A lot of what I do can be done offline, although I use the Web a lot to download scientific journal articles (I work in a med school research lab). However, while you may say "go down to the library and photocopy the articles you need", that only works in some cases. Photocopies are far more expensive for color pages (so we photocopy in greyscale only) and the print versions of many journals are no longer subscribed to because the storage space savings are substantial, there's no books to have to inventory and track (and rebind if they get old or repair them if they are damaged, and people do do that -- someone stole the original Watson & Crick DNA article out of our '53 Nature archival copy, and so the replacement was a crappy Xerox version that has horrible quality and is worn out... grr. Discovered that when I was asked to get a copy of the article.)
I find dead-tree editions easier to work with, anyway.
I work at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, also in the Cell Biology department. We have one Bio-Rad confocal. Windows-only software that is terrible, full of bugs, and crashes all the time. We have Windows-only analysis software which the developer simply refuses to port to the Mac despite Apple practically begging them to. It runs, but it requires a hardware dongle -- stupid buggy thing. We do have a camera which has Mac drivers... the drivers never seem to crash.
I have some hope as Bio-Rad sold their confocal business to Zeiss. Maybe Zeiss will put out a Mac version of that horrid software.
Trainspotting IS a terrible affliction, causing the purchase of ridiculous amounts of photography gear costing ridiculous amounts of money. Trust me. I know.;)
And I know the movie is pretty unrelated, or so I'm told (never seen it.)
When it shows up in the dock, rightclick it (or control-click), point to the "quit" menu item and hit Option. It will change to "force quit". Hopefully, you can hit it in time to force kill it.
Bank of America does this. I've complained to BofA and they said my comment was passed on to the web developers. Nothing changed.
I'd originally posted this as a bug to bugzilla (several others have done the same, as I still occasionally get notices that other bugs were marked as dupes of mine) and so it means other people out there are having trouble. Someone posted a comment to my bug that it was a stylesheet after testing the same site on several platforms I don't have daily access to with the same date nightly.
I still get part of the login page shoved off the screen. It's only cosmetic, but it's still annoying that it's a quick stylesheet fix but still isn't working.
The purchasing people in our office still use Eudora Lite 3. But it works for them, and if you're using email for relatively simple things, you may not need to upgrade since there aren't a lot of absolutely compelling new features. Now, I personally use Eudora 6 because I like the spam filtering options and it works very well. However, I admit I haven't yet checked to see whether Thunderbird can import my Eudora mailboxes and filters (I have a rather lot of filters) and whether it can have multiple signatures and multiple accounts to check. (It probably does; I just haven't yet looked.)
It really depends on what you need. Some people hate Eudora's interface; I mostly like it, and the spam filters were great; my boss gets hundreds of spams a day and has used Eudora for years. When I gave him 6, he immediately found his spam problem manageable. But he's not a geek and won't try a new email client. I am, and I will.
p.s. any answers to my haven't-had-chance-to-check-yet musings are appreciated.:)
You can rescue all the stuff from your previous profile folder (prefs.js, bookmarks.html, and all the miscellaneous cache files for history, cookies etc) but the fact that it ate everything (I just posted elsewhere in this article about having had the same problem) is disappointing. I'll go to the trouble for 0.9 if it has the "nothing happens when clicking on an xpi file" glitch and categories aren't missing from the preferences window and all the dialogs draw properly. (I'm using OS X).
I don't get it, considering the nightly download I grabbed yesterday worked fine.
My bookmarks, which I had ported over to yesterday's nightly (for OS X the modification date was May 31) vanished. Trying to start installing extensions all over again does nothing when clicking on an.xpi file (the download never starts). Disappointing. I've almost always managed to get instant upgrades in the past and almost never had to "start from scratch" (rescuing bookmarks, prefs, cookies, etc from an old profile folder). I'd expected the same from a release candidate.
Went back to the nightly. Guess I'm sitting this out til the final comes out.
