They want people that want to annoy guys like us by leaving their phone on the desk and ringing at full volume while they are in a meeting.
Just a tip. When somebody does that in my environment, I simply stand up, go to the phone and turn it off. Oh, and, no, I won't tell the person I turned it off, nor that he/she had a call.
If that person doesn't notice the phone is off, then it's their problem... not mine. Revenge is sweet.
My DVD recorder (for TV) takes at least 60 seconds from 0 to operational. This is a problem one finds all over the place these days. It's not limited to self-made settop boxes.
Yes, 900km isn't peanuts. Still, in Windows XP you can use remote desktop and I found it works even fine over dial-up. (As long as you don't open a browser that displays flash... That was horrible) I have family in Antwerp (I see you're Belgian. I used to be Belgian) and I used to support them too. Alas, they didn't want to adhere to my policies.
Solution: no support for you. It's harsh, but the only way.
Sorry for the use of "them" and "they". I usually don't generalize, but it was just for the humours sake.:-)
Disclaimer: I do not own an full blown iPod
Recently on German news they covered CeBit and plainly stated that the next generation phones would be iPod killers. I was thinking by myself: WTF? Then they started to enumerate the advantages of having MP3 player in your phone. The main thing seemed to be that you could download songs on a whim. Essentially iTMS but over wireless. I fell over laughing. (I know that the device in the article is not a phone, but I just wanted to mention it)
So, I first am going to shell out money to get the song, then pay UMTS packets? Are you *insane*? How expensive will be a 3Meg song that way? Waaaaay beyond the current prices in iTMS.
The iPod is successful because it is simple and later on the seamless integration with iTMS was the big winner. Any competing product must at least match this and make it less expensive.
None of these so-called iPod-killers will fly. At least that is MHO.
Slow down... I was trying to be funny. Nothing against OS X, nor Macs. I only left because my iBook had the logic board failure last year and Apple wouldn't replace it under their extended warranty. I would have bought a new Apple, but then the announcement of the Intel Macs came and I completely jumped ship. Nothing against Intel, but buying a first-gen Apple was never a good idea.
So now you know my reason.
I only have one remark regarding to your comment:
And every time I'm at my sister's I can't believe all the crap I have to remove in order to get her box running again. Every time. Is she stupid? No. She's just not your average geek.
You are obviously a geek, so I can only ask you one single question: why don't you protect your users better? I have three networks, the first network features my mom, dad, brother and sister. Network two my wife and network three my mother in law and her 14-year old son. None of them are computer geeks by any definition (with perhaps the exception being my dad, who gets a lot of leeway from my part). All of them run Windows XP, all of them run Limited Accounts, all of them are behind a powerful firewall (Network 1 and Network 2 => OpenBSD and Network 3 => hardware firewall) The machines they run were configured by me and feature Firefox and Thunderbird for Internet connectivity. (IE and Outlook are disabled) OpenOffice for productivity. (MS Office is not required) AVG Antivirus is standard and that's about it.
None of these computers have any problems and my users never complain. Sure, I reign over these networks with an iron fist, but my users have (by now) understood that it is in their best interest to follow my policies.
So, yes, I can see legitimate uses for running Windows on an Apple (running unavailable software, but one can do that in a virtualized environment if we're not talking about games), but the problems you currently have will not go away even if you could run Windows on an Apple, because it's still Windows and Windows need careful system administration and competent network design.
I suppose you mean OpenFirmware and not the BIOS that is in your PC. I agree that OpenFirmware is very nice, but alas, Intel suffers from the Not Invented Here syndrome. Everyone *could* use OpenFirmware, but Intel prefers its own stuff. That's why... No other reason, really.
since we're constantly hearing from Mac owners how wonderful OS X is, then why would they give a damn about this?
Because those same Mac owners, that are so proud of the operating system are big whiners when it comes to games. They want it all, you know: a pretty operating system and all the games you can get on that ugly thing called Windows XP.
They are proud to be "the minority", but don't accept the fact that them being a minority it doesn't add up for game publishers to develop for them.
And, yes, I am a former Apple user... I however left for entirely different reasons.
Exactly. One could do something like emulate a "classic" BIOS. EFI starts something that adversises to be a Operating System, but in reality it just starts a "classic" BIOS. That BIOS is then used to load a BIOS-dependent Operating System like Windows.
