And the best thing they can think of doing with it all is to offer it to T-Mobiles competitors? Seriously? I can think of tons of ways to profit off of all that information.
So buy it from them for $10,000 and make your millions.
RIAA: So you see, your honor, our first round in court was based solely on a technicality as to how we approached the jury, which is why we're asking for as little to change as possible.
Judge: I granted your request to not reference prior cases. Overruled.
RIAA: That's not what the judge in the Napster case...I mean the Sharman Networks/KaZaA case...I mean the Grokster case...dammit.
Judge: Is that all? Because I'd like to finish this in time to get home to watch Judge Judy.
This was stated before, and someone answered it very well. To summarize, what you're talking about isn't what trademark law refers to. Trademark law makes selling fake Coach/Prada/Vuitton purses on a street corner illegal, because they are trying to convince the customer that they're selling something authentic when it is not. Palm doesn't have an Apple logo on their phone, it is being distinctly sold as a Palm phone. Only the computer is tricked; most customers will never see the VID string.
I hope they're also planning on discontinuing the "call dropping" feature that my iPhone seems to have near-complete support for.
It's a feature to ensure that you end up using twice the minutes calling them back saying "sorry I dropped the [NO CARRIER]" a few dozen times, duh! I mean, it'd be so inconsiderate of them to sell you the minutes without ensuring that you use all of them.
It was a different internet when dial-up was the de facto standard. Pages were done in HTML, maybe a little CSS. Pages made entirely in Flash were few and far between. heavily compressed 320x240 video didn't look too bad on our 640x480 screens. Windows came on a CD, and a patch was actual news, not a monthly release cycle. Computers had "unfillable" 4GByte drives; they were unfillable because most of the files we used were small enough to fit on a 3.5" floppy or two. Downloading a song off Napster incurred an assumed 10-30 minute wait time, which was about the time it took to encode your own MP3 anyway. Youtube and Hulu didn't exist. Neither did Photobucket. Neither did horrendously cluttered Myspace pages. The closest thing to "Cloud Computing" was word processing at 37,000 feet. Cell phones themselves were just hitting critical mass.
Yes, the throughput is ~20x faster than dial-up, but there's a near proportional amount of data contained and/or referenced in a web page.
I like the idea in theory, but there's a fly in the ointment. A person who is this addicted and does little besides play an MMO probably isn't very excited about anything but their MMO. All they will do is either talk about their MMO, or try to hurry the conversation along so that they can get back to their MMO. I sincerely doubt that they'd take an interest in listening to stories from real life, either. If they cared about their friends, they'd make some attempt to socialize with them, which the OP has both expressed and implied that it isn't the case. I'm all for trying it, but I'm not convinced it's the solution.
No, the MPAA should now sue Electronic Arts for their lost sales. EA can cite their use of DRM as a means of trying to prevent their customers from playing their games so that they go watch movies instead. The verdict will go to the highest bidder.
I (partially) retract my statement about CCC. I have no idea why you couldn't get it to image your drive. Perhaps it is because you tried AFTER the HD started failing, eh?
I tried CCC once we got the machine back and had reinstalled OSX, iWork, Photoshop Elements, Firefox, VLC, and other misc. utilities. This was on the NEW drive, the first day I'd gotten it back. I wasn't trying to image the defective drive.
You call yourself an "IT consultant", and YET you didn't arrange for a BACKUP system (especially since there is one BUILT IN to the OS!!!). Did you really think that Apple has some magical power over Hard Drive reliabilty? As you yourself pointed out, a Western Digital drive is, afterall, a Western Digital drive. And worse yet, a LAPTOP drive, which are notoriously short-lived (although yours was obviously defective, or subjected to the "drop test" that your Pastor didn't tell you about, or that you didn't want the world to know about...)
I have told the pastor REPEATEDLY to back his data up. I SHOWED him how to burn it to a DVD. I have told him to get an external hard drive for the purpose of backup, but he didn't want to spend his budget money on one. I tried telling him the very point that you make, but he refused to listen. Either I get my head handed to me for spending his money, or something like this ends up happening. I couldn't win.
