Only from the standpoint of people receiving one who really wanted an iPod.:-)
Trust me, the Zune won't put a dent in Apple's Christmas season iPod sales. This is not hubris talking, it's a plain fact. The thing has gotten almost uniformly bad reviews and has even been soundly mocked on CNN. Zune 1.0 is nothing for Apple to worry about. By the time Microsoft gets a worthy competitor to the current iPod out the door (if history is any guide it will be their 3rd generation Zune), Apple will have advanced the iPod further, still leaving MS at a disadvantage.
The network effect of the iPod is probably just too great for Microsoft to ever overcome-- there are already thousands upon thousands of iPod accessories out there, and the majority of new cars now offer iPod connectivity as an option. Furthermore, it's doubtful many companies will jump to make Zune accessories in any great hurry, seeing how willing Microsoft is to abandon things at the drop of a hat when they decide what they're doing isn't working out. In short, by going up against the iPod Microsoft is learning what it's like to be a competitor to Windows, where they are the ones enjoying the network effect.
Suppose they adopted a policy of shutting off the access of machines on their network that are clearly compromised, until those machines are cleaned up. Those PCs likely belong to idiots who neither know nor care about properly maintaining Windows and using their computer with care so as not to get pwned.
To deal with that, an ISP would need to set up huge call centers to deal with the influx of angry calls from these people wondering why their intarweb doesn't work. Those call center employees would have to try to talk them through cleaning their machines up-- which can take a lot of time with an experienced tech on site, so forget about doing it quickly over the phone with someone who can barely turn the machine on and click the blue "e" acting as your hands.
It's also a losing proposition, because even when they're told that their machine is slow because of malware and causing problems for other users, people don't want to be bothered... most of them who could would just cancel their account and go to a competing ISP who didn't monitor their network health and cut off the access of compromised machines. Anything, as long as they could again access that one site that has the video of the monkey peeing into his own mouth.
Because they could edit MySpace pages to include code that does silent, drive-by malware installs on the machine of anyone that pulls up that page on an ill-maintained Windows box. Those machines would get pwned and could then have keyloggers installed on them to gather more useful info, or could be used to send spam, perform DoS attacks, etc.
Yes, the phishers could create MySpace accounts/pages from scratch, but their work pays off much more quickly if they co-opt the pages of frequent users with large, well-established friend networks.
From what I gathered from various Apple history books, Apple management expected the clones to offer high-end models.
Nope, you got it ass-backwards. The cloners were supposed to take the low end of the market that Apple wasn't that interested in. Apple wanted to keep the high-margin, high end of the market to themselves.
The cloners didn't see it that way, and got into a pissing match with Apple over who could build the fastest boxes for the least money. There was at least a brief period where the fastest Mac you could buy was made by Power Computing, and Power Computing was not shy about advertising that fact. That was very bad for Apple, since their hardware sales were responsible for a much bigger chunk of their revenues than the OS licenses the cloners bought. If things kept going that way, Apple would've been in an irreversible death spiral a la Netscape: less revenue --> insufficient R&D funds --> inferior new products --> nobody buying your products --> repeat.
Enter Steve Jobs. He returned to the company around this time, saw what a mess the cloning program was causing, and acted quickly to end it. The cloners' licenses only covered Mac OS 7.x, so Jobs decided that what should really have been called Mac OS 7.7 was going to instead ship as Mac OS 8.0, which he then refused to license to the cloners-- extracting Apple from a bad situation via a technicality.
When allowing clones nearly killed the company the last time they tried it, is it really any wonder that they are so reluctant to try it again?
I don't know if it was so much the selling direct as it was simply having a place where display-model Macs were prominently displayed and well taken-care of, with staff who could answer questions about them correctly-- as opposed to dirty, broken/sabotaged, disparaged by the sales staff, and shoved in the farthest corner of the store from the entrance (CompUSA, I'm looking at you!-- even after the 'store within a store' deal you made with Apple).
The argument for going with the PowerPC was that IBM was going to make Macs. Yes, that was the whole point of the deal. Didn't happen, but that was Apple's big plan. And that bad move happened under Jobs.
Wrong. The first PowerPC-based Macs were released on March 14, 1994, during Michael Spindler's tenure as Apple CEO. The alliance to create the PowerPC was formed before that, during John Sculley's tenure. Jobs had absolutely nothing to do with Apple switching to the PPC architecture. Apple announced their intention to purchase NeXT on December 20, 1996 and finalized the deal on February 4, 1997. During that timeframe is when Jobs and his influence returned.
