but I did know about www.fixyourownprinter.com, having previously repaired the worn outfeed rollers on my LaserJet 4M.
So I ordered up the 5L repair kit for my mom's machine a couple of years ago, and it's running like a champ to this day. The repair kit from fixyourownprinter is much better than the original ever was.
You know, it's funny you mention the VM thing... I was recently giving another go at getting Dungeon Keeper 2 to work on XP (which I've got in Boot Camp), and found this page on Microsoft's website.
One of things it points out is that Microsoft Virutal PC 2007 is a free downloadable application that can be used to run older operating systems at the click of a button.
But if that's the solution, I'll just use VMWare Fusion and stay in OS X.
Apple's DRM wrapper for AAC is called FairPlay, so they're not above trying to pretty up their DRM.
.m4a. (.m4p for "protected" files.)
That being said, the wrapper is simple, and using it is simple, and defeating it is simple for those of us that don't a trip to an audio CD and back.
AAC is readily available without the FairPlay wrapper; the suffix is
Well, you might want to call the ambulance anyway and try driving the car....
A co-worker's car only made 300 meters after the Check Engine lamp came on. Then he needed a new engine. Had that been an emergency situation, he'd have been better off stopping where he could see a house number clearly and calling for an ambulance from there.
The great thing about Check Engine is you have no idea WHY.
Fortunately, nuclear reactors have better idiot lights. Like, say, "Oil Pressure" being a distinct indicator from "You Forgot The Gas Cap And We're Telling You Check Engine Even Though The Filler Pipe Is Far Away From The Engine Compartment Don't You Feel Like A Tool Now."
There's a brighter way to handle "show your work". Your teacher was an idiot.
The _smart_ way is to give full marks for correct answers, and inform the students that partial marks will not be given if there is no intermediate work to mark. This is particularly useful in, say, solving simultaneous systems of equations. You _can_ do it on your HP-48, but if you screw it up, you and the HP get nothing. If you write out the steps and show you know where you're going, you can still get a passing mark with mechanical errors. (And a good description of what you think should be the approach can be good for a few marks, even if you can't recall the formulae.)
Unless, of course, the point of the test is to show you know the steps--but it should say in the question "show your work".
THAT would be a broken compiler. Not a strict compiler; it is actually non-conforming to the standard if it won't accept:
A conforming implementation must accept and correctly compile all strictly conforming programs.
Also, use of the '_t' suffix is not a good idea if it is a structure name and not a typedef; so continuing the above:
(A certain blue three-letter company created a serious problem in a system header by incorrectly leaving the 'typedef' off of one of those. The result was a violation of the ANSI C++ One Definition Rule, and very strange crashes because GNU C++ ties global initialization to the name of the first global definition in a translation unit--and of course, system headers generally come before user code. It was wrong in C, also, because foo_t wasn't a typename, it was a global variable defined in every .o file, but you didn't get the crashes.)
I'm not a fan of Hungarian notation in general, but the '_t for typedef' meme is reasonably well-entrenched, and it does work with both K&R compilers (which have a single namespace for struct, enum, union and typedef) and ANSI/ISO compilers (which have separate namespaces), so that one I'm not complaining about.
Fortunately, I haven't had to deal with K&R C for a few years.
The real explanation is far more sinister....
The Post Office actually got the discs there that quickly.
It's the same here in Canada with zip.ca; it's usually a single business day between my putting the DVD in a street-side mailbox and zip.ca saying, "We've received and shipped your DVDs." (We don't have Saturday mail delivery, but the sorting plant is running.)
Going by the changes they've made to the return envelope, they (zip.ca) have got small "receiving" stations all over the place where they take the inbound DVDs and register them as returned, and the bigger stations send out the next batch to you.
You just summed up "Why Software Patents Are Bad" in one easy sentence.
The U.S. patent office treats any software method of doing X as identical, so all implementations are infringing on the same patent.
You'll find that, in Berne convention countries, copyright is automatic and does not require an explicit copyright notice.
This means copyright must be explicitly disclaimed if you really want to put something in the public domain. Simply posting it on a forum probably wouldn't do that, especially given the number of forum systems which say "Comments and postings are copyright by their authors" or something similar. (Lack of that message would not imply there is no copyright.)
However, unless 200 lines is a sizable percentage of the completed work, I wouldn't worry about it this close to shipping. It also depends on just what those 200 lines of code actually are; interface definitions aren't copyright-able, after all. So there might be fewer, perhaps many fewer, lines of actual creative work.
And the work itself may be based on something that is public domain....
And the author would be hard-pressed to claim a loss of revenue in this case, since he did post it publicly.
Copying code from random un-attributed sources without license agreements isn't a good idea. But for this one, I wouldn't try and fix it. Ignorance is bliss and you've lost that now, but you can always pretend and be happy.
And Option on a Mac has generated funny characters for years. There are both "dead" keys for accent combining, like Opt-e, Opt-^, and just-another-shift-state-keys, like Option-Shift-8 for a bullet, Option-Z for Omega, Option-O for a slashed O. (At least, in the Canadian keymap.)
If you've never been out of e-mail range for more than 72 hours... ...then I feel sorry for you. Take a vacation to somewhere the cellphone and Wi-Fi don't work. At least try it once in your life, anyway. Give it a week.
Bringing the laptop is OK, as long as you promise to only use it as a DVD player when it's raining outside.
In Toronto, the two main broandband providers have already whored their customers out to U.S. companies. Roger's (cable) uses Yahoo!, and Bell Sympatico (DSL, dial-up) uses MSN. This isn't just for e-mail, this is their whole "portal" thing.
Many Roger's customers were really pissed when they found everything dumped into Yahoo! Geocities, what with all the blacklists that drop e-mail when it sees a link into a geocities site.
