That hideous price tag is now down to $89, plus $30 for the USB Ethernet adapter if you have a LAN at home (this is at TigerDirect). Audrey still works fine, if all you want to do is e-mail and light web browsing (the "channels" of presumably specialized content no longer work, but otherwise the unit is fully functional).
If you do a little relatively easy hacking, you can get a GUI text editor onto it that could be a passable word processor, and Audrey does hook up to certain USB printers with no modification.
Most people are hacking the shit out of them, though-- they make great little terminals for controlling home automation and stuff-- I have two.
I agree that Dell support sucks. I used to work for a large company that had one of Dell's 'preferred' support dealies... you know, where you have a shorter wait time and presumably better techs? Yeah, in theory. The reality was, I'd usually have a shorter wait time, but the people I got on the phone were so dumb, one would think they had just evolved out of living in the trees as recently as that morning. They were just as bad as the first-line Script Monkeys who do ISP support-- no capability for independent thought, just follow the script.
Needless to say, this used to drive me nuts as a very busy, seasoned support tech who couldn't just say, "Such-and-such a part is bad. As per my company's agreement with Dell, send a tech out to replace it." Oh, no, I had to sit there, wasting my valuable time, support calls piling up, going through the sacred script until this person finally agreed with my original assessment and booked a tech. After the first call went like that, subsequent calls went like this.
Everyone loves to rag on Apple, especially over the PowerBook 5300 with defective batteries and other problems. Nobody seems to remember that less than five of these units were in customer hands when the battery problems surfaced, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of affected units in customer hands when Dell and Compaq have done recentbatteryrecalls.
And everyone is so quick to condemn Apple for the 5300, but nobody praises them when they do make things right. Like the 5300/190 Repair Extension Program, which fixed specific defects in the 5300 and 190 series PowerBooks, for free, for a period 7 years after they were discontinued-- I do believe it is still in effect.
And let's not forget the numerous times in the last 18 months or so that Apple offered people who still owned those machines trade-in deals to get much, much better PowerBook G3 units at reduced cost.
~Philly
Re:Technical Question ICO Firewaire transfers
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 2
Ok, well, keep in mind you're not transferring the full 650MB contents of the music CD to the iPod-- you're transferring the mp3 versions of those songs to it.
The songs in my mp3 collection average out to right around 4MB each, encoded at 128kbps. The average album these days has, what, 12-14 songs on it? Well that's ~48-56MB, which could be sucked across a FireWire cable pretty damned quickly.
"Weighs just 6.5 ounces -- fits in your pocket"
- That's neat, but not enough to be a major selling point.
Oh yeah? The Newton 2000, which kicked the shit out of any Palm organizer then available, lost out to the Palms for one reason (among people for whom price was not an issue): It wouldn't fit in their pocket.
I dont give a rats hind end about specs... and apparently niether do many electronics consumer purchasers...
Yeah, all those consumers are much more discerning than to simply buy based on specs, like getting the computer with the highest megahertz rating they can afford and looking down their noses at anything slower. Oh, wait...
Re:Neodymium transducer magnets?
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Neodymium magnets are nothing new. I remember that being listed as a feature in Sony headphones years ago. From a little quick reading on Google, they are just damned strong little magnets.
Since the iPod can double as a normal portable hard drive. I'm sure it will likely be pretty easily used on a PC. And if it's not, big deal. It might be nice for the other half to see how THEY like having their perfectly-good platform ignored, and having to hack a product to make it usable on their systems.
Fortunately there is a solution. Simply wait a few months. You will be able to download patches from the internet. The built in hard drive will allow these patches to work.
Whoo hoo, this is just what I've been waiting for to make my life complete! After a long day of work fixing Windows problems, I really want to come home to a video game console that has to have service packs downloaded and applied to it!
Thanks, but I think I'll stick with my older systems that just work. I never got a GPF or segfault while playing a frantic game of Kaboom! on my 2600 or Super Mario Brothers on my NES.