But hey, don't let little things like easily-verifiable facts get in the way of you spouting your drivel.
We don't do component upgrades often because they are less necessary in the Mac world. For the last five years we have enjoyed an OS where version n+1 runs (or at least "feels") faster than version n did on the same hardware. The only thing that really needs to be added internally to most Macs is RAM. For more HD space, that's what those nice FireWire and USB 2 connections are for. And when it comes to video-- let's be honest, what really drives video card upgrades on the Windows side of the fence? The latest flavor-of-the-month GPU-hungry game, that's what. Like it or not, this is still not much of an issue on the Mac side. When a (consumer-level) Mac user really wants better video performance, their existing machine is probably a couple years old... They'll likely just buy a new Mac and throw the old one up on eBay to offset the cost. Since migrating your stuff to a new machine is a completely automated and (IME) painless process, and since Macs retain their resale value much better, it's a quite palatable option.
Seriously though, does anyone who's not in their pocket actually believe any of the statistics spewed by the RIAA or MPAA? If their math got any fuzzier their press releases about it would have to be shaved before the text could be made out.
To put it another way, Apple and Microsoft could very easily produce a modern *-lite version of their respective OSes and sell them to people with older or not maxed out hardware and probably keep a high percentage of the population happy with just that. However that will not help Apple (or MS's hardware partners) sell new machines that most people don't really need, so it will not happen.
What the hell are you talking about? I've got OS X Server 10.4 running on a G4 made in 2000. I've got 10.4 Client running on a G4 from 2001. They both work beautifully. Give 'em enough RAM, and it works just fine. OS X has a great reputation when it comes to working on older machines-- the new version would feel faster than the previous did on the same hardware.
Yes, but with a legacy compatibility environment, businesses wouldn't have to repurchase all those applications until they were good and ready-- unless the application vendors were a-holes who prematurely cut off support of older versions to force upgrades (but that's something businesses already have to contend with).
If Microsoft were to do such a thing, the transition would take years, probably two or more times as long as Apple supported the Classic environment.
True, it's not an optimal solution for Microsoft, but Windows as it is now is just too unwieldy to keep building on top of what they've got-- witness the 5 years it's taken them to get Vista just about out the door (though it would have taken longer if they hadn't gutted it of many of its promised features).
Then again, I don't really care what they do, I won't have to support the mess.
I don't think his suggestion is crazy. Why couldn't Microsoft start from scratch with a totally new OS, and include a legacy compatibility environment?
Doing that worked out pretty well for Apple a few years back during the OS 9-OS X transition. In fact, it's working well for them again right now with a much more seamless compatibility environment that's bridging the gap while developers transition of all their Mac apps to Intel-native versions.
I never push out updates anywhere near business hours, so a silent reboot is not a problem. In fact, I usually set all the machines in my care to power on/wake up for a period late on Sunday night just for maintenance time.
Schedule it if you are so inclined, and don't forget to set a reboot task if one of the updates require it.
If all the machines you want to update are running Tiger, just do softwareupdate -ai && shutdown -r now to install all available updates and reboot when complete with a single command.
Of course, that doesn't work correctly with Macs running Panther, then you would have to do softwareupdate --install --all and schedule the reboot separately in ARD because IIRC the single-letter switches don't seem to work for the softwareupdate command in Panther, and Panther won't wait until softwareupdate is done to execute the reboot.
The above commands are better when used with an OS X Server running the Software Update service, so you can pick and choose which ones are made available to all of your managed Macs.
~Philly
I've got the missile launcher, it's okay.
on
Outré USB Gadgets
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I wanted to up the ante in a rubber-band-gun arms race in my office, but I couldn't find it available from any online vendors in the U.S. I see ThinkGeek now has a listing for them and they're expected in stock there in October. Anyway, I ended up picking one up on eBay from a guy in Australia for a decent price, about a month and a half ago.
It takes AA batteries to actually power the launcher motors, with a switch on the underside of the base. The part of the missile that locks into the spring mechanism is actually heavier than the the rest of it, so it doesn't always fly nose-first like you'd think. It also doesn't have much in the way of range. If I could find extra missiles for it I'd experiment a bit with weighting the tips to try to address those issues.
I haven't used the included (Windows-only) control app yet, but a guy wrote a control app for it for OS X that's not too bad. You can find it on Versiontracker, I'm too lazy to hunt it down and make a link right now.