And yet, you didn't arrange for a backup BEFORE disaster struck.
See Above.
Your failing has nothing to do with Apple; you simply need to hand in your Geek badge. Thanks for playing!
I never said that it was Apple's fault. Again, the question presented was to list something that was harder to do on a Mac than a PC. Disk Imaging over a LAN was my answer. You can have my geek badge. I'll keep my job, paycheck, and phone book full of lady friends.
As you would know if you had bothered to read even the feature page regarding Time Machine, it is designed to work with a DIRECTLY-CONNECTED external Hard Drive. What you are wanting is an Apple product called "Time Capsule" [apple.com], which provides both an Airport Base Station (with print server support), and wired and wireless Time Machine backup services for EVERY Mac on your LAN. Of course you wouldn't know about it, since it's right there under the "Mac" tab of Apple's site...
See above for 1.) why there was no drive connected, and 2.) the fact that backing up wasn't the task that's more difficult, but DISK IMAGING OVER A LAN.
And despite your belated (and disingenuous) protestations of "Not saying that Apple is an inferior product", the the tone of your entire original comment beLIES that statement. So my original "Liar" epithet, though admittedly harsh, applies now more than ever; because you have now lied FURTHER to cover your previous LIES.
I do have an issue with the fact that people believe in the concept that Macs are infallible and immune to the second law of thermodynamics. I did fun telling people about this because they were under the impression that this kind of thing never happens with Macs. I don't believe that they are inferior, I believe that they need the same maintenance and disaster planning as PCs do, and if I had my way, that Mac *would* have had an external drive tethered to it for this very reason. The fact that they didn't listen to me does not make me a liar.
But I expect nothing less from someone who believes in the FSM... [wikia.com]
"The few, the proud, the delusional: the Christian, Conservative, Republican Slashdotters."
There, fixed that sig for ya.
I fail to see how my religious beliefs fit into a technical discussion. If you disagree with me, that's your right and it is not my place to judge you for it. However, I fail to see why people here find it okay to bash me for said beliefs when, to my knowledge, I have NEVER done so to anyone else, and it is completely tangential to the topic at hand. However, if I have come across as being antagonistic or judgmental toward anyone for their religious beliefs, I'd like to take the opportunity to apologize for doing so.
Thisis a common problem for the Dell XPS line. The authentication chip in the power adapter is connected to the motherboard by what amounts to an antenna. Both ends of the circuitry are known to fry at the slightest power surge or EMP. It's not that I literally *couldn't* fix the computer, but it doesn't make fiscal sense for me to buy a $200-$300 motherboard, then spend hours replacing it. His first Dell ended up with the GPU failure that's also well-documented. In both cases, we're talking internal hardware failures that isn't a 2-minute job like RAM or a hard drive. Even if I were to take matters into my own hands, there's not a chance that Dell would honor the warranty on either machine if I had manipulated the guts of the machine.
It's not beneath me to ask for help. I did call Applecare and did go to the Apple store. When I told them the problem, they're like "send it back to us", giving me no guarantee of data integrity. When it came time to do a disk image, the only two answers I got were "Time Machine backs up your photos and documents but I'm not sure what it does with your system files" from the "geniuses" at the Genius Bar, and "We don't officially support that, but you can check our forums" from the phone techs. That's how I found out about Carbon Copy Cloner, which I did try, albeit unsuccessfully.
The experience as I shared it is exactly how it went down. This chain of events happened last week, before the GP ever posed the question. It was never my intention to carry out an ad hominem attack on the GP. He asked the question regarding a specific example of something that took longer to do on a Mac than on a PC. I perfectly accept that a large portion of it is because of my unfamiliarity with the platform. That's no secret and I've admitted to that in my other response as well. However, I have no ill-intent toward the GP. I am not looking to embarrass him. I'm not looking to diminish him in the eyes of others. To the contrary, I will be taking a closer look at Time Machine and CCC. I'm also going to look into adding a Mac Mini to the budget for next fiscal year with the intent of trying all the different things listed here and hopefully learning how to better maintain the platform. If admitting my own fault and doing something to rectify it at the suggestion of the GP is embarrassing to him/her, then I apologize as such. But i have been accused of being a liar, an idiot, and intentionally committing libel the GP, none of which are true.