I heartily agree with this. Since I got my iBook 2001, I take it around to all my client sites and pop on their respective networks within minutes of walking in the door. It's also handy at home and in the office, when I switch back and forth from my wired connections to AirPort. The only thing I have to do manually is power on/off the AirPort card. Someone did try making a Location Manager module to automate that as well, but it gave me problems.
Perhaps the nicest thing about Location Manager, though, were the reactions I got while demonstrating it to my Windows-using co-workers: "That's it, you just pick it from the menu and you're done? You mean you don't even need to reboot? And this was included free with the OS?"
Maybe one day Bill will learn to bundle USEFUL stuff with his OSes, instead of welding in [cough, cough] "killer apps" like instant messaging.:-)
I went from a Duo 210, to a 5300, to an iBook 2001.
I loved my Duo, though it was slow and the screen was passive-matrix grayscale, it still rocked. The Duo idea IMHO is one of the most innovative things Apple has ever done, I was sad to see them just drop the product line. There was a very good market for people who needed laptops, preferred to work on desktops when possible, but didn't want to spend big bucks for both. Apple took the simple concept of docking a laptop and ran with it.
My 5300 was okay, it had a nice color screen and was pretty speedy compared to the Duo it replaced. I managed to have few problems with it but took it in for preventive service whenever I read about widespread hardware problems instead of waiting to get hit myself. I bear no ill will towards Apple for it-- thanks to their 7-year Repair Extension Program, I managed to sell the 5300 in 1997, bundled with a RENO CD-ROM drive for over $1100. Most of the proceeds of the sale bought me a Newton 2000, which still runs like a champ.
But I have to give props to the iBook 2001 as Best.... PowerBook.... Ever! Sure, the TiG4 looks cool and the screen is nice. But I'm an integration consultant, so along with something that looked cool, I needed something that was small and built tough. The iBook fits perfectly in my backpack, even nestled in its padded sleeve case (the vertical model sold by these guys, I highly recommend it). Between the iBook's speed and its full complement of ports, I can connect to damn near anything with the right software and occasional USB-to-whatever adapter. Even my Windows-bigot co-workers are impressed with its versatility.
[additional: Yes yes yes, I know it was upgradable and I know it could even be upped to a G3:-) But while it was new, all that wasn't exactly advertised by Apple and most consumers didn't know all that.]
Well, after the "Ready for PowerPC upgrade" sticker debacle with the 500 series, I can see why Apple would not vigorously promote processor-upgradability anymore.
I meant to add that I've got this Moniswitch2 USB setup working with a Power Mac 7600 with a USB upgrade card in it, and a home-built PC running Win2000.
The KVM also switches back and forth flawlessly when I've got my other HD module in the PC and it's running Red Hat 7.
A little over a year ago I bought a Dr. Bott 2-port USB KVM from DevDepot for $139. Dr. Bott stuff is more Mac-friendly than most-- the KVM has dual video ports (i.e. Mac DB15 and PC HD15) for each position on the switch.
All cables are included with the switch, and the video cables have one end HD15 and one end DB15-- no matter how you have to hook your computers up, you can get it done by just swapping cable ends, no video adapters needed.
Contrast this with Belkin, who charges out the ass for everything, cables are extra, and sometimes requires a separate box to provide Mac connectivity, resulting in an ugly mess of tangled cables. Sure, the Belkins are electronic while the Dr. Bott is physical, but I'd rather pay less and wait a few seconds for my keyboard and mouse to be detected when I switch (and have a much neater-looking work area).
You don't have to be rich to pay for things with $2 bills. You just have to have a warped sense of humor, which Woz has. I happen to think that few things are funnier than watching your average 16 year-old Taco Bell counter-jockey's reaction to getting handed a few $2 bills as payment for your meal. Simply priceless.
...but he was absolutely correct in pointing out that blind brand loyalty by "artsy types" was keeping them in business.
I'm not an "artsy" type in the least. I'm a system integrator. After a long day of work fixing the piece of shit that is Windows, for unappreciative clients that get mad at me because the software they chose is constantly getting fucked up, I want to come home, sit down, and use a computer that works right all the time. As long as Apple continues to make computers that fit that criteria, I will be loyal to them.
