OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 was released on September 18th. That is not 'a while'. We were already in the Release Candidate stage at that point. Would you expect Microsoft to do a major version update of, say, Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer between Vista RC2 and Vista final? Of course not.
No, but since when is going from 2.2 to 2.3 a major version update? I would expect them to apply security patches and minor version updates between an RC and a release version, and I do expect the FOSS community to evolve better development procedures than Microsoft, but apparently that's asking too much. Two weeks should be plenty of time to put in the latest version of something that many desktop users will be interacting with on a daily basis.
This is because the idea of having pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions is, frankly, silly. The package management system works best when people understand it, and worst when they try to do end runs around it. This is not surprising. Software writers should write, and packagers (who work for individual distros) should package. That system works great. It's when people start messing with it that you get problems.
I love this. You do realize you're helping to support my assertions, right? No? Maybe you should re-read what you wrote here. It's just like I said before. Package management systems only work for software that stays inside the limited box the system was designed for. Try to do something outside the box and it breaks down. How about that. What you're not realizing, or refuse to accept, is that there are many different legitimate and illegitimate reasons people have for wanting to do something outside that box.
Your whole paragraph here is filled with typical idealist blind spots. "Do end runs around it", "software writers should", "packagers should", "when people start messing with it". These statements are rather arrogant in nature. "If you don't do it my way, you're doing it wrong," and so forth. Guess what? You're never going to get everyone to do something the same way. There are always exceptions, and if that isn't allowed for in the design, it's a bad design. There will always be some "silly" software out there that won't be provided as source code. You can choose to be an idealist and not use that software, but not everyone has that choice or wants to be such an extreme idealist. And most people don't like to be called silly for wanting to do things differently.
We do? Can't say I find myself kept up at night wondering about that. Maybe because lots of people *do* develop for Linux. It's simple - release source code.
You are an individual. By "we" I was speaking of a community with a large number of members who have spent the last several years complaining that almost nobody in the commercial software world has started to seriously develop Linux versions of their software. You apparently don't care about any commercial or proprietary software, but some people want or need such software and there is nothing wrong with that. Source code doesn't really have much to do with it.
Why do you want one? What's wrong with the package management system?
What difference does it make why I want one? There are reasons to want a way to work outside the package management system. Ever tried to install two different versions of the same software package? Ever wanted to install a package for only one user? Ever wanted to install some software that isn't available in your package management system and never will be? Good luck with that. But more importantly, the main problem here is that you're assuming that because you see no reason to do it, there is no reason. That kind of thinking is arrogant, and wrong. And one of the reasons that package management systems aren't perfect for every user and every situation.
Then go think about something else and quit trolling Linux threads. Good lord, if anyone's wasting their time around here it's you.
Oh, don't I know it. Constructive criticism or pointing out flaws in Our Favorite Operating System is NOT welcome. I know. Complete waste of time. Can't help it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong? You mean I haven't been waiting for KDE 4 for years? That's not my recollection.
How nice that it is finally about to have an initial point-zero release. However, having read some of the KDE roadmaps I noticed they have a tendency to release major versions before they have feature parity with the previous major version. Then they continue adding features with each minor version release, . So I'm not holding my breath for a stable selection of KDE apps being commonly available in ready-to-use format for all platforms immediately this December. I also won't be getting excited about Linux distros finally coming out with KDE 4 pre-installed until they get to about version 4.4, for the same reasons. There probably won't even be a mainstream Linux distro using KDE 4 until there is at least one minor version update. I'm guessing it will be another year before the majority of distros will finally be using KDE 4. Again, not holding my breath.
But more importantly, even if I'm wrong on a few details here, it doesn't matter (to me). I simply don't care anymore. I was excited about the potential of KDE 4.0 a few years ago. Then I moved on with life. You can take that negatively and call me a troll, or you can take it as a simple statement of personal opinion based on my previous experience, and an indicator that a lot of people like me would still be using Linux if KDE 4 had come out a couple of years ago. When I can download pretty much any KDE application I want in a Windows and Mac OS X native version, then I'll start being impressed.
Guess what? Pointing out projects that are still in alpha stage as an indicator of progress isn't very impressive either.
To begin with, I was a Mandrake user and even paid for a Silver account or whatever it was for a couple of years. I used other Linux distros also, and liked them. I love the idea of Linux in general, free software, package management and all that. It's all great stuff, in theory. But today, as I read this announcement, there are many reasons I continue to be completely unimpressed with the "progress" of Linux distros over the years since I stopped using it. In the vain and ridiculous hope that someone is listening without their finger poised over the "troll" button, I'd like to just point out a few things for the umpteenth time...
KDE 3.x has been in use for way too long. I was reading about KDE 4.x literally (in the literally literal sense) years ago. I got very excited about the possibility of having "native" KDE 4.x applications running on Windows and Macs as well as Linux, without needing special intermediary layers of software on those other platforms. I gave up on Linux a long time ago, but I sure would love to be able to run some of the nicer KDE applications without needing to use Linux or set up some complex Cygwin or X11 environment. Yet, several years later (years, not months), there is no stable KDE 4.x release in sight. Yes, I'm sure many bugs have been fixed and features have been added between 3.0 and 3.5.7, but it still isn't KDE 4.x with its promise of true cross-platform goodness. WTF?
Mandriva 2008? What is it, a quarterly magazine? Is it a car? It isn't going to be 2008 for another 2.5 months. WTF?
OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.6, in a distro that was just released? OO.o 2.3 and FF 2.0.0.7 have been out for a while now. It's been about a decade since I started using Linux, and development methods are still so ridiculously inefficient and unstable that they still need to do weeks of stability testing before including the most up-to-date versions of desktop software? There is something seriously wrong with that, in my not-so-humble opinion. Part of which is rooted in the fact that every type of Linux distro still seems to need its own special software repository, separate from all the others, where different people are responsible for compiling the same software in different ways for each family of Linux distros. Good God, when I think of all the man-hours that are being wasted with all this idiotic redundancy, and all the time spent by users complaining in forums that their distro-of-choice doesn't have the latest version of package X yet because the package maintainer is on vacation, it makes my head hurt.
Yeah, package management is a great idea, in theory. For servers it really is great. For desktop usage, it falls so short of actually simplifying things that it's ridiculous. After almost two decades of Linux development there is no grand unified package management system in sight. The few pieces of software that have pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions still need at least three different types of packages just to cover "most" of the popular Linux distros. And then we wonder why nobody bothers to develop for "Linux". There is no "Linux", that's why. There are only Linux-based families of distros, each requiring a different packaging procedure. And there is no single clear-cut procedure for installing software completely outside of the native package management system in a way that neither will ever interfere with the other. That too is different for every distro, and not something that is easy for non-geeks to implement on their own personal computer. WTF?
"Reworked hardware detection sub-system". "New network configuration center". I see things like this in almost every distro release announcement I bother to read. Yes, improvement is great. No, redesigning systems constantly is not great. Having to completely rework things means you did it wrong before. This happens entirely too often. It also means that many Linux distros have completely different interfaces to various important system functions. This is one of the many things that confuses the hec
I don't know why this e-mail client [claws-mail.org] doesn't get more attention. I find it similar to Thunderbird but much faster. Also, as far as I remember, included some tools to import from Eudora, which worked very well for me (while Thunderbird didn't).
Dude, because it bites.
No, seriously. It says so right on the website. Thanks, I'll be here all day.
I kid. But seriously for real this time, GTK+? WTF+? That does bite. I know it's a great toolkit that's been in use since ancient times, etc., but it's pretty ugly no matter what theme you slap on it and it's a serious pain to install on any platform besides *nix. The Windows version of Claws is apparently part of a confusing (to non-geeks) package of a bunch of GPG software. The Mac version is one of those ports maintained by one guy on his own domain, which is nice of him but doesn't give me much confidence that it will always be available. I'm downloading it because I've heard good things about it over the years, but I would never recommend it to anyone who didn't know how to build their own computer.
In short, like so much of the software that has originated on the *nix side, Claws is entirely too *nix oriented to appeal to the masses. The Mac and Windows versions are mere afterthoughts on a page filled with links to versions of the software for a dozen different Linux distros, the BSDs, and even Solaris. If the developers cared about the general computing population using Claws, the Windows and Mac links would be the most prominent links at the top of the page, and they wouldn't send you off to some other website, there would be official Windows and Mac packages right there. You know, like with Firefox and Thunderbird.
And you wonder why it doesn't get more attention. The developers don't care about attention. They've made powerful software that does what they want, and that's as far as it goes for them. Unfortunately in my experience this is a fairly common mindset in the FOSS software world, which is why few non-geeks have ever heard of any free software other than Firefox.
Wow, there's a lot to go over here. I'm not sure if I should even bother since your view of the world is so skewed, but here goes.
First off, you seem to think you're a lot smarter than the average person, or perhaps you're prescient and thus able to plan this sort of thing out in advance. What the hell? The guy was just going to the store, he didn't wake up that day thinking, "Today would be a good day to get arrested illegally under clear and simple circumstances so that defend _one_ of my civil rights." He left the store in a polite and fully legal manner and had his rights violated by first the store personnel and then again by the very police officer who was supposed to be protected the rights that were previously violated, and who should have known better. Both violations were equally egregious and equally unnecessary, and equally important to stand up for. He will be defending himself in court against the improper arrest and he filed charges against the store employees before he even left the police station.
This is all exactly as it should be. You should be thanking him for what he's doing instead of berating him for doing something wrong. He did absolutely nothing wrong, and was arrested for it. That should scare any rational person. He wasn't even rude to the idiot cop, from the sound of things. He simply stated his rights, at which point the idiot cop should have said, "Alright sir, you're correct, and you've identified yourself already according to what the law requires. Would you like to press charges against these individuals now?" Instead, the idiot cop arrested him without reading the man his Miranda rights and without informing him what he was being charged with until hours later, thus continuing to compound the rights violations and declare himself an idiot cop.
Your opinion differs from mine and many others in that you think rights should only be defended when it is convenient, and ignored whenever it is "reasonable" to give them up. You also have the very common and very incorrect paradoxical idea that you'll be doing a better job protecting your family by "taking them out of the equation". In point of fact, the presence of multiple passengers in the car, perhaps even a minor among them, once again compounds the action of the store employees. Instead of merely detaining one person illegally, they illegally detained an entire car full of people. And they didn't just stand in front of the car. The store manager got between the open car door and the man inside, and refused to move when the man attempted to close the door, after politely asking what the problem was, I might add.
In point of fact once again, this man was amazingly polite with both the store employees and the idiot cop. He would have been well within his rights to kick the store manager in the nuts and forcibly remove him from the car in order to get his family out of there, and then call the cops afterward. Several things went very wrong that day. This guy standing up for his rights was not one of them.
The big picture? Give me break. He just refused to let a store employee look at his receipt. It sounds like he was being a smart ass to the cop as well. If you want the right to be a dick to the cops, then don't be surprised when the cops return the favor.
