It's filtered, with a very strong filter compared to the majority of cameras. You can see IR if you look closely enough, but if you compare it to an unfiltered camera, the amount of IR that comes through is absolutely minuscule.
To the point where in the brightly lit Museum of Science display, the IR LEDs in their "this is the visible spectrum" display were invisible on the iPhone.
Because last I checked, the iPhone camera since the iPhone 4 has an IR filter on it and can't see IR light. Found this out at the Science Museum when there was a display of the visible spectrum and it told you to take out your phone and look at it via the camera.
Surprise! iPhones can't see the IR lights, but other phone cameras could.
My work MacBook Pro has crapped out entirely, and that was bought in August of last year. Its wifi support is flakey at best and as of today, it stopped booting. Well, sort of: it makes it past the part where you log in to FileVault and then goes to a black screen it never recovers from.
Given their most expensive laptop couldn't even make it a year before crapping out, I'm not surprised they don't want longer warranties.
Now to go through the incredibly annoy process of getting a laptop replaced through corporate IT... sigh.
Yes, but Amazon did it using plain old MP3s you can play everywhere while Apple did it with some crappy Apple-only format that only worked on iPods, so...
Then don't buy electric and buy diesel or gas instead. Wow that was tough to solve!
You mean exactly what I'm doing?
The story is about VW moving over to mostly electric vehicles, and the problem is that the infrastructure for that just doesn't exist and isn't likely to exist in the next decade - the time period they're apparently planning on doing the move.
We'll see. I'd love to think that in 10 years I'd be able to go all-electric, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Oh, probably, but that would mean I'd have to actually go to work and I'm mostly a telecommuter these days. (Meaning I don't have to drive at all, which is even more eco-friendly!)
My employer does have charging spots. Eight of them, I think.
So while it might work for - well, up to eight employees out of - I dunno, say a thousand - clearly it's not a solution it everyone starts getting an electric car. And they do get used, I generally see cars parked and charging with them when I do go in to the building.
That's not the only problem. Not all of us live in houses with garages. I live in an apartment complex with assigned parking. If I were to get an electric vehicle I have no clue how the hell I'd charge it.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I think electric vehicles are the future and I'd love to be able to drive a plug-in hybrid, but at present I have absolutely no way to charge it and that needs to change before electric cars can roll out to the entire population.
If the cost of testing in Firefox is higher than the cost of driving away Firefox users (and it almost always isn't, since the type of people using Firefox are the type of people who'll just use a different browser if the site fails), then it's simple: don't support Firefox.
Right now, we're at the point where the decision is easy: don't support Firefox. It isn't worth the effort, and generally if things work in Chrome, they'll probably work in Firefox. So Firefox isn't supported and I only ever bother testing things in Firefox if someone complains.
Well, in theory I only bother testing things in Firefox if someone complains. So far, no one has.
Yeah, about that, as someone who works as a web developer, my reaction to reading this story was "Safari is at version 10 already? When did that happen?"
Now granted none of the websites I work on require any plugins at all, and some of them even use things like HTML 5's <canvas> to render pretty charts and graphs.
But they all have one thing in common: no one tests in Safari. If it's broken in Safari, the answer is "download Chrome." Fortunately I can't remember a time when something was broken in Safari and Safari alone - generally if it works in Chrome, it'll work in Safari too.
(Remembering that this is about Safari and not Mobile Safari. There are enough iPhone users out there that people do test in Mobile Safari.)
It's an aggregator of stuff that's split among a ton of other sites. That's the point - to cherry-pick the interesting stuff and leave the rest of it out there.
I don't need Slashdot's help to find way too much coverage about the Orlando terrorist attack. Just news.google.com is enough to find way more coverage of it than I possibly could care about.
E3 and WWDC are both next week. I'm sure Slashdot can find plenty of stories about stuff that's happening then without having to cover a story that's already over-saturated.
Nerds can use the address bar in their web browser to go to other sites to read about how Obama has, yet again, failed to stop a terrorist attack on US soil. But Slashdot is focused on news for nerds - specifically stuff I won't find on other sites.
And, yes, the Orlando Islamic terrorist attack is a perfect example of a story that's newsworthy to the general public but not newsworthy on a website targeted to a specific kind of news.
I'll say here what I said elsewhere: I'm sure Donald Trump is all torn up about losing access to advertising to all those people who don't vote anyway.