Once a month I rebuild my desktop, and I run Norton Disk Doctor quarterly as preventative maintenance. A virus? What's that? I saw one once on my Mac, in 1992. (MDEF, IIRC, a non-malicious virus that could be removed by a desktop rebuild).
Being artsy or not has little to do with why people choose Macs.
Here in Philadelphia I pay $112/mo for Comcast analog basic cable plus 3 HBOs, and cable modem. They don't do phone service, so I'm stuck paying ~$40/mo to Verizon (and it wouldn't be that much less if I gave up my fax line).
I think 'weird' might be if you were assured of getting someone else's photos back, and not your own.
Or perhaps simply having the option of paying a little extra to get access to the photos taken by the last few people that used that camera. I'm sure they'd get a lot of business from the exhibitionist/voyeur crowd that way, at least.
Take a look at this site. It has an interactive buyers' guide of sorts that lets you pick the features you find important and spits back the camera(s) that do what you want.
"So you've ordered me to take you through the drive-thru at Taco Bell. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and you ask me to take you through the drive-thru at Taco Bell. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."
...was ZDnet columnist David Coursey, and it was Office XP that was demanding insertion of its install CD so it could re-activate itself on his laptop. Unfortunately, Coursey was just starting out on a lengthy business trip (during which he would presumably need to use Word to write his articles) and had left his Office CD at home. (The link attached to his name goes to part 2 of the article, part 1 was posted in June and doesn't seem to be available in ZDNet's archives).
One day soon its going to be really hard for a CTO of a small or medium sized company to justify buying Microsoft rather than using a free, similar product.
Don't hold your breath. Yeah, those Office alternatives may be cheaper, yeah, they may be almost as good. But what good is any of that if you can't communicate effectively with the people and companies your company does business with, because of file format issues?
Rest assured, Microsoft will just keep fucking with their file formats to ensure that the only way you won't have problems with Office documents is to have the same latest-and-greatest version of Office as the people who created them and sent them to you, period.
Look for them to eventually do something to their file formats that will protect them under the DMCA (frankly, I'm surprised they haven't already). Then the companies who make file translators and other like products will have to (if they don't already-- I don't know how it works) pay steep licensing fees to be able to continue making their products. Anyone who doesn't want to or can't afford to pay licensing fees, but still insists on making a non-Microsoft means of reading/writing Office files, could be prosecuted.
Do you think for a minute Napster will survive as a subscription service? No way!
That's because they probably won't do it the right way, charging 5 or 10 cents per downloaded song, which I and many others would happily pay.
Back on topic, I think it's just completely laughable that Microsoft now expects us to trust them to hold onto our personal data for convenience. Especially when they can't even keep their own sites from belching up passwords sometimes.
Personally, I wouldn't trust Microsoft to carry a still-usable tissue I've already blown my nose in, much less my vital financial information. Microsoft knows there are a lot of people like me who won't be swayed by their marketing bullshit. To take care of us, they'll simply attempt to co-opt as many 'net merchants as possible, until they make it virtually impossible to make a purchase on the 'net without using their service for authentication. And if it comes down to switch-or-do-without, I'll simply do without.
I've got something like that on my Mac-based home-automation server, connected to a modem that has Caller ID, and using XTension and MacCallerID, all glued together with healthy doses of Applescript.
MacCallerID offers you the option of dumping incoming calls with blocked/missing/incomplete Caller ID info, but I can't use that since some of my friends block theirs, and some of my relatives' calls only generate "OUT OF AREA."
What my system does do, however, is send notifications of incoming calls to whatever computers (well, the Macs, anyway) it detects on my network when the call comes in. It also speaks the name of the caller via several small wireless speakers placed throughout my house. I could do the TV text-overlay thing, but it's kinda expensive and I'm usually working on a computer while watching TV anyway. If I don't know the incoming number or there isn't one, I just don't pick up the phone.
Slashdot Mirror
That hideous price tag is now down to $89, plus $30 for the USB Ethernet adapter if you have a LAN at home (this is at TigerDirect). Audrey still works fine, if all you want to do is e-mail and light web browsing (the "channels" of presumably specialized content no longer work, but otherwise the unit is fully functional).
