If the iPod were still under warrantee, Apple will fix it for free.
No.
Generally, batteries are *not* covered under a warranty. They are considered "consumables" and are handled under a separate agreement, if at all.
So, any regular or additional warranties would apply to the iPod device itself.
As pointed out be many others, having a consumable that you have to void the warranty to replace is a stupid design. Forcing consumers to void their warranty to maintain a perfectly useful device is a stupid design.
We need to stop designing things that are fucking useless, or a PITA to maintain, only after a few years.
Perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to destroy this labeling on each drive, spending thousands of manhours and voiding manufacturers' warranties in the process.
Uo-oh. You've used the term "man-hours". Ironically, the majority of computer parts are assembled by women.
It's not surprising to see some less technical fields like anthropology further behind in understanding and using the technology, and high energy physics has a particular advantage in that the web was originally created for disseminating information in that field.
I agree that this field has a particular and long history with web technology.
Statements like "further behind in understanding technology" are a bit back-handed (though I'm sure it was not intentional). To this, my GF states "the social sciences are more robust".
Heh. Given that the original article was warning about increased reliance on scholarly works being archived online without a decent infratructure to maintain linkage and history, one could say that it's not surprising that more technical fields like high-energy physics are a little too ahead in this for their own good!
I'm tweaking both your fields a bit; it's all in good fun.
Just for completeness, though I know I've gone off on a tangent here, here is my GF's thoughts on the subject about citing online references:
For the most part, the web is an inappropriate place for getting
information for scholarly papers, particularly for undergrads. There
are a few exceptions:
There are online archives of published, peer reviewed journals.
These typically require a subscription and are cited in the same way as
if you read them on paper.
If you want to make a claim about information that is available
online or in popular news sources it is appropriate to use examples,
and, of course, to cite them. In this case, the APA and MLA both have
guidelines for online citations. For instance, in a paper I am
currently working on, I cite a Google web search to illustrate both the
number of charitable organizations available to which one can donate
money, and the ease of obtaining information about them. However, in
this case I am only illustrating a point, my argument certainly does
not rest on online sources.
There are a few online, peer reviewed journals. The ones I've seen
are generally under the auspices of a university or foundation that
exists in the physical world. This may indicate that if they run out of
money or stop publishing they will be able to take care of archiving,
but I don't really know. These are perfectly reasonable articles to use
to support an argument, but I don't know how archiving is dealt with.
Another reply to this thread specifically talks about how some fields are trying to handle the archival persistence of online references, especially as these become more common in that field. For now, it seems, a lot of research is only informally done online. The majority of results are still published in dead-tree editions.
The APA way to format papers includes several ways to cite electronic references.
Cool. I didn't know someone was developing guidelines. I'll forward the link.
As for "valid" papers, my GF showed me a paper that was both peer-reviewed, presented and published that was an experiment in writing "scholarly" papers that were poorly thought-out, full of factual errors, with no real citations. I wish I had the link (pun sort of intended...).
The journal that published it is no longer publishing...
Hmmm. I'm not sure most scholary works are allowed to just cite arbitrary URLs for inline references or footnotes.
The idea is that you generally have to cite peer-reviewed, published and presented articles; criteria which the majority of web published material simply does not satisfy. Web reading would fall under the "course reading", and would have to be backed up by a "real" reference.
According to my GF (currently working on a Masters in Anthropology) there is a lot of confusion on how to use the web for scholary references. Many people cite URLs in citations that are really just online archives of previously-published work. In this case, noting the URL is like saying which library you checked the article out, and what shelf it was on. If you are an undergrad and cite a URL, it is almost a sure thing that the prof or the TA's will take marks off for improper citations.
There are a few peer-reviewed journals that are (partly or completely) published online, in which case the URL might be a valid citation. This is likely to changed, and it seems the original article was suggesting that we need to handle this case now, before we lose more good work.
In a much smaller way, this is the kind of thing that those involved in the whole blog phenomenon are trying to resolve; making sure that their blog-rolls, trackbacks and search-engine cached pages stay historically maintainable.
Glad I don't for for your company...generally any company that has 'an armload' of customers asking for something would catch a clue.
*shrug*
We've been in business for over 2 decades now. Pretty old for a software company. Our app suite has had to change with the times, as have the platforms we support.
I guess I was just saying that regardless of what developers think of OS X as a development platform, not everyone is in a hurry to port their apps to the Mac. There are just too many other considerations.