It is - although where I'm planning to put the one I bought yesterday means it will be used as a repeater. There is no ethernet wire provided to the location and so I can't use it as a base station. I do however need a repeater -- my existing signal isn't strong enough to let me sit outside on the front porch on nice evenings.
I have considered purchasing an extra one of these for replacing my existing Netgear MR314 once the Powerbook G5 comes out, and then it will be used as a basestation. I don't have more than ten simultaneous users online even when I have a few friends over, so that limitation isn't a problem for me. I will be interested in finding out what kind of range this thing has and how it compares to the regular UFO-style box.
So, in other words, I know that it is a basestation, but for the moment it won't be used as such.
I sure hope that paper whose article got scanned in was joking about it being even more worrying that some people don't know the lyrics of whatever song they were talking about here. I've only faintly heard of the band and never heard of the song, so does that make me an evilnastybad terrorist?
And people wonder why I can't stand the media. On D-Day the US media didn't give a crap about the anniversary, any more than they ever give a crap about things I'm actually interested. It was literally a one-line "oh by the way" type mention on more than one major US media site.
Disappointing. We were the ones responsible for it and we can't be moved to care? Pathetic.
Pretty much, what it's for is to make your music play from much nicer speakers than the ones in your laptop, and you can sit in the same room as the stereo and change songs by clicking on the screen.
I'm planning to purchase one and hook it up to Input 2 of my powered speakers (Input 1 goes to the television.) That way, I can sprawl on the couch and, when I run out of things to watch on the Tivo, click buttons on Synergy (an iTunes menu-bar controller) or the iTunes window, and instead of coming out of my Powerbook's cheap speakers, the music will play out of the much better Sonys.
Plus, it's a wireless print server, so I could get a photo printer and stick it in the living room on the lowest shelf of the TV cart and print out photos from time to time. And it's a wireless repeater, which means I can finally sit on the porch on nice evenings and surf the web. (That last might not work until I get an Apple branded basestation, but I won't know for sure till I get one of these things.)
As for audio connectors - it's got a standard 1/8" headphone jack. You can use any adapters you like for hooking up stereo equipment to that. My speakers will (I think; I'm at work) require a 1/8" to RCA adapter cable, and I happen to have several lying in a drawer here in the video equipment pile.
I'm going to get this so I don't have to splurge for the home media option on the Tivo - I don't like the interface the Tivo is using, I don't need the photo streaming, I do need a wireless repeater, and the print server function may someday be useful to me.
Dunno why Creative would do that. A sale is a sale. Once they've sold the device, they've gotten their money, and the user is free to smash it with a hammer if they want to.
(I'm not debating the fact that some people haven't gotten it to work, whether through bad luck, bad karma, or an actual change. It just makes no sense.)
I have two digital cameras, an Olympus E-100RS and a Konica Minolta Dimage X20. Both of them work very well for what I want to do.
The Olympus has an SLR-like feel and a very long zoom (10x optical) and an image stabilizer. It's great for general-purpose use and feels very nice, has a lot of customization options, and can shoot up to 15 frames per second. It's only a 1.5-megapixel camera, but that's been fine so far because I mostly have been posting images on my website.
The Minolta is my "go anywhere" camera that I bought for its small size, low cost ($160ish), it uses AA batteries just like the Olympus does, a coworker has a higher-end Dimage camera with a metal case and a more-megapixel sensor (this one is a 2MP camera) and I liked it quite a lot when I played with it.
However, I have ordered a D70 and am looking forward to its arrival, though it hasn't even been shipped yet, which is pretty unusual for my digital camera equipment orders (and I did order from a reputable seller.) This one has a 6-megapixel sensor, so I'll get far better images than I've been getting; it has a RAW mode which lets me change all kinds of settings after the fact; I can still change all sorts of things in menus and with buttons on the camera body (like the E-100RS), but the big improvements for me will be the interchangeable lenses (I will be getting a zoom lens with an optical stabilizer, something I've grown to like on the Olympus, pretty soon), quicker start-up time, no wait after hitting the shutter button to take photos (I'm sick of not being able to do action shots and having to wait such a long time between shots), and all the control you get with a DSLR.