Oddly enough, the only person that I know that never turns off her computer is not a geek. She's my wife. I turn off my computer because it's fucking loud (that's what I got for buying an AMD Athlon MP based system... *grin*)
My wifes computer is whisper quiet. I don't get it. Well, there is this other computer running all the time, but I underclocked it to 800MHz. I'm probably the only sucker in the world having an AMD64 machine running at 800Mhz.;-)
I've seen it go up to 150MByte, but after that is seemed to stop. Or did I restart the computer for some reason? I do not remember... Usually it hovers between 30MByte to 80MByte. (Right now: 63MByte). It doesn't matter: this computer has 4GByte of RAM and firefox can take whatever it needs. I also made sure that all computers in my close family (that would be about 10 different machines) are equipped with at least 512MByte. With moderate surfing and a normal computer usage (meaning: you turn the fucking thing off at night!), I had never any complaints about Firefox making the system laggy.
I'm not saying Firefox is perfect, but based on my (anecdotical) evidence I must conclude that most memory holes have been closed.
Not saying that the UI doesn't suck, but it does work on Firefox. At least here it does. That is Firefox on Windows. If I understood it correctly, Google Video uses Flash to display videos and if you have flash disabled (often on Linux, for example) or use some ad-blocking extentions it might interfere because of that.
Same in Dutch ("Informatika") and in French ("Informatique").
I still translate my degree (which is in dutch) to "Computer Science" because most non-german/dutch/french people have no idea what I'm talking about if I say "Informatics":-)
My great-grand-father (following dad's line) had a bike-repair shop.
My grand-father was an accountant.
My dad is an economist, but reverted quite early to IT. (in the seventies to be exact... Self-taught of course, he can't really program)
I am a computer scientist.
As you can see, there is clearly a up-going line. According to your idea, I should encourage my kids to become MBA's. You know what? My dad wanted *me* to become an MBA, because it was *his* vision of "his-career-but-better". My vision of "his-career-but-better" was not in the management part but in the IT part. These constructs are not "lines", they are networks.
Worse: you don't take into account the capacities of the kids. My brother is a bus driver and my sister finished highschool, but that's it. Oddly enough, both seem to be happier than me in what they do.
What you want is the "best-for-them-financially", because you know that an MBA usually earns better than whatever you do now. That is not the road to happiness. Go figure.... Sometimes, I wish I was the busdriver in the family.... or heck, had a bike repair shop. Utimately, in the line of the family, my great-grand-father had the best situation: a cool "tech job" (for those times) and he was his own boss. I don't think an MBA can match that...
Well knonw examples are polarbears tigers and bullsharks. All of these animals regularly hunt humans for food.
Odd... That's not what I have been told. Big sharks, like bullsharks (and other so-called human eaters, usually mistake us for their normal prey. Their diet is high-fat, like seals and the like. Usually, they attack and release ASAP because we taste afwul to them. The first bite is usually a taste bite. Alas, their kind of tasting involves a lot of razor-sharp teeth which is very hazardous to our health. More information here
For Polar Bears, I don't know, but it might be part of the fact that they have much less prey in the regions that they live and thus "anything with meat on it is good enough". My guess is that they'll eat anything that moves...
Tiger-eating humans usually turn out to be old or wounded tigers that physically can't tackle their usual prey. Thus they revert to the easily killed naked apes. They probably don't like us at all, but it's better to eat a bad-tasting ape than to starve to death. More information here (They do talk about an exception, though.... which I didn't know of)
I'm not saying that we're not "prey", but more something like "second-class prey".
Yes, the 600MHz iBooks were included in the recall program. One can find a full list here . Mine was a Dual USB and you can find it in the list. (Also could be a "Late 2001", since that is when I bought it)
The main problem is that I live in a country that doesn't have an Apple Store (online or offline) and for warranty claims I depend on third party support. I went to an Official Apple dealer with my laptop and they charged me about 80€ (could be more, I was quite angry) just for looking at it and telling me a repair would cost over 600€. I had printed out the webpage I linked to in this post, but they wouldn't listen. No proof of purchase means no proof of purchase. So, granted, it is more a problem with Apples "Official Dealers", but IMHO an "Official Dealer" should offer exact the same service as Apple.