No, it doesn't. It acts like it does, but it doesn't. Facebook's timeline is a filtered feed where Facebook filters out "unwanted" posts, and there is absolutely no way to disable that or see what it's filtering.
Here's a real world example. I "follow" the local NWS branch on Facebook and Twitter. They post weather forecasts and other useful information about upcoming weather events and local weather activity. A while ago, they posted an interesting look at how you could view the increasing greenery across the region from satellite photos as spring progressed.
I know they posted this thanks to Twitter. When I went to try and share the picture via Facebook, Facebook filtered it out for me. I tried to sort it via "most recent" but what that actually does is it takes your "New Stories" feed and sorts it chronologically. And that's all it does.
There is no way to browse by newest.
Which isn't entirely true. There is a crazy workaround that allows you to sort of be able to see everything by chronological order, but that involves creating a special "list" of friends and then explicitly going to that list and not looking at either the news feed or "most recent."
Incidentally I "follow" Slashdot on Facebook too, and generally speaking Facebook will show me blocks of Slashdot stories up to a week after they were posted. For example, this story does not show up at all on my "Most Recent" feed despite being posted three hours ago.
This is why I don't bother asking Apple users for help any more. The huge issues you run into with Apple products are never Apple's fault (why do I have to reboot at least once a day to keep wifi working?), they're always somehow your fault.
Yes. "Innovation." I hate those stupid "mag-safe" power adapters. All Apple succeeded in doing was inventing a power adapter that can't stay plugged in. The weight of the cord itself is enough to pull the stupid thing out if you let enough of it dangle.
There's nothing like going into work and discovering that the laptop you left to charge overnight didn't charge at all because Apple likes "cool fancy" over practical power adapters.
Of course, the theory is that you won't be able to dump the laptop on the floor by tripping over the cord, yet I've managed to do just that on multiple occasions. Sure, it snaps unplugged in the process but it puts more than enough force on the laptop to drag it to the floor.
But that's Apple "innovation" - it sure seems neat, up until you try and use it in reality.
With all due respect, no one cares what Apple fans think.
No, seriously. An Apple fan is someone who is going to back Apple regardless. It would be like asking a Patriots fan about the ongoing Tom Brady saga (yeah, that's still happening): no one cares what they think because they're going to back Tom Brady regardless, no matter how blatantly guilty he is.
But the average person? Apple came out of that looking hilariously incompetent. First they refused to help the FBI, then the plucky li'l FBI managed to unlock the phone anyway, and then Apple demanded to know how. If you watched any of the late night shows, they made fun of Apple over the thing. Even John Oliver, who was on Apple's side, mocked Apple for being hilariously incompetent at security. If you know any "average person" they were not on Apple's side.
Fortunately for Apple, that the whole thing was such a niche story that, outside of techies, no one remembers it anymore anyway.
The whole "Macs are comparable to PCs" thing stopped being true like five years ago when Apple decided to forget that they were a computer company and concentrate on iDevices. Their current top-end computers are something like two generations behind the current latest-and-greatest, the graphics cards in their Macs are either the same two generation old Intel integrated graphics or even older AMD or Nvidia GPUs, depending on model.
So, yeah - it's trivial to beat a Mac these days, because Apple has entirely stopped caring about the Mac.
It's hard to see where they're focusing on these days. iOS has been allowed to languish. iOS 9 was supposed to be a "polish" release that was focused on fixing bugs and resolving old issues. It didn't. iPhones appear to have picked up the wifi issues that plague Macs and routinely drop wifi and refuse to connect. The iOS home screen appears buggier than ever and will routinely freeze on you. Siri is just as useless as she ever was and while Apple Maps may have finally gotten a database of points of interest so you can at least find places you want to go, their routing software is still useless and their POIs still contain hilarious gaps.
For example, Apple Maps contains the Apple Store nearest to me - but NOT the mall that Apple Store is located in. If you try and use Apple Maps to navigate to that Apple Store, it will continually try and find routes to the middle of the mall where the store is but since you can't actually drive through the mall you'll never "arrive" so it will keep on giving driving instructions around the mall. (It's actually kind of hilarious, because it'll tell you it's going to route you to the "closest point" it can and then when you arrive there rather than say "you've arrived!" it immediately plots a route back to that point.)
