"For example, Rendezvous will show me that there is another computer on my local network and that it has been set up as a file-server. You need zero configuration to do this: plug two completely unconfigured computers into a crossover cable, and all of a sudden you'll have that fileserver available."
You don't even need a crossover cable. My iBook detects the cable type and switches the polarity of the NIC port as necessary. I actually hooked up to the home network and only after I had copied my music collection did someone tell me I had plugged a crossover cable into the jack in the wall when a normal cable was required. The iBook took it all in stride.
" The author suggests that Apple should release a Rendezvous enabled VOIP app. It seems to me that he's almost hit the nail on the head. Imagine if all new Macs came with not only that app, but also a phone jack that you could plug your telephone into. Maybe partner with a long distance company to provide a.Mac internet-to-phone calling plan! The possibilities are wide open for a company who owns the hardware, the software, and has little bit of capital."
It is possible that this has been in Apple's business plan for a while new. Keep in mind that they do own the domain iPhone.com.
"I'm not a big Mac apologist, but may I ask what meaningful things are harder to do on a Mac than on Windows?"
I have an OS X machine and a Windows 2000 machine. Here are some good answers to that question. If I am wrong, I hope some more experienced mac users will point me in the right direction. (I've only had this OS 10.2.3 iBook for 1 month.)
-OGG Vorbis Handling. iTunes handles OGGs much more slowly than WinAMP and much more slowly than itself with MP3s, and it only handles them at all when using a 3rd party plugin.
-Precision CD Burning. I can use NERO on Windows to cut a very custom CD-Extra disc with proper CD-Text, Mode/2XA selection, silence stripping, etc. I don't know of any way to do this on OS X.
-Precision CD Ripping. I can 100% automate the process of dual ripped and verified.wav files using exact audio copy (freeware) on windows and have them auto-encoded to OGGs. Nothing like this on OS X.
-Keyboard oriented navigation. The finder doesn't cut it for me. Not by a longshot. It is infinitely more efficient to navigate with a nice Norton Commander / Midnight Commander clone like Turbo Navigator. (Of course if you are unfamiliar with this type of navigation, you'll be lost using it.)
-Graphical FTP Client. Does anyone know of a real, OS X native graphical FTP client? The pseudo FTP client in the finder doesn't count.
" mac towers have a convenient door to allow you to access the inside of yr box. no screws, now little latchy things. just swing it open and all your hardware innards are spread out before you like a smorgasbord. Look here [bilkom.com.tr].
now, i'll leave everyone else to explain to you why you are clueless about mac hardware. i'm sure they'll do a good job."
When my macaholic friend was showing me his new G4 desktop, I was floored when he opened the side of the case on which the motherboard was mounted down onto the floor WHILE IT WAS POWERED ON. I was quite impressed with the design. AFAIK you can't do that with any PC. Heh, it left more of an impression than I originally realised because I now have an iBook.
Sometimes I think I prefer tray loading drives over slot loading ones because if the drive breaks, I can still use the little emergency eject hole and rescue the disc that was in the drive. You can't do that with a slot loader. I have both types in my PC and a tray loader in my iBook, and honestly, the only thing the slot loading has going for it is convenience.
" don't buy the Powerbook. The 800Mhz 12 inch iBook is a MUCH better deal - and is actually FASTER in normal use ( the PPC 750fx has 512KB L2 cache vs the G4's 256KB)"
Agreed, although the iBook has its issues too. These probably aren't major things for most people. For example the battery and CD drive don't flush perfectly with the side of the machine. The connector for the power adapter is flimsy and is known for breaking. There is no 'del' key on the keyboard and you have to press fn + backspace to use it. And the backspace key is labelled as 'delete' . The speakers are pretty bad, but each one is only a big as a quarter. I carry my own headphones. There is no USB 2.0. Don't buy Apple's RAM because it's way overpriced, get it from a local dealer. (The default 128 MB is underpowered.) The 5h rated battery life is pure fantasy unless you switch Airport off, turn down the screen to minimum brightness and throttle the CPU, and you're not watching a DVD. Otherwise, expect about 3 to 3.5 hours. There is no 'glow in the dark' keyboard like the new powerbooks. And maybe it's just because I keep my fingernails cut really short but occasionally the tips of my fingers get caught under keys on the keyboard.