~Philly
My own tips from almost 4 years ago
on
The Science of eBay
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Don't post stuff in lots. Auction stuff off separately because you'll have a hard time finding someone who wants all of it, but you will get bombarded with annoying emails from people interested only in one or two items who want you to break up the lot. Instead, list everything the same day, mention in each item description that you've got other items that complement this item, and create a link to all your current auctions (assume people won't think to click on the official eBay "View seller's other auctions" link).
Having nice, large photos of everything will encourage a higher final value. People like to know what they're buying.
Having detailed descriptions will cut down on having to answer the same question a hundred times from prospective bidders.
Make the auctions run for at least 5 days, so patient people who like to search and zero in on low-priced items they need will be able to put you in their watch list-- more watchers in the beginning means more people competing with each other and driving up the price at the end.
Time the start of the auctions so they end on a Sunday evening, but before 8pm-- when people are almost certain to be home but aren't yet glued to the TV. (But definitely don't end it the night of the Super Bowl!)
I have used the above tips for years, with great success.
They've got a lot of work ahead of them if they expect anyone to upgrade existing equipment. Or for that matter, if they expect people to not complain about Vista feeling slower on their new machines (where it came preinstalled) than XP did on their old machines.
I tried it out on a very capable home-built machine that 's less than 3 weeks old (which Vista rates a 4.2). It felt slower than XP on the same hardware even using the "Windows Classic" theme with all the GUI bells and whistles turned off.
If that kind of performance drag still exists in what ends up on el-cheapo Dells, the negative buzz will spread very fast.
Does anybody know whether there's any way to make XP 'feel like' vista?
Based on my experience running the Vista builds they've put up on MSDN (with a 3 week-old home-built PC that Vista rates a 4.2), underclock your machine and take out half the RAM.
Logically if the big companies pay then the consumer wont pay as much. This is what everyone on that side of the issue has been saying all along.
You mean the same people who, when faced with the elimination of a tax whose cost they passed on to their customers, invented new surcharges to just keep that money for themselves instead of knocking a couple bucks off what they charge their customers every month?
It doesn't matter that public outcry put a stop to the plans, all that matters is that they intended to do it. The telcos have already proven that to them, no dollar is too trivial to filch from their customers. Only a fool would trust them to act with their customers' best interests in mind. All they care about is maximizing profits, and any benefit their customers customers see as a result is purely coincidental.
I don't know about the enterprise market, but based on my experience OS X Server would already have a respectable presence in the SMB market if they had had groupware features in it sooner. My company sold a great number of Windows SBS 2003 servers in the last couple of years, and many of the clients who bought them were very interested in OS X Server until they found out there was no reasonable equivalent to Exchange built in. Third-party solutions like Kerio or CommuniGate work, but aren't as nice as one integrated piece.
Clients were asking about OS X Server for two main reasons: Security: Many of them were hit or concerned about being hit during the Summer of Windows Worms a few years back. Cost: They like the flat price of $1000 for unlimited CALs (or the idea of getting unlimited CALs "free" with purchase of a server). Managing Windows server CALs in a growing small business can be a real pain in the ass-- frugal clients tend to buy only what they need and then they get caught short when they add a new hire or two and wonder why they can't log into the server.
Now that Leopard Server is going to finally add group calendaring and some other sorely-needed groupware features, I expect to see an uptick in interest that translates to actual purchases in 2007 and beyond.
As sad as it might be, the phone companies never release any information about a phone number, internet connection, or anything else without a search warrant.
It only enjoyed the success it did because it was made by IBM, so businesses snapped them up-- if not at first, then definitely after Lotus 1-2-3 appeared and give the machine its killer app.
I have never met anybody who owned one. Everyone I know who had a computer at home had a C64, an Apple, or a Trash 80.
Slashdot Mirror
Only from the standpoint of people receiving one who really wanted an iPod. :-)
Trust me, the Zune won't put a dent in Apple's Christmas season iPod sales. This is not hubris talking, it's a plain fact. The thing has gotten almost uniformly bad reviews and has even been soundly mocked on CNN. Zune 1.0 is nothing for Apple to worry about. By the time Microsoft gets a worthy competitor to the current iPod out the door (if history is any guide it will be their 3rd generation Zune), Apple will have advanced the iPod further, still leaving MS at a disadvantage.