I sold my iBook on eBay two weeks ago.... I must say that I found it sad, because I loved that machine. Alas, it was my first eBay sale and the guy buying it did a very good deal. (After all, it included 512Meg RAM and an Airport Classic card...) My bad for not knowing well how eBay works.
My country now has an online Apple store, but it's only for companies . With the switch to Intel + my previous experiences, I am not going to buy an Apple in the near future. The switch to Intel is too recent and others can bugtest for me.
But at least when my dad "screws up the internet,"
How does one "screw up the internet" with broadband? I mean, in all the years that I've broadband the users never screwed it up. It usually screwed up itself, by disconnecting for some reason. The users were not at fault though.
... but when I brought my a little more than 3 year old iBook to warranty, for logic board replacement, they refused. After all, it didn't fit the "three year old" condition. They did ask for a proof-of-purchase.
I am now again a Windows user. Because the machine I am typing this on is a laptop I bough for 100€ from my former employer. I added a 25€ wireless card and some RAM I had lying around (actually RAM from the iBook). Yeah, a P-III 600MHz mobile with 512Meg RAM and 80Gig harddisk (bought for 100€) might not be much but I can't buy a iBook for it. Actualy, my iBook 600MHz felt slower than what I have now.
I have no reason to switch to Apple again. I was a Linux switcher before Apple, I think it is the cheaper and better way.
My 295hp car just got 28 mpg on a 3 hour trip today, in 1978 that car would have gotten about 6-12mpg
The question you should ask yourself is why you actually need a 295HP car... I mean, sure: the mileage of cars has become better but if car constructors had let power at the same level of 1978, the mileage would be insanely better.
Look, I understand you are proud of your 28mpg and want to show that you have an "economical muscle car". Let me tell you this: when I was a student in 1998, I had a 14 year old Audi 80 1.8S. (Thus it was a 1989 model) It produced 80HP and was more than comfortable enough to drive from my home to the place where I studied (~160km apart). At comfortable highway speeds of about 80MPH, it had a mileage of about 33.6MPG. I loved that car.
My current car, while producing a lot more power, doesn't even manage 26MPG. Granted, my driving pattern is different now (nearly no highway anymore). Oddly enough, my current driving pattern would go very well with lower-powered cars. Who needs 295HP (my car has less, I assure you) when you're standinding in the traffic to work? A 2HP car would do the job!;-)
My wifes car has a 1.7l Turbo Diesel engine, she does about only highway because of her job and her mileage is close to 50MPG. Power of the car? 75HP... Which is just fine to drive the legal limit on highways. One can go up to about 90MPH, but at that point the fun ends. I'm sure that your car just starts to wake up at 90MPH, but frankly: you rarely drive that fast... (If you're being honest with yourself)
Okay, I admit that I didn't know and that such a thing is very cool. This has not much meaning for the ordinary user though. Not that I'm complaining, I'm definately going to look into it.
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Just a tip. When somebody does that in my environment, I simply stand up, go to the phone and turn it off. Oh, and, no, I won't tell the person I turned it off, nor that he/she had a call.
If that person doesn't notice the phone is off, then it's their problem... not mine. Revenge is sweet.
Named "LePod" et "LesTunes"? ;-)
Messieurs, je ne vous félicite pas!
My DVD recorder (for TV) takes at least 60 seconds from 0 to operational. This is a problem one finds all over the place these days. It's not limited to self-made settop boxes.
So, the North of Uranus is somewhere on it's side? Left or right? Just wondering. (Spare me the lame Uranus jokes...)
Solution: no support for you. It's harsh, but the only way.
Sorry for the use of "them" and "they". I usually don't generalize, but it was just for the humours sake. :-)
Recently on German news they covered CeBit and plainly stated that the next generation phones would be iPod killers. I was thinking by myself: WTF? Then they started to enumerate the advantages of having MP3 player in your phone. The main thing seemed to be that you could download songs on a whim. Essentially iTMS but over wireless. I fell over laughing. (I know that the device in the article is not a phone, but I just wanted to mention it)
So, I first am going to shell out money to get the song, then pay UMTS packets? Are you *insane*? How expensive will be a 3Meg song that way? Waaaaay beyond the current prices in iTMS.