I tried resetting the permissions on the Windows share. I went so far as to give 'everyone' full control, and log into the share as an admin. OSX wouldn't let me write to it. I might have missed something somewhere, but I simply couldn't get the Mac to write to the network share. It's something I still have to research.
I do intend to take another look at Time Machine as well; a few people have recommended it.
I *did* do the research. I *did* see Carbon Copy Cloner. If you'd like to call me an idiot for not being able to get it to successfully image the machine, then you might have a case there, because I was not able to successfully get it to work. I do not blame Apple for that, and I don't necessarily blame the writer of CCC, either.
I don't consider NTFS an open standard by any stretch of the imagination. But you mention a free app that enables read/write support on NTFS volumes. I'll keep that in mind if such an issue comes up again. However, why isn't HFS+ at least read-only in Windows? I'm sure that's Microsoft's fault...
Does Time Machine work over a LAN? I did look at it, and wasn't able to get it to do so. By time I tethered the drive to the computer, it was already unable to start up.
I don't claim to know everything. My argument wasn't saying that Apple is an inferior product, or that it's necessarily Apple's fault for Acronis and Ghost not working on their platform. The question was posed as to whether there was something that took longer to do on a Mac than a PC. I shared an experience. If you'd like to consider me an inferior IT consultant for not knowing how to image a Mac (as it's the first Mac I'm responsible for and am doing alot of learning of the platform in many other respects), then fine. You would be correct in that regard. But calling me a *liar*, as in being intentionally untruthful? I think that's a bit harsh.
The youth pastor at my church got a Macbook Pro. After having a Dell XPS 1710 and a 1730 which each spent as much time on his desk as it did on a FedEx truck, the money men conceded and spent ~$3,000 between hardware, software, and Applecare.
Two months later, the hard drive dies. The IT director and I admittedly had a little too much fun telling that to everyone, and they were stunned at the fact that the MBP isn't immune to hardware failures (although the looks of disbelief were so entertaining). He and I were fully aware that a Western Digital hard drive is a Western Digital hard drive, and the fact that it was in a Mac didn't make it magically immune to failure.
So, he and I backed up over 150GBytes of data from that drive (a task which required the purchase of third party software, since we didn't have another Mac handy to read the file system and thus had to tether it to a PC) and sent it to Apple to have the drive replaced. Yes, we could have replaced the drive ourselves, but Apple was going to give us the drive for free, and us swapping the drive probably would have voided the warranty (if not by consistent policy, by our dumb luck). We then proceeded to reinstall OSX, along with his apps.
The fun part came when we looked at each other and said, "maybe we should make a Ghost image of this machine, just in case." This is something that both he and I have done dozens of times before with Ghost, Acronis, and PING on Windows machines. It's nearly second nature to us. If this were a Windows machine, we could have had an image made in an hour. Well, we could find no working solution to make an image of this machine over a LAN. Apple treats all FTP and SMB shares as read-only, even with admin accounts. Their Disk Utility doesn't support file splitting, nor can it write to an NTFS formatted drive. No, the only way we were able to perform this task - one that is almost simple enough for me to walk my mom through with Acronis on a PC - was for us to rip another hard drive out of a defunct machine, put it into a USB enclosure, format it with their proprietary file system so no PC can read it, and THEN run Disk Utility's "Create Image" feature (which has no verify option).
Call this paranoia if you choose, the IT director and I call it planning for failure (especially given my youth pastor's track record with laptop longetivity). When something that takes 10 setup minutes on a PC takes 4-5 troubleshooting hours on a Mac, us on-site maintenance people have a rough time vouching for the "just works" selling point of Apple products.
The only thing that requires Silverlight will be the Expression Studio, whose purpose is to compose stuff for Silverlight. Besides, everything I've read indicates that Silverlight is more extensible, has better performance, and (I can't believe I'm saying this) has had fewer security problems than Flash has. I'm generally a platform agnostic, but Silverlight seems to be the better plug-in. I think it's going to be stuck with the same problem as Windows itself as Flash is simply too entrenched and near-universally compatible.