The network effect of the iPod is probably just too great for Microsoft to ever overcome-- there are already thousands upon thousands of iPod accessories out there, and the majority of new cars now offer iPod connectivity as an option. Furthermore, it's doubtful many companies will jump to make Zune accessories in any great hurry, seeing how willing Microsoft is to abandon things at the drop of a hat when they decide what they're doing isn't working out. In short, by going up against the iPod Microsoft is learning what it's like to be a competitor to Windows, where they are the ones enjoying the network effect.
~Philly
Why do they do nothing ??
Doing something costs money.
Suppose they adopted a policy of shutting off the access of machines on their network that are clearly compromised, until those machines are cleaned up. Those PCs likely belong to idiots who neither know nor care about properly maintaining Windows and using their computer with care so as not to get pwned.
To deal with that, an ISP would need to set up huge call centers to deal with the influx of angry calls from these people wondering why their intarweb doesn't work. Those call center employees would have to try to talk them through cleaning their machines up-- which can take a lot of time with an experienced tech on site, so forget about doing it quickly over the phone with someone who can barely turn the machine on and click the blue "e" acting as your hands.
It's also a losing proposition, because even when they're told that their machine is slow because of malware and causing problems for other users, people don't want to be bothered... most of them who could would just cancel their account and go to a competing ISP who didn't monitor their network health and cut off the access of compromised machines. Anything, as long as they could again access that one site that has the video of the monkey peeing into his own mouth.
~Philly
Because they could edit MySpace pages to include code that does silent, drive-by malware installs on the machine of anyone that pulls up that page on an ill-maintained Windows box. Those machines would get pwned and could then have keyloggers installed on them to gather more useful info, or could be used to send spam, perform DoS attacks, etc.
Yes, the phishers could create MySpace accounts/pages from scratch, but their work pays off much more quickly if they co-opt the pages of frequent users with large, well-established friend networks.
~Philly
From what I gathered from various Apple history books, Apple management expected the clones to offer high-end models.
Nope, you got it ass-backwards. The cloners were supposed to take the low end of the market that Apple wasn't that interested in. Apple wanted to keep the high-margin, high end of the market to themselves.
The cloners didn't see it that way, and got into a pissing match with Apple over who could build the fastest boxes for the least money. There was at least a brief period where the fastest Mac you could buy was made by Power Computing, and Power Computing was not shy about advertising that fact. That was very bad for Apple, since their hardware sales were responsible for a much bigger chunk of their revenues than the OS licenses the cloners bought. If things kept going that way, Apple would've been in an irreversible death spiral a la Netscape: less revenue --> insufficient R&D funds --> inferior new products --> nobody buying your products --> repeat.
Enter Steve Jobs. He returned to the company around this time, saw what a mess the cloning program was causing, and acted quickly to end it. The cloners' licenses only covered Mac OS 7.x, so Jobs decided that what should really have been called Mac OS 7.7 was going to instead ship as Mac OS 8.0, which he then refused to license to the cloners-- extracting Apple from a bad situation via a technicality.
When allowing clones nearly killed the company the last time they tried it, is it really any wonder that they are so reluctant to try it again?
~Philly
I don't know if it was so much the selling direct as it was simply having a place where display-model Macs were prominently displayed and well taken-care of, with staff who could answer questions about them correctly-- as opposed to dirty, broken/sabotaged, disparaged by the sales staff, and shoved in the farthest corner of the store from the entrance (CompUSA, I'm looking at you!-- even after the 'store within a store' deal you made with Apple).
~Philly
The argument for going with the PowerPC was that IBM was going to make Macs. Yes, that was the whole point of the deal. Didn't happen, but that was Apple's big plan. And that bad move happened under Jobs.
Wrong. The first PowerPC-based Macs were released on March 14, 1994, during Michael Spindler's tenure as Apple CEO. The alliance to create the PowerPC was formed before that, during John Sculley's tenure. Jobs had absolutely nothing to do with Apple switching to the PPC architecture. Apple announced their intention to purchase NeXT on December 20, 1996 and finalized the deal on February 4, 1997. During that timeframe is when Jobs and his influence returned.
But hey, don't let little things like easily-verifiable facts get in the way of you spouting your drivel.