I have a Mac for work and it's the most annoying thing ever. I routinely have to reboot it to get it to stay connected to wifi. Really the only thing going for it is the retina display, and Windows is finally (finally!) catching up in that area. You can get Windows laptops with 4K displays in them. (Not MacBooks, though.) I remember when the MacBook trackpad was by far the best trackpad I ever used - but Windows laptops caught up, and now the OS X trackpad is horrible because the "click" is now done via some sort of software-triggered force feedback thing. Which is a problem because when OS X is lagging, which is often, the click stops, so you can't tell you "clicked."
Bottom line here is that while Apple may have, at one point produced quality laptop/desktop hardware that was on par or even better than anything in the PC world, those days are long past. Anyone saying otherwise is deluding themselves.
If they just made the privacy settings more prominent when creating a post, it will be easier to designate a post's visibility to different groups (and creating those groups).
What are you talking about? The privacy controls are literally right next to the "Post" button on Facebook, unless you're using the mobile client, then they're right next to your name. In either case they're pretty freaking prominent and you can use them to have a pretty fine-grained control over who sees what you post.
Of course, I doubt most people bother with that control. I have it set to "friends only" and just leave it at that. If I don't want some subset of people to see something on Facebook, I just don't post it at all, and I expect most people are similar. People know that just because they blocked someone from seeing a post directly doesn't mean someone else can't show it to them.
I call BS, App certs do not have any use whatsoever in the TCP stack. I'm sure people had problems, but it wasn't due to this.
If the app in question is a VPN app, then it's entirely possible that they literally could not connect to the Internet with the app disabled.
Alternatively what's meant is that they couldn't connect to the Internet at the time and were therefore locked out of their legitimately purchased apps until whatever time they could connect to the Internet. Not everyone has a 24/7 Internet connection. (Seems unlikely for someone who can afford the huge expense of an Apple product, but whatever.)
I call BS on that too. The app settings are in a text file in the user directories, you can go and open them in your favorite text editor right now. Re-installing an app does not overwrite these settings, which is *the whole reason* they're done this way. It is possible that app did that, but that's a bug in the app and has nothing to do with certs.
I could have sworn part of removing an app via the App Store (or via Launchboard or whatever it's called) is that it deletes all the app's data as part of the process, just like it does under iOS.
You forgot all the UX people whose job it is to randomly change Twitter's UI around for no real reason. Don't forget, Twitter is a modern web-based application, it needs UX because if there's one thing a platform based around sending 140-character messages shouldn't be, it's simple.
(No, really, they seem to love randomly changing their website and client apps. I guess so those 4100 employees can justify their existence. Alternatively they feel they need to mimic Facebook.)
If they're going to mandate locking down, lock down the WiFi radio, as that's the part that uses the radio waves. The WiFi radio can be a "black box" with it own firmware, much like on cellular phones, where the cellular radio is a similar black box.
As I understand it, that is what the FCC wants to mandate. The problem is that in order to keep costs down, a lot of the wifi hardware in the routers doesn't have separate radio firmware, everything is controlled by a single system-on-chip, sort of like those old "winmodems" that didn't contain any firmware and instead offloaded everything to the CPU via their Windows driver.
So the FCC's rules locking down the radio firmware turn out to mean that manufacturers would have to lock down the entire software stack, not because that's what the FCC really wants, but because in order to save costs the radio firmware is instead done as part of the "main" firmware.
I remember when Sprint was running a campaign where you could go unlimited everything for about what I was paying AT&T. I tried to switch to Sprint at that time. They rejected my credit card.
I'm not sure why they rejected my credit card. It wasn't like there wasn't enough money to cover the cost of a new phone and the initial fees. In fact, they managed to put a hold on the account for the amount they wanted, but even with the hold, they wouldn't accept the card. Customer support couldn't help me, and my bank (which happened to be right next door to the Sprint store) couldn't figure out what was going on with them.
So I stayed with AT&T.
There's really no point to this story other than I remember trying to become a Sprint customer and being unable to do so. I wonder how many other people Sprint has rejected over the years due to broken systems?
Slashdot Mirror
It's filtered, with a very strong filter compared to the majority of cameras. You can see IR if you look closely enough, but if you compare it to an unfiltered camera, the amount of IR that comes through is absolutely minuscule.
To the point where in the brightly lit Museum of Science display, the IR LEDs in their "this is the visible spectrum" display were invisible on the iPhone.
That's a really interesting idea from Apple.
