Wow is my experience/opinion different from yours!
I find Quickbooks to be just horrible. I use the Windows version (under VMWare Fusion on my Mac) because the Mac version doesn't even pretend to support the only thing I still use it for (the credit card billing). But even the Windows version (which all of the following is about)...
Well, it is full of just plain bugs. For example, there is an obvious trivial bug in the forms entry for credit card expiration date for a customer's preferred payment method. The month always resets to 12 even if you set it to something else. I called their "customer support" about that one. After about half an hour on the phone with a clueless script-reading "customer support" rep, he obviously decided he had spent too much time and brushed me off (telling me to call the merchant services folk, whose problem it obviously wasn't). I wasn't expecting him to fix the problem, but I was hoping he'd at least pass it on as a bug report; no such luck.
I find the interface incredibly nonintuitive, complicated, awkward... just add every poor adjective you can think of for a poor user interface.
I rapidly gave up downloading my bank statements because it was so awkward to do and messed up so often. It was easier to manually reconcile.
It won't reconcile its own automatic entries. The month-end merchant fees get auto-entered as 2 separate transactions, but show up at the bank as a single combined one... and the reconciliation won't let you reconcile a single bank-downloaded entry to multiple transactions (like Quicken can).
And a host of other problems and awkward things that would make this post longer than the too long that it already is.
Eventually, I gave up on using Quickbooks for everything except the credit card billing (which actually does reasonably match my needs, in spite of the darned reset-month-to-12 bug). I moved everything else to Quicken Home&Business and I double enter credit card deposits in both Quickbooks and Quicken; the double entry is actually easier than fighting with Quickbook's management of my checking account.
Not that I'm thrilled with Quicken. I'm debating switching (possibly to MoneyDance) at the end of this year. But it is worlds better than Quickbooks. It seems obvious to me that Quickbooks and Quicken were done by entirely different groups, and it also seems obvious which group has a better handle on user interface.
I was intrigued when I saw that it was a drm-free game and had a Mac version available. That's two thumbs up for me. Saw that it had a playable demo. (A third thumb?) Played with the demo a little and decided it seemed at least half decent. Ok, out of thumbs, Bought a copy.
Oh, and I then sent them a short email saying pretty much the above, so that they know those things influenced my purchase.
Hmm. And it looks like a good xmas gift for one of my nephews. I'll likely buy a second one for that.
Well, if you are going to go there, I suppose one might mention that "human-powered" should be hyphenated when used as an adjective. Without the hyphen, I'm afraid that it would be a powered boat that was also human. Shades of Asimov.:-)
There are many variants of #1. The basic element is that, for just about any reason, they send you a check and ask for you to deposit it and send part of it back. Within that framework, the variants are wide.
I've personally seen several cases of one variant. My wife runs a math tutoring center. A "prospective client" contacts us by email to arrange tutoring for his son, who will be in the US a few months (allegedly from the UK). They propose to pay in advance for the tutoring... and also to include extra funds that we are supposed to forward to some "relative" who will be using them for... whatever... the latest one was for the plane ticket back.
We've gotten 2 of these, and other tutoring centers in the same chain also report getting them. No, we didn't fall for them.
You said that they looked at your data "presumably, in order to tell me what I was doing wrong." It sounds to me that you were asking for help and they were trying to provide it. I'm having trouble seeing the problem here, either practically or legally. Most privacy policies that I've seen quite reasonably say that the host can look at data as directly needed to provide you the service in question. That's sort of implied by your asking for the service - in this case your support request. For example, they can use your address to send you bills, etc.
Now perhaps the support folk were incorrect in thinking that the data in question was needed to solve the problem in question. I can't judge that from the data given. But that seems more like a support competency question than a privacy one. You suggested that you had other reasons to question their support competency (not that this is unusual, as you note.)
The followon stuff with their replies to your complaint does seem to get into the privacy issues, but maybe you got off on the wrong foot and it went downhill with their attempts at rationalization.