So if I'm rude to a police officer I should expect him to be rude in return? That's fine, although that would be contrary to the training and policies of any law enforcement agency you care to name. Officers are supposed to maintain a calm and polite demeanor no matter how a subject is reacting (as long as no physical interaction is required). It helps them keep situations from escalating. It's part of their F-ing job.
Unfortunately this officer went far beyond the quid pro quo reaction called for in your little fantasy world. The subject might have been rude, which is understandable after having one's rights violated, one's family illegally detained in a public parking lot, and then having a cop trying to force you to show your drivers license after he just verified that there was never any legal reason to detain you. In response, the cop took the subject downtown and charged him with a trumped-up totally BS "crime", which will remain on his permanent legal record unless a lawsuit forces the city to expunge it at some point. Most reasonable people who understand the law would consider this the very definition of abuse of power.
Please don't compare this guy to Rosa Parks. A few seconds of your time isn't that big of a deal. It wasn't like the cop was asking him to do anything embarrassing, time consuming, or painful.
Yeah, moving to the back of the bus wasn't particularly time-consuming or painful either. According to your logic, she shouldn't have bothered making a fuss. After all she got arrested for her trouble, causing herself a lot of hardship. She probably should have waited until she had to stand up for something that actually mattered. Nobody actually needs to ride in the front of the bus, especially if they have dark skin. Right?
I'm all about fighting for our freedoms, but we should pick our battles more wisely. If we focus our efforts on stupid crap like this, then other more important rights might slip through the cracks.
You're probably right. We should wait until things get so bad that cops feel like they have the right to beat the crap out of you in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses because they don't like the shirt you were wearing that day. Better yet, we should wait until the cops feel like they can start murdering people without any regard to procedural law whatsoever. We should wait for that kind of situation instead of standing up for frivolous stuff like the right to not be searched or detained illegally, or the right to not have a cop make up charges for you just because you irritated him.
Rights are rights, and they're all important, jackass. If you don't defend each instance of your rights being violated today, you may find them missing tomorrow. Thanks for being part of the sheeple majority who thinks my rights haven't been violated unless I've been beaten half to death, murdered, or already imprisoned for 30 years without being charged with a crime. One of these days you'll have a rude awakening, or a very chapped anal orifice from bending over to take all the "unimportant" violations of your rights. Exactly which freedoms are you ready to fight for today? You know, before they get lost?
Here's an example which demonstrates my situation -- say I've got 3 Firefox windows open, and 4 terminal windows. I see something in one of the Firefox windows, and want to type something into my terminal window while still looking at that Firefox window. Under the various versions of Linux I use, I have an easy way to just warp to a single terminal window, and do what I want. But on Macs, if I command-tab to my terminal window, ALL of the terminal windows pop up, which obscures my view of the Firefox window I still want to see. From my several times playing around with other people's Macs (and asking them how to do what I want), I haven't been able to find a way to just zip back to one particular terminal window, bringing only that one to the foreground and making it active, without changing the arrangement of other windows, unless I use the mouse. And I really don't like using the mouse if it's at all possible to avoid it.
If you can see any part of the other window you can of course bring it to the front by itself without bringing all the application's windows forward at once. But you need to use the mouse for that. There's Exposé, but that's also designed for the mouse. I tend to use almost every application as maximized as possible with the Finder being the only app I usually have any need to view multiple windows at once, so I haven't really run into the problem you're describing.
I don't think you're going to find a totally keyboard-centric way to work with Mac OS X like you can with certain Linux window managers. It's a trade-off. A lot can be done with just the keyboard, and the keyboard shortcuts are easy to use and intuitive unlike all the Windows and Linux keyboard shortcuts I've ever encountered. The Mac was the original GUI computer system and there is still a lot of focus on mouse usage. If you don't find anything else about Mac OS X that makes it better than what you have already, by all means stick with Linux. The good news is that you can also run Linux on any new Intel Mac, but that's mainly useful for someone who wants to use Linux applications that don't have counterparts in Mac OS X.
All I know is, I've been using computers since 1988 or so and I never used the keyboard a fraction as much with any other operating system as I do with Mac OS X.
I just bought my first Mac. A Santa Rosa macbook pro. And I use it almost exclusively now.
Here's what I don't like.
* The OS/X user interface is crap.
I think what you meant to say was, "I haven't used it for long enough to adjust to it yet." In my experience the longer one uses the Mac OS X (no slash) interface, the more one realizes just how brilliant they were to come up with it over two decades ago. Of course, one has to be able to let go of the various idiosyncracies we've learned from other operating system interfaces that are training grounds for control freaks. This may take quite a lot of time, depending on how long you've been using other systems.
1. The application menu constrained to the top of the screen hides information present in other applications and forces the user to either learn all the shortcut keys or suffer rediculous amounts of additional mouse travel.
This complaint would have more weight if you gave some concrete examples of what information is being hidden away any more than what is hidden in the per-window menu bars in other interfaces. If there are functions that should be constantly visible and accessible with a single click, well, that's what toolbars are for. As for me, I simply love having that menu bar up there always in the exact same place, with the Apple menu in the corner giving me extremely fast access to things that affect the entire system, like shutdown/logout/restart and the System Preferences application.
Secondly, I do recommend learning at least some of the basic keyboard commands. Unlike Windows/KDE/GNOME/Emacs/vi/WindowMaker/etc., most Mac OS keyboard shortcuts (many of which haven't changed in the last couple of decades) are simple and intuitive, and can be used without resorting to constant finger contortions or looking at the keyboard. The people responsible for making the Control key the primary keyboard shortcut key for most PC operating systems, and then positioning the Control key in the inaccessible bottom corners of the keyboard, should be hung up by their pinky fingers.
Start with the shortcuts for cut/copy/paste, save, close window, quit, hide (a cleaner, more efficient alternative to minimizing individual windows), and one of my absolute favorites, the switch-document shortcut (Command-backtick/tilde). Some people actually seem to enjoy Alt-tabbing through a dozen visually identical document icons like Windows does it, but one of my absolute favorite features of the OS X interface is that Command-Tab shortcut switches between applications, not windows. So you switch to the application you want, then if you want to stay within that application and switch between its open windows/documents you just use Cmd-backtick. It's right over the tab key.
Looking in the menus it should take you about two minutes to find all the keyboard shortcuts to the functions I listed above since they are listed right on the menu. After about 15 minutes of actually using them you should know them by heart and be using them every single day henceforth. Just listing the letters you should be able to guess every single one: x, c, v, s, w, q, h. Funny how cut/copy/paste are right next to each other on the keyboard, and in that order.
Then of course there are the Expose keys. Mostly I just use F11 to hide/show the desktop. Very handy at times. Just a side note here, if I was on my iBook right now I would have put the accented character at the end of Expose with a very simple Cmd-e shortcut just prior to typing the final letter "e". On Windows, I have no idea which of the hundreds of Alt-0nnn numerical codes would do the equivalent function. Other character accents are equally easy to activate, and they work the same way EVERYWHERE in the operating system, not just in certain applications.
2. A single mouse button was NEVER a good idea. It's a terrible idea actually. It was terrible when the macintosh wa
The grandparent post was a little odd in that he didn't bother to point out the fact that SuperDuper! has absolutely nothing to do with anything unless you're using Macs. I do recommend Macs to everyone I meet, especially now that they're Intel-based and capable of running Windows and taking gobs of inexpensive RAM, but Macs aren't for everyone and I rather doubt the original poster was talking about a shop that has even a single Mac on the premises. So mentioning a Mac-only backup solution is kind of a non-sequitur.
SuperDuper! does have a Smart Update option if you register it, that only syncs the changes. Otherwise you'll be erasing and cloning the whole drive each time. Having a backup drive with multiple partitions or separate backup drives is good idea, and I always recommend that also. 320GB drives are incredibly cheap these days.
Now, if the grandparent had said, like I'm going to say, that they should switch to Macs and run their Windows software in a virtual machine (it runs at native speeds), that would have been a bit more on-topic. Then they would have a wealth of additional options for backups including backing up the entire Windows virtual machine as a file, and cloning the Macs onto cheap external drives whenever they come in to the shop.
Hey, here's a thought. Worried about security on your laptops? Use the Mac OS X host operating system for unimportant stuff like web surfing and do all your important high security work inside a Windows virtual machine. Here's the trick: Host the Windows virtual machine hard drive file on an encrypted disk image (DMG). That way if the machine gets stolen the only information they can access is whatever inconsequential stuff you left on the Mac OS X side. The ability to create an encrypted DMG is built into Mac OS X. I would recommend using a statically sized DMG rather than a sparse disk image, the sparse images have a bad habit of becoming unrecoverably corrupted after a system crash.
I was one of those Mac-haters back in the day, but right now as far as I'm concerned there is no longer any reason to waste money on a non-Mac computer anymore, even if you need to run Windows. The Intel Macs run any version of Windows supported by the virtual machine software (Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion are the main contenders right now). They'll also run Linux, of course. And backup up the entire system is simply a matter of having one or two inexpensive external drives and using any cloning app like SuperDuper. Anyone can do it, that's the best part. There is nothing like it on the Windows side. No, Ghost does not compare.
Yes, Mac OS X is more complex than the Classic Mac OS. Thank the Lord. I know these apps are just front-ends to the powerful command-line tools. That's pretty much the whole point. They take those powerful UNIX-y tools and make them so easy to use that anyone can make a bootable copy of their system disk with a few clicks.
Every operating system has quirks. My challenge was to show me how an end user can accomplish the same end result that can easily be achieved with Mac OS X in Linux or Windows, with simple GUI tools, on a system that's still running. Other than complaining about some very well hidden filesystem bugs in HFS+ it doesn't seem like you've added anything to the conversation.
See, I'm sure that making a bootable disk from a single-partition Linux system is technically just as easy as it is in Mac OS X. It's just that nobody ever took the time to make a tool that made it easy for normal people to actually do it, from beginning to end, with one click. So in actuality, it's close to impossible to accomplish this task with Linux without being a command-line guru. It's the end result that counts.
I am blown away by the fact that the Mac OS X reviewer failed to mention SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner on the page about backups. They linked to a page that mentions it, but it should have been at the forefront in big, bold letters. This IMHO is one of the best features of Macs and Mac OS X, that any idiot can make a clone of their entire system onto any internal or external media. If that media is a FireWire hard drive, the clone will be bootable on any Mac with a FireWire port (and the same processor type, PowerPC and Intel can't boot from each other's drives without some hacks). This means that for any PowerPC Mac going back about 8 years to the first iMac with a FireWire port, you will be able to clone the system drive of any other PowerPC Mac onto a FireWire hard drive and boot from that drive on any other PowerPC Mac in that range. The same goes for Intel machines, although they can also boot from USB devices. (There are reports that some PowerPC models can also boot from USB drives since about Mac OS X 10.4.5 came out, but FireWire is a much better choice speedwise anyway.)