Because last I checked, the iPhone camera since the iPhone 4 has an IR filter on it and can't see IR light. Found this out at the Science Museum when there was a display of the visible spectrum and it told you to take out your phone and look at it via the camera.
Surprise! iPhones can't see the IR lights, but other phone cameras could.
I can see why.
My work MacBook Pro has crapped out entirely, and that was bought in August of last year. Its wifi support is flakey at best and as of today, it stopped booting. Well, sort of: it makes it past the part where you log in to FileVault and then goes to a black screen it never recovers from.
Given their most expensive laptop couldn't even make it a year before crapping out, I'm not surprised they don't want longer warranties.
Now to go through the incredibly annoy process of getting a laptop replaced through corporate IT... sigh.
Yes, but Amazon did it using plain old MP3s you can play everywhere while Apple did it with some crappy Apple-only format that only worked on iPods, so ...
The latest Square connects using Bluetooth, so there's that.
But if you read that page, you'll discover that it still requires the headphone jack for swiping cards. So maybe they will just focus on Android.
Then don't buy electric and buy diesel or gas instead. Wow that was tough to solve!
You mean exactly what I'm doing?
The story is about VW moving over to mostly electric vehicles, and the problem is that the infrastructure for that just doesn't exist and isn't likely to exist in the next decade - the time period they're apparently planning on doing the move.
We'll see. I'd love to think that in 10 years I'd be able to go all-electric, but I don't think it's going to happen.
Yes, I can definitely see how a rifle emoji would be threatening, but a dagger, crossed swords, skull and crossbones, a bomb , or even a pistol clearly aren't.
There's already a pistol emoji. There's no reason not to add a rifle emoji for completeness sake.
Oh, probably, but that would mean I'd have to actually go to work and I'm mostly a telecommuter these days. (Meaning I don't have to drive at all, which is even more eco-friendly!)
My employer does have charging spots. Eight of them, I think.
So while it might work for - well, up to eight employees out of - I dunno, say a thousand - clearly it's not a solution it everyone starts getting an electric car. And they do get used, I generally see cars parked and charging with them when I do go in to the building.
That's not the only problem. Not all of us live in houses with garages. I live in an apartment complex with assigned parking. If I were to get an electric vehicle I have no clue how the hell I'd charge it.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I think electric vehicles are the future and I'd love to be able to drive a plug-in hybrid, but at present I have absolutely no way to charge it and that needs to change before electric cars can roll out to the entire population.
Depends if management can do math.
If the cost of testing in Firefox is higher than the cost of driving away Firefox users (and it almost always isn't, since the type of people using Firefox are the type of people who'll just use a different browser if the site fails), then it's simple: don't support Firefox.
Right now, we're at the point where the decision is easy: don't support Firefox. It isn't worth the effort, and generally if things work in Chrome, they'll probably work in Firefox. So Firefox isn't supported and I only ever bother testing things in Firefox if someone complains.
Well, in theory I only bother testing things in Firefox if someone complains. So far, no one has.
And on that note there's apparently a Flash 0-day out there that's being actively attacked with the patch scheduled for tomorrow at the earliest.
So, uh, yeah.
Yeah, about that, as someone who works as a web developer, my reaction to reading this story was "Safari is at version 10 already? When did that happen?"
Now granted none of the websites I work on require any plugins at all, and some of them even use things like HTML 5's <canvas> to render pretty charts and graphs.
But they all have one thing in common: no one tests in Safari. If it's broken in Safari, the answer is "download Chrome." Fortunately I can't remember a time when something was broken in Safari and Safari alone - generally if it works in Chrome, it'll work in Safari too.
(Remembering that this is about Safari and not Mobile Safari. There are enough iPhone users out there that people do test in Mobile Safari.)
It's an aggregator of stuff that's split among a ton of other sites. That's the point - to cherry-pick the interesting stuff and leave the rest of it out there.
I don't need Slashdot's help to find way too much coverage about the Orlando terrorist attack. Just news.google.com is enough to find way more coverage of it than I possibly could care about.
E3 and WWDC are both next week. I'm sure Slashdot can find plenty of stories about stuff that's happening then without having to cover a story that's already over-saturated.
Nerds can use the address bar in their web browser to go to other sites to read about how Obama has, yet again, failed to stop a terrorist attack on US soil. But Slashdot is focused on news for nerds - specifically stuff I won't find on other sites.