And the vast majority of posts I've read up until this point, have apparently either never worked in retail, or never realized that there was a trend.
when I worked at Staples, I sold cameras and laptops to both men and women. Men were more likely to ask questions about the technical specifications, while women were immediately drawn to the slim, pink/silver camera. There were women who bought the camera specifically because it was pink and for no other reason (which was good, because it was among the worst performing cameras from a technical standpoint). At the same time, there *were* other women who *did* ask about technical specifications. More of the artistic photographers I talked to at the camera rack were women, and they weren't touching the pink camera with a ten foot pole. So obviously, there is a range.
To level the playing field, let's go with a jock-oriented site, where they market their computers for keeping track of Fantasy Baseball scores, ordering beer online, and getting tips for their perfect lawn. Great! If it helps Dell gain a few customers who end up saying, "I hadn't thought of that...", then fine. I don't feel degraded, stereotyped, or any other negative feeling toward Dell. I just won't be a statistic in their browser traffic. As a technical person, I'm going to be browsing cnet, pcworld, and other specifically technical sites. Likewise, women who are tech savvy probably aren't going to buy a Dell because it's pink and they can get dieting tips from it. Della isn't marketing towards tech savvy women, and I don't see how it's degrading that it's targeting a certain demographic.
You're dating yourself
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
It is currently accepted as obligatory to make references to Tony Stark being able to "boot your OS with a Swiss Army Knife..." in a cave. Tell MacGyver to get off your lawn.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone wanna bet that the reason why all the studios switched over to Blu-Ray is *because* it supports more DRM than HD-DVD did?
Or they might lose karma!
Did they have any to begin with that was worth keeping?
*sigh* I thought it was the most well known classic blunder not to start a LAN war in Asia!
*DUCKS*
And the best thing they can think of doing with it all is to offer it to T-Mobiles competitors? Seriously? I can think of tons of ways to profit off of all that information.
So buy it from them for $10,000 and make your millions.
Lawyer: I object!
Judge: On what grounds?
Lawyer: That it's devestating to my case.
there is no excuse for having a movie quote need a 'fixed-that-for-you' post when it can be cut-and-pasted off IMDB.
That would be almost as good.
RIAA: So you see, your honor, our first round in court was based solely on a technicality as to how we approached the jury, which is why we're asking for as little to change as possible.
Judge: I granted your request to not reference prior cases. Overruled.
RIAA: That's not what the judge in the Napster case...I mean the Sharman Networks/KaZaA case...I mean the Grokster case...dammit.
Judge: Is that all? Because I'd like to finish this in time to get home to watch Judge Judy.
RIAA: uhm...think of the children?
This was stated before, and someone answered it very well. To summarize, what you're talking about isn't what trademark law refers to. Trademark law makes selling fake Coach/Prada/Vuitton purses on a street corner illegal, because they are trying to convince the customer that they're selling something authentic when it is not. Palm doesn't have an Apple logo on their phone, it is being distinctly sold as a Palm phone. Only the computer is tricked; most customers will never see the VID string.
(i have a powerful enough comp that makes Crysis cry)
...but does it run Vista?
I hope they're also planning on discontinuing the "call dropping" feature that my iPhone seems to have near-complete support for.
It's a feature to ensure that you end up using twice the minutes calling them back saying "sorry I dropped the [NO CARRIER]" a few dozen times, duh! I mean, it'd be so inconsiderate of them to sell you the minutes without ensuring that you use all of them.
It was a different internet when dial-up was the de facto standard. Pages were done in HTML, maybe a little CSS. Pages made entirely in Flash were few and far between. heavily compressed 320x240 video didn't look too bad on our 640x480 screens. Windows came on a CD, and a patch was actual news, not a monthly release cycle. Computers had "unfillable" 4GByte drives; they were unfillable because most of the files we used were small enough to fit on a 3.5" floppy or two. Downloading a song off Napster incurred an assumed 10-30 minute wait time, which was about the time it took to encode your own MP3 anyway. Youtube and Hulu didn't exist. Neither did Photobucket. Neither did horrendously cluttered Myspace pages. The closest thing to "Cloud Computing" was word processing at 37,000 feet. Cell phones themselves were just hitting critical mass.