So if your hard drive dies, you have a bootable backup that works just as well as the internal drive (if you're using FireWire, USB is a little slow). If the computer dies and you have access to another Mac, you can boot from your backup drive and it will be just as if you were still using your own computer, barring any extreme differences in memory and processor speeds. With enough RAM available the processor speed makes very little difference under general usage like web browsing, email and office applications. When you get your computer fixed (or replace a failed hard drive) you can then clone your backup drive back onto the drive in the computer, reboot, and it's like nothing ever happened. Click a button, walk away for about an hour, and get back to work.
With a properly implemented cloning schedule you can recover any system, including a Mac OS X server, in about 5 minutes (as long as it takes to restart the computer, hold down the Option key, and choose to boot from the latest backup drive). I could teach a monkey to do it.
No resetting hidden magic identifiers.
No reinstalling a hundred different drivers for different motherboards, video cards, network cards, etc.
No, "I'm going to refuse to work at all because there is too much different hardware." (I tried to Ghost a Win2K system from one laptop to a virtually identical laptop once. The clone failed to function, ended up having to reset the registry and reinstall most of the pre-installed software.)
No, "This copy of your operating system needs to be reactivated because the hardware changed, you dirty pirate." The non-server version of Mac OS X doesn't even require a serial number, so of course there is no product activation crap to make your life more difficult. Even the server version can be freely cloned and moved to a different system. It requires a serial, but there is no product activation.
No shutting down the system and booting from some special magic CD just to do a clone. That's right, Mac OS X can be easily cloned LIVE, while it's running. It can be cloned automatically on a schedule, so the user doesn't have to even have to think about it.
The target media can be smaller than the source media, as long as there is enough room for the data. It's a smart clone, only the relevant data gets copied. That's all automatic too, the user never needs to go through any complicated preferences or command-line arguments. No need for defragmenting the drive or anything like that either.
In short, Mac OS X is the first operating system I have ever encountered where it is incredibly easy to make a complete USABLE system backup that doesn't require jumping through hoops for hours to restore the system. Any non-technical user can be told in one short paragraph how to keep their system backed up and how to recover from a typical hardware disaster in a matter of minutes. Observe:
I remember reading something recently about why some CF cards show up as removable media and others show up as hard drives. It boils down to a firmware option on the card that tells the computer what type of device it is. So some cards do not show up as removable devices. You'd probably have better luck with some of the newer UDMA cards like the Sandisk Extreme IV, Kinston Ultimate 266x, or Lexar 300x ranges. I'm not sure about any of the slower cards but I'm sure all of these are UDMA, and are much more likely to have their firmware set to declare themselves as non-removable storage devices.
What is "innate fear"? I would suggest that in fact, no such thing exists. Instead, virtually all fear is learned. Even the amorphous entity called "fear of the unknown" is simply a result of having spent time on Planet Earth and correctly learned that the unknown can kill you.
I make this claim based on my having raised two daughters. As infants and toddlers, they have no fear whatsoever: just endless simian curiosity. This is why parents have to child-proof the house, since no 18-month old yet has a fear of electrical outlets nor running ovens. These are things that a child must be taught to fear.
Uh huh, and when a vicious dog intent on maiming them came charging directly at them, snarling like a demon from The Bad Place, I guess they just laughed and clapped their hands? Or did they run for their lives, screaming at the top of their lungs, without having to be taught? If you stick your scowling face in front of a baby and say "Arrgh!", does the baby smile or screw up its tiny face and start bawling it's eyes out?
We are sentient animals, so we are able to learn about man-made technological threats to our safety that aren't inherent in nature. But we are still animals, and with that comes base instincts and innate fear of certain natural elements of life, like snakes, spiders, angry people or animals (and that would include combat situations), loud noises (yelling, lightning, etc.), heights, so on and so forth. No learning needed, in fact we have to unlearn a lot of behaviors that are innate, so that we can accomplish tasks no animal ever could. That's big part of growing up. If our species had no innate instincts telling us what to fear and when to run, we wouldn't have lasted very long on this planet. All you've observed is that your children haven't learned to fear the things you've learned to fear, not that they have been totally fearless since birth.
Similarly, one has to be taught to fear certain aspects of combat: if you've never been exposed to it, how would you have any reaction to it at all, other than as a concept? I don't actually fear combat, and at 42, I should have such a fear if it was innate. I have a learned fear of death and I associate combat with mortality, so I know conceptually that combat should be avoided if possible. However, I have no real fear of it except as a concept because I've never personally experienced it.
Oh, you don't fear combat. Except that you do, as a concept. So if you were actually shipped off to the front lines in Iraq, given a firearm and told that fifty "insurgents" with AK-47s and rocket propelled grenades were just down the block and heading your way, you would probably soil your pants and then vomit from the adrenaline rush, caused by experiencing fear. Oh yes, and you'd feel like running away, but you'd overcome that with training and devotion to duty, and your desire to protect your fellow soldiers, your home, your family and your country. Fight or flight, instinctive behaviors that exist throughout the natural world. How about that. If you truly don't fear combat, why aren't you over in Iraq making a mint as a mercenary?
I suspect that once this drug hits the market, we're going to discover clinically what I just suggested: that almost all fear is learned, consequently this drug will be used (and abused) to remove fears ranging from shellshock (I refuse to water the concept down by calling it PTSD) to fear of pregnancy or STDs from unprotected sex.
Uh huh, because nobody up until now has bothered to do any studies regarding learned and innate fear responses in humans and similar mammals. Yeah. That's it. And how exactly does the term "shellshock" communicate the concept better than the current technical name? That word was used back when people had no clue why soldiers kept suffering decades after experiencing a terrible event, and only applied to soldiers coming back from a war. PTSD happens in all kinds of
He wasn't lying, he just didn't have a clue what he was doing (computer illiterate really doesn't cover it) and the applications didn't warn him clearly enough about what was going to happen when he saved his documents. They probably used a Yes/No dialog, and you know what users do with Yes/No dialogs. It's all Greek to them so they just auto-click Yes.
I know, it's all the user's fault. Nobody should have admin rights in Windows. Blah blah blah. Well, in the real world everyone runs Windows as admin and most of them have to take care of their computer themselves while barely knowing enough to turn it on and write a letter in Word. No one is standing by to hold their hand and tell them to do something "in chronological order". Which also shouldn't be necessary. The software is simply not reliable and too tightly intertwined with the operating system and common libraries. "Normal circumstances" do not happen very often in the real world either.
Well, I know it wasn't saving in the new XML formats, and I did get a little confused during the whole process because he's one of those people who doesn't have a clue that "applications" and "documents" are two different and completely separate things, which was rather bizarre as it caused him to describe events in ways that seemed to make sense but didn't actually convey what he really meant, and vice versa.
I do know two things for sure though, one being that installing the 2007 trial caused his 2000 applications to fail to load up (which the user described as "I can't open my old documents, only the new ones open"), and two is that at the very least it did change his Publisher files so that the older version couldn't open them any more. I'm sure there may have been an option in the new version of Publisher to save the file as an older version, but we didn't realize there would be any incompatibility until after I uninstalled everything and restored Office 2000. I would have had to redownload and reinstall the trial software to even verify whether or not there was some way to restore those documents to a usable form for the earlier version of Publisher.
It turned out to be a good thing in the end though since the user only had a handful of Publisher files, with content that could and should have been created in Word. So I just explained to him that Publisher is one of the worst applications he could possibly be producing documents with, and he should just never use it again. He was fine with that.
Here's what I'm not fine with. One, the fact that trial software went about changing even one file or one type of file into a new and incompatible format without multiple difficult-to-bypass warnings to the user is really inexcusable. Two, you can call BS until you're blue in the face, but that install of Office 2000 was borked, and the cause was installing the trial Office 2007 software, because it all worked fine before that. The fact that Microsoft can't manage to make their software function reliably when two different versions are installed is just ridiculous. Now, it may have actually been installed in the same folder as the previous version, but if so it was only because it defaulted to installing in that folder and the user didn't know any better. In the end most of the blame for these screwups must remain with Microsoft. We can't expect every computer user to know even one tenth of what most of us know, or have one-tenth of the information and understanding it would take to avoid all the potential pitfalls.
Sharing customers personal photos isn't prying into private documents? An auto mechannic isn't likely to find photos you took of spousal abuse under your hood. Interesting ethics.
While it sounds like the article doesn't talk specifically about Office 2007, I can say from first hand experience that Microsoft hasn't really changed their ways since the Office 2003 trial. I had a client a couple of months back who downloaded and installed the Office 2007 try-before-you-buy trial and installed it on his system which already had Office 2000 installed. Luckily, if we can use that word here, he had already purchased and switched over to Outlook 2007, so his mail was fine, but Office 2007 totally screwed up his install of Office 2000. Most of the older components wouldn't run and all the files he worked on were converted to new formats by Office 2007. Anyways, it caused a whole host of problems for him, interrupting his business.
What's even better is that he was fine with the new software and so we actually tried to register it for him on two separate occasions, and we failed both times with some idiotic error about a shipping method... for a downloaded product. How stupid is that? Finally we gave up and I was able to uninstall every version of Office (he also had some 2003 components for some reason) and reinstalled Office 2000 from a disk I had, in the process weaning him off of using Publisher ever again, since his Publisher files were no longer readable by any version of Publisher except the new version that had messed with the file. Thanks, Microsoft.
Yeah, he was definitely not the most computer literate person, but when I trial application goes around changing old files and saving new files in a format that can't be read by any older version of the software, you can't entirely blame that on the user. Everyone should be warned to backup their files before installing any Microsoft trial software. If he'd wanted to return to a previous version of Outlook I honestly don't have a clue what I would have done. It probably would have been easier to switch him over to Thunderbird.
In any case, it's time for new MBP form factors. The Al enclosure has to be one of the all-time best notebook designs -- it's still more functional and useful than most others -- but, for crying out loud, the 17" version was introduced in early 2003, and hasn't appreciably changed since!
Um, hunh? You want them to change "one of the all-time best notebook designs" just so that you can have an updated "look" on your $3,000 laptop? It's a tool, not a pair of shoes. Normally people buy them for what they have inside. Who cares what it looks like as long as it looks nice? If you just want to change the appearance, knock yourself out:
[LED backlighting] is far better than the Cold Cathode tube in there that fails, yellows with age fairly quickly, and causes heartaches the world over.
LEDs are still subject to failure from time to time, and something tells me it won't be nearly as simple to replace a single failed LED as it is to replace a CCFL backlight. Unless they were clever enough to build it so that an individual LED can simply be unplugged and replaced with a new one.
LEDs also fade or get odd color casts over time as well, and I have to wonder how well it will work to replace a single failed LED with a brand new one that will outshine all the faded ones around it. They'll probably have to change out the entire backlight assembly, and that can't be cheap.