There's no Canadian "portal provider" to speak of. Not at the scale of hotmail or gmail.
Similarly, my ISP offers two plans for the same price: a "low latency" package with a 100GB monthly transfer cap, and an "unlimited" package where they don't guarantee the latency. Choose your poison. (And, since they're reasonably competent, the two packages link to different bulk providers. I'm not dealing with a telephone or cable company.)
Am I the only one who things an always-exposed keyboard is just a pain? I use a belt holster, and without a "flip"-type phone, the buttons would get pressed all the time.
I even had a flip-phone with buttons that were accessible through the flip--and holding one down (by, say, sitting down on the subway) would unlock the phone and start calling entries your incoming call log.
What point is a flip-closed-keypad-lock that can be canceled without opening the flip?
That one was a POS in many other ways, and the telco got to replace it per their warranty terms....
Cron may think in UTC, but the crontab is in the system's local timezone.
So you still have the ambiguity with the local hour that happens twice or doesn't happen at all, depending on which way you're going.
The manpage for Vixie Cron goes into this on the very first screen-full of text.
I know my newer WRT54GS (rev 3) came with Wi-Fi disabled. But there was no interlock to prevent you from turning Wi-Fi on while still leaving the password and SSID at the defaults. I _think_ admin access over Wi-Fi was disabled by default. Mind you, now that they don't use Linux any more, I'll bet they're re-inventing all the old problems.
If you used the Secure Easy Setup, then it _would_ set a random-scribble SSID and some strange level of security that I couldn't figure out. So I had to re-configure after that "I wonder what this button does?"
My BEFSW11 (remember 802.11b?) came with "p0wn me" as the default.
Heh. Reminds me of the second hard disk I ever owned; it was a 33 MB RLL drive with "NFG" in big black marker scrawled over the top case.
It was $20 at the surplus store, and I thought, cool, motors and magnets and I can do something silly with the platters, that's easily $20 of fun.
On a lark, I plugged it in to my Amiga 2000... and it spun up. So I crimped together the right signal cables for a second ST-506 drive and hooked up the lines. And the controller was able to get the heads to track zero... Hmmm.
I _had_ to try and format it now, right? Well, I only had an MFM controller, so that's 20 megabytes, but that plus my 40 megger would be a big help.... It low-level formatted fine. Partitioned fine. Took a filesystem format fine....
Not trusting it, I ran a disk analyzer on it for 3 days. No errors. Not even the ones in the bad block sticker on the cover.
Maybe the drive wouldn't work on an RLL controller, or someone used the wrong RLL settings for the drive; but I used that "NFG" drive for 10 years as my main document storage disk. (I also did regular backups, but I do that even if the drive doesn't say NFG.)
Not as much fun was when my mom's steam iron "broke", and my grandfather bought her a nice new one with auto-shutoff for Christmas one year. I took the old one, poured white vinegar in it and let it stand for 30 minutes. Been working fine ever since. I needed an iron for University, but not often enough to want to spend money on one. And my mom really was happier with the lighter model, and much less nervous about burning the house down with the automatic shutoff.
Oh yeah. I did a high school co-op term with a structural engineering firm (which is a specialization under civil engineering).
Some days the air would turn blue from the swearing at some architect's latest vision. "Glass walls AND no interior columns? What will hold it up?" "They want WHAT round?" "Cantilever the elevator shafts? That doesn't even make sense!"
There was one architecture firm whose LOGO took 45 minutes for the plotter to grind out. The actual drawing could be completed in a measly 15 or 20 minutes. (This was 1988, and it was one of those plotters where the pen moves back and forth over a drum, and the drum moves the entire sheet of paper or mylar for the other axis. My job was to abort the plot when the paper skewed.... I like to think there's a building that's only standing because I was able to get the plotter to hold together long enough for the support columns to be plotted on top of their footings. Of course, the engineers would have to verify the plots and sign off before they could be used, but a boy can dream....)
I'll stick with Donald Norman's assertion: "Something that hard to use? It must have won a design award."
That may have been true for the all-in-ones, but the NuBus machines were very upgradeable. NuBus was fast enough for video cards; and the Toolbox ROM knew how to negotiate with the cards to determine if onboard video or slot video was connected, and cards could store their own settings in system PRAM. (Parameter RAM; like the "CMOS RAM" on PCs. Apple generally labels things by function, not technology. Most of the time. Sort of.)
They just happened to use SIMM memory when PCs were still using socketed DIP chips. "Processor Direct" slots for accelerators were common; they were basically the 68000 or 68020 bus exposed in a special slot connector.
Original iMac sales said, "we don't want to mess with it, we want it to work." But even those had accessible DIMM slots; you needed a nickel to get at the slots, though.
Heck, not only do I not mind paying for a satellite radio subscription, I _ALSO_ don't mind paying for an Internet radio subscription; in my case, Digitally Imported and SKY.FM.
In both cases, they work like the radio or TV: You turn it on, it plays. You pick the channel (stream, whatever), and you get whatever they want to send on that channel.
There's NOTHING equivalent to many of the di.fm and sky.fm channels on terrestrial radio in Toronto; and there's nothing equivalent to what I listen to on my XM radio, either. JACK-FM is the closest if I only have an FM radio; but the radio in my car is either playing the AM news/traffic station, the iPod, MP3 CDs, or the XM radio.
Heck, I can even use my SkyFi XM radio in the office--there's a terrestrial repeater tower somewhere at just the right angle to reach my desk.
But why would I wand the dispose-ability of a subscription service with the hassle of picking things of a real purchase? That's like the worst of both worlds. I'll pay for either a service or for particular songs that I can keep: not a mix of the two.