Does that mean I'm selling my other two cameras? Nope. Not yet, anyway. I've had the Minolta for less than two weeks and I bought it for a specific purpose that it's filled quite well so far (I've already taken a bunch of opportunistic photos that I'd have missed otherwise since I can carry a camera with me all the time). The Olympus is out of production and if I sell it I'll never be able to get another one like it (it seems to be in somewhat high demand, or was last time I looked, on the used-Olympus market), so I will probably carefully pack it up and store it.
I've shot some stuff with a D100 so I know how the D70 will operate - it's a less-expensive D100 with some extra goodies thrown in. And I like what I see.
A DSLR is absolutely worth it once you move past advanced beginner stage. But I wouldn't recommend one for my mom, who is perfectly happy with her Olympus point-and-shoot format 5-megapixel pocket camera, which has replaced her old film pocket cameras. I helped her buy an iBook a couple of months ago, and it's so easy she can use it on her own and she is constantly taking pictures now and importing them into iPhoto. (Downside: I still live near them, so I'm tech support if she can't figure stuff out!).
Dad has an Olympus E-10 and a Fuji FinePix SLR-like camera (I don't recall which one) and he doesn't want a real DSLR because it's too much of a hassle for him to change lenses, or so he says, plus he thinks the inside of the camera would get dirty. A little odd, I think, but he's happy with what he has, and he doesn't go railfanning or planespotting like I want to be doing (just two examples of things that will open up for me with a real SLR), so he doesn't really need the big zoom lenses you can get for real SLR cameras.
So it's all in what you want to be doing. Figure out what your abilities are, what you're willing to spend, what you do and don't feel comfortable doing with your camera, and what you'll do with your photos. I rarely print mine, but mom prints hers on photo paper all the time, so that's one place where a 1.5-megapixel camera just won't cut it, for example. But she mostly takes pictures of flowers or people, so she doesn't need a 10x zoom lens. Neither of my parents try to photograph moving trains so they don't need a stabilized zoom lens and a high shots-per-second rate.
That said,
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 1
On my powerbook keyboard, it's a standard size key above a 1.75-length return/enter key and below a 1.5-length delete key, but on my PC keyboards, it's varied in size. I've got a new keyboard on the way and it'll probably change size yet again.
Sure wish narrator types on TV could tell the difference between / and \ -- getting tired of "visit blahblah.com backslash blah" ads over programs' end credits.
Or just use a firewall to block IE from connecting to the net other than for purposes of using windowsupdate. If they don't like it, they can just learn to use another browser. Besides... why is it so tough to use another browser when it's already installed and set up?
That particular scheme always amused me ever since I first heard of it because it forced your computer to run software that you never requested and you never signed an agreement to run.
So, when users legitimately blocked the unauthorized software (which, being unauthorized, seems little better to me than a virus or worm or piece of sneaky sleazy spyware) from running, because they didn't know what it was for, or because it caused their computers to misbehave or not do things the user desired it to, the people who distributed the sneakware got angry.
Excuse me? It's my computer. I say what goes, unless I signed an agreement to run/not run something. If I bought a CD, I didn't do that; last I checked, I got a little plastic disk in a plastic case with printing on the disk and the case indicating what's on it and a warning against unauthorized redistribution (which I can honestly say that I do not do.)
Therefore, that "case", to me, seems rather ludicrous. I'd like to see someone who wrote a virus not get laughed out of court if THEY tried to sue users for failing to run their malware. Better yet, I would have laughed pretty hard if someone had sued (or at least filed a complaint against) these people (is it the RIAA that did it? a label? an artist? Whoever it was) for some kind of trespass for trying to foist something, on the sly, on users.
The user would probably win, as they didn't "break" anything... they just chose not to allow something to execute using a known feature of their OS.
By the way, my system has Autorun disabled in the control panels as autorun installers popped up one time too many while I was doing something else and I got to the point where I tore through the settings and found the checkbox and unchecked it. If I had bought one of these CDs and then done whatever I wanted with it, for personal use, would they try to sue me, too?