Of course I don't actually know how the new displays are configured internally, I'm just pointing out that LEDs are better but not totally immune to failure and color changes.
I have to second those who are recommending a computer/software solution. I happen to enjoy Macs these days, so I'll describe just how simple it is to set this up in Mac OS X.
1. Open the Apple menu, go to System Preferences.
2. Open the Print & Fax preference pane.
3. Go to the "Faxing" tab.
4. Check the box "Receive faxes on this computer".
5. Fill in your fax number, set the number of rings before answering (depends on how you use the line)
6. Choose any or all of the available receiving options:
a. Save the fax as a PDF file to a folder you designate (if it's a shared folder anyone on the network can monitor incoming faxes)
b. Email the fax to an address you designate
c. Print the fax to any printer the Mac is set up to print to (local or network printer, either will work)
7. Optionally, go to the "Sharing" tab and turn on printer sharing, then choose "Let others send faxes through this computer". This makes the fax modem available as a shared "printer" to any other Mac on the network, or any Windows XP computer with Apple's "Bonjour for Windows" package installed.
If you're keeping your regular fax machine on the same line, set it to answer manually so that it doesn't pre-empt the computer. it's not actually necessary to keep the fax machine, but it is the simplest way to send faxes when you only have a physical document. Otherwise you'll need a scanner to pull physical documents in and then "print" them to the shared fax. This distributed direct sending method is kind of a bonus though. The main feature is the ability to receive faxes without using up fax supplies.
I did this once already for a former employer, rerouting their incoming faxes to their laser printer, where printing is immensely cheaper than using up fax machine ribbon. If you have or get one of the new Intel Macs you'll also need one of the external Apple USB modems since they don't come built-in anymore. Other than that the process will be exactly the same on any Mac that is capable of running Mac OS X 10.3 or above.
If the junk faxes are coming from a legitimate number you can also file a complaint with the FCC and/or possibly take them to court and get $1500 per incident if you can prove that there was a willful and knowledgeable intent to violate the TCPA. I read about somebody who did that a few years back. Of course there is always the tried and true faxing back an endless loop of black pages, although I can't imagine a spamming company these days who would actually be using a real fax machine that would be subject to having its ribbon used up by this little prank. Alternating the black pages with a huge "TAKE MY NUMBER OFF YOUR LIST IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO FILE A FORMAL COMPLAINT WITH THE FCC" might work even better.
That's a good point, and thanks for taking the time to be one of the few who bothered to look deeper and point out that there still is no true and final crack available.
But there is also a separate issue here. I keep wondering how long the ignorant masses are going to put up with this crap. The better the crackers get, the more often they will have to revoke keys. Every time keys are revoked people will have to download updates to their software or hardware players in order to play new movies, and it will start happening more and more. Every other time you rent a new movie you'll come home and be unable to play it before applying an update to your computer. Strange as it may seem there are still a significant number of people who either don't have Internet access at home or are still using a single computer with dial-up modem access. It will be a royal pain to download large software patches, and they don't have the network set up to have their hardware players plugged in all the time.
How long can this possibly go on? Obviously the vast majority of the population never really noticed the problems with DVD/CSS/Region-Coding, and that's been around for at least a decade. Most of the time over the years DVDs just worked, and if they worked once they continued to work. Not enough people had ongoing problems, so CSS never got killed off as we'd all hoped it would be. Is the same thing going to happen here, or is AACS going to end up being enough of a hindrance to movie enjoyment that a significant number of people will actually wake up and simply stop renting or buying BR/HD DVDs? I'm certainly not even going to start supporting it for the foreseeable future.
Also, why are we bothering to crack AACS anyway? Why not just play the discs and downsample to regular DVD5-level quality, which was already more than good enough for most people? Don't you need an HD display and high-end audio system to even notice any difference? Is there already software to do this? Or is capturing the stream one of those things that's been made difficult by HDCP?
I'm also wondering whether these new discs incorporate additional "copy protection" schemes like the ArcCOS/SafeDisc kind of stuff that keeps causing problems for DVD rippers. CSS was cracked for good years ago but it's that constantly changing copy protection junk that keeps breaking the ripping software. If the same issue is present on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs then a real crack won't actually mean that ripping will be easy henceforth. We'll still have to route around the various copy protection schemes, which actually seems to be more complicated in the end.
The school has rules. You break the rules, they toss you out. Adding a computer into the mix doesn't change that equation. There is no law that says "Oh, the rule that you broke involved the Internet! Well, that's an entirely different case!"
Agreed. Although unfortunately there does seem to be an unspoken rule that any situation involving a computer requires reactions equivalent to a terrorist attack.
The article submitter is retarded. The students broke the established rules for use of the network, and received punishment for their actions. It has nothing to do with any "security problems" they may or may not have been exploiting during their rule-breaking. The only actual issue here is that the punishments seem as usual to be far too harsh in response to the infractions, unless the students were also doing something malicious besides simply skirting a censored web by browsing through proxies. This is caused by certain endemic problems that have been around for decades, if not longer:
A.) Public school officials seem to be required to wildly overreact to almost any infraction of the rules.
B.) "Zero tolerance" policies make everything worse, like expelling a student who keeps aspirin in her purse, arresting a student who forgot that he had his pocketknife in the jacket he grabbed that morning.
C.) Computer-related activities have become the modern-day witch hunt. No matter how innocuous your activities are, if the authorities don't understand or expressly approve what you're doing you will be treated like the most dangerous person within a 200-mile radius. If you even show any sign of having more knowledge of computers than your overseers you will be considered guilty of something by default, even if they never find any evidence of you ever having touched a computer. You could have done something from home, or from an Internet café, or you could have hacked in with a cell phone. That's how insane and ignorant people are about computers and networks.
These are the actual issues. Until these issues get acknowledged and fixed this stuff will keep happening to both guilty and innocent students. But more importantly this country is rapidly becoming more and more antagonistic toward all kinds of freedoms, so students who learn not to get caught doing anything outside "the box" will be more successful subversive agents later on. That's all these kind of rules do, of course, they weed out the ones who aren't smart enough to break the rules and get away with it. It's like military boot camp (been there, done that) or juvenile detention, or prison. Anyone in that system either obeys all the rules (yeah, right) or quickly learns to:
- have a heightened awareness of the movements and activities of authority figures (i.e., "the enemy"), - identify and exploit security weaknesses intelligently, - always have a Cover-Your-Ass option available, - redirect blame for any action away from themselves, - maintain the appearance of obeying all the rules, - maintain a low profile to avoid being noticed, - identify and develop associations with like-minded individuals, - develop surreptitious communication systems, - work in teams to more effectively defeat "the enemy".
See "The Doradi Experiment" by Frank Herbert for the best example of this effect that I've seen. It happens in any social system where there is some kind of "survival pressure", where if you fail to follow the rules you get killed/suspended/expelled/demoted or whatever. That's what the schools and the Internet are becoming, a pressure cooker environment for the honing of subversive skills. On the one hand it's tragic that the situation is so screwed up. On the other hand, the next generation will be stronger, faster, and smarter. They'll be able to teach others how to hide in the shadows like they do. Welcome to communist America, where freedom can only be enjoyed in the dark behind shuttered windows.
OK, this is pretty not-cool for me, since I'm typing this on my iBook G4 14" 1.42GHz that's just over a year old now, with no AppleCare. But there's something I'm not entirely clear about. Is this a defect that affects ALL iBook G4s out there, or is it confined to certain models/runs/sizes? I mean, "iBook G4" describes ten different models of iBook produced from 2003 to 2005. This one is the last model they made before moving to the MacBook line. Was this defect fixed by the time this model was manufactured or should I still be worried? Also, does anyone have a clue what the actual defect rates are?
I'm not just wondering for myself either. I know a business and some individuals who also own iBook G4s, and I'm sort of becoming the local Mac guru, so people come to me for advice about Macs. I need to know what to tell them when they come to me with a problem or ask me whether there is any reason not to purchase a used iBook G4 (actually they're still being sold as new too!). I did some analysis of the whole PPC/Intel relationship recently and came to the conclusion that used G4 and later PPC machines can actually be a smart investment (or smart to hold onto) as long as the user has no need for doing high-end graphics or gaming, or for doing the main thing that Intel Macs are much better at: Running Windows apps at native speed in virtualization software like Parallels Desktop, or in Boot Camp.
The Intel machines are definitely faster, but due to the magic of Mac OS X and Universal Binary applications a typical G4/G5 PPC Mac will be highly functional for years to come, with official support from Apple for Leopard and probably at least one version of OS X after that. Many Universal applications will perform just as well on a PPC Mac as on Intel. For people who just do email/web/office documents a PPC Mac is going to be a lot cheaper and work fantastically well for years. But, depending on the outcome of this situation I may have to amend my conclusion with a "stay away from iBook G4s," which would really be unfortunate because they are great machines.
So, anyone have pointers to more references on this? Discussions, news reports, accounts from users who encountered the problem and tried to get it fixed, action centers where people are or will be following up on this Danish report, where to find out about the progress of getting Apple US to acknowledge this issue and what they're going to do about it, how to use this report as leverage to get a defective iBook fixed, anything like that. I'm sure I'm not the only person you will be helping.
For others here are some sites that I already know of off the top of my head where some information is likely to show up (no links, just write 'em down and check them out sometime):
MacRumors.com, AppleInsider.com, other Apple/Mac rumor sites. LowEndMac.com MacNN.com, other Apple/Mac news sites.
Fortunately due to the stability of Mac OS X and an actually usable (reliable) sleep mode, I very rarely shut down or turn on my iBook. When I go around town I just put it to sleep. I've probably only used the power button two or three dozen times in the whole year that I've owned the machine. Still worried though.
DRM restricts what you can do with something you have paid for. How is that not a relevant freedom-related issue?
Them: "Sorry. How about, the right to private exhibition? Only ${29.99 plus tax}." You: "Now you're talkin'!" Them: "So we have a deal?" You: "Yep." [you hand them {$29.99 plus tax}, and they hand you a DVD.] Them: "Have a nice day." ... Them: "Do you understand that you paid for limited ownership, and that you consented to the limits stated and known to you at the time of sale?" You: "No, I'm too dumb-stupid to grasp that. I can only handle concrete meanings of the idea of ownership."
Me: "No, I didn't get that either, because when I went in that store over there and paid a substantial amount of legal tender to purchase a DVD the clerk at the checkout counter said that once it's paid for I would own it, just like all the books, VHS cassette tapes, vinyl records, audio CDs and audio cassette tapes they still sell. He said that under US copyright law I have the right of first sale, the right to take excerpts for fair use purposes, the right to make one archival backup in case of damage or loss of the original media, and of course that I could only view or use the copyrighted item for private, non-commercial purposes. I understand that there are laws that would impose large fines and possible prison time if I attempt to use copyrighted media for commercial purposes."
