Apple has used just about every HD out there - the Rodime that outlasted just about every other drive I had in those days was shipped as an Apple HDSC 20. It never touched a Mac - it was on my Apple IIgs.
My clients are varied enough to have drives sized anywhere from 500MB SCSI drives that aren't full to terrabyte Xserve RAIDs that are. I don't think many of the drives are older than about '94 vintage, but I see working ones from the late '80s occasionally.
And I agree with you on never having enough myself. My G4 has a 200GB, a 120GB and an 80GB drive right now - and they're nearly full. I'm running 2 Samsung drives and a Toshiba - so far, so good on all of those - but I rarely go more than a year without changing a drive. They fill up so quickly...
I made the mistake of letting Virtual PC have a real IP address without a firewall a few months back, and I got hit within 5 minutes.
(yeah, it was a stupid screwup. The Mac was previously behind a firewall, and then my provider handed me a real subnet when I moved. I needed the Mac outside the firewall to use it for the setup. I left it there for a while (a pretty harmless thing to do with a patched Mac) but then I needed to troubleshoot a windoze issue. I fired up VPC, started working on the problem, and realized too late that I'd set up VPC to be able to DHCP its own IP address, not a shared one.)
I was definitely not seeing problems with FAT32, since if a drive is formatted FAT32 and I'm touching it, it's about to get formatted, and HFS+ and ext3 don't have a problem with >32GB partitions.
I do see quite a bit of 5+ year old hardware, as I primarily work on Apple hardware, and people tend to keep their Macs for quite a while. I'll see in a few years how Maxtor is really doing, as Apple has been using a lot of Maxtor drives in the last 3-4 years. I did replace a lot of Maxtors on the slot-loading iMacs under warranty - but there was generally no data loss, I just replaced them because they were noisy, and Apple covers that.
Apple hasn't used many WD drives since the beige G3s, and I've changed quite a few drives in those. Most of them made it through the warranty, and then the failures started.
I think the industry in general is getting better, though. I'm replacing more drives for capacity reasons and fewer because of failures these days.
In most cases, you don't have to ship it anywhere. Most Apple Authorized Service Providers have a tech who is portable certified, and can work on the computer in the shop.
If the tech trusts you, and the problem is something you can live with, you might not even have to leave your PowerBook in the shop overnight while the shop is waiting on the part. If you're close by, the shop might even pick up and deliver your computer.
Now, if you take it to an Apple Store, it's gonna get shipped...
My experience has been almost the exact opposite. I went through a stretch a few years ago where the average lifetime of a WD drive was about a month, with the quickest failure in 2 days. I give the ones I get back from RMA away - because I know they're going to fail soon, too. I warn the recipients about it, they don't listen, and then they whine at me about the drive failure. I just remind them of my warning not to put any critical data on the drive.
I use a lot of Maxtors these days, because they're cheap. While they don't last like Seagates, they're acceptable for most uses, and in my experience they get annoyingly noisy long before they ever fail.
I think the longest lived drive I've ever had was a Rodime - it was an early 3.5", 20MB SCSI drive, and lasted from 1986 - 2002. It wasn't getting very heavy use those last few years, and finally succumbed to stiction.
You want secure flights? Secure the cockpit door, and then let everybody with a concealed weapon permit carry on the flight.
Law enforcement will NEVER be able to bring us security from ANYTHING. It's not even their job.
And no amount of screening you do will ever keep all weapons off a flight. Somebody can always get through security.
If you just encourage people to carry legally on the flight, you've just made it virtually impossible for the flight to be hijacked. Just sniff for bombs, and your flight is safe.
And you get the reduced inconvenience of being able to go to the airport and get on a plane. I haven't flown since the 9/11 incident - not because I'm afraid of terrorists, I'm not. I haven't flown because I don't want to deal with the "security". And I used to ENJOY flying.
I don't know what kind of third party mouse you're using (it's not an Apple mouse - they only have one button) but most third party mouse drivers have an option to set the type of click sent by the middle button.
My mouse is a Logitech, and the Logitech Control Center has the option to assign a command-click to the middle button. I also know the option also exists in most other mouse driver software.
A command-click is the standard command for opening in a new tab in Firefox. You shouldn't need to hack Mozilla/Firefox to have your third-party mouse work as you want it to.
