If your "return rate" with Apple is 3 out of 4 you must be buying them off the back of a truck in Jersey from Chris Moltisanti's retarded second cousin. Since 4-digit Power Macs til now, at two schools (K-12 and edu), our "return rate" has been ~5%, only one of them an outright exchange, all the others successfully repaired under warrantee.
$57 in pennies, shipped parcel post. Not sure what's more astonishing - this or how much we used to spend per message and per hour for access back in the day...
Apple read your comment, and that's the last straw. They're canceling the iPhone, disbanding the dev team, and selling the entire production run at Overstock.com and everyone gets a free Clio while supplies last. Oh, and you're invited to a party at John Dvorak's house. You have to bring the Tostitos, Shaw Wu's bringing the Dr. Pepper.
I've pretty much had it with companies who treat their policy as if it were the law of the land. Yes, when you enter into a contract you are bound by its terms, but the idea that any policy is immutable is gaining acceptance and seems to be the norm at least on the companies' parts.
I just picked up an old Apple//c and started going thru our library of old programs. It still does some amazing things. I have two students who are enthralled with this thing. They know more about how memory and disk basics after two weeks of this thing than they ever knew. Synapses 10 years dormant are snapping back into action... PEEKing POKEing. Where's my hole puncher - I need to make double sided disks!
"While not a particular resource hog in the classical sense, the OS does get very finicky when it doesn't get enough RAM to run. Swap load times can make a computer feel unbearably slow even when it may be absolutely fine the rest of the time."
So does every major OS.
"The operating system is also very particular about the type of hardware it likes to connect with. There were a couple of peripherals that I simply could not get to work no matter what I tried."
Erm, what were they? Likely someone's figured these out.
"Although Apple chooses to include support for X11 and Windows apps, the actual applications can be difficult and confusing to install, and they don't work well with the native Mac programs. In general, our efforts to get our X11 programs working more often ended in failure than success."
What - boot camp NG? X11 is known to be a lousy choice - see neooffice vs openoffice.
"The hardware lock-in and lack of quality freeware makes owning and maintaining a Macintosh an expensive endeavor."
Owning? It's within 10% the same price for a feature matched PC. It's more than a bare bones PC than no one wants anyway.
"While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all."
Neo Office. It's on 20 machines here and works just fine.
"A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing. "
Unless you use the perfectly good PS Elements for OSX that ships with just about every scanner, tablet or just costs $75.
"From time to time, there are small, niche apps that cost you - like the DVD shrinking software or the WMV converter - which have a freeware equivalent on both Windows XP and Linux. There are numerous other examples of this."
Now we're getting miniscule, and Microsoft lets you - actually WANTS you to download Flip4Mac becasue it just works.
Bob Tinker - speed of light with an Apple ][
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We had Bob Tinker (founder of TERC & Concord Consortium) on our interactive satellite science telecast back in the late 80s. He was demo-ing some of the bank street labs software, including the graphical sound scope on the Apple ][. He did with a caller on the air, and when he recorded, we got some feedback from the open phone audio. Bob quickly realized that the echo was going up to the bird, back down to the caller, and thru the phone lines. Hmmmm. He quickly changed gears, told the caller to stay on the phone, and did some single claps to get a distinct spike on the sound recorder. Freeze the screen, some quick metrics on the screen, carry the 7 - and voila! Speed of light +/- 10%
speed of light - chocolate version
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 1
using mini-chips helps - finer resolution on the node length.
Of course there's always Dick Feynman...
on
MacGyver Physics
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
... at the Rogers Commission hearings. C-clamp: $1.79 Styrofoam cup of ice water: $.50 Watching the expressions on the faces of NASA scientists who had inconclusive data from millions of dollars of testing? Priceless.
Also he allegedly was the only person to see the Trinity blast - as he figured the auto windshield glass would protect him from the UV, just as long as he ducked before the blast wave hit the glass.
Plus the one about Enrico Fermi at Trinity: he put some pieces of paper on the ground, scraped their start and finish positions in the sand with his toe, and based on the distance moved, the paper mass, and the distance to the blast, estimated the yield pretty darn close for that method.