Them: "Well, yeah..."
Me: "Funny, I didn't hear you explaining to my friend here in clear terms before the sale that he was paying for limited ownership, nor did I see any contract being presented, read, understood and signed by my friend before the sale. This isn't a movie rental shop, so we certainly didn't just pay for the temporary use of a DVD belonging to someone else. Therefore what you just said to my friend was nonsense, because other than the standard assumed limitations under copyright law there were no additional terms presented in any legally binding manner. So, your DRM-laden DVD, while not actually doing anything to prevent commercial piracy which is the usual reason given for the use of this technology, is instead just going to keep my friend here from exercising the aforementioned rights under US copyright law. How and why is this legal, again?"
Them: "Umm, OH! Look at the time. Gotta run! kthxbye."
Certainly the movie studios are obnoxiously attempting to prevent format-shifting, in order to sell you the same movie twice. But that doesn't mean they are violating any of your rights.
Certainly you've accepted the content industry's absurdist spin on "the idea of ownership", and you are obnoxiously self-assured in your ignorance of why this is a problem. But that doesn't mean their New Speak twisted definition is in any way correct, or legal, or doesn't violate your rights under copyright law and do damage to our society and culture by attempting to degrade us all to "limited ownership" and block important rights like fair use. You know, the thing that lets reviewers, journalists, bloggers, teachers and everyone else use quotes, frame grabs, clips, sound samples and other types of excerpts in order to enrich our culture, improve the education of our children, use actual examples in discussions of copyrighted works, so on and so forth. Silly stuff like that. I'm sure we'll do fine without the ability to actually exercise fair use. If Suzy Schoolteacher gets arrested for a DMCA violation for decrypting a DRMed text file in order to hand out copies of the lyrics to "Happy Birthday" to her kindergarten class, well, that's her problem, isn't it? She shouldn't have assumed that her fair use rights would trump a law that makes it illegal to "circumvent a copyright protection mechanism", like the DRM on that DVD.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice.org 2.3.0 was released on September 18th. That is not 'a while'. We were already in the Release Candidate stage at that point. Would you expect Microsoft to do a major version update of, say, Windows Media Player or Internet Explorer between Vista RC2 and Vista final? Of course not.
No, but since when is going from 2.2 to 2.3 a major version update? I would expect them to apply security patches and minor version updates between an RC and a release version, and I do expect the FOSS community to evolve better development procedures than Microsoft, but apparently that's asking too much. Two weeks should be plenty of time to put in the latest version of something that many desktop users will be interacting with on a daily basis.
This is because the idea of having pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions is, frankly, silly. The package management system works best when people understand it, and worst when they try to do end runs around it. This is not surprising. Software writers should write, and packagers (who work for individual distros) should package. That system works great. It's when people start messing with it that you get problems.
I love this. You do realize you're helping to support my assertions, right? No? Maybe you should re-read what you wrote here. It's just like I said before. Package management systems only work for software that stays inside the limited box the system was designed for. Try to do something outside the box and it breaks down. How about that. What you're not realizing, or refuse to accept, is that there are many different legitimate and illegitimate reasons people have for wanting to do something outside that box.
Your whole paragraph here is filled with typical idealist blind spots. "Do end runs around it", "software writers should", "packagers should", "when people start messing with it". These statements are rather arrogant in nature. "If you don't do it my way, you're doing it wrong," and so forth. Guess what? You're never going to get everyone to do something the same way. There are always exceptions, and if that isn't allowed for in the design, it's a bad design. There will always be some "silly" software out there that won't be provided as source code. You can choose to be an idealist and not use that software, but not everyone has that choice or wants to be such an extreme idealist. And most people don't like to be called silly for wanting to do things differently.
We do? Can't say I find myself kept up at night wondering about that. Maybe because lots of people *do* develop for Linux. It's simple - release source code.
You are an individual. By "we" I was speaking of a community with a large number of members who have spent the last several years complaining that almost nobody in the commercial software world has started to seriously develop Linux versions of their software. You apparently don't care about any commercial or proprietary software, but some people want or need such software and there is nothing wrong with that. Source code doesn't really have much to do with it.
Why do you want one? What's wrong with the package management system?
What difference does it make why I want one? There are reasons to want a way to work outside the package management system. Ever tried to install two different versions of the same software package? Ever wanted to install a package for only one user? Ever wanted to install some software that isn't available in your package management system and never will be? Good luck with that. But more importantly, the main problem here is that you're assuming that because you see no reason to do it, there is no reason. That kind of thinking is arrogant, and wrong. And one of the reasons that package management systems aren't perfect for every user and every situation.
Then go think about something else and quit trolling Linux threads. Good lord, if anyone's wasting their time around here it's you.
Oh, don't I know it. Constructive criticism or pointing out flaws in Our Favorite Operating System is NOT welcome. I know. Complete waste of time. Can't help it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong? You mean I haven't been waiting for KDE 4 for years? That's not my recollection.
How nice that it is finally about to have an initial point-zero release. However, having read some of the KDE roadmaps I noticed they have a tendency to release major versions before they have feature parity with the previous major version. Then they continue adding features with each minor version release, . So I'm not holding my breath for a stable selection of KDE apps being commonly available in ready-to-use format for all platforms immediately this December. I also won't be getting excited about Linux distros finally coming out with KDE 4 pre-installed until they get to about version 4.4, for the same reasons. There probably won't even be a mainstream Linux distro using KDE 4 until there is at least one minor version update. I'm guessing it will be another year before the majority of distros will finally be using KDE 4. Again, not holding my breath.
But more importantly, even if I'm wrong on a few details here, it doesn't matter (to me). I simply don't care anymore. I was excited about the potential of KDE 4.0 a few years ago. Then I moved on with life. You can take that negatively and call me a troll, or you can take it as a simple statement of personal opinion based on my previous experience, and an indicator that a lot of people like me would still be using Linux if KDE 4 had come out a couple of years ago. When I can download pretty much any KDE application I want in a Windows and Mac OS X native version, then I'll start being impressed.
Guess what? Pointing out projects that are still in alpha stage as an indicator of progress isn't very impressive either.
To begin with, I was a Mandrake user and even paid for a Silver account or whatever it was for a couple of years. I used other Linux distros also, and liked them. I love the idea of Linux in general, free software, package management and all that. It's all great stuff, in theory. But today, as I read this announcement, there are many reasons I continue to be completely unimpressed with the "progress" of Linux distros over the years since I stopped using it. In the vain and ridiculous hope that someone is listening without their finger poised over the "troll" button, I'd like to just point out a few things for the umpteenth time...
KDE 3.x has been in use for way too long. I was reading about KDE 4.x literally (in the literally literal sense) years ago. I got very excited about the possibility of having "native" KDE 4.x applications running on Windows and Macs as well as Linux, without needing special intermediary layers of software on those other platforms. I gave up on Linux a long time ago, but I sure would love to be able to run some of the nicer KDE applications without needing to use Linux or set up some complex Cygwin or X11 environment. Yet, several years later (years, not months), there is no stable KDE 4.x release in sight. Yes, I'm sure many bugs have been fixed and features have been added between 3.0 and 3.5.7, but it still isn't KDE 4.x with its promise of true cross-platform goodness. WTF?
Mandriva 2008? What is it, a quarterly magazine? Is it a car? It isn't going to be 2008 for another 2.5 months. WTF?
OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.6, in a distro that was just released? OO.o 2.3 and FF 2.0.0.7 have been out for a while now. It's been about a decade since I started using Linux, and development methods are still so ridiculously inefficient and unstable that they still need to do weeks of stability testing before including the most up-to-date versions of desktop software? There is something seriously wrong with that, in my not-so-humble opinion. Part of which is rooted in the fact that every type of Linux distro still seems to need its own special software repository, separate from all the others, where different people are responsible for compiling the same software in different ways for each family of Linux distros. Good God, when I think of all the man-hours that are being wasted with all this idiotic redundancy, and all the time spent by users complaining in forums that their distro-of-choice doesn't have the latest version of package X yet because the package maintainer is on vacation, it makes my head hurt.
Yeah, package management is a great idea, in theory. For servers it really is great. For desktop usage, it falls so short of actually simplifying things that it's ridiculous. After almost two decades of Linux development there is no grand unified package management system in sight. The few pieces of software that have pre-compiled downloadable Linux versions still need at least three different types of packages just to cover "most" of the popular Linux distros. And then we wonder why nobody bothers to develop for "Linux". There is no "Linux", that's why. There are only Linux-based families of distros, each requiring a different packaging procedure. And there is no single clear-cut procedure for installing software completely outside of the native package management system in a way that neither will ever interfere with the other. That too is different for every distro, and not something that is easy for non-geeks to implement on their own personal computer. WTF?
"Reworked hardware detection sub-system". "New network configuration center". I see things like this in almost every distro release announcement I bother to read. Yes, improvement is great. No, redesigning systems constantly is not great. Having to completely rework things means you did it wrong before. This happens entirely too often. It also means that many Linux distros have completely different interfaces to various important system functions. This is one of the many things that confuses the hec
Dude, because it bites.
No, seriously. It says so right on the website. Thanks, I'll be here all day.
I kid. But seriously for real this time, GTK+? WTF+? That does bite. I know it's a great toolkit that's been in use since ancient times, etc., but it's pretty ugly no matter what theme you slap on it and it's a serious pain to install on any platform besides *nix. The Windows version of Claws is apparently part of a confusing (to non-geeks) package of a bunch of GPG software. The Mac version is one of those ports maintained by one guy on his own domain, which is nice of him but doesn't give me much confidence that it will always be available. I'm downloading it because I've heard good things about it over the years, but I would never recommend it to anyone who didn't know how to build their own computer.
In short, like so much of the software that has originated on the *nix side, Claws is entirely too *nix oriented to appeal to the masses. The Mac and Windows versions are mere afterthoughts on a page filled with links to versions of the software for a dozen different Linux distros, the BSDs, and even Solaris. If the developers cared about the general computing population using Claws, the Windows and Mac links would be the most prominent links at the top of the page, and they wouldn't send you off to some other website, there would be official Windows and Mac packages right there. You know, like with Firefox and Thunderbird.
And you wonder why it doesn't get more attention. The developers don't care about attention. They've made powerful software that does what they want, and that's as far as it goes for them. Unfortunately in my experience this is a fairly common mindset in the FOSS software world, which is why few non-geeks have ever heard of any free software other than Firefox.
Wow, there's a lot to go over here. I'm not sure if I should even bother since your view of the world is so skewed, but here goes.