Yeah, it's stupid to call the cops every time a crime occurs. Do you call the cops every time somebody's parking meter expires? Every time you see somebody run a red light? Do you call them on every car you see speeding?
I should hope not - because calling them for those crimes is stupid and wasteful of public resources.
A kid sneaking into a movie theater is a similar crime. Kick the kid out, or make them buy a ticket. Don't waste taxpayer money persecuting a 16 year old who hasn't done anything that's going to hurt anybody.
It's a common misconception that civil disobedience requires that one intend to get caught.
One of the most effective civil disobedience campaigns of the past century was carried out by people who did everything in their power to avoid getting caught, and it was over entertainment.
That, of course, being the fight against the prohibition of alcohol.
And you're an AC. Which makes your arguement in this case worthless.
But civil disobedience has always encompassed more than just the "do it in front of a cop and go to jail" kind, and it's been equally effective.
For example, people did not deliberately engage in liquor production in front of cops to get prohibition repealed - they did it in secret, and smuggled it into the country. They just did it in such overwhelming numbers that their civil disobedience forced prohibition to be repealed.
And that strategy is much more likely to be effective today in the struggle for copyright reform than a few martyrs.
When I was an undergrad, I copied an IP address from MacTCP on one of the lab machines onto my PowerBook 140.
After this, I could plug my PowerBook into any LocalTalk port on campus. Nobody really worried about filtering, nobody really even cared that I was stealing a lab IP address. The lab guys didn't really even notice that I was walking in, yanking the cable out of one of their computers, and plugging into mine.
I think you've begun to touch on the real problem here. It's not the money being spent, it's not the technology.
It's that most teachers are idiots.
That's right, I said most. Not a few, not even half, most of the teachers in ANY school system are in fact idiots.
Think back to your K-12 education - do you remember a few teachers as actually good, and just forget about the rest of them? I know I do. Now, think about the good ones. How many of those were actually good at using computers? Maybe 1 or 2? Now, try to remember the rest of the teachers. Chances are, they were following the book, a book that they had already used for a few years before you got there. These people barely know their subject, let alone have any ability to use a wireless card. And as you go earlier in your education, the teachers were probably worse - the elementary education people are generally the ones who barely made it through college.
Now, this is NOT intended to disparage the good teachers out there. Those of you who are and are reading this will know who you are - and you will also realize that most of your colleagues are idiots.
How do we fix this? Well, it's unfortunately going to have to be through testing - not for the students, but for the teachers. Standards of acceptable knowledge and ability have to be developed that will raise the standards for teachers need to put in place.
I think that's exactly his point - there would be less hesitation to use such a weapon. Unless you're a psychopath, you're going to have to think more before you fire a weapon that will most likely kill someone, and if you're a politician, you're less likely to order a crowd shot than order them tasered.
Well, in Tennessee, we get our power from the Tennessee Valley Authority - a federal agency. It's distributed by a local government agency, the Knoxville Utilities Board.
My electricity is 6.357 cents per kilowatt hour, all year. I'd say that's a pretty strong case against deregulation, as a government agency is keeping rates LOWER than private industry can manage.
It's only common sense that it would be lower, because the government not only has no profit motive, it is not legally allowed to make a profit.
So careful regulation or even nationalization of all production would be a much better way to go than any sort of deregulation when it comes to utilities.
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No one is making you use a one-button mouse with a laptop either.
Apple portables DON'T EVEN COME WITH MICE. You get your choice if you want to buy one - you can buy Apple's or you can buy a third-party one.
As for the trackpad, you get FAR fewer hand cramps by control-clicking than by trying to hit the right button on a non-Apple laptop.
I use a 5-button logitech mouse on my G4 - I'm very happy with the single button on my iBook trackpad.
My girlfriend insists that I set you straight. A cup of sugar per gallon isn't even close to sufficient.
You should use at least 2 cups per gallon, with 3 per gallon as a preferred sweetning level.
As I'm in Tennessee, I'd imagine that 3 would be more of a minimum further south.
Apple has used just about every HD out there - the Rodime that outlasted just about every other drive I had in those days was shipped as an Apple HDSC 20. It never touched a Mac - it was on my Apple IIgs.
My clients are varied enough to have drives sized anywhere from 500MB SCSI drives that aren't full to terrabyte Xserve RAIDs that are. I don't think many of the drives are older than about '94 vintage, but I see working ones from the late '80s occasionally.