Don't get the 14" iBook unless you really need the bigger screen due to poor vision. The only benefits are the bigger screen and bigger battery. The keyboard is the same and the whole thing just doesn't seem to jive that well. The iBook was natively designed to be a 12" machine, IMO.
Overall, I am still quite please with my 12"/800MHz iBook purchase and I would buy it again. I hope this food for thought from someone who has never before owned a notebook computer or an Apple computer just helped someone.
"one. Also he seemd to think that Apple should use two different 12" displays on their different laptops. I certainly haven't had any of the display problems he claims with my iBook..."
Same here. I find the display to be quite crisp. Some things look better than on my desktop monitor (which is a Sony Multiscan CPD-G400 19" professional quality display.) Maybe we got the better quality display or something? The screen only becomes slightly unreadable when I am looking at it from perhaps a 45 degree angle (sideways.) Even if I am at 60 to 70 degrees, I can still read your post. Move above and below the screen, the range is a little lower, but I can still read the article at a 45 degree angle from the flat surface.
"I felt the same way you did until about 6 months ago. I went two years without Spam. Then a coworker thought he would fill out one of those forms on a web page to have the site send me a link to the page. You know the "send link to a friend" that shows up on some pages."
I am wary of these thnigs too. I have various 'levels' of e-mail addresses. The actual real pop3 address practically nobody gets, except my parents, and a few technie friends. All of these people know better than to abuse an e-mail address.
The 'next' address is what most people I know get.
The webmail addresses are what I use if I do something related to 'the unwashed masses' . Those can get filled with spam, I don't care. I only check them once every few days.
For anything that is shown publicly, I always anti-spam-armour it, and make it some sneakemail address or unique address for my domain name.
Due to this strategy, I only get 3-4 spams or so per year.
"What would you have gotten? Poorly written essays?"
"How about the network administrator's root password?"
Heh, I didn't need a keyboard logger to do that.:-) It turned out to be the same as his netbus password which was easily extracted from the Windows registry of lab computers.
"I wonder if there will be a way to transfer money directly from one card to another, although I suppose you would need a separate machine for that."
We had something similar to this called "Mondex" in my town in Canada, it was being run as a trial only in my town. (There were some differences, like the card was linked to YOU, had your name on it, your bank account, etc. You could get these keychains that you slide the card into and it tells you the balance. It also kept track of where you spent your money. You could lock it with a PIN.)
I have seen money transfer devices for these cards where the transfer device has two slots and you can transfer money between cards that way. The pay phones had mondex slots as well so you could do it over the phone. (i.e. pay for the pizza over the phone so the delivery guy doesn't have to carry cash, make change, etc.) One of our home phones actually has a mondex slot on it, but it's useless now.
Yes, I see card to card transactions as a strong possibility for these things.
"Personally, I would love to be able to ssh into my refrigerator and poke around without having to get up and go all the way to the kitchen...
And imagine how cool you'll be with sendmail running on your air conditioner."
These things have real applications. If you were at the grocery store and wanted to know if you neede milk, you can connect to the fridge and check the inventory. I have actually seen a concepy fridge with a barcode scanner, webcam, web server and some other gadgets built into it.
As to the air conditioner, you could send it an e-mail before you get home or ssh into it to turn it on so the house will not be stinking hot.
" As Manager of Technology for a school system, we made the decision to shut down all AIM ports because there is currently no way to monitor, filter, or track instant messages that go across it."
There should be an 'advertisements' topic on slashdot.