First off, you seem to think you're a lot smarter than the average person, or perhaps you're prescient and thus able to plan this sort of thing out in advance. What the hell? The guy was just going to the store, he didn't wake up that day thinking, "Today would be a good day to get arrested illegally under clear and simple circumstances so that defend _one_ of my civil rights." He left the store in a polite and fully legal manner and had his rights violated by first the store personnel and then again by the very police officer who was supposed to be protected the rights that were previously violated, and who should have known better. Both violations were equally egregious and equally unnecessary, and equally important to stand up for. He will be defending himself in court against the improper arrest and he filed charges against the store employees before he even left the police station.
This is all exactly as it should be. You should be thanking him for what he's doing instead of berating him for doing something wrong. He did absolutely nothing wrong, and was arrested for it. That should scare any rational person. He wasn't even rude to the idiot cop, from the sound of things. He simply stated his rights, at which point the idiot cop should have said, "Alright sir, you're correct, and you've identified yourself already according to what the law requires. Would you like to press charges against these individuals now?" Instead, the idiot cop arrested him without reading the man his Miranda rights and without informing him what he was being charged with until hours later, thus continuing to compound the rights violations and declare himself an idiot cop.
Your opinion differs from mine and many others in that you think rights should only be defended when it is convenient, and ignored whenever it is "reasonable" to give them up. You also have the very common and very incorrect paradoxical idea that you'll be doing a better job protecting your family by "taking them out of the equation". In point of fact, the presence of multiple passengers in the car, perhaps even a minor among them, once again compounds the action of the store employees. Instead of merely detaining one person illegally, they illegally detained an entire car full of people. And they didn't just stand in front of the car. The store manager got between the open car door and the man inside, and refused to move when the man attempted to close the door, after politely asking what the problem was, I might add.
In point of fact once again, this man was amazingly polite with both the store employees and the idiot cop. He would have been well within his rights to kick the store manager in the nuts and forcibly remove him from the car in order to get his family out of there, and then call the cops afterward. Several things went very wrong that day. This guy standing up for his rights was not one of them.
So if I'm rude to a police officer I should expect him to be rude in return? That's fine, although that would be contrary to the training and policies of any law enforcement agency you care to name. Officers are supposed to maintain a calm and polite demeanor no matter how a subject is reacting (as long as no physical interaction is required). It helps them keep situations from escalating. It's part of their F-ing job.
Unfortunately this officer went far beyond the quid pro quo reaction called for in your little fantasy world. The subject might have been rude, which is understandable after having one's rights violated, one's family illegally detained in a public parking lot, and then having a cop trying to force you to show your drivers license after he just verified that there was never any legal reason to detain you. In response, the cop took the subject downtown and charged him with a trumped-up totally BS "crime", which will remain on his permanent legal record unless a lawsuit forces the city to expunge it at some point. Most reasonable people who understand the law would consider this the very definition of abuse of power.
Yeah, moving to the back of the bus wasn't particularly time-consuming or painful either. According to your logic, she shouldn't have bothered making a fuss. After all she got arrested for her trouble, causing herself a lot of hardship. She probably should have waited until she had to stand up for something that actually mattered. Nobody actually needs to ride in the front of the bus, especially if they have dark skin. Right?
You're probably right. We should wait until things get so bad that cops feel like they have the right to beat the crap out of you in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses because they don't like the shirt you were wearing that day. Better yet, we should wait until the cops feel like they can start murdering people without any regard to procedural law whatsoever. We should wait for that kind of situation instead of standing up for frivolous stuff like the right to not be searched or detained illegally, or the right to not have a cop make up charges for you just because you irritated him.
Rights are rights, and they're all important, jackass. If you don't defend each instance of your rights being violated today, you may find them missing tomorrow. Thanks for being part of the sheeple majority who thinks my rights haven't been violated unless I've been beaten half to death, murdered, or already imprisoned for 30 years without being charged with a crime. One of these days you'll have a rude awakening, or a very chapped anal orifice from bending over to take all the "unimportant" violations of your rights. Exactly which freedoms are you ready to fight for today? You know, before they get lost?
If you can see any part of the other window you can of course bring it to the front by itself without bringing all the application's windows forward at once. But you need to use the mouse for that. There's Exposé, but that's also designed for the mouse. I tend to use almost every application as maximized as possible with the Finder being the only app I usually have any need to view multiple windows at once, so I haven't really run into the problem you're describing.
I don't think you're going to find a totally keyboard-centric way to work with Mac OS X like you can with certain Linux window managers. It's a trade-off. A lot can be done with just the keyboard, and the keyboard shortcuts are easy to use and intuitive unlike all the Windows and Linux keyboard shortcuts I've ever encountered. The Mac was the original GUI computer system and there is still a lot of focus on mouse usage. If you don't find anything else about Mac OS X that makes it better than what you have already, by all means stick with Linux. The good news is that you can also run Linux on any new Intel Mac, but that's mainly useful for someone who wants to use Linux applications that don't have counterparts in Mac OS X.
All I know is, I've been using computers since 1988 or so and I never used the keyboard a fraction as much with any other operating system as I do with Mac OS X.
I think what you meant to say was, "I haven't used it for long enough to adjust to it yet." In my experience the longer one uses the Mac OS X (no slash) interface, the more one realizes just how brilliant they were to come up with it over two decades ago. Of course, one has to be able to let go of the various idiosyncracies we've learned from other operating system interfaces that are training grounds for control freaks. This may take quite a lot of time, depending on how long you've been using other systems.
This complaint would have more weight if you gave some concrete examples of what information is being hidden away any more than what is hidden in the per-window menu bars in other interfaces. If there are functions that should be constantly visible and accessible with a single click, well, that's what toolbars are for. As for me, I simply love having that menu bar up there always in the exact same place, with the Apple menu in the corner giving me extremely fast access to things that affect the entire system, like shutdown/logout/restart and the System Preferences application.
Secondly, I do recommend learning at least some of the basic keyboard commands. Unlike Windows/KDE/GNOME/Emacs/vi/WindowMaker/etc., most Mac OS keyboard shortcuts (many of which haven't changed in the last couple of decades) are simple and intuitive, and can be used without resorting to constant finger contortions or looking at the keyboard. The people responsible for making the Control key the primary keyboard shortcut key for most PC operating systems, and then positioning the Control key in the inaccessible bottom corners of the keyboard, should be hung up by their pinky fingers.
Start with the shortcuts for cut/copy/paste, save, close window, quit, hide (a cleaner, more efficient alternative to minimizing individual windows), and one of my absolute favorites, the switch-document shortcut (Command-backtick/tilde). Some people actually seem to enjoy Alt-tabbing through a dozen visually identical document icons like Windows does it, but one of my absolute favorite features of the OS X interface is that Command-Tab shortcut switches between applications, not windows. So you switch to the application you want, then if you want to stay within that application and switch between its open windows/documents you just use Cmd-backtick. It's right over the tab key.
Looking in the menus it should take you about two minutes to find all the keyboard shortcuts to the functions I listed above since they are listed right on the menu. After about 15 minutes of actually using them you should know them by heart and be using them every single day henceforth. Just listing the letters you should be able to guess every single one: x, c, v, s, w, q, h. Funny how cut/copy/paste are right next to each other on the keyboard, and in that order.
Then of course there are the Expose keys. Mostly I just use F11 to hide/show the desktop. Very handy at times. Just a side note here, if I was on my iBook right now I would have put the accented character at the end of Expose with a very simple Cmd-e shortcut just prior to typing the final letter "e". On Windows, I have no idea which of the hundreds of Alt-0nnn numerical codes would do the equivalent function. Other character accents are equally easy to activate, and they work the same way EVERYWHERE in the operating system, not just in certain applications.
The grandparent post was a little odd in that he didn't bother to point out the fact that SuperDuper! has absolutely nothing to do with anything unless you're using Macs. I do recommend Macs to everyone I meet, especially now that they're Intel-based and capable of running Windows and taking gobs of inexpensive RAM, but Macs aren't for everyone and I rather doubt the original poster was talking about a shop that has even a single Mac on the premises. So mentioning a Mac-only backup solution is kind of a non-sequitur.
SuperDuper! does have a Smart Update option if you register it, that only syncs the changes. Otherwise you'll be erasing and cloning the whole drive each time. Having a backup drive with multiple partitions or separate backup drives is good idea, and I always recommend that also. 320GB drives are incredibly cheap these days.
Now, if the grandparent had said, like I'm going to say, that they should switch to Macs and run their Windows software in a virtual machine (it runs at native speeds), that would have been a bit more on-topic. Then they would have a wealth of additional options for backups including backing up the entire Windows virtual machine as a file, and cloning the Macs onto cheap external drives whenever they come in to the shop.
Hey, here's a thought. Worried about security on your laptops? Use the Mac OS X host operating system for unimportant stuff like web surfing and do all your important high security work inside a Windows virtual machine. Here's the trick: Host the Windows virtual machine hard drive file on an encrypted disk image (DMG). That way if the machine gets stolen the only information they can access is whatever inconsequential stuff you left on the Mac OS X side. The ability to create an encrypted DMG is built into Mac OS X. I would recommend using a statically sized DMG rather than a sparse disk image, the sparse images have a bad habit of becoming unrecoverably corrupted after a system crash.
I was one of those Mac-haters back in the day, but right now as far as I'm concerned there is no longer any reason to waste money on a non-Mac computer anymore, even if you need to run Windows. The Intel Macs run any version of Windows supported by the virtual machine software (Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion are the main contenders right now). They'll also run Linux, of course. And backup up the entire system is simply a matter of having one or two inexpensive external drives and using any cloning app like SuperDuper. Anyone can do it, that's the best part. There is nothing like it on the Windows side. No, Ghost does not compare.
Yes, Mac OS X is more complex than the Classic Mac OS. Thank the Lord. I know these apps are just front-ends to the powerful command-line tools. That's pretty much the whole point. They take those powerful UNIX-y tools and make them so easy to use that anyone can make a bootable copy of their system disk with a few clicks.
Every operating system has quirks. My challenge was to show me how an end user can accomplish the same end result that can easily be achieved with Mac OS X in Linux or Windows, with simple GUI tools, on a system that's still running. Other than complaining about some very well hidden filesystem bugs in HFS+ it doesn't seem like you've added anything to the conversation.
See, I'm sure that making a bootable disk from a single-partition Linux system is technically just as easy as it is in Mac OS X. It's just that nobody ever took the time to make a tool that made it easy for normal people to actually do it, from beginning to end, with one click. So in actuality, it's close to impossible to accomplish this task with Linux without being a command-line guru. It's the end result that counts.
I am blown away by the fact that the Mac OS X reviewer failed to mention SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner on the page about backups. They linked to a page that mentions it, but it should have been at the forefront in big, bold letters. This IMHO is one of the best features of Macs and Mac OS X, that any idiot can make a clone of their entire system onto any internal or external media. If that media is a FireWire hard drive, the clone will be bootable on any Mac with a FireWire port (and the same processor type, PowerPC and Intel can't boot from each other's drives without some hacks). This means that for any PowerPC Mac going back about 8 years to the first iMac with a FireWire port, you will be able to clone the system drive of any other PowerPC Mac onto a FireWire hard drive and boot from that drive on any other PowerPC Mac in that range. The same goes for Intel machines, although they can also boot from USB devices. (There are reports that some PowerPC models can also boot from USB drives since about Mac OS X 10.4.5 came out, but FireWire is a much better choice speedwise anyway.)