The difference between this guy and Daryl is that Daryl won. No, he didn't win the lawsuits, but that's a small detail. He walked away from it all a rich man. He won. With our legal system, it is quite easy to win a suit and come away having lost money big time. It is also possible to loose a suit, while getting rich in the process, although that's not so easy a trick to pull. Daryl managed. I'm not at all sure Daryl is stupid. Crooked - yes; stupid - not so clear at all.
Indeed, it apparently would shock interstellar donkey to know that tech-savy people sometimes have criteria other than the cheapest box they can find. For example, they are often well paid and would prefer not to have to waste a lot of their time fiddling with system-level things of their desktop computer.
I personally sysadmined and otherwise managed multiple computers, including the main central ones at a NASA center. I designed several of the major systems there. I think I count as tech savy, and I know quite a lot of other people who are. We also had a technical Apple sales representative (one who could actually "speak Unix") specifically marketting Apple stuff to us, so I'm a bit puzzled where he came from if Apple doesn't do the kinds of things he was doing, as interstellar donkey appears to claim.
Sure, I could put together my own boxes; I've done that. I've also bought boxes from Dell. My time happens to be more valuable than any price difference involved. Last time I checked, the hardware cost of a box was almost negligible compared to the cost of keeping one supported in our environment. I'd expect anyone who had actually worked in a professional environment full of technical people to know this. Or is Donkey's notion of "tech savy" restricted to hobyists?
As with others, I am amazed at quite how dumb the fox news reporter was. I don't normally watch fox, so I guess I wasn't adequately prepared. Wow!
But frankly the slashdot article wasn't a whole lot better. No, NASA didn't "unveil" anything, contrary to th earticle, which even emphasizes that it was the "real" thing. There isn't anything to unveil (well, not that we know about, I should say). This was clearly described as a simulation. Perhaps the slashdot poster has been sitting in his basement too long and forgot the difference between simulations and reality.
That difference applies to aircraft too - not just sex - an area where stereotypical slashdot posters are also alleged to go in for simulation in lieu of reality.
Oh, and in reply to another followup. No, the X-43 was not anything even particularly close to the same thing. Everything that goes fast isn't automatically the same technology.
Yes, I understand there is a difference between "cover story" and "cover up". If you'll check the citations, you'll see that the ABC news one uses "cover up". That's what I was referring to. Now that you point it out, I see that the slashdot title used "cover story", which term isn't actually used in either of the citations, but then we know about slashdot misquotations. They are so common as to barely be worth noting.:-(
The two cited sources actually contradict each other. One says, like the slashdot headline, that the Titanic search was a cover-up. However, the other source directly quotes the searcher and makes it clear that it was not at all a cover-up, but rather the opposite - something that accidentally drew attention when it unexpectedly succeeded. There was concern that the attention might also raise other questions.
Methinks that some of the news media just likes to use the word cover-up, without particular regard for whether or not it fits.
Perhaps you failed to actually read what I said before deciding it was worth replying with such profanity. I rather specifically said that I was talking about stuff *NOT* done on government time and equipment. From other posts, it seems like we were being held to the pre-1993 rules; I don't know why. Of course, about 20 years of my time was pre-1993, so that would have made "sense" then.
You also apparently have trouble with English comprehension in that I rather explicitly referred to the "ethics" training in general, rather than solely to the Hatch act stuff, which was just one part. For example, the "ethics training" was full of details about what the exact penalties for various things were.
Perhaps your sense of ethics depends on what the penalties are. Mine doesn't.
My notion of ethics also doesn't have monetary cutoffs saying that it is fine to accept a gift of $24, but unethical to accept one of $26. That's a distinction of law - not of ethics. But it was part of our "ethics training".
One of my "favorites" early in my career was the conclusion that the combination of several "ethics" laws required me to limit my work to things far below my best capabilities, which seemed pretty unethical to me. Not worth elaborating the details. (The short form is that I was required to work according to my job description, which was required to match my grade, which was limited by time in service, even though I could do work several levels higher). Me and my boss both agreed that this was silly (and unethical), so we just ignored it, but that was the "official" position from the personnell office.