The D70/D100 comparison chart is actually pretty free of annoyances -- have a look and see what you think: here's the DPReview D70/D100/DigiRebel comparison.
I'm looking forward to the arrival of the D70 I've ordered.
I think I have seen a story or two somewhere in which some form of encryption which actually does authentication is used, hence the use of that term. Alas, I don't remember where I saw that, so unfortunately I'll have to leave it up to anyone who's bored enough to use Google to find it. I might be remembering incorrectly, too, but I still wouldn't put it past carmakers to try...
Yep. Check out APR for the chip he is probably using. (There are other chippers, but APR seems the most common for the 1.8T).
The example requested earlier in this thread is right here: VW uses the 1.8T engine in the Audi TT as well and detunes the VW version so you'll pay more for the admittedly just as pretty (I think Golfs look great) but less practical (GTIs and Golfs can hold a huge amount of stuff) Audi.
While the chip can cause you trouble when getting service (for which reason APR designs many of their chips to act like the stock chip when you enter an easter-egg sequence of buttons on the cruise control/turn signal stalk), APR has been doing this long enough that their chips are pretty safe to use.
I'm a VW Golf owner (2000 GLS) but I'm not a 1.8T owner, but I know a lot of people who are, and complaints are relatively rare.
The "three good starts" trick is pretty much a standard for OBDII systems. The mechanic told you to do that because each of those starts causes the car to run a little POST-like check. It keeps track of recent codes and counts how many times the problem hasn't been detected. After the third good start, the problem is assumed to be fixed (or that it was transient) and the light goes out.
The car may or may not store the code in memory until a mechanic or someone with a scan tool clears it, but the indicator lamp on the dash will not light.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: Dead-tree versions are HARDER to work with.
A lot of what I do can be done offline, although I use the Web a lot to download scientific journal articles (I work in a med school research lab). However, while you may say "go down to the library and photocopy the articles you need", that only works in some cases. Photocopies are far more expensive for color pages (so we photocopy in greyscale only) and the print versions of many journals are no longer subscribed to because the storage space savings are substantial, there's no books to have to inventory and track (and rebind if they get old or repair them if they are damaged, and people do do that -- someone stole the original Watson & Crick DNA article out of our '53 Nature archival copy, and so the replacement was a crappy Xerox version that has horrible quality and is worn out... grr. Discovered that when I was asked to get a copy of the article.)
I find dead-tree editions easier to work with, anyway.
*cracks up*
I work at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, also in the Cell Biology department. We have one Bio-Rad confocal. Windows-only software that is terrible, full of bugs, and crashes all the time. We have Windows-only analysis software which the developer simply refuses to port to the Mac despite Apple practically begging them to. It runs, but it requires a hardware dongle -- stupid buggy thing. We do have a camera which has Mac drivers... the drivers never seem to crash.
I have some hope as Bio-Rad sold their confocal business to Zeiss. Maybe Zeiss will put out a Mac version of that horrid software.
Trainspotting IS a terrible affliction, causing the purchase of ridiculous amounts of photography gear costing ridiculous amounts of money. Trust me. I know. ;)
And I know the movie is pretty unrelated, or so I'm told (never seen it.)
When it shows up in the dock, rightclick it (or control-click), point to the "quit" menu item and hit Option. It will change to "force quit". Hopefully, you can hit it in time to force kill it.
Bank of America does this. I've complained to BofA and they said my comment was passed on to the web developers. Nothing changed.
I'd originally posted this as a bug to bugzilla (several others have done the same, as I still occasionally get notices that other bugs were marked as dupes of mine) and so it means other people out there are having trouble. Someone posted a comment to my bug that it was a stylesheet after testing the same site on several platforms I don't have daily access to with the same date nightly.
I still get part of the login page shoved off the screen. It's only cosmetic, but it's still annoying that it's a quick stylesheet fix but still isn't working.
glitch FIXED, I mean. Argh!