Yes, the throughput is ~20x faster than dial-up, but there's a near proportional amount of data contained and/or referenced in a web page.
Woosh!
I like the idea in theory, but there's a fly in the ointment. A person who is this addicted and does little besides play an MMO probably isn't very excited about anything but their MMO. All they will do is either talk about their MMO, or try to hurry the conversation along so that they can get back to their MMO. I sincerely doubt that they'd take an interest in listening to stories from real life, either. If they cared about their friends, they'd make some attempt to socialize with them, which the OP has both expressed and implied that it isn't the case. I'm all for trying it, but I'm not convinced it's the solution.
No, the MPAA should now sue Electronic Arts for their lost sales. EA can cite their use of DRM as a means of trying to prevent their customers from playing their games so that they go watch movies instead. The verdict will go to the highest bidder.
The sequel to this movie is not only an odd number, but it's number 13. Pardon my skepticism.
I (partially) retract my statement about CCC. I have no idea why you couldn't get it to image your drive. Perhaps it is because you tried AFTER the HD started failing, eh?
I tried CCC once we got the machine back and had reinstalled OSX, iWork, Photoshop Elements, Firefox, VLC, and other misc. utilities. This was on the NEW drive, the first day I'd gotten it back. I wasn't trying to image the defective drive.
You call yourself an "IT consultant", and YET you didn't arrange for a BACKUP system (especially since there is one BUILT IN to the OS!!!). Did you really think that Apple has some magical power over Hard Drive reliabilty? As you yourself pointed out, a Western Digital drive is, afterall, a Western Digital drive. And worse yet, a LAPTOP drive, which are notoriously short-lived (although yours was obviously defective, or subjected to the "drop test" that your Pastor didn't tell you about, or that you didn't want the world to know about...)
I have told the pastor REPEATEDLY to back his data up. I SHOWED him how to burn it to a DVD. I have told him to get an external hard drive for the purpose of backup, but he didn't want to spend his budget money on one. I tried telling him the very point that you make, but he refused to listen. Either I get my head handed to me for spending his money, or something like this ends up happening. I couldn't win.
And yet, you didn't arrange for a backup BEFORE disaster struck.
See Above.
Your failing has nothing to do with Apple; you simply need to hand in your Geek badge. Thanks for playing!
I never said that it was Apple's fault. Again, the question presented was to list something that was harder to do on a Mac than a PC. Disk Imaging over a LAN was my answer. You can have my geek badge. I'll keep my job, paycheck, and phone book full of lady friends.
As you would know if you had bothered to read even the feature page regarding Time Machine, it is designed to work with a DIRECTLY-CONNECTED external Hard Drive. What you are wanting is an Apple product called "Time Capsule" [apple.com], which provides both an Airport Base Station (with print server support), and wired and wireless Time Machine backup services for EVERY Mac on your LAN. Of course you wouldn't know about it, since it's right there under the "Mac" tab of Apple's site...
See above for 1.) why there was no drive connected, and 2.) the fact that backing up wasn't the task that's more difficult, but DISK IMAGING OVER A LAN.
And despite your belated (and disingenuous) protestations of "Not saying that Apple is an inferior product", the the tone of your entire original comment beLIES that statement. So my original "Liar" epithet, though admittedly harsh, applies now more than ever; because you have now lied FURTHER to cover your previous LIES.
I do have an issue with the fact that people believe in the concept that Macs are infallible and immune to the second law of thermodynamics. I did fun telling people about this because they were under the impression that this kind of thing never happens with Macs. I don't believe that they are inferior, I believe that they need the same maintenance and disaster planning as PCs do, and if I had my way, that Mac *would* have had an external drive tethered to it for this very reason. The fact that they didn't listen to me does not make me a liar.
But I expect nothing less from someone who believes in the FSM... [wikia.com]
"The few, the proud, the delusional: the Christian, Conservative, Republican Slashdotters."
There, fixed that sig for ya.