An "armlength" of customers is just that: a tiny handful compared to the rest of our Win32 and Unix-dominated customer base. Don't get me wrong: I love my Mac, and development on it is fun. It's just that no matter what developers like or what customers want, market pressures and day-to-day business concerns will always eclipse those desires. Honestly, those customers will just move their apps to another platform. At this point nobody stops buying our client-server app because we don't have a Mac client. They make those Mac users switch to something else.
I've learned that the actual development of an app is actually one of the smallest parts of selling to an enterprise market. I'm still holding out for a Mac client, though. What I'm not looking forward to is being the only person with Mac expertise once we release it.
Finally, a thought for Apple : you've wooed many of us across with the strong Unix core and aggressive pricing - time to capitalise on that and get more developers pushing out product for the Mac.
Jeepers, we've got an armlength of customers asking for a port of our (mostly) Java-based client to OS X, but we still don't have a business case for it.
So this G4 sit next to my desk and serves iTunes.
I did the proof-of-concept, and other than some weirdo Look And Feel problems related to the completely new (to us) Aqua LAF, it seemed to work ok. Some of the Swing widgets behave badly the way we use them, but ain't that Swing?
Of course, there is more to porting apps than just getting it to build and run. The QA schedule and Support resources and post-release maintenance have to be taken into consideration as well. This is especially so given I'm the only Mac guy in the entire company, so we'd have to educated people in a hurry. Developers know it's a good platform, but everyone else does not want to get saddled with having to support another potentially marginal platform.
So, it looks like we'll never port our enterprise app over to OS X. From a business standpoint, it's still not a viable platform regardless of how many companies want us to support it.
Well, most coders sign the document that says what they code during their employment belongs to the company. I know I did; I had no choice.
All they have to do is prove that you used company equipment or time to work on something, and it becomes their asset. Apple is no different in this respect than most companies.
Maybe it does suck, but that's the way it works. Individuals have very little room to move when up against a coporation. This is the primary reason for the existence of collective bargaining.
Requirements:
Macintosh computer with PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor; built-in USB; and 128MB of physical RAM.
I guess you mean that when you buy a Mac, you get some kind of OS. However, even Apple makes this distinction, and provides "upgrade" CDs that require exsisting previous copies to be present on the target. The US$129 Panther package can be installed to a bare disk.
Of course, these upgrades from Apple are pretty hard to qualify for. I'm just advocating making the criteria a little more friendly.
I have no trouble convincing myself that the $15/month (for me) is worth it. I did have trouble paying the full price for Jaguar less than 2 months after I dropped a significant amount of money on a new system. Others seemed to feel the same way back then. It can make creative discounting very attractive.
I'll likely wait and let the bugs shake themselves out and make the purchase eventually.
I almost see it as a "montly" subscription to using an OS.
Seeing as I'm a "the glass is half-empty" kind of guy, I've never looked at it like this before.
I'd still like an "upgrade" price (yes, I know, Apple provides what they call an upgrade release, but this is not what I'm talking about) for those that always legally get each release.
Ok, it sounds a bit like Dr. Evil asking to be thrown a frickin' bone, here, but the cost is more like $15/month for me. I would have appreciated a nice little discount to offset the taxes and such.
I felt like this more when they released Jag less than two months after I got my shiny new G4 with all the bells and whistles. Running 10.1.x is not _really_ an option, and was quickly a forgotten release. The same will likely happen for 10.2.
That's the problem, isn't it. I prefer not to buy any compact unit with a radio.
I come from the old days, where integrated anything could be roughly translated to another marginal part to break. The engineer in me would prefer that they save the $0.50 per unit on the radio chip (well, plus the effort for programming for the radio options) and make the existing features better.
But that's me: my application of diminishing returns has usually prompted me to buy discrete parts over integrated units.
Anyway, radio generally sucks, and I get better news and weather from my PDA. Which also plays MP3s; a feature I do not use!
How can you be assured that biased vote-counters aren't surrepetitiously discarding or destroying ballots for candidates that they do not like?
True. But at least we know how someone would attack a pencil-and-paper ballot system. As I've said before, the problems with paper ballots are relatively well-known. There are ways to help stop and (more importantly) detect when paper ballots have been compromised.
The design of Diebold (and other) electronic voting systems is to deliberately obfuscate the audit process.
Frankly the method of voting seems to be pretty irrelevant to falsification of results
Current problems have a lot to do with how mechanical voting machines can be set up (does it reject a misvote, or silently eat it?) and who gets on the voter lists (or, more correctly, who gets removed from the lists).