~Philly
We don't do component upgrades often because they are less necessary in the Mac world. For the last five years we have enjoyed an OS where version n+1 runs (or at least "feels") faster than version n did on the same hardware. The only thing that really needs to be added internally to most Macs is RAM. For more HD space, that's what those nice FireWire and USB 2 connections are for. And when it comes to video-- let's be honest, what really drives video card upgrades on the Windows side of the fence? The latest flavor-of-the-month GPU-hungry game, that's what. Like it or not, this is still not much of an issue on the Mac side. When a (consumer-level) Mac user really wants better video performance, their existing machine is probably a couple years old... They'll likely just buy a new Mac and throw the old one up on eBay to offset the cost. Since migrating your stuff to a new machine is a completely automated and (IME) painless process, and since Macs retain their resale value much better, it's a quite palatable option.
~Philly
In no particular order:
Time Pilot
Mr. Do!
Q*Bert
Kung-Fu Master
As for non-MAME: GTA3, GTA:VC or GTA:SA (when I'm in the mood to just run/drive/fly around and blow off steam by commiting acts of mayhem).
~Philly
"Internet piracy may be tougher for lawmakers to conceptualize, entertainment companies fear."
Well, they're right to be afraid about this, when you consider that lawmakers have a tough enough time conceptualizing the Internet.
Seriously though, does anyone who's not in their pocket actually believe any of the statistics spewed by the RIAA or MPAA? If their math got any fuzzier their press releases about it would have to be shaved before the text could be made out.
~Philly
To put it another way, Apple and Microsoft could very easily produce a modern *-lite version of their respective OSes and sell them to people with older or not maxed out hardware and probably keep a high percentage of the population happy with just that. However that will not help Apple (or MS's hardware partners) sell new machines that most people don't really need, so it will not happen.
What the hell are you talking about? I've got OS X Server 10.4 running on a G4 made in 2000. I've got 10.4 Client running on a G4 from 2001. They both work beautifully. Give 'em enough RAM, and it works just fine. OS X has a great reputation when it comes to working on older machines-- the new version would feel faster than the previous did on the same hardware.
~Philly
Yes, but with a legacy compatibility environment, businesses wouldn't have to repurchase all those applications until they were good and ready-- unless the application vendors were a-holes who prematurely cut off support of older versions to force upgrades (but that's something businesses already have to contend with).
If Microsoft were to do such a thing, the transition would take years, probably two or more times as long as Apple supported the Classic environment.
True, it's not an optimal solution for Microsoft, but Windows as it is now is just too unwieldy to keep building on top of what they've got-- witness the 5 years it's taken them to get Vista just about out the door (though it would have taken longer if they hadn't gutted it of many of its promised features).
Then again, I don't really care what they do, I won't have to support the mess.
~Philly
I don't think his suggestion is crazy. Why couldn't Microsoft start from scratch with a totally new OS, and include a legacy compatibility environment?
Doing that worked out pretty well for Apple a few years back during the OS 9-OS X transition. In fact, it's working well for them again right now with a much more seamless compatibility environment that's bridging the gap while developers transition of all their Mac apps to Intel-native versions.
~Philly
I never push out updates anywhere near business hours, so a silent reboot is not a problem. In fact, I usually set all the machines in my care to power on/wake up for a period late on Sunday night just for maintenance time.
~Philly
Schedule it if you are so inclined, and don't forget to set a reboot task if one of the updates require it.
If all the machines you want to update are running Tiger, just do softwareupdate -ai && shutdown -r now to install all available updates and reboot when complete with a single command.
Of course, that doesn't work correctly with Macs running Panther, then you would have to do softwareupdate --install --all and schedule the reboot separately in ARD because IIRC the single-letter switches don't seem to work for the softwareupdate command in Panther, and Panther won't wait until softwareupdate is done to execute the reboot.
The above commands are better when used with an OS X Server running the Software Update service, so you can pick and choose which ones are made available to all of your managed Macs.
~Philly
I wanted to up the ante in a rubber-band-gun arms race in my office, but I couldn't find it available from any online vendors in the U.S. I see ThinkGeek now has a listing for them and they're expected in stock there in October. Anyway, I ended up picking one up on eBay from a guy in Australia for a decent price, about a month and a half ago.
It takes AA batteries to actually power the launcher motors, with a switch on the underside of the base. The part of the missile that locks into the spring mechanism is actually heavier than the the rest of it, so it doesn't always fly nose-first like you'd think. It also doesn't have much in the way of range. If I could find extra missiles for it I'd experiment a bit with weighting the tips to try to address those issues.
I haven't used the included (Windows-only) control app yet, but a guy wrote a control app for it for OS X that's not too bad. You can find it on Versiontracker, I'm too lazy to hunt it down and make a link right now.