So if your hard drive dies, you have a bootable backup that works just as well as the internal drive (if you're using FireWire, USB is a little slow). If the computer dies and you have access to another Mac, you can boot from your backup drive and it will be just as if you were still using your own computer, barring any extreme differences in memory and processor speeds. With enough RAM available the processor speed makes very little difference under general usage like web browsing, email and office applications. When you get your computer fixed (or replace a failed hard drive) you can then clone your backup drive back onto the drive in the computer, reboot, and it's like nothing ever happened. Click a button, walk away for about an hour, and get back to work.
With a properly implemented cloning schedule you can recover any system, including a Mac OS X server, in about 5 minutes (as long as it takes to restart the computer, hold down the Option key, and choose to boot from the latest backup drive). I could teach a monkey to do it.
No resetting hidden magic identifiers.
No reinstalling a hundred different drivers for different motherboards, video cards, network cards, etc.
No, "I'm going to refuse to work at all because there is too much different hardware." (I tried to Ghost a Win2K system from one laptop to a virtually identical laptop once. The clone failed to function, ended up having to reset the registry and reinstall most of the pre-installed software.)
No, "This copy of your operating system needs to be reactivated because the hardware changed, you dirty pirate." The non-server version of Mac OS X doesn't even require a serial number, so of course there is no product activation crap to make your life more difficult. Even the server version can be freely cloned and moved to a different system. It requires a serial, but there is no product activation.
No shutting down the system and booting from some special magic CD just to do a clone. That's right, Mac OS X can be easily cloned LIVE, while it's running. It can be cloned automatically on a schedule, so the user doesn't have to even have to think about it.
The target media can be smaller than the source media, as long as there is enough room for the data. It's a smart clone, only the relevant data gets copied. That's all automatic too, the user never needs to go through any complicated preferences or command-line arguments. No need for defragmenting the drive or anything like that either.
In short, Mac OS X is the first operating system I have ever encountered where it is incredibly easy to make a complete USABLE system backup that doesn't require jumping through hoops for hours to restore the system. Any non-technical user can be told in one short paragraph how to keep their system backed up and how to recover from a typical hardware disaster in a matter of minutes. Observe:
"Here is your external backup drive. Her
I remember reading something recently about why some CF cards show up as removable media and others show up as hard drives. It boils down to a firmware option on the card that tells the computer what type of device it is. So some cards do not show up as removable devices. You'd probably have better luck with some of the newer UDMA cards like the Sandisk Extreme IV, Kinston Ultimate 266x, or Lexar 300x ranges. I'm not sure about any of the slower cards but I'm sure all of these are UDMA, and are much more likely to have their firmware set to declare themselves as non-removable storage devices.
Uh huh, and when a vicious dog intent on maiming them came charging directly at them, snarling like a demon from The Bad Place, I guess they just laughed and clapped their hands? Or did they run for their lives, screaming at the top of their lungs, without having to be taught? If you stick your scowling face in front of a baby and say "Arrgh!", does the baby smile or screw up its tiny face and start bawling it's eyes out?
We are sentient animals, so we are able to learn about man-made technological threats to our safety that aren't inherent in nature. But we are still animals, and with that comes base instincts and innate fear of certain natural elements of life, like snakes, spiders, angry people or animals (and that would include combat situations), loud noises (yelling, lightning, etc.), heights, so on and so forth. No learning needed, in fact we have to unlearn a lot of behaviors that are innate, so that we can accomplish tasks no animal ever could. That's big part of growing up. If our species had no innate instincts telling us what to fear and when to run, we wouldn't have lasted very long on this planet. All you've observed is that your children haven't learned to fear the things you've learned to fear, not that they have been totally fearless since birth.
Oh, you don't fear combat. Except that you do, as a concept. So if you were actually shipped off to the front lines in Iraq, given a firearm and told that fifty "insurgents" with AK-47s and rocket propelled grenades were just down the block and heading your way, you would probably soil your pants and then vomit from the adrenaline rush, caused by experiencing fear. Oh yes, and you'd feel like running away, but you'd overcome that with training and devotion to duty, and your desire to protect your fellow soldiers, your home, your family and your country. Fight or flight, instinctive behaviors that exist throughout the natural world. How about that. If you truly don't fear combat, why aren't you over in Iraq making a mint as a mercenary?
Uh huh, because nobody up until now has bothered to do any studies regarding learned and innate fear responses in humans and similar mammals. Yeah. That's it. And how exactly does the term "shellshock" communicate the concept better than the current technical name? That word was used back when people had no clue why soldiers kept suffering decades after experiencing a terrible event, and only applied to soldiers coming back from a war. PTSD happens in all kinds of
He wasn't lying, he just didn't have a clue what he was doing (computer illiterate really doesn't cover it) and the applications didn't warn him clearly enough about what was going to happen when he saved his documents. They probably used a Yes/No dialog, and you know what users do with Yes/No dialogs. It's all Greek to them so they just auto-click Yes.
I know, it's all the user's fault. Nobody should have admin rights in Windows. Blah blah blah. Well, in the real world everyone runs Windows as admin and most of them have to take care of their computer themselves while barely knowing enough to turn it on and write a letter in Word. No one is standing by to hold their hand and tell them to do something "in chronological order". Which also shouldn't be necessary. The software is simply not reliable and too tightly intertwined with the operating system and common libraries. "Normal circumstances" do not happen very often in the real world either.
Well, I know it wasn't saving in the new XML formats, and I did get a little confused during the whole process because he's one of those people who doesn't have a clue that "applications" and "documents" are two different and completely separate things, which was rather bizarre as it caused him to describe events in ways that seemed to make sense but didn't actually convey what he really meant, and vice versa.
I do know two things for sure though, one being that installing the 2007 trial caused his 2000 applications to fail to load up (which the user described as "I can't open my old documents, only the new ones open"), and two is that at the very least it did change his Publisher files so that the older version couldn't open them any more. I'm sure there may have been an option in the new version of Publisher to save the file as an older version, but we didn't realize there would be any incompatibility until after I uninstalled everything and restored Office 2000. I would have had to redownload and reinstall the trial software to even verify whether or not there was some way to restore those documents to a usable form for the earlier version of Publisher.
It turned out to be a good thing in the end though since the user only had a handful of Publisher files, with content that could and should have been created in Word. So I just explained to him that Publisher is one of the worst applications he could possibly be producing documents with, and he should just never use it again. He was fine with that.
Here's what I'm not fine with. One, the fact that trial software went about changing even one file or one type of file into a new and incompatible format without multiple difficult-to-bypass warnings to the user is really inexcusable. Two, you can call BS until you're blue in the face, but that install of Office 2000 was borked, and the cause was installing the trial Office 2007 software, because it all worked fine before that. The fact that Microsoft can't manage to make their software function reliably when two different versions are installed is just ridiculous. Now, it may have actually been installed in the same folder as the previous version, but if so it was only because it defaulted to installing in that folder and the user didn't know any better. In the end most of the blame for these screwups must remain with Microsoft. We can't expect every computer user to know even one tenth of what most of us know, or have one-tenth of the information and understanding it would take to avoid all the potential pitfalls.
He will if you put them there.
Just playing Devil's Advocate.
While it sounds like the article doesn't talk specifically about Office 2007, I can say from first hand experience that Microsoft hasn't really changed their ways since the Office 2003 trial. I had a client a couple of months back who downloaded and installed the Office 2007 try-before-you-buy trial and installed it on his system which already had Office 2000 installed. Luckily, if we can use that word here, he had already purchased and switched over to Outlook 2007, so his mail was fine, but Office 2007 totally screwed up his install of Office 2000. Most of the older components wouldn't run and all the files he worked on were converted to new formats by Office 2007. Anyways, it caused a whole host of problems for him, interrupting his business.
What's even better is that he was fine with the new software and so we actually tried to register it for him on two separate occasions, and we failed both times with some idiotic error about a shipping method... for a downloaded product. How stupid is that? Finally we gave up and I was able to uninstall every version of Office (he also had some 2003 components for some reason) and reinstalled Office 2000 from a disk I had, in the process weaning him off of using Publisher ever again, since his Publisher files were no longer readable by any version of Publisher except the new version that had messed with the file. Thanks, Microsoft.
Yeah, he was definitely not the most computer literate person, but when I trial application goes around changing old files and saving new files in a format that can't be read by any older version of the software, you can't entirely blame that on the user. Everyone should be warned to backup their files before installing any Microsoft trial software. If he'd wanted to return to a previous version of Outlook I honestly don't have a clue what I would have done. It probably would have been easier to switch him over to Thunderbird.
Um, hunh? You want them to change "one of the all-time best notebook designs" just so that you can have an updated "look" on your $3,000 laptop? It's a tool, not a pair of shoes. Normally people buy them for what they have inside. Who cares what it looks like as long as it looks nice? If you just want to change the appearance, knock yourself out:
http://www.speckproducts.com/
http://www.techshell.biz/
http://www.gelaskins.com/
http://www.huzzk.com/
LEDs are still subject to failure from time to time, and something tells me it won't be nearly as simple to replace a single failed LED as it is to replace a CCFL backlight. Unless they were clever enough to build it so that an individual LED can simply be unplugged and replaced with a new one.
LEDs also fade or get odd color casts over time as well, and I have to wonder how well it will work to replace a single failed LED with a brand new one that will outshine all the faded ones around it. They'll probably have to change out the entire backlight assembly, and that can't be cheap.
Of course I don't actually know how the new displays are configured internally, I'm just pointing out that LEDs are better but not totally immune to failure and color changes.
But, but... I already have a SuperAwesomeFunPlug!
I have to second those who are recommending a computer/software solution. I happen to enjoy Macs these days, so I'll describe just how simple it is to set this up in Mac OS X.
1. Open the Apple menu, go to System Preferences.
2. Open the Print & Fax preference pane.
3. Go to the "Faxing" tab.
4. Check the box "Receive faxes on this computer".
5. Fill in your fax number, set the number of rings before answering (depends on how you use the line)
6. Choose any or all of the available receiving options:
a. Save the fax as a PDF file to a folder you designate (if it's a shared folder anyone on the network can monitor incoming faxes)
b. Email the fax to an address you designate
c. Print the fax to any printer the Mac is set up to print to (local or network printer, either will work)
7. Optionally, go to the "Sharing" tab and turn on printer sharing, then choose "Let others send faxes through this computer". This makes the fax modem available as a shared "printer" to any other Mac on the network, or any Windows XP computer with Apple's "Bonjour for Windows" package installed.
