"I highly doubt that the average person flipping between stations is going to stop at a station about computers when there's better things on like the Home Shopping Network, TNN, or even C-SPAN 2. Too many choices!"
Heh, sometimes I stop by the home shopping network channel whenever they are selling a computer for the same reason that I pay close attention to toilet paper ads:
"Well, its essentially a slimline harddrive. I have no idea what the buffer is on it, so heavy shaking's going to make it skip and possibly damage the platter and/or head."
According to the specs, the buffer is 16 MB SDRAM.
"It also has a very weak system to prevent music from being copied from the iPod back to the computer. How about this player?"
Keep in mind that with older creative players (for example my Nomad II MG) it will upload and download wma files happily, but not mp3.
But if you renamed song.mp3 to song.mp3.zip it would transfer them happily.
Obviously I don't know how this will treat.mp3 files for uploading and downloading but if creative has been watching the iPod carefully enough, they will be allowing unrestricted mp3 uploading and downloading.
"You just missed the entire point of this article. Microsoft knows they're not going to convince hardcore Apple users to switch. This copy of Apple's switch campaing, is for MS users who might be tempted to switch. If a user is considering switching to Apple, then sees that some other people are switching from Apple to MS, the user might very well decide to stay right where he is. The theory of course, is that a user who is easily persuaded to try Apple could be easily persuaded not to try Apple; get it?"
You just proved my point.
Microsoft realises that Apple's switch campaign is or will have a real effect, so they are launching a counterattack. Well done for apple!
"At which point I explained "You can't have that in your computer. It's nigh impossible in Windows. But if you got a Mac...""
I know what you mean. Although I am a PC boy myself, I have used my friends' Macintosh products and test driven some in stores. My next machine will likely be a notebook and a powerbook is definitely high on the list of possibilities.
The displays are so nice. And I want i(Tunes|Photo|Movie|Pod without the hassle). I want the space age ergonomics. Very few PC notebooks have keyboards as nice as the powerbook ones. (The toshiba tecra comes to mind.)
And to think, Microsoft has gone proactively anti-apple and here I am reciting why I want a mac because of it.
One thing that just occured to me is that this is a signal that Apple's very own switch campaign is working and people are actually switching from Windows to OS X.
Microsoft is probably feeling the effects of this or predicting that they will feel the effects or this. Otherwise, they wouldn't be launching this counter-attack.
I think that the silliest part of all of this is that they actually believe that they're going to convert Macintosh users to Windows.
Now don't get me wrong, I have never owed a Macintosh and, until a few years ago, used nothing but Microsoft operating systems.
The thing is that Apple users have heard all the anti-Apple flack for years and know where their loyalties lie. The average Windows user doesn't know that anything else exists. It's easy to convert or at least influence a Windows user who hasn't developed any real loyalties.
But Mac users, on the other hand, are hardcore about their loyalties and know what their OS is and why they like it. They have used PCs in public labs, at school, libraries, whatever for years and will be able to see through the the Microsoft FUD as they have been doing for years.
I suspect that the marketing brass at Apple will be (or currently are) having a good hearty laugh over all of this.
If IBM makes some whack-ass server software that actually takes advantage of the 64 bit architecture, it could provide a better performance/price, performance/power useage, performance/space, etc ratios than current server solutions.
But that's a big *IF* . But it would be cool to have another option out there.
"It is fairly dumb to buy anything tech oriented at eBay. The marketplace is too effective and you will never get a good deal. Often the lack of knowledge of the current pricing for will cause the final prices on eBay to be higher than you can get them at say NewEgg or Thompson."
Sometimes items are unavailable (like out of print books) and you simply can't get them anywhere else. This is why somtimes I turn to ebay. One time I almost got defrauded too by someone selling bootlegged products. But what other alternative is there?
"I think what we are seeing is "small town" syndrome, that is, out of towners being taken in by obvious scams that any "big city" person would smell a mile away. I can pull up eBay right now and find a dozen suspicious auctions."
Based on this comment, I would consider myself a 'small-town person' . I opened an ebay account last month because I saw an out of print automobile service manual that I needed. The seller had hundreds of good feedback (~7 bad feedback) and the price was right... perhaps better than right.
But a couple of things tipped me off. Firstly the seller was selling HUNDREDS of these things for different models that were hard to find.