The purchasing people in our office still use Eudora Lite 3. But it works for them, and if you're using email for relatively simple things, you may not need to upgrade since there aren't a lot of absolutely compelling new features. Now, I personally use Eudora 6 because I like the spam filtering options and it works very well. However, I admit I haven't yet checked to see whether Thunderbird can import my Eudora mailboxes and filters (I have a rather lot of filters) and whether it can have multiple signatures and multiple accounts to check. (It probably does; I just haven't yet looked.)
:)
It really depends on what you need. Some people hate Eudora's interface; I mostly like it, and the spam filters were great; my boss gets hundreds of spams a day and has used Eudora for years. When I gave him 6, he immediately found his spam problem manageable. But he's not a geek and won't try a new email client. I am, and I will.
p.s. any answers to my haven't-had-chance-to-check-yet musings are appreciated.
You can rescue all the stuff from your previous profile folder (prefs.js, bookmarks.html, and all the miscellaneous cache files for history, cookies etc) but the fact that it ate everything (I just posted elsewhere in this article about having had the same problem) is disappointing. I'll go to the trouble for 0.9 if it has the "nothing happens when clicking on an xpi file" glitch and categories aren't missing from the preferences window and all the dialogs draw properly. (I'm using OS X).
I don't get it, considering the nightly download I grabbed yesterday worked fine.
My bookmarks, which I had ported over to yesterday's nightly (for OS X the modification date was May 31) vanished. Trying to start installing extensions all over again does nothing when clicking on an .xpi file (the download never starts). Disappointing. I've almost always managed to get instant upgrades in the past and almost never had to "start from scratch" (rescuing bookmarks, prefs, cookies, etc from an old profile folder). I'd expected the same from a release candidate.
Went back to the nightly. Guess I'm sitting this out til the final comes out.
Referring to the "big media" sites like CNN/ABC/Fox. I'm a History/Discovery addict too and they talked about it a lot more than Big Media did!
It is - although where I'm planning to put the one I bought yesterday means it will be used as a repeater. There is no ethernet wire provided to the location and so I can't use it as a base station. I do however need a repeater -- my existing signal isn't strong enough to let me sit outside on the front porch on nice evenings.
I have considered purchasing an extra one of these for replacing my existing Netgear MR314 once the Powerbook G5 comes out, and then it will be used as a basestation. I don't have more than ten simultaneous users online even when I have a few friends over, so that limitation isn't a problem for me. I will be interested in finding out what kind of range this thing has and how it compares to the regular UFO-style box.
So, in other words, I know that it is a basestation, but for the moment it won't be used as such.
I sure hope that paper whose article got scanned in was joking about it being even more worrying that some people don't know the lyrics of whatever song they were talking about here. I've only faintly heard of the band and never heard of the song, so does that make me an evilnastybad terrorist?
And people wonder why I can't stand the media. On D-Day the US media didn't give a crap about the anniversary, any more than they ever give a crap about things I'm actually interested. It was literally a one-line "oh by the way" type mention on more than one major US media site.
Disappointing. We were the ones responsible for it and we can't be moved to care? Pathetic.
This is why I read the Beeb.
Pretty much, what it's for is to make your music play from much nicer speakers than the ones in your laptop, and you can sit in the same room as the stereo and change songs by clicking on the screen.
I'm planning to purchase one and hook it up to Input 2 of my powered speakers (Input 1 goes to the television.) That way, I can sprawl on the couch and, when I run out of things to watch on the Tivo, click buttons on Synergy (an iTunes menu-bar controller) or the iTunes window, and instead of coming out of my Powerbook's cheap speakers, the music will play out of the much better Sonys.
Plus, it's a wireless print server, so I could get a photo printer and stick it in the living room on the lowest shelf of the TV cart and print out photos from time to time. And it's a wireless repeater, which means I can finally sit on the porch on nice evenings and surf the web. (That last might not work until I get an Apple branded basestation, but I won't know for sure till I get one of these things.)