I suppose that since you think it is bullshit to claim that laws and ethics don't always match perfectly, you must agree that it would have been ethical for me to sit on my ass 3/4 of the time after I had finished everything that my job description said I was capable of.
Oh, that's not what you meant? Then perhaps you ought to be a little less quick with the profanity-laced judgments.
I was (before retirement) a NASA employee for 35 years, and I do know the Hatch act well... as I ought to, it being drilled into us every year at mandatory and really boring "ethics" training. I feel it mandatory to quote "ethics" because it was just about laws and nothing about actual ethics, the subjects two having less correlation than one might hope. The article, and most of the posters here, are seriously misrepresenting the Hatch act.
In particular, the Hatch act has nothing to do with whether you are at work or not. The Hatch act prohibits a government employee from doing pretty much anything political even on your own time and with your own equipment. It is pretty draconian. And, of course, it only applies to peons; those high-level muck-a-mucks who are most likely to be abusing their positions are exempt. The excuse for all this is that it "protects" the employees from political pressure. Pretty lame excuse, though.
The bit about doing this stuff on government time is completely unrelated to the Hatch act. That's a distinctly separate offense, and one for which there is much less excuse.
It is unclear from the article whether the suspension was really because of the Hatch act offense or the use of government time.equipment. I suppose it could have been both.
Amen. I personally *FAR* prefer Apple's current model. Objective data (sales) suggests that I'm not the only one.
With the current model, I buy just what I want and then I have it forever. Yes, even if Apple goes out of business or otherwise changes their mind.
Even Apple's current DRM'ed stuff has a far less painful DRM than any other I've seen. I haven't actually ever wanted to do anything with it that I wasn't allowed to do. Plus Apple allows you to burn to a completely un-DRM'ed cd. No DRM at all would be nicer, but every other version I've seen strikes me as worse than Apple's.
It is also true that I don't buy huge amounts of new music. I'm sure that any premium would end up with me paying many times more than what I'm paying now, for the same music.
I'd say that anyone who thinks that such a change would constitute "getting it", doesn't "get it" themselves. At least, they don't "get" me.
I got an account with them a few years ago. They had the worst service I've ever seen in a bank... and I've seen pretty bad. The attitude was also clearly that they didn't care. I closed my account after just a few months.
That "feature" greatly annoyed me also. In addition to the distraction, it substantially slowed down the launch (which is slow enough anyway). It did *NOT* go away when you went to a non-beta version, as suggested by another poster here - not to speak of the fact that there was an awful long time (a year or so? - I forget), when there was non non-beta version. I haven't checked the new version yet (I see someone says the "feature" went away), but after I griped enough, someone pointed me to a way to disable it in the prior versions. Create files named.noshowdonationpage and.nocheckforpatches in the Contents/MacOS dir of the app.
Yes, but you are just asking for the claims to actually be factual. You apparently forget that we are talking about advertising here.:-(
One doesn't need to make up excuses like "by visible, they mean visible by the naked eye." The real explanation is much simpler: this is advertising and they don't really care whether or not they are telling the truth. Wouldn't be at all surprising if other cases also happened to be visible to the naked eye before. It isn't as though you'd expect them to have actually researched the question to make sure that they were telling the truth under any interpretation.
This is news? I thought the article was going to actually tell me that there was some new development. For about a decade, I've used CFL's for every bulb in the house except for the ones on dimmers, so their existance is scarcely news.
The bit about PS/2 keyboards not being hot-pluggable is mujch more important than one might think. It isn't just that you can't plug and unplug your keyboard on the fly and have it work; there aren't too many times that you'd want to do that anyway. It is that unplugging the keyboard, even by accident, can damage the hardware. That's true in theory for lots of kinds of hardware, but I've done my share of "bad" things like pugging in hot serial cables; the odds of doing permament damage are low enough to ignore. But not for PS/2 connectors. I have personally had to do motherboard replacements (which snowballed into replacing pretty much the whole computer) because of a PS/2 keyboard connector getting accidentally dislodged. Twice. That's a bitch.