Secondly, I contacted the bad feedback people and they said that the manuals were bootleg scans from original manuals and put on PDF and stamped to CD.
But if I was just slightly less careful, I would have been conned out of ~$35. Only 7 bad feedback in perhaps 400 ratings is not very much.
I think that if there's even the slightest pattern in any bad feedback, then you should back out. There is precious little you REALLY know about the seller and you have to look at every little scrap of info you can get.
"Where I am (Ont., Canada) it's $5/month to be unlisted, and another $3-5/month to be unpublished."
I am in Ontario and we get it for free. It turns out that someone with the same last name as my family in the same city was an illicit drug trafficker and we kept getting calls in the middle of the night asking for the guy.
We had the police kindly delist us and it has remained in effect for no charge to us, even though the guy was arrested and hauled off to jail many years ago.
"an effective CHEAP way of eliminating telemarketers is saying "PLEASE PUT ME ON YOUR DO NOT CALL LIST." By law, telemarketers are not allowed call ppl on this list. It has worked for me."
The telemarketers are getting smart and it you start to indicate that you're not interested and thank you anyway and quickly hang up. Of course this is before you get the chance to tell them to add you to the do not call list, thus letting them try their luck again.
Whenever I talk to these people, the FIRST words that come out of my mouth are "please add us to you do not call list" so that they don't get to hang up before I tell them.
I actually had to do a chemistry lab experiment one time that was specified in the course outline where we used calcium carbide chips and water (just mix them) to create acetylene and then find the best acetylene/air mixture to create the cleanest combustion.
In other words, we had to create a bunch of acetylene gas and figure out the best way to make an impressive explosion.
We called it the rain of death lab because with air-deficient mixtures you'd get a lot of partial and incompelte combustion and it would rain soot. The actual 'rain of death' was if you got one of the big-ass 5 L graduated cylinders, a while whackload of CaC2 chips and basically blew up as much acetylene as possible. BLAM!
"everyone says just check sums, but how are these people changing the file? If they can change the tarball on the server than why not change the page to have thier md5?"
You get the binaries from a mirror to ease the load on the master server and then get the MD5sum (which is just a few bytes) from the master server to verify the binaries you got.
"It is retarded to be suing over this. Not to be insensitive to disabled people..." [emphasis mine]
I feel I must catch you on this: You are being insensitive to disabled people.
And to respond to your post, how would you feel if the airline on which you wanted to travel excluded all browsers except MSIE (which happens to have a 90%+ majority)? I guess not...
"The last time i tried one of those BIG-NAME ntivirus soultions. (name withheld in fear of a defamation suit), It completely crashed my OS, my Hard Disk and my motherboard."
That would be the Macaffee anti-virus, I believe. It's a pretty common story. I've rescued a few clients' machines that were hosed by that piece of junk.
If you are looking for an anti-virus to pitch to your boss who believes that no-cost == no value then I suggest you look into F-Prot Antivirus which has detected BigBear since 2002 Oct 03 and has FreeBSD, Linux, DOS and Windows versions. It is a non-lame anti-virus program that does NOT hose systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, sometimes I stop by the home shopping network channel whenever they are selling a computer for the same reason that I pay close attention to toilet paper ads:
It's for the sole purpose of laughing at them.
According to the specs, the buffer is 16 MB SDRAM.
Keep in mind that with older creative players (for example my Nomad II MG) it will upload and download wma files happily, but not mp3.
But if you renamed song.mp3 to song.mp3.zip it would transfer them happily.
Obviously I don't know how this will treat .mp3 files for uploading and downloading but if creative has been watching the iPod carefully enough, they will be allowing unrestricted mp3 uploading and downloading.
At last, I know Hilary Rosen's slashdot alias!
You just proved my point.
Microsoft realises that Apple's switch campaign is or will have a real effect, so they are launching a counterattack. Well done for apple!
I know what you mean. Although I am a PC boy myself, I have used my friends' Macintosh products and test driven some in stores. My next machine will likely be a notebook and a powerbook is definitely high on the list of possibilities.
The displays are so nice. And I want i(Tunes|Photo|Movie|Pod without the hassle). I want the space age ergonomics. Very few PC notebooks have keyboards as nice as the powerbook ones. (The toshiba tecra comes to mind.)
And to think, Microsoft has gone proactively anti-apple and here I am reciting why I want a mac because of it.
