I agree with this. I use my Mac for everything, and I'm still running a Power Mac 7600/132-- it'll be six years old in October, and all I've added since purchase:
CPU upgrade from 132MHz 604e to 400MHz G3
scads of cheap, cheap RAM
USB PCI card
ATA PCI card and a 20GB IDE drive
PCI video card
The longevity of Macs has always amazed me. I'll probably get 7 or 8 years out of the G5 tower that will be my next new Mac purchase.
By my sophomore year, I decided that the best thing to do was to cut my losses and sell the 5300 and put the money toward an inexpensive desktop PC (the original $2300 was supposed to cover my computing needs for all 4 years of college). I called some local shops that sold used macs and I was offered $300 for it. THE MACHINE HAD DEPRECIATED $2000 IN ONLY ONE YEAR!
I think you got taken. I sold my 5300c in 1997 (it was bought in December 1995) after sending it in for all the Repair Extension Program fixes. I bundled it with a Reno portable CD-ROM drive and got $1100 for it on eBay. The 7-years-from-end-of-production warranty extension Apple tacked on made these things jump up in value. That, and the fact that Apple started offering serious 5300-trade-in deals for later, better PowerBooks.
Lotus Note on the Mac (I've never seen or used the Windows version) has a little something kinda like this in their password dialog.
As you type in your password, small images in a 2 x 2 layout change according to what you've typed. Even though the password text is bulleted out, you eventually come to recognize the 'correct' four images and know when you've misyped your password before hitting Enter. IMHO, this is the best feature of Notes, which otherwise sucks-- Lotus might not have been the first to use this idea, but it's the first place I've seen it.
And now I'd like to complain about the increasing retard-ification of our society. How can people be unable to choose a few non-obvious passwords (hell, just some random sequences of alphanumeric characters will do) and remember them with a mnemonic device? Why must we create an authentication system geared to the stupid so they can easily exist among us? Maybe they'd smarten up if they chose "password" as their password and had their checking account cleaned out for the third time as a result.
Of course, I should have seen this coming when McDonald's started using cash registers that had photos of the food on the keys and spit out the customers' change automatically, without the operator having to overtax his/her brain thinking about how a quarter, a dime, a nickel and three pennies have to combine forces to make 43 cents.
Must be something in the air in Battle Creek. I don't know what Kellogg's is belching out of their smokestacks these days, but I wish the RIAA and MPAA assholes would get a whiff of it.
I'd love to know the cost of this relative to standard concrete as well... imagine being able to flip a switch when it starts snowing, to heat your driveway, steps and sidewalk so nothing accumulated on them. Now THAT would be something.
they did try to trademark numbers (486), but they didn't get them.
And thus the marketdroids saddled the poor 586 with the "Pentium" moniker, with apparently no thought given to the fact that that naming convention would cause the 686 to be named Sexium... (sexy, yum!)
Which is why we have "Pentium II," "Pentium Pro," "Pentium III," "Pentium 4," "Pentium with Sprinkles," "Pentium, Hold the Onions," etc.
Microsoft were the only ones audacious enough to claim the name Windows as their own.
In one of the numerous books I've read about Microsoft, one of their marketing people indeed said the name "Windows" was chosen in a deliberate attempt to co-opt the generic. They do this whenever possible, like "Flight Simulator," "Network," "XBox," "Money," "Internet Explorer," etc.
I hope Notes for OS X is better than R5 for the Classic Mac OS. I have to use that dreck at one of my client sites, and until I did, I never thought I'd find Outlook/Exchange superior to *anything*.
Talk about the most half-assed port of an app that I've ever seen... what's with the hundreds of 8.3-named files scattered in the Lotus Notes directory? And the user interface sucks terribly, they have done incredibly brain-dead things with the web-browser metaphor.
I never get tired of watching that video. Plus it makes a handy way to explain the concept of "dignity"-- by being an example of the exact opposite.:-)
Be careful with roof-mounted air conditioners. They have a habit of spewing ice cold water all over the place when they have a problem.
