If have to pay what is essentially a penalty for piracy because the powers that be have presumed me guilty of it, then you're God damned right I'm gonna be pirating shit-- and if I wasn't before, then I'm going to START.
Not allowing your students to know and understand the prevalant technology and forcing on them a poor substitute is short changing them.
Likewise, not allowing your students to learn to operate a computer and its applications (as opposed to learning to operate Windows and Office), is an equal disservice. People must be taught concepts, not products, or we'll have a generation of grads who panic and break out into a cold sweat when they don't see a Start menu on the screen.
Teaching only what is prevalent is a pretty brain-dead way to approach education. Do medical schools only teach how to treat the most prevalent ailments? Do you ever hear, "Hey, sorry I can't help you with that hemophilia, but you come back when you need stitches or a broken bone set!"?
Going out into the world ONLY knowing Microsoft stuff became a bad idea the day "Become an MCSE!" commercials started replacing "Learn to drive 18-wheelers!" commercials on daytime TV.
On the subject of quitting an application by closing its window: some Mac applications have this behavior, some don't.
IME, the Mac apps that quit on close are utilities that people can be assumed to be finished working with when they close the primary window-- Calculator, Disk Utility, Key Caps, etc. Like, when I'm using Calculator, I switch away from it if I need to refer to something else. When I'm done with it, I close it. I think this fits the desktop metaphor well because switching away from the calculator is analagous to leaving it on the table in front of you, and closing it is like putting it back into a drawer when you're done with it.
Plus most of them are so small in size that they can be relaunched just as quickly as switching to them and spawning a new window if they were still active.
Staying at 97% doesn't seem normal to me. I had a 500 MHz iBook for over a year, and whenever it was plugged in and fully charged, it remained at 100%.
I now have an 800 MHz iBook that I picked up in December. I have seen all of these battery problems other people are having, though I did not notice if they got worse after 10.2.4... drastically shorter battery life, sudden sleeping when the battery is showing 75% or more full on its built-in meter, spurious "low battery" alerts, and other things.
I plan to get the battery replaced under warranty, but not until Apple acknowledges the problems and releases a software fix for whatever they fucked up in 10.2.4-- otherwise the new battery will probably just suffer the same problems as the old.
It seems a great deal of money for something that you can easily leave in a cab.
People who can afford to drop that kind of coin on a frickin' mobile phone do not take cabs very often, more like limos.
I'd be more worried about dropping the thing. For $10000, it had better detect sudden acceleration due to gravity and trigger an onboard anti-gravity field generator to stop the fall.
(P.S. Did you realise there's a $10,000 Nokia cellphone made in gold with encrusted diamonds.. not bullshitting, seen a number of stories about celebrities buying them. Anyone know what they're called?)
Vertu. I believe it is Latin for "person with too much money." I mean, that is like Krusty the Clown-level conspicuous consumption.
I fail to see how corporate clients end up with multiple licences
I don't mean different license codes, I mean actual licenses-- the right to run Windows on a given machine.
The name-brand PCs always include one that is built into the price, but often my clients (even the smaller ones) have blanket licenses entitling them to run Windows on all the machines on their site. If an incoming new machine is already covered by the blanket license, the fact that my clients must still pay for the additional, unneeded license included with the machine is utter bullshit.
There's no easy option for smaller companies to purchase a license-free PC with no OS at a slightly reduced price. That is what the Microsoft Tax is-- being forced to pay for an unneeded license. Microsoft also uses bullshit like this to inflate their Windows sales figures-- every PC sold with a Windows license counts as a PC running Windows, even if the drives were wiped and Linux was installed on those PCs.
You know, every time I bitch about my clients unavoidably ending up with multiple Windows licenses for their PCs, some knucklehead posts about how Dell will (for corporate customers) happily install a customer-provided Ghost image or provide naked PCs sans license and OS if you prove the machines are already covered by a preexisting volume license.
I would think that for a customer buying 300 PCs at once, Dell would mention those things to you if they really did offer them.
I just read about this the other day in the book "Dealers of Lightning" (page 140). While they were developing the laser printer in the 70's, some of the researchers had to move to a different building 1KM away. They had line of sight between the two locations, so they rigged up a system of lasers and photodetectors to bridge their network between the two buildings.
The beam went over a public highway, and after one woman went into a ditch after it startled her one foggy morning, they coarsened the beam to make it invisible.