The iPod is successful because it is simple and later on the seamless integration with iTMS was the big winner. Any competing product must at least match this and make it less expensive.
None of these so-called iPod-killers will fly. At least that is MHO.
So now you know my reason.
I only have one remark regarding to your comment:
And every time I'm at my sister's I can't believe all the crap I have to remove in order to get her box running again. Every time. Is she stupid? No. She's just not your average geek.
You are obviously a geek, so I can only ask you one single question: why don't you protect your users better?
I have three networks, the first network features my mom, dad, brother and sister. Network two my wife and network three my mother in law and her 14-year old son. None of them are computer geeks by any definition (with perhaps the exception being my dad, who gets a lot of leeway from my part). All of them run Windows XP, all of them run Limited Accounts, all of them are behind a powerful firewall (Network 1 and Network 2 => OpenBSD and Network 3 => hardware firewall) The machines they run were configured by me and feature Firefox and Thunderbird for Internet connectivity. (IE and Outlook are disabled) OpenOffice for productivity. (MS Office is not required) AVG Antivirus is standard and that's about it.
None of these computers have any problems and my users never complain. Sure, I reign over these networks with an iron fist, but my users have (by now) understood that it is in their best interest to follow my policies.
So, yes, I can see legitimate uses for running Windows on an Apple (running unavailable software, but one can do that in a virtualized environment if we're not talking about games), but the problems you currently have will not go away even if you could run Windows on an Apple, because it's still Windows and Windows need careful system administration and competent network design.
I'm a lousy coder. I didn't say it was easy, not that I could do it. I only said it should be feasible.
I suppose you mean OpenFirmware and not the BIOS that is in your PC. I agree that OpenFirmware is very nice, but alas, Intel suffers from the Not Invented Here syndrome. Everyone *could* use OpenFirmware, but Intel prefers its own stuff. That's why... No other reason, really.
Because those same Mac owners, that are so proud of the operating system are big whiners when it comes to games. They want it all, you know: a pretty operating system and all the games you can get on that ugly thing called Windows XP.
They are proud to be "the minority", but don't accept the fact that them being a minority it doesn't add up for game publishers to develop for them.
And, yes, I am a former Apple user... I however left for entirely different reasons.
Sounds feasible to me...
Oddly enough, the only person that I know that never turns off her computer is not a geek. She's my wife. I turn off my computer because it's fucking loud (that's what I got for buying an AMD Athlon MP based system... *grin*) ;-)
My wifes computer is whisper quiet. I don't get it. Well, there is this other computer running all the time, but I underclocked it to 800MHz. I'm probably the only sucker in the world having an AMD64 machine running at 800Mhz.
I'm not saying Firefox is perfect, but based on my (anecdotical) evidence I must conclude that most memory holes have been closed.
Not saying that the UI doesn't suck, but it does work on Firefox. At least here it does. That is Firefox on Windows. If I understood it correctly, Google Video uses Flash to display videos and if you have flash disabled (often on Linux, for example) or use some ad-blocking extentions it might interfere because of that.
I still translate my degree (which is in dutch) to "Computer Science" because most non-german/dutch/french people have no idea what I'm talking about if I say "Informatics" :-)
Uhm, in my country, that's pretty much how you order a beer...
- My great-grand-father (following dad's line) had a bike-repair shop.
- My grand-father was an accountant.
- My dad is an economist, but reverted quite early to IT. (in the seventies to be exact... Self-taught of course, he can't really program)
- I am a computer scientist.
As you can see, there is clearly a up-going line. According to your idea, I should encourage my kids to become MBA's. You know what? My dad wanted *me* to become an MBA, because it was *his* vision of "his-career-but-better". My vision of "his-career-but-better" was not in the management part but in the IT part. These constructs are not "lines", they are networks.Worse: you don't take into account the capacities of the kids. My brother is a bus driver and my sister finished highschool, but that's it. Oddly enough, both seem to be happier than me in what they do.