I recall that one of the times, I had the system booted in Linux and could still remotely access it via telnet/ssh et al. Then I tried to reboot. Reboot hung on the infamous "no keyboard detected, hit F1 to continue". If I had planned ahead, I could have set the BIOS option to ignore keyboard errors and perhaps been able to use the box for server functions that didn't need a keyboard. But it needs a keyboard to set the option.
I am really cautious about PS/2 connectors - and I get worried whenever I see that one has come a bit loose (as happens alll too easily with some of them).
I'd probably mod your followup also as flamebait, if I hadn't already posted on the topic.:-)
If you think it is no better than mediocre, that's a fine opinion for you to have. But for you to claim that anyone who feels otherwise could not have used anything else - that's just flaming.
I happen to be quite pleased with Parallels (in spite of the games issue). I've also owned and used multiple copies of Virtual PC and VMWare, and I've done double-boot systems (and even a few triple-boot ones with Linux, Win XP, and Win 98). THat doesn't guarantee that my evaluation is a good one, but if so, that's not because I haven't yet used anything else.
I once tried the comparable thing on one of my Linux+Windows systems with VMWare. I took a multi-boot system and then set up VMWare so that it could use the WIndows partition with its virtual macine. Sort of worked, but...
Realize that Windows "sees" different hardware depending on whether it is running natively or virtually. This means that it needs different drivers for the 2 cases. There is a way to set up multiple hardware configurations like that in Windows, but I found it to be very painful and fragile. As a result, I gave up on that setup. I haven't done the same thing with Parallels yet (I don't think it yet upports it), but my prior experience makes me cautious.
No, the "standalone" package does not come with XP. It comes with... that would be nothing other than Virtual PC. One might even say that it was stanalone.:-) I own several copies of the stanadlone package, so I know this first hand. You can buy a package with XP included, but that's not the standalone one - and it costs more than $129.
I also own a purchased copy of Parallels (not for the same machine, as the set of machines that will run Parallels has no intersection with the set that will run Virtual PC). Although they are similar is some sense, that similarity dissapears once you move beyond something static like a screen shot. Virtual PC is god-awful slow. Also, I have suceeded in crashing a Mac using Virtual PC, while I haven't yet done so using Parallels. That part of the comparison might be unfair, as I haven't yet put much time into Parallels.
The parent in question is explicitly talking about boot camp, not Parallels, running Oblivion well.
This agrees well with other reports and with common sense. An x1600, even underclocked, ought to be able to run Oblivion well. While it might not be the uber screaming chip for the macho teenagers using their computers as a measure of penis size, it is pretty decent. For example, it is better than any of the graphics chips I happen to have in any of my Windows boxes (one of which runs Oblivion pretty well, and the other of which is more like ok).
When is this that you left? If it was in the last few years, then all I can say is that you must have had an awfully narrow perspective. Macs are very big in many areas of scientific and technical work today. In particular, there is a huge difference between OS X and previous Mac systems. The Unix base of OS X has attracted large numbers of scientific and engineeering users. If your experience was pre-OSX, then it almost doesn't count; it is a different world in terms of scientific stuff.
I'm typing this on my Mac. I've got a Linux box at my desk also, but haven't bothered to even power it on for several months.
Do I know of any current scientific Mac apps? Yes. Start with almost all the Unix/X11 apps. That's a lot, including some specilaized ones that I wrote for my area.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow is my experience/opinion different from yours!
I find Quickbooks to be just horrible. I use the Windows version (under VMWare Fusion on my Mac) because the Mac version doesn't even pretend to support the only thing I still use it for (the credit card billing). But even the Windows version (which all of the following is about)...