I bought mine from someone on eBay for $29 each. They came with a Windows driver CD, and I did get a coworker's Dell laptop (running XP) paired with my iBook for sharing files, just as a test. Once the driver was installed, the settings needed a little tweaking but we did get it to work. Never tried my phone with his laptop, though.
Here's your how-to: Step 1: Buy a Mac that runs OS X 10.2.x. Step 2: There is no Step 2!
I've got two Mitsumi WIF-0402C adapters, one for my iBook and one for my G4. Plugged 'em in, and they worked with Apple's built-in support. I have no problems using them with my T68i.
I know that's not what you wanted to hear, but that's life.
If the MCA had been made compatible with existing hardware, then it would have been innovative.
A backwards-compatible MCA would have defeated the whole purpose of its creation. The MCA was designed for pretty much one reason only: So IBM could wrest control of the market back from the cloners.
IBM assumed the public would rush to adopt whatever they, IBM, deemed The Standard. But they were wrong-- the PC was already well on its way to becoming a commodity thanks to the cloners, and the cloners were also beginning to innovate on their own instead of just cheaply copying what IBM did.
Ignorant of this, IBM expected stiff royalties from cloners who wanted to put MCA in their machines (including royalties for a percentage of the original IBM PC-compatible machines the cloners had previously shipped). The cloners balked at this two-for-me-one-for-you deal, the bus fizzled into obscurity, and IBM's ploy failed. It was at this point that IBM essentially became a nonfactor in the desktop personal computer market.
Good point... I'm one of two Mac integrators in a smallish PC-centric consulting firm, and the Windows guys were blown away even by Location Manager in OS 9. They couldn't believe that I could change all those settings to hop on different client networks with just one mouse click-- AND without a reboot! I can't believe Microsoft hasn't stolen the idea yet.
Same with Bluetooth-- everyone that I've shown the OS X Address Book is amazed when I ring my T68i and the caller ID info shows up on my iBook's screen. And that's before I flick the Location Manager and start pulling up web pages via GPRS.
Remember when Sliders was left with only Remy as the original member of the cast on the show?
No, because I stopped watching not long after Rhys-Davies was replaced by Kari Wuhrer*, and they started blatantly ripping off sci-fi movies for their alternate earths and/or plots.:-)
A show with a rabid fanbase is better off going out on a high note. Besides, why overextend the show's lifespan when you can milk it much more effectively selling episode DVDs to aforementioned rabid fanbase?
~Philly
*Sure, Wuhrer was a piece of ass (though it was Sabrina Lloyd who really melted me), but she couldn't act for shit-- and when you've got bad material to work with, that only magnifies the overall crappiness.
Moreover, many think it's profoundly unlikely any alien races would be interested in conquering us.
I'm more worried about them seeing stuff like "American Idol," "Survivor," and "Joe Millionaire," and deciding we should all be exterminated, not subjugated.
We can only hope that their positive perception of our race from the 13 years of Simpsons episodes we've pumped out can withstand the damage the later shows will do to it.:-)
Ahh, the typical Wintel user, only interested in the specs.
My statement that Macs are more reliable comes from nothing more than my experiences using both platforms for almost twenty years, and making my living supporting them for twelve years. The Macs I've used and supported have had far fewer problems than the Windows machines. And when the Macs do have problems, they are much more easily fixed. 95% of the time, all I needed to fix any Mac problems at my last job was a Norton Utilities CD, and a book to read for the 5-10 minutes it took for Norton to finish checking the drive.
If you're so interested in the concrete numbers, then you can Google for the independent studies that show Macs have a higher initial cost but lower TCO compared to a Windows PC, once you factor in support costs and longevity of the machine. They're out there, though I'm sure you'll discount them because they usually appear on the web sites of Mac enthusiasts.
Slashdot Mirror
If have to pay what is essentially a penalty for piracy because the powers that be have presumed me guilty of it, then you're God damned right I'm gonna be pirating shit-- and if I wasn't before, then I'm going to START.
~Philly
I think it was called, "The Guy Who Couldn't Stop Killing Prostitutes."
Seriously, I think you are referring to "The Terminal Man," yet another Crichton novel that became a movie.
~Philly
Not allowing your students to know and understand the prevalant technology and forcing on them a poor substitute is short changing them.
Likewise, not allowing your students to learn to operate a computer and its applications (as opposed to learning to operate Windows and Office), is an equal disservice. People must be taught concepts, not products, or we'll have a generation of grads who panic and break out into a cold sweat when they don't see a Start menu on the screen.