What you want is the "best-for-them-financially", because you know that an MBA usually earns better than whatever you do now. That is not the road to happiness. Go figure.... Sometimes, I wish I was the busdriver in the family.... or heck, had a bike repair shop. Utimately, in the line of the family, my great-grand-father had the best situation: a cool "tech job" (for those times) and he was his own boss. I don't think an MBA can match that...
Odd... That's not what I have been told. Big sharks, like bullsharks (and other so-called human eaters, usually mistake us for their normal prey. Their diet is high-fat, like seals and the like. Usually, they attack and release ASAP because we taste afwul to them. The first bite is usually a taste bite. Alas, their kind of tasting involves a lot of razor-sharp teeth which is very hazardous to our health. More information here
For Polar Bears, I don't know, but it might be part of the fact that they have much less prey in the regions that they live and thus "anything with meat on it is good enough". My guess is that they'll eat anything that moves...
Tiger-eating humans usually turn out to be old or wounded tigers that physically can't tackle their usual prey. Thus they revert to the easily killed naked apes. They probably don't like us at all, but it's better to eat a bad-tasting ape than to starve to death. More information here (They do talk about an exception, though.... which I didn't know of)
I'm not saying that we're not "prey", but more something like "second-class prey".
Sorry, I screwed up the link to the Apple store in my country: here it is .
The main problem is that I live in a country that doesn't have an Apple Store (online or offline) and for warranty claims I depend on third party support. I went to an Official Apple dealer with my laptop and they charged me about 80€ (could be more, I was quite angry) just for looking at it and telling me a repair would cost over 600€. I had printed out the webpage I linked to in this post, but they wouldn't listen. No proof of purchase means no proof of purchase. So, granted, it is more a problem with Apples "Official Dealers", but IMHO an "Official Dealer" should offer exact the same service as Apple.
I sold my iBook on eBay two weeks ago.... I must say that I found it sad, because I loved that machine. Alas, it was my first eBay sale and the guy buying it did a very good deal. (After all, it included 512Meg RAM and an Airport Classic card...) My bad for not knowing well how eBay works.
My country now has an online Apple store, but it's only for companies . With the switch to Intel + my previous experiences, I am not going to buy an Apple in the near future. The switch to Intel is too recent and others can bugtest for me.
How does one "screw up the internet" with broadband? I mean, in all the years that I've broadband the users never screwed it up. It usually screwed up itself, by disconnecting for some reason. The users were not at fault though.
I am now again a Windows user. Because the machine I am typing this on is a laptop I bough for 100€ from my former employer. I added a 25€ wireless card and some RAM I had lying around (actually RAM from the iBook). Yeah, a P-III 600MHz mobile with 512Meg RAM and 80Gig harddisk (bought for 100€) might not be much but I can't buy a iBook for it. Actualy, my iBook 600MHz felt slower than what I have now.
I have no reason to switch to Apple again. I was a Linux switcher before Apple, I think it is the cheaper and better way.
The question you should ask yourself is why you actually need a 295HP car... I mean, sure: the mileage of cars has become better but if car constructors had let power at the same level of 1978, the mileage would be insanely better.
Look, I understand you are proud of your 28mpg and want to show that you have an "economical muscle car". Let me tell you this: when I was a student in 1998, I had a 14 year old Audi 80 1.8S. (Thus it was a 1989 model) It produced 80HP and was more than comfortable enough to drive from my home to the place where I studied (~160km apart). At comfortable highway speeds of about 80MPH, it had a mileage of about 33.6MPG. I loved that car.
My current car, while producing a lot more power, doesn't even manage 26MPG. Granted, my driving pattern is different now (nearly no highway anymore). Oddly enough, my current driving pattern would go very well with lower-powered cars. Who needs 295HP (my car has less, I assure you) when you're standinding in the traffic to work? A 2HP car would do the job! ;-)
My wifes car has a 1.7l Turbo Diesel engine, she does about only highway because of her job and her mileage is close to 50MPG. Power of the car? 75HP... Which is just fine to drive the legal limit on highways. One can go up to about 90MPH, but at that point the fun ends. I'm sure that your car just starts to wake up at 90MPH, but frankly: you rarely drive that fast... (If you're being honest with yourself)
Okay, I admit that I didn't know and that such a thing is very cool. This has not much meaning for the ordinary user though. Not that I'm complaining, I'm definately going to look into it.