Oh, and I mean the ones by CBS because a guy in the mail room is allergic to peanuts and the packages weren't clearly marked. That first one is legit. The second one will be from twelve of the the mail clerk's friends who will claim mental anguish over the loss of companionship of their co-worker, then the vet bills for one of the the suing-co-worker's twin siamese cats who are out of sorts from the stress of the lawsuit... lathter rinse, repeat...
Hey, if Josh Hancock's dad can sue the driver of the disabled car and the tow truck that Hancock hit in a drunken stupor, this isn't too far off.
...if you throw them hard enough. History repeats itself. In the US at least, a scare from the last decade panicked people into switching to bird seed to throw at weddings. The story was that birds would eat dry rice, then when they took a drink at the next birdbath - the rice would swell up and magically kill them. One local TV station got the chief ornithologist from some college and asked them if rice could kill birds. He said yes. Take a 50lb bag of rice and drop it on a bird.
In order of preference, french press, Chemex, turkish pot. Decaf Sumatra, Bourbon Santos, Starbucks' summer "gazebo" blend. For mass quantities, strong chock-full-of-nuts in a Capresso Armoa Classic. Always fresh ground. With experience you can tell when beans start to "go". Don't put them in the freezer - the defrost cycle sucks air out of the fridge and also from the bag of beans (thanks to those equalization valves).
Slashdot Mirror
of chairs flying through meeting rooms in Redmond WA.
If your "return rate" with Apple is 3 out of 4 you must be buying them off the back of a truck in Jersey from Chris Moltisanti's retarded second cousin. Since 4-digit Power Macs til now, at two schools (K-12 and edu), our "return rate" has been ~5%, only one of them an outright exchange, all the others successfully repaired under warrantee.
$57 in pennies, shipped parcel post.
Not sure what's more astonishing - this or how much we used to spend per message and per hour for access back in the day...
Apple read your comment, and that's the last straw.
They're canceling the iPhone, disbanding the dev team, and selling the entire production run at Overstock.com and everyone gets a free Clio while supplies last.
Oh, and you're invited to a party at John Dvorak's house.
You have to bring the Tostitos, Shaw Wu's bringing the Dr. Pepper.
He sat down to try and break a beta release and he did it.
Woo hoo! What did he do the rest of the day, pull the wings off of house flies?
"Doesn't report vulnerabilities to Apple"
I believe that's French for "I was such a tool the last time nobody will talk to me"
law is an instrumennt of a government.
policy is something a corporate entity wants you to like.
that's all i meant.
nothing more.
I've pretty much had it with companies who treat their policy as if it were the law of the land.
Yes, when you enter into a contract you are bound by its terms, but the idea that any policy is immutable is gaining acceptance and seems to be the norm at least on the companies' parts.
Some PCs are cheaper than any Mac.
Some PCs are more expensive than the cheapest Mac.
Yugos were cheap too. I don't see anyone driving one anymore.
I believe they left out the part where Weber says "I find your lack of faith disturbing."
I just picked up an old Apple //c and started going thru our library of old programs. It still does some amazing things. I have two students who are enthralled with this thing. They know more about how memory and disk basics after two weeks of this thing than they ever knew. Synapses 10 years dormant are snapping back into action... PEEKing POKEing. Where's my hole puncher - I need to make double sided disks!
"While not a particular resource hog in the classical sense, the OS does get very finicky when it doesn't get enough RAM to run. Swap load times can make a computer feel unbearably slow even when it may be absolutely fine the rest of the time."
So does every major OS.
"The operating system is also very particular about the type of hardware it likes to connect with. There were a couple of peripherals that I simply could not get to work no matter what I tried."
Erm, what were they? Likely someone's figured these out.
"Although Apple chooses to include support for X11 and Windows apps, the actual applications can be difficult and confusing to install, and they don't work well with the native Mac programs. In general, our efforts to get our X11 programs working more often ended in failure than success."
What - boot camp NG? X11 is known to be a lousy choice - see neooffice vs openoffice.
"The hardware lock-in and lack of quality freeware makes owning and maintaining a Macintosh an expensive endeavor."