And, yes, the Orlando Islamic terrorist attack is a perfect example of a story that's newsworthy to the general public but not newsworthy on a website targeted to a specific kind of news.
I'll say here what I said elsewhere: I'm sure Donald Trump is all torn up about losing access to advertising to all those people who don't vote anyway.
No, it doesn't. It acts like it does, but it doesn't. Facebook's timeline is a filtered feed where Facebook filters out "unwanted" posts, and there is absolutely no way to disable that or see what it's filtering.
Here's a real world example. I "follow" the local NWS branch on Facebook and Twitter. They post weather forecasts and other useful information about upcoming weather events and local weather activity. A while ago, they posted an interesting look at how you could view the increasing greenery across the region from satellite photos as spring progressed.
I know they posted this thanks to Twitter. When I went to try and share the picture via Facebook, Facebook filtered it out for me. I tried to sort it via "most recent" but what that actually does is it takes your "New Stories" feed and sorts it chronologically. And that's all it does.
There is no way to browse by newest.
Which isn't entirely true. There is a crazy workaround that allows you to sort of be able to see everything by chronological order, but that involves creating a special "list" of friends and then explicitly going to that list and not looking at either the news feed or "most recent."
This was covered on Slashdot a while ago. Essentially Facebook does this to force companies to pay to not be filtered.
Incidentally I "follow" Slashdot on Facebook too, and generally speaking Facebook will show me blocks of Slashdot stories up to a week after they were posted. For example, this story does not show up at all on my "Most Recent" feed despite being posted three hours ago.
Yes, I know, I'm holding it wrong.
This is why I don't bother asking Apple users for help any more. The huge issues you run into with Apple products are never Apple's fault (why do I have to reboot at least once a day to keep wifi working?), they're always somehow your fault.
Yes. "Innovation." I hate those stupid "mag-safe" power adapters. All Apple succeeded in doing was inventing a power adapter that can't stay plugged in. The weight of the cord itself is enough to pull the stupid thing out if you let enough of it dangle.
There's nothing like going into work and discovering that the laptop you left to charge overnight didn't charge at all because Apple likes "cool fancy" over practical power adapters.
Of course, the theory is that you won't be able to dump the laptop on the floor by tripping over the cord, yet I've managed to do just that on multiple occasions. Sure, it snaps unplugged in the process but it puts more than enough force on the laptop to drag it to the floor.
But that's Apple "innovation" - it sure seems neat, up until you try and use it in reality.
With all due respect, no one cares what Apple fans think.
No, seriously. An Apple fan is someone who is going to back Apple regardless. It would be like asking a Patriots fan about the ongoing Tom Brady saga (yeah, that's still happening): no one cares what they think because they're going to back Tom Brady regardless, no matter how blatantly guilty he is.
But the average person? Apple came out of that looking hilariously incompetent. First they refused to help the FBI, then the plucky li'l FBI managed to unlock the phone anyway, and then Apple demanded to know how. If you watched any of the late night shows, they made fun of Apple over the thing. Even John Oliver, who was on Apple's side, mocked Apple for being hilariously incompetent at security. If you know any "average person" they were not on Apple's side.
Fortunately for Apple, that the whole thing was such a niche story that, outside of techies, no one remembers it anymore anyway.
The whole "Macs are comparable to PCs" thing stopped being true like five years ago when Apple decided to forget that they were a computer company and concentrate on iDevices. Their current top-end computers are something like two generations behind the current latest-and-greatest, the graphics cards in their Macs are either the same two generation old Intel integrated graphics or even older AMD or Nvidia GPUs, depending on model.
So, yeah - it's trivial to beat a Mac these days, because Apple has entirely stopped caring about the Mac.
It's hard to see where they're focusing on these days. iOS has been allowed to languish. iOS 9 was supposed to be a "polish" release that was focused on fixing bugs and resolving old issues. It didn't. iPhones appear to have picked up the wifi issues that plague Macs and routinely drop wifi and refuse to connect. The iOS home screen appears buggier than ever and will routinely freeze on you. Siri is just as useless as she ever was and while Apple Maps may have finally gotten a database of points of interest so you can at least find places you want to go, their routing software is still useless and their POIs still contain hilarious gaps.