And I agree with you on never having enough myself. My G4 has a 200GB, a 120GB and an 80GB drive right now - and they're nearly full. I'm running 2 Samsung drives and a Toshiba - so far, so good on all of those - but I rarely go more than a year without changing a drive. They fill up so quickly...
I made the mistake of letting Virtual PC have a real IP address without a firewall a few months back, and I got hit within 5 minutes.
(yeah, it was a stupid screwup. The Mac was previously behind a firewall, and then my provider handed me a real subnet when I moved. I needed the Mac outside the firewall to use it for the setup. I left it there for a while (a pretty harmless thing to do with a patched Mac) but then I needed to troubleshoot a windoze issue. I fired up VPC, started working on the problem, and realized too late that I'd set up VPC to be able to DHCP its own IP address, not a shared one.)
But it can happen very quickly.
I was definitely not seeing problems with FAT32, since if a drive is formatted FAT32 and I'm touching it, it's about to get formatted, and HFS+ and ext3 don't have a problem with >32GB partitions.
I do see quite a bit of 5+ year old hardware, as I primarily work on Apple hardware, and people tend to keep their Macs for quite a while. I'll see in a few years how Maxtor is really doing, as Apple has been using a lot of Maxtor drives in the last 3-4 years. I did replace a lot of Maxtors on the slot-loading iMacs under warranty - but there was generally no data loss, I just replaced them because they were noisy, and Apple covers that.
Apple hasn't used many WD drives since the beige G3s, and I've changed quite a few drives in those. Most of them made it through the warranty, and then the failures started.
I think the industry in general is getting better, though. I'm replacing more drives for capacity reasons and fewer because of failures these days.
In most cases, you don't have to ship it anywhere. Most Apple Authorized Service Providers have a tech who is portable certified, and can work on the computer in the shop.
If the tech trusts you, and the problem is something you can live with, you might not even have to leave your PowerBook in the shop overnight while the shop is waiting on the part. If you're close by, the shop might even pick up and deliver your computer.
Now, if you take it to an Apple Store, it's gonna get shipped...
My experience has been almost the exact opposite. I went through a stretch a few years ago where the average lifetime of a WD drive was about a month, with the quickest failure in 2 days. I give the ones I get back from RMA away - because I know they're going to fail soon, too. I warn the recipients about it, they don't listen, and then they whine at me about the drive failure. I just remind them of my warning not to put any critical data on the drive.
I use a lot of Maxtors these days, because they're cheap. While they don't last like Seagates, they're acceptable for most uses, and in my experience they get annoyingly noisy long before they ever fail.
I think the longest lived drive I've ever had was a Rodime - it was an early 3.5", 20MB SCSI drive, and lasted from 1986 - 2002. It wasn't getting very heavy use those last few years, and finally succumbed to stiction.
I think you've got it backwards.
You want secure flights? Secure the cockpit door, and then let everybody with a concealed weapon permit carry on the flight.
Law enforcement will NEVER be able to bring us security from ANYTHING. It's not even their job.
And no amount of screening you do will ever keep all weapons off a flight. Somebody can always get through security.
If you just encourage people to carry legally on the flight, you've just made it virtually impossible for the flight to be hijacked. Just sniff for bombs, and your flight is safe.
And you get the reduced inconvenience of being able to go to the airport and get on a plane. I haven't flown since the 9/11 incident - not because I'm afraid of terrorists, I'm not. I haven't flown because I don't want to deal with the "security". And I used to ENJOY flying.
I don't know what kind of third party mouse you're using (it's not an Apple mouse - they only have one button) but most third party mouse drivers have an option to set the type of click sent by the middle button.
My mouse is a Logitech, and the Logitech Control Center has the option to assign a command-click to the middle button. I also know the option also exists in most other mouse driver software.
A command-click is the standard command for opening in a new tab in Firefox. You shouldn't need to hack Mozilla/Firefox to have your third-party mouse work as you want it to.
What do you want to do with the middle button that it won't do in Firefox?
(my middle button does exactly what I want it to do - open a link in a new tab. You just have to map the middle button to send a command-click.)
But it IS unfair. It's an unfair law. That's the point of disobeying it, isn't it?
It always depends on the crime.