If you do a little relatively easy hacking, you can get a GUI text editor onto it that could be a passable word processor, and Audrey does hook up to certain USB printers with no modification.
Most people are hacking the shit out of them, though-- they make great little terminals for controlling home automation and stuff-- I have two.
~Philly
Keep on killing AltaVista, and then when they get really desperate, pick up Babelfish for a song!
Now that they've got Deja under their umbrella, Babelfish is all Google needs to be...
Best.... Search Engine.... Ever!
~Philly
I agree that Dell support sucks. I used to work for a large company that had one of Dell's 'preferred' support dealies... you know, where you have a shorter wait time and presumably better techs? Yeah, in theory. The reality was, I'd usually have a shorter wait time, but the people I got on the phone were so dumb, one would think they had just evolved out of living in the trees as recently as that morning. They were just as bad as the first-line Script Monkeys who do ISP support-- no capability for independent thought, just follow the script.
Needless to say, this used to drive me nuts as a very busy, seasoned support tech who couldn't just say, "Such-and-such a part is bad. As per my company's agreement with Dell, send a tech out to replace it." Oh, no, I had to sit there, wasting my valuable time, support calls piling up, going through the sacred script until this person finally agreed with my original assessment and booked a tech. After the first call went like that, subsequent calls went like this.
~Philly
Everyone loves to rag on Apple, especially over the PowerBook 5300 with defective batteries and other problems. Nobody seems to remember that less than five of these units were in customer hands when the battery problems surfaced, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of affected units in customer hands when Dell and Compaq have done recent battery recalls.
And everyone is so quick to condemn Apple for the 5300, but nobody praises them when they do make things right. Like the 5300/190 Repair Extension Program, which fixed specific defects in the 5300 and 190 series PowerBooks, for free, for a period 7 years after they were discontinued-- I do believe it is still in effect.
And let's not forget the numerous times in the last 18 months or so that Apple offered people who still owned those machines trade-in deals to get much, much better PowerBook G3 units at reduced cost.
~Philly
Ok, well, keep in mind you're not transferring the full 650MB contents of the music CD to the iPod-- you're transferring the mp3 versions of those songs to it.
The songs in my mp3 collection average out to right around 4MB each, encoded at 128kbps. The average album these days has, what, 12-14 songs on it? Well that's ~48-56MB, which could be sucked across a FireWire cable pretty damned quickly.
~Philly
"Weighs just 6.5 ounces -- fits in your pocket"
- That's neat, but not enough to be a major selling point.
Oh yeah? The Newton 2000, which kicked the shit out of any Palm organizer then available, lost out to the Palms for one reason (among people for whom price was not an issue): It wouldn't fit in their pocket.
~Philly
I dont give a rats hind end about specs... and apparently niether do many electronics consumer purchasers...
Yeah, all those consumers are much more discerning than to simply buy based on specs, like getting the computer with the highest megahertz rating they can afford and looking down their noses at anything slower. Oh, wait...
Neodymium magnets are nothing new. I remember that being listed as a feature in Sony headphones years ago. From a little quick reading on Google, they are just damned strong little magnets.
~Philly
...which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners...
You mean, people who own Apple Macs like these?
Since the iPod can double as a normal portable hard drive. I'm sure it will likely be pretty easily used on a PC. And if it's not, big deal. It might be nice for the other half to see how THEY like having their perfectly-good platform ignored, and having to hack a product to make it usable on their systems.
And if you haven't noticed, it is possible to buy a FireWire card for a PC that doesn't already come with it.
Fortunately there is a solution. Simply wait a few months. You will be able to download patches from the internet. The built in hard drive will allow these patches to work.
Whoo hoo, this is just what I've been waiting for to make my life complete! After a long day of work fixing Windows problems, I really want to come home to a video game console that has to have service packs downloaded and applied to it!
Thanks, but I think I'll stick with my older systems that just work. I never got a GPF or segfault while playing a frantic game of Kaboom! on my 2600 or Super Mario Brothers on my NES.