For example, Apple Maps contains the Apple Store nearest to me - but NOT the mall that Apple Store is located in. If you try and use Apple Maps to navigate to that Apple Store, it will continually try and find routes to the middle of the mall where the store is but since you can't actually drive through the mall you'll never "arrive" so it will keep on giving driving instructions around the mall. (It's actually kind of hilarious, because it'll tell you it's going to route you to the "closest point" it can and then when you arrive there rather than say "you've arrived!" it immediately plots a route back to that point.)
I have a Mac for work and it's the most annoying thing ever. I routinely have to reboot it to get it to stay connected to wifi. Really the only thing going for it is the retina display, and Windows is finally (finally!) catching up in that area. You can get Windows laptops with 4K displays in them. (Not MacBooks, though.) I remember when the MacBook trackpad was by far the best trackpad I ever used - but Windows laptops caught up, and now the OS X trackpad is horrible because the "click" is now done via some sort of software-triggered force feedback thing. Which is a problem because when OS X is lagging, which is often, the click stops, so you can't tell you "clicked."
Bottom line here is that while Apple may have, at one point produced quality laptop/desktop hardware that was on par or even better than anything in the PC world, those days are long past. Anyone saying otherwise is deluding themselves.
If they just made the privacy settings more prominent when creating a post, it will be easier to designate a post's visibility to different groups (and creating those groups).
What are you talking about? The privacy controls are literally right next to the "Post" button on Facebook, unless you're using the mobile client, then they're right next to your name. In either case they're pretty freaking prominent and you can use them to have a pretty fine-grained control over who sees what you post.
Of course, I doubt most people bother with that control. I have it set to "friends only" and just leave it at that. If I don't want some subset of people to see something on Facebook, I just don't post it at all, and I expect most people are similar. People know that just because they blocked someone from seeing a post directly doesn't mean someone else can't show it to them.
I call BS, App certs do not have any use whatsoever in the TCP stack. I'm sure people had problems, but it wasn't due to this.
If the app in question is a VPN app, then it's entirely possible that they literally could not connect to the Internet with the app disabled.
Alternatively what's meant is that they couldn't connect to the Internet at the time and were therefore locked out of their legitimately purchased apps until whatever time they could connect to the Internet. Not everyone has a 24/7 Internet connection. (Seems unlikely for someone who can afford the huge expense of an Apple product, but whatever.)
I call BS on that too. The app settings are in a text file in the user directories, you can go and open them in your favorite text editor right now. Re-installing an app does not overwrite these settings, which is *the whole reason* they're done this way. It is possible that app did that, but that's a bug in the app and has nothing to do with certs.
I could have sworn part of removing an app via the App Store (or via Launchboard or whatever it's called) is that it deletes all the app's data as part of the process, just like it does under iOS.
You forgot all the UX people whose job it is to randomly change Twitter's UI around for no real reason. Don't forget, Twitter is a modern web-based application, it needs UX because if there's one thing a platform based around sending 140-character messages shouldn't be, it's simple.
(No, really, they seem to love randomly changing their website and client apps. I guess so those 4100 employees can justify their existence. Alternatively they feel they need to mimic Facebook.)
If they're going to mandate locking down, lock down the WiFi radio, as that's the part that uses the radio waves. The WiFi radio can be a "black box" with it own firmware, much like on cellular phones, where the cellular radio is a similar black box.
As I understand it, that is what the FCC wants to mandate. The problem is that in order to keep costs down, a lot of the wifi hardware in the routers doesn't have separate radio firmware, everything is controlled by a single system-on-chip, sort of like those old "winmodems" that didn't contain any firmware and instead offloaded everything to the CPU via their Windows driver.
So the FCC's rules locking down the radio firmware turn out to mean that manufacturers would have to lock down the entire software stack, not because that's what the FCC really wants, but because in order to save costs the radio firmware is instead done as part of the "main" firmware.
I remember when Sprint was running a campaign where you could go unlimited everything for about what I was paying AT&T. I tried to switch to Sprint at that time. They rejected my credit card.
I'm not sure why they rejected my credit card. It wasn't like there wasn't enough money to cover the cost of a new phone and the initial fees. In fact, they managed to put a hold on the account for the amount they wanted, but even with the hold, they wouldn't accept the card. Customer support couldn't help me, and my bank (which happened to be right next door to the Sprint store) couldn't figure out what was going on with them.
So I stayed with AT&T.
There's really no point to this story other than I remember trying to become a Sprint customer and being unable to do so. I wonder how many other people Sprint has rejected over the years due to broken systems?