I fail to see how my religious beliefs fit into a technical discussion. If you disagree with me, that's your right and it is not my place to judge you for it. However, I fail to see why people here find it okay to bash me for said beliefs when, to my knowledge, I have NEVER done so to anyone else, and it is completely tangential to the topic at hand. However, if I have come across as being antagonistic or judgmental toward anyone for their religious beliefs, I'd like to take the opportunity to apologize for doing so.
I'm definitely saving this. It seems extremely helpful and can't wait to try it!
This is a common problem for the Dell XPS line. The authentication chip in the power adapter is connected to the motherboard by what amounts to an antenna. Both ends of the circuitry are known to fry at the slightest power surge or EMP. It's not that I literally *couldn't* fix the computer, but it doesn't make fiscal sense for me to buy a $200-$300 motherboard, then spend hours replacing it. His first Dell ended up with the GPU failure that's also well-documented. In both cases, we're talking internal hardware failures that isn't a 2-minute job like RAM or a hard drive. Even if I were to take matters into my own hands, there's not a chance that Dell would honor the warranty on either machine if I had manipulated the guts of the machine.
It's not beneath me to ask for help. I did call Applecare and did go to the Apple store. When I told them the problem, they're like "send it back to us", giving me no guarantee of data integrity. When it came time to do a disk image, the only two answers I got were "Time Machine backs up your photos and documents but I'm not sure what it does with your system files" from the "geniuses" at the Genius Bar, and "We don't officially support that, but you can check our forums" from the phone techs. That's how I found out about Carbon Copy Cloner, which I did try, albeit unsuccessfully.
The experience as I shared it is exactly how it went down. This chain of events happened last week, before the GP ever posed the question. It was never my intention to carry out an ad hominem attack on the GP. He asked the question regarding a specific example of something that took longer to do on a Mac than on a PC. I perfectly accept that a large portion of it is because of my unfamiliarity with the platform. That's no secret and I've admitted to that in my other response as well. However, I have no ill-intent toward the GP. I am not looking to embarrass him. I'm not looking to diminish him in the eyes of others. To the contrary, I will be taking a closer look at Time Machine and CCC. I'm also going to look into adding a Mac Mini to the budget for next fiscal year with the intent of trying all the different things listed here and hopefully learning how to better maintain the platform. If admitting my own fault and doing something to rectify it at the suggestion of the GP is embarrassing to him/her, then I apologize as such. But i have been accused of being a liar, an idiot, and intentionally committing libel the GP, none of which are true.
I tried resetting the permissions on the Windows share. I went so far as to give 'everyone' full control, and log into the share as an admin. OSX wouldn't let me write to it. I might have missed something somewhere, but I simply couldn't get the Mac to write to the network share. It's something I still have to research.
I do intend to take another look at Time Machine as well; a few people have recommended it.
I *did* do the research. I *did* see Carbon Copy Cloner. If you'd like to call me an idiot for not being able to get it to successfully image the machine, then you might have a case there, because I was not able to successfully get it to work. I do not blame Apple for that, and I don't necessarily blame the writer of CCC, either.
I don't consider NTFS an open standard by any stretch of the imagination. But you mention a free app that enables read/write support on NTFS volumes. I'll keep that in mind if such an issue comes up again. However, why isn't HFS+ at least read-only in Windows? I'm sure that's Microsoft's fault...
Does Time Machine work over a LAN? I did look at it, and wasn't able to get it to do so. By time I tethered the drive to the computer, it was already unable to start up.
I don't claim to know everything. My argument wasn't saying that Apple is an inferior product, or that it's necessarily Apple's fault for Acronis and Ghost not working on their platform. The question was posed as to whether there was something that took longer to do on a Mac than a PC. I shared an experience. If you'd like to consider me an inferior IT consultant for not knowing how to image a Mac (as it's the first Mac I'm responsible for and am doing alot of learning of the platform in many other respects), then fine. You would be correct in that regard. But calling me a *liar*, as in being intentionally untruthful? I think that's a bit harsh.