Amen to that. We got a wall-mounted unit put in just under the ceiling in our server room at my last job. We came in one morning to find a dark spot on the carpet. Turns out that that model had a known defect where it would just never stop running, would ice up, and then trip its breaker and shut off, leaving the ice to melt as the servers heated the room to near-oven temperatures. Ended up having to jury-rig a normal, everyday thermostat to the thing to set a minimum temperature for the room in addition to the maximum temp set on the built-in thermostat.
I know this won't answer the question, but I've always wanted to put together a list of good computer names from the sci-fi world. Here's what I've got so far:
Guardian, Colossus- Colossus: The Forbin Project SkyNet- Terminator 2 HAL- 2001 WOPR- WarGames Eddie- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I know I'm probably missing some good ones. Come on, slashgeeks, fill in the blanks!:-)
motherboard, CPU, RAM, GFX, audio, HDD, DVD, CDR, TV cap and anything else that might take my fancy.
Time and time again, it has been explained to you thickheads that the iMac's target market DOES NOT DO THESE KIND OF UPGRADES. I'll say it again, to see if it can penetrate your concrete skull: The iMac's target market DOES NOT DO THESE KIND OF UPGRADES. They want to do word processing, e-mail, and web surfing, play some MP3s, and hook up their digital still and video cameras. Grandma does not spend her evenings installing a new video card in an attempt to to coax a few more FPS out of her lame-o, cookie-cutter FPS-of-the-month. The iMac she gets today, as taken out of the box, will do what she wants it to do until she keels over.
If you want upgradability, however, there are plenty of upgradable Macs available. The Power Mac 7600 I'm typing this on, I bought new in 1996. It's 5.5 years old, and still works great. I've added USB, IDE, put in faster drives, and upgraded the processor twice in that time. Macs cost more at purchase time because they remain viable for significantly longer than PCs do, and their resale value shows it. If you don't believe me, look on eBay.
~Philly
Re:20th Anniversary Mac, 5 years later
on
iMac LCD Impostors
·
· Score: 2
Bet Gateway doesn't offer a tech in a cow suit to set theirs up...
I'd settle for Ted Waitt, so I could pin him on the floor face-down and cut off that stupid, ponytail of his. Nothing more pathetic, IMHO, than a severely balding man with a ponytail.
I'm about to jump in the shower and go catch a matinee of this flick, so I don't have time for a long, drawn-out reply. But I think it will be entertaining, though after reading several reviews I expect it to be inferior to the 1960 version in all aspects except effects.
I replied mostly to complain about this continuing trend of chopping scenes out of movies so as not to offend people still haunted by the terrorist attacks. Why do The Powers That Be think we'll all be reduced to sniveling wussies if we see a skyscraper blow up in a work of *fiction*? I had hoped this practice would've run out of steam by now, six months after the fact. Memo to Hollywood: If you're so concerned about offending me, leave the 'destruction of New York' scenes in your movies, and stop labeling me and the rest of your customers as potential thieves, chomping at the bit to steal movies and music from you.
Kuhn did not invent this technique, I read about this being doable in Popular Science in the mid-to-late 80's. It's called 'van Eck phreaking' after Wim van Eck, its discoverer. As I recall from that long-ago article, he sat in an equipped van parked outside a building, tuned in on a CRT that was inside the building, and read the contents of that screen right off his. I think I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and this was the coolest thing I had ever heard of-- in fact, it made such an impression on me that "kinda like van Eck" was the first thought that crossed my mind when I read the posting on here.
Here's some info about the van Eck phreaking method.
It's about the right to choose. I want to be able to control IF my email gets spam filtered.
Then register your own domain name, and run your own mailserver, carefully set up so as not to be an open relay. That's what I did. I got tired of having no control over the most basic yet most crucial aspect of internet service. I also had a lame ISP, @Home, that was plagued by mail outages and became a spammer haven. So I took matters into my own hands-- I switched to DSL, and now I've got a very reliable mailserver running in my spare bedroom.