Re:Maybe she had just switched from an x86 laptop.
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
"... and thought it wasn't getting hot enough when it ran."
Apple notebooks are not exactly cool-running. The 12" powerbook gets DAMN hot. My iBook gets very warm on the left (hard drive) side as well.
Re:I'm more amazed....
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
"Of course, once it's out of sight in the oven, it's forgotten. Do you ever check inside the oven before you turn it on to preheat?"
I always check. I mean, we sometimes store cloths and such in there. But I would never put a computer, even a notebook, in the oven. Those things are small enough to hide elsewhere.
Re:I'm more amazed....
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
"He's being paid to fix it, not to ask questions.
As long as she's willing to pay money for the job, it's none of his business."
Um, no he's not. According to the article, he told her it would be $1k alone for the screen so she left the product with him for disposal. Then he tried to power it up for fun and amazingly it worked and he got OS 10.2 up and running. RTFA.
"On a related note, I get spam from my university's student union to my university email account. Normally this is internal, but since I collect this email from home using POP3 (rather than from one of the university's terminals) they are using JANET bandwidth to send unsolicited commercial email, which is in violation of the JANET conditions of use. I've notified them of this, but they continue. My next step will be to notify the JANET authorities. If more people take this kind of action, then the (already small) sales benefits of sending spam will be so outweighed by the legal overhead that it will be uneconomic to send spam (well, I can hope...)."
The same thing is happenning to me. If I determie that they are trying to make a commercial profit with the e-mails, I send it to spamcop. Otherwise I leave them alone.
"I have Mozilla installed, so that at least is a start, but IE is still out there, and even with mozilla a computer-illeterate user can download a hostile.exe."
I found the solution to this one a while ago:
1. Delete all shortcuts to IE except the one on the desktop.
2. Change the one on the desktop to link to mozilla.
3. Install IE Lookalike skin into mozilla.
4. Watch people use mozilla for all browsing.
The average person doesn't care what browser they use to browse the web. They'll take whatever's most convenient as long as it works (and usually, they'll use it even if it doesn't work.)
Start off with a new e-mail address. Do this sooner or later because you already have a ton of contacts who know your current address. The longer you wait, the harder it is to switch.
To get a new address, I bought a domain name through DirectNIC (whose service is fantastic, btw) and set up a referrer myname@mydomain.org to point to my POP3 box. NOBODY ever gets the pop3 address. The contacts I trust get the @mydomain.org. For other online services, I create servicename@mydomain.org (or use sneakemail, which is also fabulous, btw) and can kill those if they get spammed.
My addresses NEVER appear on any web site, usenet, etc. without spam-guarding.
This method works, and at my real address I only get about four spams PER YEAR. (It's always the same spam too. Something about skin care.)
Now which would you prefer? Setting up tons of filters, spamcop, spamassassin, etc. or just acting with a little more caution from the start and avoidign the spam in the first place?
(Note to trolls: The e-mail address you see attached to this message is a spam-trap.)
I also have issues with Phoenix. I do find that the load time is much improved compared to mozilla, but essential XUL improvements like multizilla, optimoz and bannerblind never install properly. The UI elements never appear and they never function even though the installer says that they were successful. What gives?
Slashdot Mirror
You don't even need a crossover cable. My iBook detects the cable type and switches the polarity of the NIC port as necessary. I actually hooked up to the home network and only after I had copied my music collection did someone tell me I had plugged a crossover cable into the jack in the wall when a normal cable was required. The iBook took it all in stride.
It is possible that this has been in Apple's business plan for a while new. Keep in mind that they do own the domain iPhone.com.
LOL ... before I saw the explanation of that acronym, I read it as "I am not a mother fu...."
I have an OS X machine and a Windows 2000 machine. Here are some good answers to that question. If I am wrong, I hope some more experienced mac users will point me in the right direction. (I've only had this OS 10.2.3 iBook for 1 month.)