As for audio connectors - it's got a standard 1/8" headphone jack. You can use any adapters you like for hooking up stereo equipment to that. My speakers will (I think; I'm at work) require a 1/8" to RCA adapter cable, and I happen to have several lying in a drawer here in the video equipment pile.
I'm going to get this so I don't have to splurge for the home media option on the Tivo - I don't like the interface the Tivo is using, I don't need the photo streaming, I do need a wireless repeater, and the print server function may someday be useful to me.
Dunno why Creative would do that. A sale is a sale. Once they've sold the device, they've gotten their money, and the user is free to smash it with a hammer if they want to.
(I'm not debating the fact that some people haven't gotten it to work, whether through bad luck, bad karma, or an actual change. It just makes no sense.)
I have two digital cameras, an Olympus E-100RS and a Konica Minolta Dimage X20. Both of them work very well for what I want to do.
The Olympus has an SLR-like feel and a very long zoom (10x optical) and an image stabilizer. It's great for general-purpose use and feels very nice, has a lot of customization options, and can shoot up to 15 frames per second. It's only a 1.5-megapixel camera, but that's been fine so far because I mostly have been posting images on my website.
The Minolta is my "go anywhere" camera that I bought for its small size, low cost ($160ish), it uses AA batteries just like the Olympus does, a coworker has a higher-end Dimage camera with a metal case and a more-megapixel sensor (this one is a 2MP camera) and I liked it quite a lot when I played with it.
However, I have ordered a D70 and am looking forward to its arrival, though it hasn't even been shipped yet, which is pretty unusual for my digital camera equipment orders (and I did order from a reputable seller.) This one has a 6-megapixel sensor, so I'll get far better images than I've been getting; it has a RAW mode which lets me change all kinds of settings after the fact; I can still change all sorts of things in menus and with buttons on the camera body (like the E-100RS), but the big improvements for me will be the interchangeable lenses (I will be getting a zoom lens with an optical stabilizer, something I've grown to like on the Olympus, pretty soon), quicker start-up time, no wait after hitting the shutter button to take photos (I'm sick of not being able to do action shots and having to wait such a long time between shots), and all the control you get with a DSLR.
Does that mean I'm selling my other two cameras? Nope. Not yet, anyway. I've had the Minolta for less than two weeks and I bought it for a specific purpose that it's filled quite well so far (I've already taken a bunch of opportunistic photos that I'd have missed otherwise since I can carry a camera with me all the time). The Olympus is out of production and if I sell it I'll never be able to get another one like it (it seems to be in somewhat high demand, or was last time I looked, on the used-Olympus market), so I will probably carefully pack it up and store it.
I've shot some stuff with a D100 so I know how the D70 will operate - it's a less-expensive D100 with some extra goodies thrown in. And I like what I see.
A DSLR is absolutely worth it once you move past advanced beginner stage. But I wouldn't recommend one for my mom, who is perfectly happy with her Olympus point-and-shoot format 5-megapixel pocket camera, which has replaced her old film pocket cameras. I helped her buy an iBook a couple of months ago, and it's so easy she can use it on her own and she is constantly taking pictures now and importing them into iPhoto. (Downside: I still live near them, so I'm tech support if she can't figure stuff out!).
Dad has an Olympus E-10 and a Fuji FinePix SLR-like camera (I don't recall which one) and he doesn't want a real DSLR because it's too much of a hassle for him to change lenses, or so he says, plus he thinks the inside of the camera would get dirty. A little odd, I think, but he's happy with what he has, and he doesn't go railfanning or planespotting like I want to be doing (just two examples of things that will open up for me with a real SLR), so he doesn't really need the big zoom lenses you can get for real SLR cameras.
So it's all in what you want to be doing. Figure out what your abilities are, what you're willing to spend, what you do and don't feel comfortable doing with your camera, and what you'll do with your photos. I rarely print mine, but mom prints hers on photo paper all the time, so that's one place where a 1.5-megapixel camera just won't cut it, for example. But she mostly takes pictures of flowers or people, so she doesn't need a 10x zoom lens. Neither of my parents try to photograph moving trains so they don't need a stabilized zoom lens and a high shots-per-second rate.