Teaching only what is prevalent is a pretty brain-dead way to approach education. Do medical schools only teach how to treat the most prevalent ailments? Do you ever hear, "Hey, sorry I can't help you with that hemophilia, but you come back when you need stitches or a broken bone set!"?
Going out into the world ONLY knowing Microsoft stuff became a bad idea the day "Become an MCSE!" commercials started replacing "Learn to drive 18-wheelers!" commercials on daytime TV.
~Philly
On the subject of quitting an application by closing its window: some Mac applications have this behavior, some don't.
IME, the Mac apps that quit on close are utilities that people can be assumed to be finished working with when they close the primary window-- Calculator, Disk Utility, Key Caps, etc. Like, when I'm using Calculator, I switch away from it if I need to refer to something else. When I'm done with it, I close it. I think this fits the desktop metaphor well because switching away from the calculator is analagous to leaving it on the table in front of you, and closing it is like putting it back into a drawer when you're done with it.
Plus most of them are so small in size that they can be relaunched just as quickly as switching to them and spawning a new window if they were still active.
~Philly
Staying at 97% doesn't seem normal to me. I had a 500 MHz iBook for over a year, and whenever it was plugged in and fully charged, it remained at 100%.
I now have an 800 MHz iBook that I picked up in December. I have seen all of these battery problems other people are having, though I did not notice if they got worse after 10.2.4... drastically shorter battery life, sudden sleeping when the battery is showing 75% or more full on its built-in meter, spurious "low battery" alerts, and other things.
I plan to get the battery replaced under warranty, but not until Apple acknowledges the problems and releases a software fix for whatever they fucked up in 10.2.4-- otherwise the new battery will probably just suffer the same problems as the old.
~Philly
It seems a great deal of money for something that you can easily leave in a cab.
People who can afford to drop that kind of coin on a frickin' mobile phone do not take cabs very often, more like limos.
I'd be more worried about dropping the thing. For $10000, it had better detect sudden acceleration due to gravity and trigger an onboard anti-gravity field generator to stop the fall.
~Philly
(P.S. Did you realise there's a $10,000 Nokia cellphone made in gold with encrusted diamonds.. not bullshitting, seen a number of stories about celebrities buying them. Anyone know what they're called?)
Vertu. I believe it is Latin for "person with too much money." I mean, that is like Krusty the Clown-level conspicuous consumption.
~Philly
I fail to see how corporate clients end up with multiple licences
I don't mean different license codes, I mean actual licenses-- the right to run Windows on a given machine.
The name-brand PCs always include one that is built into the price, but often my clients (even the smaller ones) have blanket licenses entitling them to run Windows on all the machines on their site. If an incoming new machine is already covered by the blanket license, the fact that my clients must still pay for the additional, unneeded license included with the machine is utter bullshit.
There's no easy option for smaller companies to purchase a license-free PC with no OS at a slightly reduced price. That is what the Microsoft Tax is-- being forced to pay for an unneeded license. Microsoft also uses bullshit like this to inflate their Windows sales figures-- every PC sold with a Windows license counts as a PC running Windows, even if the drives were wiped and Linux was installed on those PCs.
~Philly
...the bastards get ya coming and going, don't they?
Pay for superfluous Windows licenses, or pay more for the privilege of using your pre-existing licenses. What a great choice!
~Philly
You know, every time I bitch about my clients unavoidably ending up with multiple Windows licenses for their PCs, some knucklehead posts about how Dell will (for corporate customers) happily install a customer-provided Ghost image or provide naked PCs sans license and OS if you prove the machines are already covered by a preexisting volume license.
I would think that for a customer buying 300 PCs at once, Dell would mention those things to you if they really did offer them.
~Philly
Do we have a vaporware icon?
No, but one is in development and should be available RSN!
...you must agree to the game's EULA-- after you put the quarter in!
~Philly
I just read about this the other day in the book "Dealers of Lightning" (page 140). While they were developing the laser printer in the 70's, some of the researchers had to move to a different building 1KM away. They had line of sight between the two locations, so they rigged up a system of lasers and photodetectors to bridge their network between the two buildings.
The beam went over a public highway, and after one woman went into a ditch after it startled her one foggy morning, they coarsened the beam to make it invisible.
I bought mine from someone on eBay for $29 each. They came with a Windows driver CD, and I did get a coworker's Dell laptop (running XP) paired with my iBook for sharing files, just as a test. Once the driver was installed, the settings needed a little tweaking but we did get it to work. Never tried my phone with his laptop, though.