Electronic voting systems do not remedy this situation (ironically, since many of these voting systems were developed as a result of "voter reform" legislation enacted after recent messes in some states). But they make it a hell of a lot easier to hide the evidence of tampering.
Since Diebold is making these claims under ordinary copyright law, which most nations have ratified, simply moving the files to another country does not necessarily legally help. They can pretty much ask any country to uphold their claim.
I still agree with the principle that while all nations need to take interest, it is up to U.S. citizens to drag their government kicking and screaming back toward democracy.
Universal copyright is one of those things that many countries have all agreed to and ratified, in principle. Copyright enforcement might be one of those things where international borders don't quite have the same meaning.
paper ballots are just as easily altered as electronic...
That may be true, but the main issue is that paper ballots have been around for a long time -- long enough for us to work most of the kinks out and to find out where the weak spots are.
Remember that security issues are not an absolute; we rarely look for perfect security or perfect auditing. But any system that purports to be secure (i.e., keep a secret) has to be provably secure enough, and well-understood enough to determine the best implementation.
Put another way, the Diebold machines have a lot of known issues with security and auditing. What we should be as concerned about is the unknown security and auditing issues.
When discussed in this light, paper ballots are insecure as any physical tally can be. They are subject to accidental miscount and deliberate abuse. However, we've had hundreds, maybe thousands, of years to devise systems that utilize paper ballots to minimize or isolate these problems. We know where most of the systemic bugs are, and we can concentrate on ensuring that rogue polling stations don't break existing law.
Jeepers, when we vote federally in Canada, the polling officer actually initials each ballot (on the back, naturally) and checks for the initial before the folded ballot goes into the box. This is one of the oldest checksums known to humanity (and no checksum is perfect).
Paper ballots are not perfect, but they are perfect enough.
My question (and it may be naive) is why do we need fancy polling machines (mechanical or otherwise) anyway? What problem do they solve that is not solved by paper ballots? Is it simply a matter of scale? Is the electorate really served any better by mechanical or electronic voting methods by solving a critical problem with paper ballots?
If you're going to be doing what you're describing, you've already got a laptop or PDA or something out- right?
Nope.
I regularily do SMS from my PDA to my phone sitting in a meeting room, with my phone at my desk in my cubicle. I just took a road trip with someone else who had a Bluetooth PDA. It is a big pain trying to aim IR in a moving car full of other people -- with Bluetooth we just sent stuff and played games without having to twist around in our seats, no problem.
Line of sight IR is a nice last-ditch or specialized protocol. Non-directional short-range communication is just more natural to use.
this system can handle 1000 watts (yes, a kilowatt) per square centimeter.
I'm pretty sure a kilowatt is actually 1,024 watts.
Though, I suppose that's depending on who is measuring it. Not to mention that some electrical systems cannot handle larger wattages, or do so through Logical Wattage Access (LWA).
Slashdot Mirror
No.
Generally, batteries are *not* covered under a warranty. They are considered "consumables" and are handled under a separate agreement, if at all.
So, any regular or additional warranties would apply to the iPod device itself.
As pointed out be many others, having a consumable that you have to void the warranty to replace is a stupid design. Forcing consumers to void their warranty to maintain a perfectly useful device is a stupid design.
We need to stop designing things that are fucking useless, or a PITA to maintain, only after a few years.
Believe it. I've turned several "projects" into parts-box candidates, myself.
Uo-oh. You've used the term "man-hours". Ironically, the majority of computer parts are assembled by women.
I agree that this field has a particular and long history with web technology.
Statements like "further behind in understanding technology" are a bit back-handed (though I'm sure it was not intentional). To this, my GF states "the social sciences are more robust".
Heh. Given that the original article was warning about increased reliance on scholarly works being archived online without a decent infratructure to maintain linkage and history, one could say that it's not surprising that more technical fields like high-energy physics are a little too ahead in this for their own good!
I'm tweaking both your fields a bit; it's all in good fun.
Just for completeness, though I know I've gone off on a tangent here, here is my GF's thoughts on the subject about citing online references:
Another reply to this thread specifically talks about how some fields are trying to handle the archival persistence of online references, especially as these become more common in that field. For now, it seems, a lot of research is only informally done online. The majority of results are still published in dead-tree editions.
Cool. I didn't know someone was developing guidelines. I'll forward the link.
As for "valid" papers, my GF showed me a paper that was both peer-reviewed, presented and published that was an experiment in writing "scholarly" papers that were poorly thought-out, full of factual errors, with no real citations. I wish I had the link (pun sort of intended...).