Owning? It's within 10% the same price for a feature matched PC. It's more than a bare bones PC than no one wants anyway.
"While AbiWord and NeoOffice are both available through X11, neither had the full functionality that we needed, not to mention that we had a hell of a time getting them to work at all."
Neo Office. It's on 20 machines here and works just fine.
"A new Mac user can expect to pay $400 for the Office Suite, and more for Adobe Photoshop if they want to do any serious photo editing. "
Unless you use the perfectly good PS Elements for OSX that ships with just about every scanner, tablet or just costs $75.
"From time to time, there are small, niche apps that cost you - like the DVD shrinking software or the WMV converter - which have a freeware equivalent on both Windows XP and Linux. There are numerous other examples of this."
Now we're getting miniscule, and Microsoft lets you - actually WANTS you to download Flip4Mac becasue it just works.
Pardon my skepticism.
Seems easier to just put the sound > em units on every street corner in every major city.
And strapped to every 4 year old.
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
We had Bob Tinker (founder of TERC & Concord Consortium) on our interactive satellite science telecast back in the late 80s.
He was demo-ing some of the bank street labs software, including the graphical sound scope on the Apple ][.
He did with a caller on the air, and when he recorded, we got some feedback from the open phone audio.
Bob quickly realized that the echo was going up to the bird, back down to the caller, and thru the phone lines. Hmmmm.
He quickly changed gears, told the caller to stay on the phone, and did some single claps to get a distinct spike on the sound recorder.
Freeze the screen, some quick metrics on the screen, carry the 7 - and voila! Speed of light +/- 10%
using mini-chips helps - finer resolution on the node length.
... at the Rogers Commission hearings.
C-clamp: $1.79
Styrofoam cup of ice water: $.50
Watching the expressions on the faces of NASA scientists who had inconclusive data from millions of dollars of testing? Priceless.
Also he allegedly was the only person to see the Trinity blast - as he figured the auto windshield glass would protect him from the UV, just as long as he ducked before the blast wave hit the glass.
Plus the one about Enrico Fermi at Trinity: he put some pieces of paper on the ground, scraped their start and finish positions in the sand with his toe, and based on the distance moved, the paper mass, and the distance to the blast, estimated the yield pretty darn close for that method.
This is /. right?
Let me check the calendar... April1... nope. Sadie Hawkins Day... nope.
Hmmm... WX report for Hell... ah! There it is!
Oh, and I mean the ones by CBS because a guy in the mail room is allergic to peanuts and the packages weren't clearly marked. That first one is legit.
The second one will be from twelve of the the mail clerk's friends who will claim mental anguish over the loss of companionship of their co-worker, then the vet bills for one of the the suing-co-worker's twin siamese cats who are out of sorts from the stress of the lawsuit... lathter rinse, repeat...
Hey, if Josh Hancock's dad can sue the driver of the disabled car and the tow truck that Hancock hit in a drunken stupor, this isn't too far off.
owha tajer kiam
...if you throw them hard enough. History repeats itself. In the US at least, a scare from the last decade panicked people into switching to bird seed to throw at weddings. The story was that birds would eat dry rice, then when they took a drink at the next birdbath - the rice would swell up and magically kill them. One local TV station got the chief ornithologist from some college and asked them if rice could kill birds. He said yes. Take a 50lb bag of rice and drop it on a bird.
I thought this whole thing was settled when Spirit snapped a picture of this...
because suing all the individual users who actually pressed "scan" would be far too low a cost:benefit.
oh, wait - next week we'll see a patent for the reverse-class-action-suit.
You need helicopter- horsepower to carry something that has to over-ERP 3 watt cell signals for a few hundred yards?
In order of preference, french press, Chemex, turkish pot.
Decaf Sumatra, Bourbon Santos, Starbucks' summer "gazebo" blend.
For mass quantities, strong chock-full-of-nuts in a Capresso Armoa Classic.
Always fresh ground. With experience you can tell when beans start to "go".
Don't put them in the freezer - the defrost cycle sucks air out of the fridge and also from the bag of beans (thanks to those equalization valves).
"tired of havig their computer infested" ... fix the spell checker and we're good to go!