If you're keeping your regular fax machine on the same line, set it to answer manually so that it doesn't pre-empt the computer. it's not actually necessary to keep the fax machine, but it is the simplest way to send faxes when you only have a physical document. Otherwise you'll need a scanner to pull physical documents in and then "print" them to the shared fax. This distributed direct sending method is kind of a bonus though. The main feature is the ability to receive faxes without using up fax supplies.
I did this once already for a former employer, rerouting their incoming faxes to their laser printer, where printing is immensely cheaper than using up fax machine ribbon. If you have or get one of the new Intel Macs you'll also need one of the external Apple USB modems since they don't come built-in anymore. Other than that the process will be exactly the same on any Mac that is capable of running Mac OS X 10.3 or above.
If the junk faxes are coming from a legitimate number you can also file a complaint with the FCC and/or possibly take them to court and get $1500 per incident if you can prove that there was a willful and knowledgeable intent to violate the TCPA. I read about somebody who did that a few years back. Of course there is always the tried and true faxing back an endless loop of black pages, although I can't imagine a spamming company these days who would actually be using a real fax machine that would be subject to having its ribbon used up by this little prank. Alternating the black pages with a huge "TAKE MY NUMBER OFF YOUR LIST IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL BE FORCED TO FILE A FORMAL COMPLAINT WITH THE FCC" might work even better.
That's a good point, and thanks for taking the time to be one of the few who bothered to look deeper and point out that there still is no true and final crack available.
But there is also a separate issue here. I keep wondering how long the ignorant masses are going to put up with this crap. The better the crackers get, the more often they will have to revoke keys. Every time keys are revoked people will have to download updates to their software or hardware players in order to play new movies, and it will start happening more and more. Every other time you rent a new movie you'll come home and be unable to play it before applying an update to your computer. Strange as it may seem there are still a significant number of people who either don't have Internet access at home or are still using a single computer with dial-up modem access. It will be a royal pain to download large software patches, and they don't have the network set up to have their hardware players plugged in all the time.
How long can this possibly go on? Obviously the vast majority of the population never really noticed the problems with DVD/CSS/Region-Coding, and that's been around for at least a decade. Most of the time over the years DVDs just worked, and if they worked once they continued to work. Not enough people had ongoing problems, so CSS never got killed off as we'd all hoped it would be. Is the same thing going to happen here, or is AACS going to end up being enough of a hindrance to movie enjoyment that a significant number of people will actually wake up and simply stop renting or buying BR/HD DVDs? I'm certainly not even going to start supporting it for the foreseeable future.
Also, why are we bothering to crack AACS anyway? Why not just play the discs and downsample to regular DVD5-level quality, which was already more than good enough for most people? Don't you need an HD display and high-end audio system to even notice any difference? Is there already software to do this? Or is capturing the stream one of those things that's been made difficult by HDCP?
I'm also wondering whether these new discs incorporate additional "copy protection" schemes like the ArcCOS/SafeDisc kind of stuff that keeps causing problems for DVD rippers. CSS was cracked for good years ago but it's that constantly changing copy protection junk that keeps breaking the ripping software. If the same issue is present on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs then a real crack won't actually mean that ripping will be easy henceforth. We'll still have to route around the various copy protection schemes, which actually seems to be more complicated in the end.
Agreed. Although unfortunately there does seem to be an unspoken rule that any situation involving a computer requires reactions equivalent to a terrorist attack.
The article submitter is retarded. The students broke the established rules for use of the network, and received punishment for their actions. It has nothing to do with any "security problems" they may or may not have been exploiting during their rule-breaking. The only actual issue here is that the punishments seem as usual to be far too harsh in response to the infractions, unless the students were also doing something malicious besides simply skirting a censored web by browsing through proxies. This is caused by certain endemic problems that have been around for decades, if not longer:
A.) Public school officials seem to be required to wildly overreact to almost any infraction of the rules.
B.) "Zero tolerance" policies make everything worse, like expelling a student who keeps aspirin in her purse, arresting a student who forgot that he had his pocketknife in the jacket he grabbed that morning.
C.) Computer-related activities have become the modern-day witch hunt. No matter how innocuous your activities are, if the authorities don't understand or expressly approve what you're doing you will be treated like the most dangerous person within a 200-mile radius. If you even show any sign of having more knowledge of computers than your overseers you will be considered guilty of something by default, even if they never find any evidence of you ever having touched a computer. You could have done something from home, or from an Internet café, or you could have hacked in with a cell phone. That's how insane and ignorant people are about computers and networks.
These are the actual issues. Until these issues get acknowledged and fixed this stuff will keep happening to both guilty and innocent students. But more importantly this country is rapidly becoming more and more antagonistic toward all kinds of freedoms, so students who learn not to get caught doing anything outside "the box" will be more successful subversive agents later on. That's all these kind of rules do, of course, they weed out the ones who aren't smart enough to break the rules and get away with it. It's like military boot camp (been there, done that) or juvenile detention, or prison. Anyone in that system either obeys all the rules (yeah, right) or quickly learns to:
- have a heightened awareness of the movements and activities of authority figures (i.e., "the enemy"),
- identify and exploit security weaknesses intelligently,
- always have a Cover-Your-Ass option available,
- redirect blame for any action away from themselves,
- maintain the appearance of obeying all the rules,
- maintain a low profile to avoid being noticed,
- identify and develop associations with like-minded individuals,
- develop surreptitious communication systems,
- work in teams to more effectively defeat "the enemy".
See "The Doradi Experiment" by Frank Herbert for the best example of this effect that I've seen. It happens in any social system where there is some kind of "survival pressure", where if you fail to follow the rules you get killed/suspended/expelled/demoted or whatever. That's what the schools and the Internet are becoming, a pressure cooker environment for the honing of subversive skills. On the one hand it's tragic that the situation is so screwed up. On the other hand, the next generation will be stronger, faster, and smarter. They'll be able to teach others how to hide in the shadows like they do. Welcome to communist America, where freedom can only be enjoyed in the dark behind shuttered windows.
OK, this is pretty not-cool for me, since I'm typing this on my iBook G4 14" 1.42GHz that's just over a year old now, with no AppleCare. But there's something I'm not entirely clear about. Is this a defect that affects ALL iBook G4s out there, or is it confined to certain models/runs/sizes? I mean, "iBook G4" describes ten different models of iBook produced from 2003 to 2005. This one is the last model they made before moving to the MacBook line. Was this defect fixed by the time this model was manufactured or should I still be worried? Also, does anyone have a clue what the actual defect rates are?
I'm not just wondering for myself either. I know a business and some individuals who also own iBook G4s, and I'm sort of becoming the local Mac guru, so people come to me for advice about Macs. I need to know what to tell them when they come to me with a problem or ask me whether there is any reason not to purchase a used iBook G4 (actually they're still being sold as new too!). I did some analysis of the whole PPC/Intel relationship recently and came to the conclusion that used G4 and later PPC machines can actually be a smart investment (or smart to hold onto) as long as the user has no need for doing high-end graphics or gaming, or for doing the main thing that Intel Macs are much better at: Running Windows apps at native speed in virtualization software like Parallels Desktop, or in Boot Camp.
The Intel machines are definitely faster, but due to the magic of Mac OS X and Universal Binary applications a typical G4/G5 PPC Mac will be highly functional for years to come, with official support from Apple for Leopard and probably at least one version of OS X after that. Many Universal applications will perform just as well on a PPC Mac as on Intel. For people who just do email/web/office documents a PPC Mac is going to be a lot cheaper and work fantastically well for years. But, depending on the outcome of this situation I may have to amend my conclusion with a "stay away from iBook G4s," which would really be unfortunate because they are great machines.
So, anyone have pointers to more references on this? Discussions, news reports, accounts from users who encountered the problem and tried to get it fixed, action centers where people are or will be following up on this Danish report, where to find out about the progress of getting Apple US to acknowledge this issue and what they're going to do about it, how to use this report as leverage to get a defective iBook fixed, anything like that. I'm sure I'm not the only person you will be helping.
For others here are some sites that I already know of off the top of my head where some information is likely to show up (no links, just write 'em down and check them out sometime):
MacRumors.com, AppleInsider.com, other Apple/Mac rumor sites.
LowEndMac.com
MacNN.com, other Apple/Mac news sites.
Fortunately due to the stability of Mac OS X and an actually usable (reliable) sleep mode, I very rarely shut down or turn on my iBook. When I go around town I just put it to sleep. I've probably only used the power button two or three dozen times in the whole year that I've owned the machine. Still worried though.
Me: "No, I didn't get that either, because when I went in that store over there and paid a substantial amount of legal tender to purchase a DVD the clerk at the checkout counter said that once it's paid for I would own it, just like all the books, VHS cassette tapes, vinyl records, audio CDs and audio cassette tapes they still sell. He said that under US copyright law I have the right of first sale, the right to take excerpts for fair use purposes, the right to make one archival backup in case of damage or loss of the original media, and of course that I could only view or use the copyrighted item for private, non-commercial purposes. I understand that there are laws that would impose large fines and possible prison time if I attempt to use copyrighted media for commercial purposes."
Them: "Well, yeah..."
Me: "Funny, I didn't hear you explaining to my friend here in clear terms before the sale that he was paying for limited ownership, nor did I see any contract being presented, read, understood and signed by my friend before the sale. This isn't a movie rental shop, so we certainly didn't just pay for the temporary use of a DVD belonging to someone else. Therefore what you just said to my friend was nonsense, because other than the standard assumed limitations under copyright law there were no additional terms presented in any legally binding manner. So, your DRM-laden DVD, while not actually doing anything to prevent commercial piracy which is the usual reason given for the use of this technology, is instead just going to keep my friend here from exercising the aforementioned rights under US copyright law. How and why is this legal, again?"
Them: "Umm, OH! Look at the time. Gotta run! kthxbye."
Certainly you've accepted the content industry's absurdist spin on "the idea of ownership", and you are obnoxiously self-assured in your ignorance of why this is a problem. But that doesn't mean their New Speak twisted definition is in any way correct, or legal, or doesn't violate your rights under copyright law and do damage to our society and culture by attempting to degrade us all to "limited ownership" and block important rights like fair use. You know, the thing that lets reviewers, journalists, bloggers, teachers and everyone else use quotes, frame grabs, clips, sound samples and other types of excerpts in order to enrich our culture, improve the education of our children, use actual examples in discussions of copyrighted works, so on and so forth. Silly stuff like that. I'm sure we'll do fine without the ability to actually exercise fair use. If Suzy Schoolteacher gets arrested for a DMCA violation for decrypting a DRMed text file in order to hand out copies of the lyrics to "Happy Birthday" to her kindergarten class, well, that's her problem, isn't it? She shouldn't have assumed that her fair use rights would trump a law that makes it illegal to "circumvent a copyright protection mechanism", like the DRM on that DVD.
Thanks for being part of the probl