The journal that published it is no longer publishing...
Hmmm. I'm not sure most scholary works are allowed to just cite arbitrary URLs for inline references or footnotes.
The idea is that you generally have to cite peer-reviewed, published and presented articles; criteria which the majority of web published material simply does not satisfy. Web reading would fall under the "course reading", and would have to be backed up by a "real" reference.
According to my GF (currently working on a Masters in Anthropology) there is a lot of confusion on how to use the web for scholary references. Many people cite URLs in citations that are really just online archives of previously-published work. In this case, noting the URL is like saying which library you checked the article out, and what shelf it was on. If you are an undergrad and cite a URL, it is almost a sure thing that the prof or the TA's will take marks off for improper citations.
There are a few peer-reviewed journals that are (partly or completely) published online, in which case the URL might be a valid citation. This is likely to changed, and it seems the original article was suggesting that we need to handle this case now, before we lose more good work.
In a much smaller way, this is the kind of thing that those involved in the whole blog phenomenon are trying to resolve; making sure that their blog-rolls, trackbacks and search-engine cached pages stay historically maintainable.
*shrug*
We've been in business for over 2 decades now. Pretty old for a software company. Our app suite has had to change with the times, as have the platforms we support.
I guess I was just saying that regardless of what developers think of OS X as a development platform, not everyone is in a hurry to port their apps to the Mac. There are just too many other considerations.
An "armlength" of customers is just that: a tiny handful compared to the rest of our Win32 and Unix-dominated customer base. Don't get me wrong: I love my Mac, and development on it is fun. It's just that no matter what developers like or what customers want, market pressures and day-to-day business concerns will always eclipse those desires. Honestly, those customers will just move their apps to another platform. At this point nobody stops buying our client-server app because we don't have a Mac client. They make those Mac users switch to something else.
I've learned that the actual development of an app is actually one of the smallest parts of selling to an enterprise market. I'm still holding out for a Mac client, though. What I'm not looking forward to is being the only person with Mac expertise once we release it.
Jeepers, we've got an armlength of customers asking for a port of our (mostly) Java-based client to OS X, but we still don't have a business case for it.
So this G4 sit next to my desk and serves iTunes.
I did the proof-of-concept, and other than some weirdo Look And Feel problems related to the completely new (to us) Aqua LAF, it seemed to work ok. Some of the Swing widgets behave badly the way we use them, but ain't that Swing?
Of course, there is more to porting apps than just getting it to build and run. The QA schedule and Support resources and post-release maintenance have to be taken into consideration as well. This is especially so given I'm the only Mac guy in the entire company, so we'd have to educated people in a hurry. Developers know it's a good platform, but everyone else does not want to get saddled with having to support another potentially marginal platform.
So, it looks like we'll never port our enterprise app over to OS X. From a business standpoint, it's still not a viable platform regardless of how many companies want us to support it.
Well, most coders sign the document that says what they code during their employment belongs to the company. I know I did; I had no choice.
All they have to do is prove that you used company equipment or time to work on something, and it becomes their asset. Apple is no different in this respect than most companies.
Maybe it does suck, but that's the way it works. Individuals have very little room to move when up against a coporation. This is the primary reason for the existence of collective bargaining.
One day all that old SCO merchandise is going to worth a lot to geeky collectors on eBay.
I'm holding out for a frisbee or baseball cap, myself.
I'm not sure I agree. From Apple's webstore entry for Panther:
I guess you mean that when you buy a Mac, you get some kind of OS. However, even Apple makes this distinction, and provides "upgrade" CDs that require exsisting previous copies to be present on the target. The US$129 Panther package can be installed to a bare disk.
Of course, these upgrades from Apple are pretty hard to qualify for. I'm just advocating making the criteria a little more friendly.
I have no trouble convincing myself that the $15 /month (for me) is worth it. I did have trouble paying the full price for Jaguar less than 2 months after I dropped a significant amount of money on a new system. Others seemed to feel the same way back then. It can make creative discounting very attractive.
I'll likely wait and let the bugs shake themselves out and make the purchase eventually.
Seeing as I'm a "the glass is half-empty" kind of guy, I've never looked at it like this before.
I'd still like an "upgrade" price (yes, I know, Apple provides what they call an upgrade release, but this is not what I'm talking about) for those that always legally get each release.