Well, it is full of just plain bugs. For example, there is an obvious trivial bug in the forms entry for credit card expiration date for a customer's preferred payment method. The month always resets to 12 even if you set it to something else. I called their "customer support" about that one. After about half an hour on the phone with a clueless script-reading "customer support" rep, he obviously decided he had spent too much time and brushed me off (telling me to call the merchant services folk, whose problem it obviously wasn't). I wasn't expecting him to fix the problem, but I was hoping he'd at least pass it on as a bug report; no such luck.
I find the interface incredibly nonintuitive, complicated, awkward... just add every poor adjective you can think of for a poor user interface.
I rapidly gave up downloading my bank statements because it was so awkward to do and messed up so often. It was easier to manually reconcile.
It won't reconcile its own automatic entries. The month-end merchant fees get auto-entered as 2 separate transactions, but show up at the bank as a single combined one... and the reconciliation won't let you reconcile a single bank-downloaded entry to multiple transactions (like Quicken can).
And a host of other problems and awkward things that would make this post longer than the too long that it already is.
Eventually, I gave up on using Quickbooks for everything except the credit card billing (which actually does reasonably match my needs, in spite of the darned reset-month-to-12 bug). I moved everything else to Quicken Home&Business and I double enter credit card deposits in both Quickbooks and Quicken; the double entry is actually easier than fighting with Quickbook's management of my checking account.
Not that I'm thrilled with Quicken. I'm debating switching (possibly to MoneyDance) at the end of this year. But it is worlds better than Quickbooks. It seems obvious to me that Quickbooks and Quicken were done by entirely different groups, and it also seems obvious which group has a better handle on user interface.
Yup. Me too. I guess slashvertizing works.
I was intrigued when I saw that it was a drm-free game and had a Mac version available. That's two thumbs up for me. Saw that it had a playable demo. (A third thumb?) Played with the demo a little and decided it seemed at least half decent. Ok, out of thumbs, Bought a copy.
Oh, and I then sent them a short email saying pretty much the above, so that they know those things influenced my purchase.
Hmm. And it looks like a good xmas gift for one of my nephews. I'll likely buy a second one for that.
Well, if you are going to go there, I suppose one might mention that "human-powered" should be hyphenated when used as an adjective. Without the hyphen, I'm afraid that it would be a powered boat that was also human. Shades of Asimov. :-)
There are many variants of #1. The basic element is that, for just about any reason, they send you a check and ask for you to deposit it and send part of it back. Within that framework, the variants are wide.
I've personally seen several cases of one variant. My wife runs a math tutoring center. A "prospective client" contacts us by email to arrange tutoring for his son, who will be in the US a few months (allegedly from the UK). They propose to pay in advance for the tutoring... and also to include extra funds that we are supposed to forward to some "relative" who will be using them for... whatever... the latest one was for the plane ticket back.
We've gotten 2 of these, and other tutoring centers in the same chain also report getting them. No, we didn't fall for them.
I'm not sure I see the problem here.
You said that they looked at your data "presumably, in order to tell me what I was doing wrong." It sounds to me that you were asking for help and they were trying to provide it. I'm having trouble seeing the problem here, either practically or legally. Most privacy policies that I've seen quite reasonably say that the host can look at data as directly needed to provide you the service in question. That's sort of implied by your asking for the service - in this case your support request. For example, they can use your address to send you bills, etc.
Now perhaps the support folk were incorrect in thinking that the data in question was needed to solve the problem in question. I can't judge that from the data given. But that seems more like a support competency question than a privacy one. You suggested that you had other reasons to question their support competency (not that this is unusual, as you note.)
The followon stuff with their replies to your complaint does seem to get into the privacy issues, but maybe you got off on the wrong foot and it went downhill with their attempts at rationalization.