It's staying at $249. So now, the lifetime pays for itself in about 19 months as opposed to 25.:-)
TiVo will certainly still be around in 2 years. I've done everything but print up my own brochures to explain just how wonderful it is to all of my friends, and most people who've taken the plunge are the same way.
Man, I'd love to travel back in time five years and tell a bunch of Mac advocates that within five years, Emacs will come pre-loaded on a Mac.
Me, I'd like to go back in time to 1954 and give Gates' parents a case of rubbers. And then stop off at the zoo to give Ballmer's father a cyanide-laced banana.:-)
I wholeheartedly agree with you, the wage tax FUCKING SUCKS. It's about a $2000 chunk out of my ass every year. My last employer didn't deduct it automatically, so I had to pay it myself quarterly. Writing a $500 check to the city every three months was like passing a kidney stone.
If moving wasn't such a huge hassle, and if I didn't already own my current house, I'd move to just outside the city limits in a heartbeat and enjoy the thousands of dollars in wage tax and car insurance savings.
~Philly
"To install..."
on
iWarez
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"...copy this folder to your hard drive"
That's what it says on the Office X CD. You copy that folder, and when you launch an Office app for the first time it checks to see if that other stuff isn't there. If it's not, it copies it there to complete the install.
From the article: When installing Office, users simply drag and drop the Office folder to their hard drive. Everything is included, including a self-repair mechanism that replaces critical files in the system folder.
Chances are, just copying the Office folder worked like a charm. If not, it's not like he can't grab a.dmg of the Office X CD from Hotline or Carracho, and registration keys are easy to find for almost anything online.
It should not be possible for Microsoft (or any company, but Microsoft is the best example) to boast about how robust and secure their products are in their marketing, and then make the purchaser agree to a EULA that removes their liability, if their claims turn out to be untrue.
This is especially true of their enterprise products, like, say, Outlook/Exchange. It should not be a full-time job patching and reconfiguring the damn stuff to keep the misfit script kiddies with Outlook Worm Kits from bringing down an entire organization's e-mail system. Microsoft should damn well have been able to be held liable for something like ILOVEYOU, that knocked some very large companies' mailservers off the Net for days.
Imagine if, after all the car commercials boasting airbags, crumple zones, etc, those safety features turned out not work-- and then, while paging through it from your hospital bed, you found a EULA in the back of the Owner's Manual disclaiming Ford/GM/whoever from liability, if they didn't?
The biggest bullshit, though, is the notion that people will eventually get pissed off about software not living up to the hype and take their business elsewhere. If that theory held water, Microsoft would already be a memory amongst sysadmins these days. Companies are practically locked into using Microsoft products. And what people use at work, they will buy and use at home because by and large, they are sheep who fear change. Which is exactly the kind of environment in which companies like Microsoft can shovel sub-par shit out the door, not be liable for its flaws, and still thrive.
The UK is turning more and more into Airstrip One every day... you've already got the cams everywhere, and now They want to have every motor vehicle create a record of its whereabouts so you can pay for your actual road use? Does anyone *not* see those records being used to disprove a criminal's alibi within about 2 months of its rollout? Who on earth would be pushing for this, is it a conspiracy amongst bicycle manufacturers, or what? Because the gasoline tax accomplishes the same thing, but without the facist aftertaste.
Given the choice, I'd rather pay for a little more than my actual road use to retain my privacy. Then again, I'm a different breed of cat-- I'd also be willing to pay a little more for my magazine subscriptions if I could get a copy without those annoying fucking blow-in cards and such in each issue.
Slashdot Mirror
CPU upgrade from 132MHz 604e to 400MHz G3
scads of cheap, cheap RAM
USB PCI card
ATA PCI card and a 20GB IDE drive
PCI video card
The longevity of Macs has always amazed me. I'll probably get 7 or 8 years out of the G5 tower that will be my next new Mac purchase.