Ok, it sounds a bit like Dr. Evil asking to be thrown a frickin' bone, here, but the cost is more like $15/month for me. I would have appreciated a nice little discount to offset the taxes and such.
I felt like this more when they released Jag less than two months after I got my shiny new G4 with all the bells and whistles. Running 10.1.x is not _really_ an option, and was quickly a forgotten release. The same will likely happen for 10.2.
That's the problem, isn't it. I prefer not to buy any compact unit with a radio.
I come from the old days, where integrated anything could be roughly translated to another marginal part to break. The engineer in me would prefer that they save the $0.50 per unit on the radio chip (well, plus the effort for programming for the radio options) and make the existing features better.
But that's me: my application of diminishing returns has usually prompted me to buy discrete parts over integrated units.
Anyway, radio generally sucks, and I get better news and weather from my PDA. Which also plays MP3s; a feature I do not use!
True. But at least we know how someone would attack a pencil-and-paper ballot system. As I've said before, the problems with paper ballots are relatively well-known. There are ways to help stop and (more importantly) detect when paper ballots have been compromised.
The design of Diebold (and other) electronic voting systems is to deliberately obfuscate the audit process.
Current problems have a lot to do with how mechanical voting machines can be set up (does it reject a misvote, or silently eat it?) and who gets on the voter lists (or, more correctly, who gets removed from the lists).
Electronic voting systems do not remedy this situation (ironically, since many of these voting systems were developed as a result of "voter reform" legislation enacted after recent messes in some states). But they make it a hell of a lot easier to hide the evidence of tampering.
Since Diebold is making these claims under ordinary copyright law, which most nations have ratified, simply moving the files to another country does not necessarily legally help. They can pretty much ask any country to uphold their claim.
I still agree with the principle that while all nations need to take interest, it is up to U.S. citizens to drag their government kicking and screaming back toward democracy.
It really never was about "the chads", except in the U.S. media. What really happened is far worse.
Check this and this and this out. And this. And why not this, as well.
Like the other guy said, try a torrent download.
Anyway, apparently Why War? is keeping some mirrors in their back pocket in case Diebold starts throwing lawyers at existing mirrors.
Not sure.
Universal copyright is one of those things that many countries have all agreed to and ratified, in principle. Copyright enforcement might be one of those things where international borders don't quite have the same meaning.
That may be true, but the main issue is that paper ballots have been around for a long time -- long enough for us to work most of the kinks out and to find out where the weak spots are.
Remember that security issues are not an absolute; we rarely look for perfect security or perfect auditing. But any system that purports to be secure (i.e., keep a secret) has to be provably secure enough, and well-understood enough to determine the best implementation.
Put another way, the Diebold machines have a lot of known issues with security and auditing. What we should be as concerned about is the unknown security and auditing issues.
When discussed in this light, paper ballots are insecure as any physical tally can be. They are subject to accidental miscount and deliberate abuse. However, we've had hundreds, maybe thousands, of years to devise systems that utilize paper ballots to minimize or isolate these problems. We know where most of the systemic bugs are, and we can concentrate on ensuring that rogue polling stations don't break existing law.
Jeepers, when we vote federally in Canada, the polling officer actually initials each ballot (on the back, naturally) and checks for the initial before the folded ballot goes into the box. This is one of the oldest checksums known to humanity (and no checksum is perfect).
Paper ballots are not perfect, but they are perfect enough.
My question (and it may be naive) is why do we need fancy polling machines (mechanical or otherwise) anyway? What problem do they solve that is not solved by paper ballots? Is it simply a matter of scale? Is the electorate really served any better by mechanical or electronic voting methods by solving a critical problem with paper ballots?
Nope.
I regularily do SMS from my PDA to my phone sitting in a meeting room, with my phone at my desk in my cubicle. I just took a road trip with someone else who had a Bluetooth PDA. It is a big pain trying to aim IR in a moving car full of other people -- with Bluetooth we just sent stuff and played games without having to twist around in our seats, no problem.
Line of sight IR is a nice last-ditch or specialized protocol. Non-directional short-range communication is just more natural to use.
Nice try yourself.
This site explains how one should have read my original posting.
Sheesh.
<sarcasm>No kidding. Really?</sarcasm>
look, no offence, but I'm pretty sure it was clear in my original posting that I was making a funny.
I'm pretty sure a kilowatt is actually 1,024 watts.
Though, I suppose that's depending on who is measuring it. Not to mention that some electrical systems cannot handle larger wattages, or do so through Logical Wattage Access (LWA).
;)