-OGG Vorbis Handling. iTunes handles OGGs much more slowly than WinAMP and much more slowly than itself with MP3s, and it only handles them at all when using a 3rd party plugin.
-Precision CD Burning. I can use NERO on Windows to cut a very custom CD-Extra disc with proper CD-Text, Mode/2XA selection, silence stripping, etc. I don't know of any way to do this on OS X.
-Precision CD Ripping. I can 100% automate the process of dual ripped and verified .wav files using exact audio copy (freeware) on windows and have them auto-encoded to OGGs. Nothing like this on OS X.
-Keyboard oriented navigation. The finder doesn't cut it for me. Not by a longshot. It is infinitely more efficient to navigate with a nice Norton Commander / Midnight Commander clone like Turbo Navigator. (Of course if you are unfamiliar with this type of navigation, you'll be lost using it.)
-Graphical FTP Client. Does anyone know of a real, OS X native graphical FTP client? The pseudo FTP client in the finder doesn't count.
When my macaholic friend was showing me his new G4 desktop, I was floored when he opened the side of the case on which the motherboard was mounted down onto the floor WHILE IT WAS POWERED ON. I was quite impressed with the design. AFAIK you can't do that with any PC. Heh, it left more of an impression than I originally realised because I now have an iBook.
Sometimes I think I prefer tray loading drives over slot loading ones because if the drive breaks, I can still use the little emergency eject hole and rescue the disc that was in the drive. You can't do that with a slot loader. I have both types in my PC and a tray loader in my iBook, and honestly, the only thing the slot loading has going for it is convenience.
Agreed, although the iBook has its issues too. These probably aren't major things for most people. For example the battery and CD drive don't flush perfectly with the side of the machine. The connector for the power adapter is flimsy and is known for breaking. There is no 'del' key on the keyboard and you have to press fn + backspace to use it. And the backspace key is labelled as 'delete' . The speakers are pretty bad, but each one is only a big as a quarter. I carry my own headphones. There is no USB 2.0. Don't buy Apple's RAM because it's way overpriced, get it from a local dealer. (The default 128 MB is underpowered.) The 5h rated battery life is pure fantasy unless you switch Airport off, turn down the screen to minimum brightness and throttle the CPU, and you're not watching a DVD. Otherwise, expect about 3 to 3.5 hours. There is no 'glow in the dark' keyboard like the new powerbooks. And maybe it's just because I keep my fingernails cut really short but occasionally the tips of my fingers get caught under keys on the keyboard.
Don't get the 14" iBook unless you really need the bigger screen due to poor vision. The only benefits are the bigger screen and bigger battery. The keyboard is the same and the whole thing just doesn't seem to jive that well. The iBook was natively designed to be a 12" machine, IMO.
Overall, I am still quite please with my 12"/800MHz iBook purchase and I would buy it again. I hope this food for thought from someone who has never before owned a notebook computer or an Apple computer just helped someone.
Same here. I find the display to be quite crisp. Some things look better than on my desktop monitor (which is a Sony Multiscan CPD-G400 19" professional quality display.) Maybe we got the better quality display or something? The screen only becomes slightly unreadable when I am looking at it from perhaps a 45 degree angle (sideways.) Even if I am at 60 to 70 degrees, I can still read your post. Move above and below the screen, the range is a little lower, but I can still read the article at a 45 degree angle from the flat surface.
Another good way is to block mail that has a @hotmail.com reply-to address, but isn't actually from hotmail.
I am wary of these thnigs too. I have various 'levels' of e-mail addresses. The actual real pop3 address practically nobody gets, except my parents, and a few technie friends. All of these people know better than to abuse an e-mail address.
The 'next' address is what most people I know get.
The webmail addresses are what I use if I do something related to 'the unwashed masses' . Those can get filled with spam, I don't care. I only check them once every few days.
For anything that is shown publicly, I always anti-spam-armour it, and make it some sneakemail address or unique address for my domain name.