I heartily agree with this. Since I got my iBook 2001, I take it around to all my client sites and pop on their respective networks within minutes of walking in the door. It's also handy at home and in the office, when I switch back and forth from my wired connections to AirPort. The only thing I have to do manually is power on/off the AirPort card. Someone did try making a Location Manager module to automate that as well, but it gave me problems.
:-)
Perhaps the nicest thing about Location Manager, though, were the reactions I got while demonstrating it to my Windows-using co-workers: "That's it, you just pick it from the menu and you're done? You mean you don't even need to reboot? And this was included free with the OS?"
Maybe one day Bill will learn to bundle USEFUL stuff with his OSes, instead of welding in [cough, cough] "killer apps" like instant messaging.
~Philly
Best PowerBook ever: ??? suggestions ???
I went from a Duo 210, to a 5300, to an iBook 2001.
I loved my Duo, though it was slow and the screen was passive-matrix grayscale, it still rocked. The Duo idea IMHO is one of the most innovative things Apple has ever done, I was sad to see them just drop the product line. There was a very good market for people who needed laptops, preferred to work on desktops when possible, but didn't want to spend big bucks for both. Apple took the simple concept of docking a laptop and ran with it.
My 5300 was okay, it had a nice color screen and was pretty speedy compared to the Duo it replaced. I managed to have few problems with it but took it in for preventive service whenever I read about widespread hardware problems instead of waiting to get hit myself. I bear no ill will towards Apple for it-- thanks to their 7-year Repair Extension Program, I managed to sell the 5300 in 1997, bundled with a RENO CD-ROM drive for over $1100. Most of the proceeds of the sale bought me a Newton 2000, which still runs like a champ.
But I have to give props to the iBook 2001 as Best.... PowerBook.... Ever! Sure, the TiG4 looks cool and the screen is nice. But I'm an integration consultant, so along with something that looked cool, I needed something that was small and built tough. The iBook fits perfectly in my backpack, even nestled in its padded sleeve case (the vertical model sold by these guys, I highly recommend it). Between the iBook's speed and its full complement of ports, I can connect to damn near anything with the right software and occasional USB-to-whatever adapter. Even my Windows-bigot co-workers are impressed with its versatility.
~Philly
[additional: Yes yes yes, I know it was upgradable and I know it could even be upped to a G3 :-) But while it was new, all that wasn't exactly advertised by Apple and most consumers didn't know all that.]
Well, after the "Ready for PowerPC upgrade" sticker debacle with the 500 series, I can see why Apple would not vigorously promote processor-upgradability anymore.
~Philly
I meant to add that I've got this Moniswitch2 USB setup working with a Power Mac 7600 with a USB upgrade card in it, and a home-built PC running Win2000.
The KVM also switches back and forth flawlessly when I've got my other HD module in the PC and it's running Red Hat 7.
~Philly
A little over a year ago I bought a Dr. Bott 2-port USB KVM from DevDepot for $139. Dr. Bott stuff is more Mac-friendly than most-- the KVM has dual video ports (i.e. Mac DB15 and PC HD15) for each position on the switch.
All cables are included with the switch, and the video cables have one end HD15 and one end DB15-- no matter how you have to hook your computers up, you can get it done by just swapping cable ends, no video adapters needed.
Contrast this with Belkin, who charges out the ass for everything, cables are extra, and sometimes requires a separate box to provide Mac connectivity, resulting in an ugly mess of tangled cables. Sure, the Belkins are electronic while the Dr. Bott is physical, but I'd rather pay less and wait a few seconds for my keyboard and mouse to be detected when I switch (and have a much neater-looking work area).
You don't have to be rich to pay for things with $2 bills. You just have to have a warped sense of humor, which Woz has. I happen to think that few things are funnier than watching your average 16 year-old Taco Bell counter-jockey's reaction to getting handed a few $2 bills as payment for your meal. Simply priceless.
~Philly
...but he was absolutely correct in pointing out that blind brand loyalty by "artsy types" was keeping them in business.
I'm not an "artsy" type in the least. I'm a system integrator. After a long day of work fixing the piece of shit that is Windows, for unappreciative clients that get mad at me because the software they chose is constantly getting fucked up, I want to come home, sit down, and use a computer that works right all the time. As long as Apple continues to make computers that fit that criteria, I will be loyal to them.