~Philly
Here's your how-to:
Step 1: Buy a Mac that runs OS X 10.2.x.
Step 2: There is no Step 2!
I've got two Mitsumi WIF-0402C adapters, one for my iBook and one for my G4. Plugged 'em in, and they worked with Apple's built-in support. I have no problems using them with my T68i.
I know that's not what you wanted to hear, but that's life.
~Philly
Yes, but he said TI68.
That whooshing sound you heard while posting your reply was his joke, whizzing by over your head.
~Philly
Could it BE any more boxy?
I'll keep my T68i, thanks.
~Philly
If the MCA had been made compatible with existing hardware, then it would have been innovative.
A backwards-compatible MCA would have defeated the whole purpose of its creation. The MCA was designed for pretty much one reason only: So IBM could wrest control of the market back from the cloners.
IBM assumed the public would rush to adopt whatever they, IBM, deemed The Standard. But they were wrong-- the PC was already well on its way to becoming a commodity thanks to the cloners, and the cloners were also beginning to innovate on their own instead of just cheaply copying what IBM did.
Ignorant of this, IBM expected stiff royalties from cloners who wanted to put MCA in their machines (including royalties for a percentage of the original IBM PC-compatible machines the cloners had previously shipped). The cloners balked at this two-for-me-one-for-you deal, the bus fizzled into obscurity, and IBM's ploy failed. It was at this point that IBM essentially became a nonfactor in the desktop personal computer market.
~Philly
Good point... I'm one of two Mac integrators in a smallish PC-centric consulting firm, and the Windows guys were blown away even by Location Manager in OS 9. They couldn't believe that I could change all those settings to hop on different client networks with just one mouse click-- AND without a reboot! I can't believe Microsoft hasn't stolen the idea yet.
Same with Bluetooth-- everyone that I've shown the OS X Address Book is amazed when I ring my T68i and the caller ID info shows up on my iBook's screen. And that's before I flick the Location Manager and start pulling up web pages via GPRS.
~Philly
Ok, so what if you used canned 'computer duster' air, or some other means of inflating the bubbles that didn't blow warm air?
Great, now I'll be outside this weekend with a can of air and a bottle of bubble solution. I hope it stays cold enough.
~Philly
I'd be willing to bet he lists The Outer Limits, since he adapted Inconstant Moon to be an episode for them.
~Philly
Remember when Sliders was left with only Remy as the original member of the cast on the show?
:-)
No, because I stopped watching not long after Rhys-Davies was replaced by Kari Wuhrer*, and they started blatantly ripping off sci-fi movies for their alternate earths and/or plots.
A show with a rabid fanbase is better off going out on a high note. Besides, why overextend the show's lifespan when you can milk it much more effectively selling episode DVDs to aforementioned rabid fanbase?
~Philly
*Sure, Wuhrer was a piece of ass (though it was Sabrina Lloyd who really melted me), but she couldn't act for shit-- and when you've got bad material to work with, that only magnifies the overall crappiness.
Try to be funny without quoting the Simpsons, go ahead, try.
Hmmm. Well, my parent post got +5, Funny, WITHOUT quoting the Simpsons.
And I'm not into Monty Python, and I own my own home so no need to go to my parents' basement.
To sum up, kiss my ass.
~Philly
Moreover, many think it's profoundly unlikely any alien races would be interested in conquering us.
:-)
I'm more worried about them seeing stuff like "American Idol," "Survivor," and "Joe Millionaire," and deciding we should all be exterminated, not subjugated.
We can only hope that their positive perception of our race from the 13 years of Simpsons episodes we've pumped out can withstand the damage the later shows will do to it.
~Philly
Ahh, the typical Wintel user, only interested in the specs.
My statement that Macs are more reliable comes from nothing more than my experiences using both platforms for almost twenty years, and making my living supporting them for twelve years. The Macs I've used and supported have had far fewer problems than the Windows machines. And when the Macs do have problems, they are much more easily fixed. 95% of the time, all I needed to fix any Mac problems at my last job was a Norton Utilities CD, and a book to read for the 5-10 minutes it took for Norton to finish checking the drive.
If you're so interested in the concrete numbers, then you can Google for the independent studies that show Macs have a higher initial cost but lower TCO compared to a Windows PC, once you factor in support costs and longevity of the machine. They're out there, though I'm sure you'll discount them because they usually appear on the web sites of Mac enthusiasts.
~Philly