Yeah, it's stupid to call the cops every time a crime occurs. Do you call the cops every time somebody's parking meter expires? Every time you see somebody run a red light? Do you call them on every car you see speeding?
I should hope not - because calling them for those crimes is stupid and wasteful of public resources.
A kid sneaking into a movie theater is a similar crime. Kick the kid out, or make them buy a ticket. Don't waste taxpayer money persecuting a 16 year old who hasn't done anything that's going to hurt anybody.
hmmm... 0.9.1 on Mac OS X here - and I can't seem to duplicate the problem.
It's a common misconception that civil disobedience requires that one intend to get caught.
One of the most effective civil disobedience campaigns of the past century was carried out by people who did everything in their power to avoid getting caught, and it was over entertainment.
That, of course, being the fight against the prohibition of alcohol.
And you're an AC. Which makes your arguement in this case worthless.
But civil disobedience has always encompassed more than just the "do it in front of a cop and go to jail" kind, and it's been equally effective.
For example, people did not deliberately engage in liquor production in front of cops to get prohibition repealed - they did it in secret, and smuggled it into the country. They just did it in such overwhelming numbers that their civil disobedience forced prohibition to be repealed.
And that strategy is much more likely to be effective today in the struggle for copyright reform than a few martyrs.
The disagreement isn't just about what the law says.
It's also about the fact that THE LAW IS WRONG.
What the kid did is harmless, and does not justify spending my tax money to enforce this bad law. The law should be repealed.
At 16? Sure. I'd have no problem letting a few kids get away with it.
If you catch them, make them pay for a ticket. Calling the cops on a kid sneaking into a movie is stupid.
When I was an undergrad, I copied an IP address from MacTCP on one of the lab machines onto my PowerBook 140.
After this, I could plug my PowerBook into any LocalTalk port on campus. Nobody really worried about filtering, nobody really even cared that I was stealing a lab IP address. The lab guys didn't really even notice that I was walking in, yanking the cable out of one of their computers, and plugging into mine.
I'd hate to be going to school these days.
I just need a new CRT for mine... I miss that machine.
But even Arizona has rain sometimes. The last time I was in Phoenix, it rained 3 out of 7 days I was there.
Lasers are always going to have a reliability problem when you're talking about long distances and the possibility of adverse weather.
Of course, if the downtime is acceptable, laser comm is fine. I'm not sure it will be acceptable for most internet users.
As a ham, I'm not thrilled about BPL, but I don't think laser comm will be a solution in most of the country.
Fog?
I think you've begun to touch on the real problem here. It's not the money being spent, it's not the technology.
It's that most teachers are idiots.
That's right, I said most. Not a few, not even half, most of the teachers in ANY school system are in fact idiots.
Think back to your K-12 education - do you remember a few teachers as actually good, and just forget about the rest of them? I know I do. Now, think about the good ones. How many of those were actually good at using computers? Maybe 1 or 2? Now, try to remember the rest of the teachers. Chances are, they were following the book, a book that they had already used for a few years before you got there. These people barely know their subject, let alone have any ability to use a wireless card. And as you go earlier in your education, the teachers were probably worse - the elementary education people are generally the ones who barely made it through college.
Now, this is NOT intended to disparage the good teachers out there. Those of you who are and are reading this will know who you are - and you will also realize that most of your colleagues are idiots.
How do we fix this? Well, it's unfortunately going to have to be through testing - not for the students, but for the teachers. Standards of acceptable knowledge and ability have to be developed that will raise the standards for teachers need to put in place.
I think that's exactly his point - there would be less hesitation to use such a weapon. Unless you're a psychopath, you're going to have to think more before you fire a weapon that will most likely kill someone, and if you're a politician, you're less likely to order a crowd shot than order them tasered.
Well, in Tennessee, we get our power from the Tennessee Valley Authority - a federal agency. It's distributed by a local government agency, the Knoxville Utilities Board.
My electricity is 6.357 cents per kilowatt hour, all year. I'd say that's a pretty strong case against deregulation, as a government agency is keeping rates LOWER than private industry can manage.
It's only common sense that it would be lower, because the government not only has no profit motive, it is not legally allowed to make a profit.
So careful regulation or even nationalization of all production would be a much better way to go than any sort of deregulation when it comes to utilities.
I think you're assuming the individual would be on his or her own. I think there's a very good chance the EFF would jump on this one.