~Philly
By my sophomore year, I decided that the best thing to do was to cut my losses and sell the 5300 and put the money toward an inexpensive desktop PC (the original $2300 was supposed to cover my computing needs for all 4 years of college). I called some local shops that sold used macs and I was offered $300 for it. THE MACHINE HAD DEPRECIATED $2000 IN ONLY ONE YEAR!
I think you got taken. I sold my 5300c in 1997 (it was bought in December 1995) after sending it in for all the Repair Extension Program fixes. I bundled it with a Reno portable CD-ROM drive and got $1100 for it on eBay. The 7-years-from-end-of-production warranty extension Apple tacked on made these things jump up in value. That, and the fact that Apple started offering serious 5300-trade-in deals for later, better PowerBooks.
~Philly
'anticomet pills' guaranteeing protection from the comet's noxious fumes, were bought up eagerly.
:-)
Well, I'm off to eBay to post a few pill bottles full of Skittles with the "S" logos rubbed off!
This'll be as easy as selling Nikes to Heaven's Gaters.
~Philly
Lotus Note on the Mac (I've never seen or used the Windows version) has a little something kinda like this in their password dialog.
As you type in your password, small images in a 2 x 2 layout change according to what you've typed. Even though the password text is bulleted out, you eventually come to recognize the 'correct' four images and know when you've misyped your password before hitting Enter. IMHO, this is the best feature of Notes, which otherwise sucks-- Lotus might not have been the first to use this idea, but it's the first place I've seen it.
And now I'd like to complain about the increasing retard-ification of our society. How can people be unable to choose a few non-obvious passwords (hell, just some random sequences of alphanumeric characters will do) and remember them with a mnemonic device? Why must we create an authentication system geared to the stupid so they can easily exist among us? Maybe they'd smarten up if they chose "password" as their password and had their checking account cleaned out for the third time as a result.
Of course, I should have seen this coming when McDonald's started using cash registers that had photos of the food on the keys and spit out the customers' change automatically, without the operator having to overtax his/her brain thinking about how a quarter, a dime, a nickel and three pennies have to combine forces to make 43 cents.
~Philly
Must be something in the air in Battle Creek. I don't know what Kellogg's is belching out of their smokestacks these days, but I wish the RIAA and MPAA assholes would get a whiff of it.
~Philly
I'd love to know the cost of this relative to standard concrete as well... imagine being able to flip a switch when it starts snowing, to heat your driveway, steps and sidewalk so nothing accumulated on them. Now THAT would be something.
~Philly
they did try to trademark numbers (486), but they didn't get them.
And thus the marketdroids saddled the poor 586 with the "Pentium" moniker, with apparently no thought given to the fact that that naming convention would cause the 686 to be named Sexium... (sexy, yum!)
Which is why we have "Pentium II," "Pentium Pro," "Pentium III," "Pentium 4," "Pentium with Sprinkles," "Pentium, Hold the Onions," etc.
~Philly
Microsoft were the only ones audacious enough to claim the name Windows as their own.
In one of the numerous books I've read about Microsoft, one of their marketing people indeed said the name "Windows" was chosen in a deliberate attempt to co-opt the generic. They do this whenever possible, like "Flight Simulator," "Network," "XBox," "Money," "Internet Explorer," etc.
~Philly
I hope Notes for OS X is better than R5 for the Classic Mac OS. I have to use that dreck at one of my client sites, and until I did, I never thought I'd find Outlook/Exchange superior to *anything*.
Talk about the most half-assed port of an app that I've ever seen... what's with the hundreds of 8.3-named files scattered in the Lotus Notes directory? And the user interface sucks terribly, they have done incredibly brain-dead things with the web-browser metaphor.
~Philly
I never get tired of watching that video. Plus it makes a handy way to explain the concept of "dignity"-- by being an example of the exact opposite. :-)
~Philly
Be careful with roof-mounted air conditioners. They have a habit of spewing ice cold water all over the place when they have a problem.