The youth pastor at my church got a Macbook Pro. After having a Dell XPS 1710 and a 1730 which each spent as much time on his desk as it did on a FedEx truck, the money men conceded and spent ~$3,000 between hardware, software, and Applecare.
Two months later, the hard drive dies. The IT director and I admittedly had a little too much fun telling that to everyone, and they were stunned at the fact that the MBP isn't immune to hardware failures (although the looks of disbelief were so entertaining). He and I were fully aware that a Western Digital hard drive is a Western Digital hard drive, and the fact that it was in a Mac didn't make it magically immune to failure.
So, he and I backed up over 150GBytes of data from that drive (a task which required the purchase of third party software, since we didn't have another Mac handy to read the file system and thus had to tether it to a PC) and sent it to Apple to have the drive replaced. Yes, we could have replaced the drive ourselves, but Apple was going to give us the drive for free, and us swapping the drive probably would have voided the warranty (if not by consistent policy, by our dumb luck). We then proceeded to reinstall OSX, along with his apps.
The fun part came when we looked at each other and said, "maybe we should make a Ghost image of this machine, just in case." This is something that both he and I have done dozens of times before with Ghost, Acronis, and PING on Windows machines. It's nearly second nature to us. If this were a Windows machine, we could have had an image made in an hour. Well, we could find no working solution to make an image of this machine over a LAN. Apple treats all FTP and SMB shares as read-only, even with admin accounts. Their Disk Utility doesn't support file splitting, nor can it write to an NTFS formatted drive. No, the only way we were able to perform this task - one that is almost simple enough for me to walk my mom through with Acronis on a PC - was for us to rip another hard drive out of a defunct machine, put it into a USB enclosure, format it with their proprietary file system so no PC can read it, and THEN run Disk Utility's "Create Image" feature (which has no verify option).
Call this paranoia if you choose, the IT director and I call it planning for failure (especially given my youth pastor's track record with laptop longetivity). When something that takes 10 setup minutes on a PC takes 4-5 troubleshooting hours on a Mac, us on-site maintenance people have a rough time vouching for the "just works" selling point of Apple products.
The only thing that requires Silverlight will be the Expression Studio, whose purpose is to compose stuff for Silverlight. Besides, everything I've read indicates that Silverlight is more extensible, has better performance, and (I can't believe I'm saying this) has had fewer security problems than Flash has. I'm generally a platform agnostic, but Silverlight seems to be the better plug-in. I think it's going to be stuck with the same problem as Windows itself as Flash is simply too entrenched and near-universally compatible.
I know it's an AC, but mod parent up! Unfortunately, this is simply reality.
Ha ha ha.
As Ballmer's toilet slave you got nothing much to do anyway.
No kidding. It's the only sitting implement that Ballmer can't throw.
And the vast majority of posts I've read up until this point, have apparently either never worked in retail, or never realized that there was a trend.
when I worked at Staples, I sold cameras and laptops to both men and women. Men were more likely to ask questions about the technical specifications, while women were immediately drawn to the slim, pink/silver camera. There were women who bought the camera specifically because it was pink and for no other reason (which was good, because it was among the worst performing cameras from a technical standpoint). At the same time, there *were* other women who *did* ask about technical specifications. More of the artistic photographers I talked to at the camera rack were women, and they weren't touching the pink camera with a ten foot pole. So obviously, there is a range.
To level the playing field, let's go with a jock-oriented site, where they market their computers for keeping track of Fantasy Baseball scores, ordering beer online, and getting tips for their perfect lawn. Great! If it helps Dell gain a few customers who end up saying, "I hadn't thought of that...", then fine. I don't feel degraded, stereotyped, or any other negative feeling toward Dell. I just won't be a statistic in their browser traffic. As a technical person, I'm going to be browsing cnet, pcworld, and other specifically technical sites. Likewise, women who are tech savvy probably aren't going to buy a Dell because it's pink and they can get dieting tips from it. Della isn't marketing towards tech savvy women, and I don't see how it's degrading that it's targeting a certain demographic.
It is currently accepted as obligatory to make references to Tony Stark being able to "boot your OS with a Swiss Army Knife..." in a cave. Tell MacGyver to get off your lawn.