Once a month I rebuild my desktop, and I run Norton Disk Doctor quarterly as preventative maintenance. A virus? What's that? I saw one once on my Mac, in 1992. (MDEF, IIRC, a non-malicious virus that could be removed by a desktop rebuild).
Being artsy or not has little to do with why people choose Macs.
~Philly
Jesus, where do you live?
Here in Philadelphia I pay $112/mo for Comcast analog basic cable plus 3 HBOs, and cable modem. They don't do phone service, so I'm stuck paying ~$40/mo to Verizon (and it wouldn't be that much less if I gave up my fax line).
~Philly
I think 'weird' might be if you were assured of getting someone else's photos back, and not your own.
Or perhaps simply having the option of paying a little extra to get access to the photos taken by the last few people that used that camera. I'm sure they'd get a lot of business from the exhibitionist/voyeur crowd that way, at least.
~Philly
Take a look at this site. It has an interactive buyers' guide of sorts that lets you pick the features you find important and spits back the camera(s) that do what you want.
~Philly
"So you've ordered me to take you through the drive-thru at Taco Bell. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and you ask me to take you through the drive-thru at Taco Bell. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."
~Philly
...was ZDnet columnist David Coursey, and it was Office XP that was demanding insertion of its install CD so it could re-activate itself on his laptop. Unfortunately, Coursey was just starting out on a lengthy business trip (during which he would presumably need to use Word to write his articles) and had left his Office CD at home. (The link attached to his name goes to part 2 of the article, part 1 was posted in June and doesn't seem to be available in ZDNet's archives).
~Philly
One day soon its going to be really hard for a CTO of a small or medium sized company to justify buying Microsoft rather than using a free, similar product.
Don't hold your breath. Yeah, those Office alternatives may be cheaper, yeah, they may be almost as good. But what good is any of that if you can't communicate effectively with the people and companies your company does business with, because of file format issues?
Rest assured, Microsoft will just keep fucking with their file formats to ensure that the only way you won't have problems with Office documents is to have the same latest-and-greatest version of Office as the people who created them and sent them to you, period.
Look for them to eventually do something to their file formats that will protect them under the DMCA (frankly, I'm surprised they haven't already). Then the companies who make file translators and other like products will have to (if they don't already-- I don't know how it works) pay steep licensing fees to be able to continue making their products. Anyone who doesn't want to or can't afford to pay licensing fees, but still insists on making a non-Microsoft means of reading/writing Office files, could be prosecuted.
~Philly
Do you think for a minute Napster will survive as a subscription service? No way!
That's because they probably won't do it the right way, charging 5 or 10 cents per downloaded song, which I and many others would happily pay.
Back on topic, I think it's just completely laughable that Microsoft now expects us to trust them to hold onto our personal data for convenience. Especially when they can't even keep their own sites from belching up passwords sometimes.
Personally, I wouldn't trust Microsoft to carry a still-usable tissue I've already blown my nose in, much less my vital financial information. Microsoft knows there are a lot of people like me who won't be swayed by their marketing bullshit. To take care of us, they'll simply attempt to co-opt as many 'net merchants as possible, until they make it virtually impossible to make a purchase on the 'net without using their service for authentication. And if it comes down to switch-or-do-without, I'll simply do without.
~Philly
I've got something like that on my Mac-based home-automation server, connected to a modem that has Caller ID, and using XTension and MacCallerID, all glued together with healthy doses of Applescript.
MacCallerID offers you the option of dumping incoming calls with blocked/missing/incomplete Caller ID info, but I can't use that since some of my friends block theirs, and some of my relatives' calls only generate "OUT OF AREA."
What my system does do, however, is send notifications of incoming calls to whatever computers (well, the Macs, anyway) it detects on my network when the call comes in. It also speaks the name of the caller via several small wireless speakers placed throughout my house. I could do the TV text-overlay thing, but it's kinda expensive and I'm usually working on a computer while watching TV anyway. If I don't know the incoming number or there isn't one, I just don't pick up the phone.
~Philly