The difference between this guy and Daryl is that Daryl won. No, he didn't win the lawsuits, but that's a small detail. He walked away from it all a rich man. He won. With our legal system, it is quite easy to win a suit and come away having lost money big time. It is also possible to loose a suit, while getting rich in the process, although that's not so easy a trick to pull. Daryl managed. I'm not at all sure Daryl is stupid. Crooked - yes; stupid - not so clear at all.
JLR, on the other hand, is in prison.
Indeed, it apparently would shock interstellar donkey to know that tech-savy people sometimes have criteria other than the cheapest box they can find. For example, they are often well paid and would prefer not to have to waste a lot of their time fiddling with system-level things of their desktop computer.
I personally sysadmined and otherwise managed multiple computers, including the main central ones at a NASA center. I designed several of the major systems there. I think I count as tech savy, and I know quite a lot of other people who are. We also had a technical Apple sales representative (one who could actually "speak Unix") specifically marketting Apple stuff to us, so I'm a bit puzzled where he came from if Apple doesn't do the kinds of things he was doing, as interstellar donkey appears to claim.
Sure, I could put together my own boxes; I've done that. I've also bought boxes from Dell. My time happens to be more valuable than any price difference involved. Last time I checked, the hardware cost of a box was almost negligible compared to the cost of keeping one supported in our environment. I'd expect anyone who had actually worked in a professional environment full of technical people to know this. Or is Donkey's notion of "tech savy" restricted to hobyists?
As with others, I am amazed at quite how dumb the fox news reporter was. I don't normally watch fox, so I guess I wasn't adequately prepared. Wow!
But frankly the slashdot article wasn't a whole lot better. No, NASA didn't "unveil" anything, contrary to th earticle, which even emphasizes that it was the "real" thing. There isn't anything to unveil (well, not that we know about, I should say). This was clearly described as a simulation. Perhaps the slashdot poster has been sitting in his basement too long and forgot the difference between simulations and reality.
That difference applies to aircraft too - not just sex - an area where stereotypical slashdot posters are also alleged to go in for simulation in lieu of reality.
Oh, and in reply to another followup. No, the X-43 was not anything even particularly close to the same thing. Everything that goes fast isn't automatically the same technology.
Yes, I understand there is a difference between "cover story" and "cover up". If you'll check the citations, you'll see that the ABC news one uses "cover up". That's what I was referring to. Now that you point it out, I see that the slashdot title used "cover story", which term isn't actually used in either of the citations, but then we know about slashdot misquotations. They are so common as to barely be worth noting. :-(
The two cited sources actually contradict each other. One says, like the slashdot headline, that the Titanic search was a cover-up. However, the other source directly quotes the searcher and makes it clear that it was not at all a cover-up, but rather the opposite - something that accidentally drew attention when it unexpectedly succeeded. There was concern that the attention might also raise other questions.
Methinks that some of the news media just likes to use the word cover-up, without particular regard for whether or not it fits.
Nice attitude, there, eh?
Perhaps you failed to actually read what I said before deciding it was worth replying with such profanity. I rather specifically said that I was talking about stuff *NOT* done on government time and equipment. From other posts, it seems like we were being held to the pre-1993 rules; I don't know why. Of course, about 20 years of my time was pre-1993, so that would have made "sense" then.
You also apparently have trouble with English comprehension in that I rather explicitly referred to the "ethics" training in general, rather than solely to the Hatch act stuff, which was just one part. For example, the "ethics training" was full of details about what the exact penalties for various things were.
Perhaps your sense of ethics depends on what the penalties are. Mine doesn't.
My notion of ethics also doesn't have monetary cutoffs saying that it is fine to accept a gift of $24, but unethical to accept one of $26. That's a distinction of law - not of ethics. But it was part of our "ethics training".
One of my "favorites" early in my career was the conclusion that the combination of several "ethics" laws required me to limit my work to things far below my best capabilities, which seemed pretty unethical to me. Not worth elaborating the details. (The short form is that I was required to work according to my job description, which was required to match my grade, which was limited by time in service, even though I could do work several levels higher). Me and my boss both agreed that this was silly (and unethical), so we just ignored it, but that was the "official" position from the personnell office.