Due to this strategy, I only get 3-4 spams or so per year.
"How about the network administrator's root password?"
Heh, I didn't need a keyboard logger to do that. :-) It turned out to be the same as his netbus password which was easily extracted from the Windows registry of lab computers.
We had something similar to this called "Mondex" in my town in Canada, it was being run as a trial only in my town. (There were some differences, like the card was linked to YOU, had your name on it, your bank account, etc. You could get these keychains that you slide the card into and it tells you the balance. It also kept track of where you spent your money. You could lock it with a PIN.)
I have seen money transfer devices for these cards where the transfer device has two slots and you can transfer money between cards that way. The pay phones had mondex slots as well so you could do it over the phone. (i.e. pay for the pizza over the phone so the delivery guy doesn't have to carry cash, make change, etc.) One of our home phones actually has a mondex slot on it, but it's useless now.
Yes, I see card to card transactions as a strong possibility for these things.
These things have real applications. If you were at the grocery store and wanted to know if you neede milk, you can connect to the fridge and check the inventory. I have actually seen a concepy fridge with a barcode scanner, webcam, web server and some other gadgets built into it.
As to the air conditioner, you could send it an e-mail before you get home or ssh into it to turn it on so the house will not be stinking hot.
You might want to check this out: http://www.instant-message-spy.com/
There should be an 'advertisements' topic on slashdot.
Apple notebooks are not exactly cool-running. The 12" powerbook gets DAMN hot. My iBook gets very warm on the left (hard drive) side as well.
I always check. I mean, we sometimes store cloths and such in there. But I would never put a computer, even a notebook, in the oven. Those things are small enough to hide elsewhere.
Um, no he's not. According to the article, he told her it would be $1k alone for the screen so she left the product with him for disposal. Then he tried to power it up for fun and amazingly it worked and he got OS 10.2 up and running. RTFA.
They have a magnesium frame. Read for yourself: http://www.apple.com/ibook/
Of course, considering magnesium's properties, you might get more than a cooked apple if you put an iBook in the oven. (Magnesium is flammable.)
The same thing is happenning to me. If I determie that they are trying to make a commercial profit with the e-mails, I send it to spamcop. Otherwise I leave them alone.
Sounds like a combination of having the sircam worm and reading slashdot. :-)
I found the solution to this one a while ago:
1. Delete all shortcuts to IE except the one on the desktop.
2. Change the one on the desktop to link to mozilla.
3. Install IE Lookalike skin into mozilla.
4. Watch people use mozilla for all browsing.
The average person doesn't care what browser they use to browse the web. They'll take whatever's most convenient as long as it works (and usually, they'll use it even if it doesn't work.)
I doubt that jhlog @ hotmail.com is his 'real' email address.
Start off with a new e-mail address. Do this sooner or later because you already have a ton of contacts who know your current address. The longer you wait, the harder it is to switch.
To get a new address, I bought a domain name through DirectNIC (whose service is fantastic, btw) and set up a referrer myname@mydomain.org to point to my POP3 box. NOBODY ever gets the pop3 address. The contacts I trust get the @mydomain.org. For other online services, I create servicename@mydomain.org (or use sneakemail, which is also fabulous, btw) and can kill those if they get spammed.
My addresses NEVER appear on any web site, usenet, etc. without spam-guarding.
This method works, and at my real address I only get about four spams PER YEAR. (It's always the same spam too. Something about skin care.)
Now which would you prefer? Setting up tons of filters, spamcop, spamassassin, etc. or just acting with a little more caution from the start and avoidign the spam in the first place?
(Note to trolls: The e-mail address you see attached to this message is a spam-trap.)
I also have issues with Phoenix. I do find that the load time is much improved compared to mozilla, but essential XUL improvements like multizilla, optimoz and bannerblind never install properly. The UI elements never appear and they never function even though the installer says that they were successful. What gives?