~Philly
Originally from this Usenet posting.
Updated:
Don't post stuff in lots. Auction stuff off separately because you'll have a hard time finding someone who wants all of it, but you will get bombarded with annoying emails from people interested only in one or two items who want you to break up the lot. Instead, list everything the same day, mention in each item description that you've got other items that complement this item, and create a link to all your current auctions (assume people won't think to click on the official eBay "View seller's other auctions" link).
Having nice, large photos of everything will encourage a higher final value. People like to know what they're buying.
Having detailed descriptions will cut down on having to answer the same question a hundred times from prospective bidders.
Make the auctions run for at least 5 days, so patient people who like to search and zero in on low-priced items they need will be able to put you in their watch list-- more watchers in the beginning means more people competing with each other and driving up the price at the end.
Time the start of the auctions so they end on a Sunday evening, but before 8pm-- when people are almost certain to be home but aren't yet glued to the TV. (But definitely don't end it the night of the Super Bowl!)
I have used the above tips for years, with great success.
~Philly
They've got a lot of work ahead of them if they expect anyone to upgrade existing equipment. Or for that matter, if they expect people to not complain about Vista feeling slower on their new machines (where it came preinstalled) than XP did on their old machines.
I tried it out on a very capable home-built machine that 's less than 3 weeks old (which Vista rates a 4.2). It felt slower than XP on the same hardware even using the "Windows Classic" theme with all the GUI bells and whistles turned off.
If that kind of performance drag still exists in what ends up on el-cheapo Dells, the negative buzz will spread very fast.
~Philly
Heh... I guess I should reload the page before posting when I've been AFK for a while, since someone else said the same thing... but it is true.
~Philly
Does anybody know whether there's any way to make XP 'feel like' vista?
Based on my experience running the Vista builds they've put up on MSDN (with a 3 week-old home-built PC that Vista rates a 4.2), underclock your machine and take out half the RAM.
~Philly
Logically if the big companies pay then the consumer wont pay as much. This is what everyone on that side of the issue has been saying all along.
You mean the same people who, when faced with the elimination of a tax whose cost they passed on to their customers, invented new surcharges to just keep that money for themselves instead of knocking a couple bucks off what they charge their customers every month?
It doesn't matter that public outcry put a stop to the plans, all that matters is that they intended to do it. The telcos have already proven that to them, no dollar is too trivial to filch from their customers. Only a fool would trust them to act with their customers' best interests in mind. All they care about is maximizing profits, and any benefit their customers customers see as a result is purely coincidental.
~Philly
I don't know about the enterprise market, but based on my experience OS X Server would already have a respectable presence in the SMB market if they had had groupware features in it sooner. My company sold a great number of Windows SBS 2003 servers in the last couple of years, and many of the clients who bought them were very interested in OS X Server until they found out there was no reasonable equivalent to Exchange built in. Third-party solutions like Kerio or CommuniGate work, but aren't as nice as one integrated piece.
Clients were asking about OS X Server for two main reasons:
Security: Many of them were hit or concerned about being hit during the Summer of Windows Worms a few years back.
Cost: They like the flat price of $1000 for unlimited CALs (or the idea of getting unlimited CALs "free" with purchase of a server). Managing Windows server CALs in a growing small business can be a real pain in the ass-- frugal clients tend to buy only what they need and then they get caught short when they add a new hire or two and wonder why they can't log into the server.
Now that Leopard Server is going to finally add group calendaring and some other sorely-needed groupware features, I expect to see an uptick in interest that translates to actual purchases in 2007 and beyond.
~Philly
As sad as it might be, the phone companies never release any information about a phone number, internet connection, or anything else without a search warrant.
:-)
Oh, no, the phone companies would never disclose anything to anyone without a warrant! Haven't kept up on the news much lately, have you?
I'd say if the guy called 'em up and told 'em he was NSA, he'd have a 50-50 shot at getting the info.
~Philly
It only enjoyed the success it did because it was made by IBM, so businesses snapped them up-- if not at first, then definitely after Lotus 1-2-3 appeared and give the machine its killer app.
I have never met anybody who owned one. Everyone I know who had a computer at home had a C64, an Apple, or a Trash 80.
~Philly
The Mac Plus is on the list, specifically for the reason that it addressed the shortcomings that kept the original Mac off the list.
~Philly
An ACSA, Apple Certified System Administrator. Yes, I am one.
~Philly