I suppose that since you think it is bullshit to claim that laws and ethics don't always match perfectly, you must agree that it would have been ethical for me to sit on my ass 3/4 of the time after I had finished everything that my job description said I was capable of.
Oh, that's not what you meant? Then perhaps you ought to be a little less quick with the profanity-laced judgments.
I was (before retirement) a NASA employee for 35 years, and I do know the Hatch act well... as I ought to, it being drilled into us every year at mandatory and really boring "ethics" training. I feel it mandatory to quote "ethics" because it was just about laws and nothing about actual ethics, the subjects two having less correlation than one might hope. The article, and most of the posters here, are seriously misrepresenting the Hatch act.
In particular, the Hatch act has nothing to do with whether you are at work or not. The Hatch act prohibits a government employee from doing pretty much anything political even on your own time and with your own equipment. It is pretty draconian. And, of course, it only applies to peons; those high-level muck-a-mucks who are most likely to be abusing their positions are exempt. The excuse for all this is that it "protects" the employees from political pressure. Pretty lame excuse, though.
The bit about doing this stuff on government time is completely unrelated to the Hatch act. That's a distinctly separate offense, and one for which there is much less excuse.
It is unclear from the article whether the suspension was really because of the Hatch act offense or the use of government time.equipment. I suppose it could have been both.
Amen. I personally *FAR* prefer Apple's current model. Objective data (sales) suggests that I'm not the only one.
With the current model, I buy just what I want and then I have it forever. Yes, even if Apple goes out of business or otherwise changes their mind.
Even Apple's current DRM'ed stuff has a far less painful DRM than any other I've seen. I haven't actually ever wanted to do anything with it that I wasn't allowed to do. Plus Apple allows you to burn to a completely un-DRM'ed cd. No DRM at all would be nicer, but every other version I've seen strikes me as worse than Apple's.
It is also true that I don't buy huge amounts of new music. I'm sure that any premium would end up with me paying many times more than what I'm paying now, for the same music.
I'd say that anyone who thinks that such a change would constitute "getting it", doesn't "get it" themselves. At least, they don't "get" me.
Makes one wonder what to say about how easy it is to confuse the likes of those who write slashdot summaries. :-)
I guess experiences and viewpoints differ.
I got an account with them a few years ago. They had the worst service I've ever seen in a bank... and I've seen pretty bad. The attitude was also clearly that they didn't care. I closed my account after just a few months.
That "feature" greatly annoyed me also. In addition to the distraction, it substantially slowed down the launch (which is slow enough anyway). It did *NOT* go away when you went to a non-beta version, as suggested by another poster here - not to speak of the fact that there was an awful long time (a year or so? - I forget), when there was non non-beta version. I haven't checked the new version yet (I see someone says the "feature" went away), but after I griped enough, someone pointed me to a way to disable it in the prior versions. Create files named .noshowdonationpage and .nocheckforpatches in the Contents/MacOS dir of the app.
Yes, but you are just asking for the claims to actually be factual. You apparently forget that we are talking about advertising here. :-(
One doesn't need to make up excuses like "by visible, they mean visible by the naked eye." The real explanation is much simpler: this is advertising and they don't really care whether or not they are telling the truth. Wouldn't be at all surprising if other cases also happened to be visible to the naked eye before. It isn't as though you'd expect them to have actually researched the question to make sure that they were telling the truth under any interpretation.
This is news? I thought the article was going to actually tell me that there was some new development. For about a decade, I've used CFL's for every bulb in the house except for the ones on dimmers, so their existance is scarcely news.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
The bit about PS/2 keyboards not being hot-pluggable is mujch more important than one might think. It isn't just that you can't plug and unplug your keyboard on the fly and have it work; there aren't too many times that you'd want to do that anyway. It is that unplugging the keyboard, even by accident, can damage the hardware. That's true in theory for lots of kinds of hardware, but I've done my share of "bad" things like pugging in hot serial cables; the odds of doing permament damage are low enough to ignore. But not for PS/2 connectors. I have personally had to do motherboard replacements (which snowballed into replacing pretty much the whole computer) because of a PS/2 keyboard connector getting accidentally dislodged. Twice. That's a bitch.