Amen to that. We got a wall-mounted unit put in just under the ceiling in our server room at my last job. We came in one morning to find a dark spot on the carpet. Turns out that that model had a known defect where it would just never stop running, would ice up, and then trip its breaker and shut off, leaving the ice to melt as the servers heated the room to near-oven temperatures. Ended up having to jury-rig a normal, everyday thermostat to the thing to set a minimum temperature for the room in addition to the maximum temp set on the built-in thermostat.
~Philly
I was hopelessly addicted to this for a few months last year-- if you don't want to muck about with emulators, just click here.
~Philly
I know this won't answer the question, but I've always wanted to put together a list of good computer names from the sci-fi world.
:-)
Here's what I've got so far:
Guardian, Colossus- Colossus: The Forbin Project
SkyNet- Terminator 2
HAL- 2001
WOPR- WarGames
Eddie- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I know I'm probably missing some good ones. Come on, slashgeeks, fill in the blanks!
~Philly
motherboard, CPU, RAM, GFX, audio, HDD, DVD, CDR, TV cap and anything else that might take my fancy.
Time and time again, it has been explained to you thickheads that the iMac's target market DOES NOT DO THESE KIND OF UPGRADES. I'll say it again, to see if it can penetrate your concrete skull: The iMac's target market DOES NOT DO THESE KIND OF UPGRADES. They want to do word processing, e-mail, and web surfing, play some MP3s, and hook up their digital still and video cameras. Grandma does not spend her evenings installing a new video card in an attempt to to coax a few more FPS out of her lame-o, cookie-cutter FPS-of-the-month. The iMac she gets today, as taken out of the box, will do what she wants it to do until she keels over.
If you want upgradability, however, there are plenty of upgradable Macs available. The Power Mac 7600 I'm typing this on, I bought new in 1996. It's 5.5 years old, and still works great. I've added USB, IDE, put in faster drives, and upgraded the processor twice in that time. Macs cost more at purchase time because they remain viable for significantly longer than PCs do, and their resale value shows it. If you don't believe me, look on eBay.
~Philly
Bet Gateway doesn't offer a tech in a cow suit to set theirs up...
I'd settle for Ted Waitt, so I could pin him on the floor face-down and cut off that stupid, ponytail of his. Nothing more pathetic, IMHO, than a severely balding man with a ponytail.
I'm about to jump in the shower and go catch a matinee of this flick, so I don't have time for a long, drawn-out reply. But I think it will be entertaining, though after reading several reviews I expect it to be inferior to the 1960 version in all aspects except effects.
I replied mostly to complain about this continuing trend of chopping scenes out of movies so as not to offend people still haunted by the terrorist attacks. Why do The Powers That Be think we'll all be reduced to sniveling wussies if we see a skyscraper blow up in a work of *fiction*? I had hoped this practice would've run out of steam by now, six months after the fact. Memo to Hollywood: If you're so concerned about offending me, leave the 'destruction of New York' scenes in your movies, and stop labeling me and the rest of your customers as potential thieves, chomping at the bit to steal movies and music from you.
~Philly
Remember, this is the same industry in which no film ever makes a profit, thus negating the need to pay royalties...
Yup, just ask the guys who wrote Forrest Gump (the novel, and the screenplay)
The movie industry is like Microsoft with concession stands.
~Philly
Kuhn did not invent this technique, I read about this being doable in Popular Science in the mid-to-late 80's. It's called 'van Eck phreaking' after Wim van Eck, its discoverer. As I recall from that long-ago article, he sat in an equipped van parked outside a building, tuned in on a CRT that was inside the building, and read the contents of that screen right off his. I think I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and this was the coolest thing I had ever heard of-- in fact, it made such an impression on me that "kinda like van Eck" was the first thought that crossed my mind when I read the posting on here.
Here's some info about the van Eck phreaking method.
~Philly
It's about the right to choose. I want to be able to control IF my email gets spam filtered.