Microsoft is probably feeling the effects of this or predicting that they will feel the effects or this. Otherwise, they wouldn't be launching this counter-attack.
WELL DONE APPLE!
If you don't understand, "C Chicken: It crosses the road without looking both ways," then I forgive you :-)
Now don't get me wrong, I have never owed a Macintosh and, until a few years ago, used nothing but Microsoft operating systems.
The thing is that Apple users have heard all the anti-Apple flack for years and know where their loyalties lie. The average Windows user doesn't know that anything else exists. It's easy to convert or at least influence a Windows user who hasn't developed any real loyalties.
But Mac users, on the other hand, are hardcore about their loyalties and know what their OS is and why they like it. They have used PCs in public labs, at school, libraries, whatever for years and will be able to see through the the Microsoft FUD as they have been doing for years.
I suspect that the marketing brass at Apple will be (or currently are) having a good hearty laugh over all of this.
So true...
But that's a big *IF* . But it would be cool to have another option out there.
Sometimes items are unavailable (like out of print books) and you simply can't get them anywhere else. This is why somtimes I turn to ebay. One time I almost got defrauded too by someone selling bootlegged products. But what other alternative is there?
Sure they do. But they deliberately make it hard to find. But other people have found them and posted them for all to see.
Based on this comment, I would consider myself a 'small-town person' . I opened an ebay account last month because I saw an out of print automobile service manual that I needed. The seller had hundreds of good feedback (~7 bad feedback) and the price was right ... perhaps better than right.
But a couple of things tipped me off. Firstly the seller was selling HUNDREDS of these things for different models that were hard to find.
Secondly, I contacted the bad feedback people and they said that the manuals were bootleg scans from original manuals and put on PDF and stamped to CD.
But if I was just slightly less careful, I would have been conned out of ~$35. Only 7 bad feedback in perhaps 400 ratings is not very much.
I think that if there's even the slightest pattern in any bad feedback, then you should back out. There is precious little you REALLY know about the seller and you have to look at every little scrap of info you can get.
You don't have to do this yourself. Some e-bay members offer this service! And it should be pretty easy to confirm delivery...
I am in Ontario and we get it for free. It turns out that someone with the same last name as my family in the same city was an illicit drug trafficker and we kept getting calls in the middle of the night asking for the guy.
We had the police kindly delist us and it has remained in effect for no charge to us, even though the guy was arrested and hauled off to jail many years ago.
The telemarketers are getting smart and it you start to indicate that you're not interested and thank you anyway and quickly hang up. Of course this is before you get the chance to tell them to add you to the do not call list, thus letting them try their luck again.
Whenever I talk to these people, the FIRST words that come out of my mouth are "please add us to you do not call list" so that they don't get to hang up before I tell them.
I actually had to do a chemistry lab experiment one time that was specified in the course outline where we used calcium carbide chips and water (just mix them) to create acetylene and then find the best acetylene/air mixture to create the cleanest combustion.
In other words, we had to create a bunch of acetylene gas and figure out the best way to make an impressive explosion.
We called it the rain of death lab because with air-deficient mixtures you'd get a lot of partial and incompelte combustion and it would rain soot. The actual 'rain of death' was if you got one of the big-ass 5 L graduated cylinders, a while whackload of CaC2 chips and basically blew up as much acetylene as possible. BLAM!
See also: Acetylene safety data
You get the binaries from a mirror to ease the load on the master server and then get the MD5sum (which is just a few bytes) from the master server to verify the binaries you got.
Mod parent up, the AC posted the article!
This brings new meaning to peer-to-peer networking in general!
I feel I must catch you on this: You are being insensitive to disabled people.
And to respond to your post, how would you feel if the airline on which you wanted to travel excluded all browsers except MSIE (which happens to have a 90%+ majority)? I guess not...
You're too late! Worldwide Talk Like a Pirate Day was back on Sept 20th!
This article has been done before!
That would be the Macaffee anti-virus, I believe. It's a pretty common story. I've rescued a few clients' machines that were hosed by that piece of junk.
If you are looking for an anti-virus to pitch to your boss who believes that no-cost == no value then I suggest you look into F-Prot Antivirus which has detected BigBear since 2002 Oct 03 and has FreeBSD, Linux, DOS and Windows versions. It is a non-lame anti-virus program that does NOT hose systems.