I recall that one of the times, I had the system booted in Linux and could still remotely access it via telnet/ssh et al. Then I tried to reboot. Reboot hung on the infamous "no keyboard detected, hit F1 to continue". If I had planned ahead, I could have set the BIOS option to ignore keyboard errors and perhaps been able to use the box for server functions that didn't need a keyboard. But it needs a keyboard to set the option.
I am really cautious about PS/2 connectors - and I get worried whenever I see that one has come a bit loose (as happens alll too easily with some of them).
What everyone obviously missed is that the energy is free as in speech. You can talk about it all you want. :-)
:-)
Free as in beer though... you expect an Irishman to be offering you free beer?
I'd probably mod your followup also as flamebait, if I hadn't already posted on the topic. :-)
If you think it is no better than mediocre, that's a fine opinion for you to have. But for you to claim that anyone who feels otherwise could not have used anything else - that's just flaming.
I happen to be quite pleased with Parallels (in spite of the games issue). I've also owned and used multiple copies of Virtual PC and VMWare, and I've done double-boot systems (and even a few triple-boot ones with Linux, Win XP, and Win 98). THat doesn't guarantee that my evaluation is a good one, but if so, that's not because I haven't yet used anything else.
I once tried the comparable thing on one of my Linux+Windows systems with VMWare. I took a multi-boot system and then set up VMWare so that it could use the WIndows partition with its virtual macine. Sort of worked, but...
Realize that Windows "sees" different hardware depending on whether it is running natively or virtually. This means that it needs different drivers for the 2 cases. There is a way to set up multiple hardware configurations like that in Windows, but I found it to be very painful and fragile. As a result, I gave up on that setup. I haven't done the same thing with Parallels yet (I don't think it yet upports it), but my prior experience makes me cautious.
Surprised nobody else corrected you yet, but...
:-) I own several copies of the stanadlone package, so I know this first hand. You can buy a package with XP included, but that's not the standalone one - and it costs more than $129.
No, the "standalone" package does not come with XP. It comes with... that would be nothing other than Virtual PC. One might even say that it was stanalone.
I also own a purchased copy of Parallels (not for the same machine, as the set of machines that will run Parallels has no intersection with the set that will run Virtual PC). Although they are similar is some sense, that similarity dissapears once you move beyond something static like a screen shot. Virtual PC is god-awful slow. Also, I have suceeded in crashing a Mac using Virtual PC, while I haven't yet done so using Parallels. That part of the comparison might be unfair, as I haven't yet put much time into Parallels.
mod -1, failure to read parent article.
The parent in question is explicitly talking about boot camp, not Parallels, running Oblivion well.
This agrees well with other reports and with common sense. An x1600, even underclocked, ought to be able to run Oblivion well. While it might not be the uber screaming chip for the macho teenagers using their computers as a measure of penis size, it is pretty decent. For example, it is better than any of the graphics chips I happen to have in any of my Windows boxes (one of which runs Oblivion pretty well, and the other of which is more like ok).
When is this that you left? If it was in the last few years, then all I can say is that you must have had an awfully narrow perspective. Macs are very big in many areas of scientific and technical work today. In particular, there is a huge difference between OS X and previous Mac systems. The Unix base of OS X has attracted large numbers of scientific and engineeering users. If your experience was pre-OSX, then it almost doesn't count; it is a different world in terms of scientific stuff.
I'm typing this on my Mac. I've got a Linux box at my desk also, but haven't bothered to even power it on for several months.
Do I know of any current scientific Mac apps? Yes. Start with almost all the Unix/X11 apps. That's a lot, including some specilaized ones that I wrote for my area.