Then register your own domain name, and run your own mailserver, carefully set up so as not to be an open relay. That's what I did. I got tired of having no control over the most basic yet most crucial aspect of internet service. I also had a lame ISP, @Home, that was plagued by mail outages and became a spammer haven. So I took matters into my own hands-- I switched to DSL, and now I've got a very reliable mailserver running in my spare bedroom.
~Philly
It's staying at $249. So now, the lifetime pays for itself in about 19 months as opposed to 25. :-)
TiVo will certainly still be around in 2 years. I've done everything but print up my own brochures to explain just how wonderful it is to all of my friends, and most people who've taken the plunge are the same way.
~Philly
Man, I'd love to travel back in time five years and tell a bunch of Mac advocates that within five years, Emacs will come pre-loaded on a Mac.
:-)
Me, I'd like to go back in time to 1954 and give Gates' parents a case of rubbers. And then stop off at the zoo to give Ballmer's father a cyanide-laced banana.
~Philly
I wholeheartedly agree with you, the wage tax FUCKING SUCKS. It's about a $2000 chunk out of my ass every year. My last employer didn't deduct it automatically, so I had to pay it myself quarterly. Writing a $500 check to the city every three months was like passing a kidney stone.
If moving wasn't such a huge hassle, and if I didn't already own my current house, I'd move to just outside the city limits in a heartbeat and enjoy the thousands of dollars in wage tax and car insurance savings.
~Philly
"...copy this folder to your hard drive"
.dmg of the Office X CD from Hotline or Carracho, and registration keys are easy to find for almost anything online.
That's what it says on the Office X CD. You copy that folder, and when you launch an Office app for the first time it checks to see if that other stuff isn't there. If it's not, it copies it there to complete the install.
From the article: When installing Office, users simply drag and drop the Office folder to their hard drive. Everything is included, including a self-repair mechanism that replaces critical files in the system folder.
Chances are, just copying the Office folder worked like a charm. If not, it's not like he can't grab a
~Philly
It should not be possible for Microsoft (or any company, but Microsoft is the best example) to boast about how robust and secure their products are in their marketing, and then make the purchaser agree to a EULA that removes their liability, if their claims turn out to be untrue.
This is especially true of their enterprise products, like, say, Outlook/Exchange. It should not be a full-time job patching and reconfiguring the damn stuff to keep the misfit script kiddies with Outlook Worm Kits from bringing down an entire organization's e-mail system. Microsoft should damn well have been able to be held liable for something like ILOVEYOU, that knocked some very large companies' mailservers off the Net for days.
Imagine if, after all the car commercials boasting airbags, crumple zones, etc, those safety features turned out not work-- and then, while paging through it from your hospital bed, you found a EULA in the back of the Owner's Manual disclaiming Ford/GM/whoever from liability, if they didn't?
The biggest bullshit, though, is the notion that people will eventually get pissed off about software not living up to the hype and take their business elsewhere. If that theory held water, Microsoft would already be a memory amongst sysadmins these days. Companies are practically locked into using Microsoft products. And what people use at work, they will buy and use at home because by and large, they are sheep who fear change. Which is exactly the kind of environment in which companies like Microsoft can shovel sub-par shit out the door, not be liable for its flaws, and still thrive.
~Philly
The UK is turning more and more into Airstrip One every day... you've already got the cams everywhere, and now They want to have every motor vehicle create a record of its whereabouts so you can pay for your actual road use? Does anyone *not* see those records being used to disprove a criminal's alibi within about 2 months of its rollout? Who on earth would be pushing for this, is it a conspiracy amongst bicycle manufacturers, or what? Because the gasoline tax accomplishes the same thing, but without the facist aftertaste.
Given the choice, I'd rather pay for a little more than my actual road use to retain my privacy. Then again, I'm a different breed of cat-- I'd also be willing to pay a little more for my magazine subscriptions if I could get a copy without those annoying fucking blow-in cards and such in each issue.
~Philly