That said,
On my powerbook keyboard, it's a standard size key above a 1.75-length return/enter key and below a 1.5-length delete key, but on my PC keyboards, it's varied in size. I've got a new keyboard on the way and it'll probably change size yet again.
Sure wish narrator types on TV could tell the difference between / and \ -- getting tired of "visit blahblah.com backslash blah" ads over programs' end credits.
I'm not affected either. Recent nightly build of Firefox.
Or just use a firewall to block IE from connecting to the net other than for purposes of using windowsupdate. If they don't like it, they can just learn to use another browser. Besides ... why is it so tough to use another browser when it's already installed and set up?
So you're the reason Adorama says it won't ship til next week. ;) Damn you!
That particular scheme always amused me ever since I first heard of it because it forced your computer to run software that you never requested and you never signed an agreement to run.
So, when users legitimately blocked the unauthorized software (which, being unauthorized, seems little better to me than a virus or worm or piece of sneaky sleazy spyware) from running, because they didn't know what it was for, or because it caused their computers to misbehave or not do things the user desired it to, the people who distributed the sneakware got angry.
Excuse me? It's my computer. I say what goes, unless I signed an agreement to run/not run something. If I bought a CD, I didn't do that; last I checked, I got a little plastic disk in a plastic case with printing on the disk and the case indicating what's on it and a warning against unauthorized redistribution (which I can honestly say that I do not do.)
Therefore, that "case", to me, seems rather ludicrous. I'd like to see someone who wrote a virus not get laughed out of court if THEY tried to sue users for failing to run their malware. Better yet, I would have laughed pretty hard if someone had sued (or at least filed a complaint against) these people (is it the RIAA that did it? a label? an artist? Whoever it was) for some kind of trespass for trying to foist something, on the sly, on users.
The user would probably win, as they didn't "break" anything... they just chose not to allow something to execute using a known feature of their OS.
By the way, my system has Autorun disabled in the control panels as autorun installers popped up one time too many while I was doing something else and I got to the point where I tore through the settings and found the checkbox and unchecked it. If I had bought one of these CDs and then done whatever I wanted with it, for personal use, would they try to sue me, too?
The D70/D100 comparison chart is actually pretty free of annoyances -- have a look and see what you think: here's the DPReview D70/D100/DigiRebel comparison.
I'm looking forward to the arrival of the D70 I've ordered.
I think I have seen a story or two somewhere in which some form of encryption which actually does authentication is used, hence the use of that term. Alas, I don't remember where I saw that, so unfortunately I'll have to leave it up to anyone who's bored enough to use Google to find it. I might be remembering incorrectly, too, but I still wouldn't put it past carmakers to try...
Yep. Check out APR for the chip he is probably using. (There are other chippers, but APR seems the most common for the 1.8T).
The example requested earlier in this thread is right here: VW uses the 1.8T engine in the Audi TT as well and detunes the VW version so you'll pay more for the admittedly just as pretty (I think Golfs look great) but less practical (GTIs and Golfs can hold a huge amount of stuff) Audi.
While the chip can cause you trouble when getting service (for which reason APR designs many of their chips to act like the stock chip when you enter an easter-egg sequence of buttons on the cruise control/turn signal stalk), APR has been doing this long enough that their chips are pretty safe to use.
I'm a VW Golf owner (2000 GLS) but I'm not a 1.8T owner, but I know a lot of people who are, and complaints are relatively rare.
The "three good starts" trick is pretty much a standard for OBDII systems. The mechanic told you to do that because each of those starts causes the car to run a little POST-like check. It keeps track of recent codes and counts how many times the problem hasn't been detected. After the third good start, the problem is assumed to be fixed (or that it was transient) and the light goes out.
The car may or may not store the code in memory until a mechanic or someone with a scan tool clears it, but the indicator lamp on the dash will not light.